Roundtable Readings 3.0 - Water

Roundtable Readings 

presents

A collection of writings on:

‘Water’

Curated by Lili Ward

Handmade by Lili Ward

The Fountain 

Biddy Mahy

You see a beautiful girl drinking from a water fountain. There is the morning sun. There is the end of her ponytail getting splashed by the water. A sliver of sunlight creeps in underneath her arm, making it look implausibly thin. Her neck is bent awkwardly to capture the jet which comes out in unpredictable waves from the abused facility. Her swallowing moves at a gallop. Perhaps she senses eyes on her and wants the experience to be over as quickly as possible. At least that is how you would feel, crumpled up like that. Showing off the kind of need that can't wait, a kind of unspoken weakness. But then, you wonder if it is instead the weight of freedom that occupies her. For her, you speculate, the day is a pull, grains of sand: there are decisions and things to do. Her thirst, and the part with the fountain where you’re watching her, is her body’s inconvenient intervention in a day ruled by the mind. The ball in her throat ticks up and down. Her nostrils dilate. She reminds you of a rabbit you had shot one time when hunting with your father. You would come to find you had misfired. The animal was as large as your boot when you found it, wriggling with pain, limbs splayed in soft right angles, gently parting the long grass. Its pulse was visible, the fur undulating as though its heart was trapped inside, trying to break free. It reminded you, strangely, of the ball inside the girl's throat. This memory appears alongside a glimmer of hotness, or perhaps it was coldness, running through you. You note this as a rare moment of distraction from your war strategy game: ‘Rome Total War III’. In it, there is a campaign to capture Pireaus which has burdened your mind for the greater part of the last few weeks. The fugue urgency that comes with video games at this age (you have experienced little; you have few responsibilities) has meant that your arms and legs are used to inactivity. From your chair, or the bed, troops are syphoned and clicked across green expanses while in another room adults you know talk of the centimetres. Even in your brief spurts of fitness, which you have been trying to make more regular and less brief these days, the smaller computer-sized world in the room is superimposed over the life sized one, at times dimly but regardless, always more compelling. For the first time in a long time, the girl in the garden gives the heart pause. Orders from your doctor or the concerned words of parents dissolve under her light and the return to life she inspires within you now; as, in this quiet theatre by the water fountain, she offers you a way back into the world that feels familiar, as if it could be your own, yet new, and like her, sparkling, attractive and obvious. Then she starts suddenly, flicking the ends of her hair over her shoulder. A light rain is cast into the yellow dirt. That the scene is a revelation to you she can realise by your expression. She turns away, embarrassed. And anyway, it doesn't matter. Her friends are now beckoning to her from across the lawn. She's already forgotten you in the time it takes to make her first step toward them. One of the girls has a large pink bottle hanging from a carabiner attached to her waist, which rattles lightly as she shifts her weight. The bottle is segmented by short white lines, against which motivational phrases are printed: 'No Excuses!', 'Remember Your Goal'. The facile words move you. You feel used and invaded. You can't pinpoint why. Later you recognise the feeling as attraction and its basic law taking hold.

Shanidar 4

Dana Sučić

I’m obsessed with Neanderthals. I tell Sarah. I just realised it last night, is what I tell Sarah. Just last night, I was watching Neanderthals on the television and that’s how I said it. But my hands were stabbing the air to barter with her interest because her eyebrows, what little of them, were creasing together to figure out 27-across. 

The Neanderthals disappeared 40,000 years ago and the documentary was a crescendo to their dramatic end. What a shame that I don’t actually know what came of that dramatic end because instead, I slept half way through. How about that, I say it to Sarah. ‘Howboutthat’ like one word because I’m obsessed, consumed, plagued, bedazzled, engrossed, hypnotised by Neanderthals. 

HYPNOTIC. I snatch the paper, H-Y-P-N-O-T-I-C I write, my capital letters perfectly boxed in. Clue: spellbinding. Ah, that was a tough one, I say that to her. We hummed over that for about an hour. God, that felt good though, when I got that one. We clink our pints together for that one. One of those Hoorahs, then a man passes us, asks us how to say that word on the tram. ‘West Maribyrnong,’ I tell him. Hm, I tell Sarah. The man at the pub, he passed us and asked me to–– 

ARTICULATE. That’s it, that’s eight-down, jot that down, I tell Sarah. She’s jotting down, good one. I pat my brow––God, that was impressive that I got that one. She’s impressed, because she’s nodding because now we know. That came back to hypnotic. I’m pointing, my silly index wagging in a weak-spirited Spring breeze. 

Anyway, so the Neanderthals. I didn’t actually get to the end of the documentary, I tell Sarah, again. But there was a cave. The television showed me the cave in Kurdistan. Shanidar cave, about 800 metres from the Great Zab River––when I saw that, and I tell Sarah this too, I thought to myself: ‘wow, I love caves,’ even though I don’t think I’ve ever thought about my opinion on caves before, or whether I do, indeed, love them. They found five Neanderthal skeletons there. Five, I have all of my fingers out like a hand to Sarah, eyebrows too. I’m repeating five to Sarah, and then it's funny, because on the television they called them Shanidar 1, Shanidar 2, Shanidar 3, and so on and on. But only up to five because there were only five. So I tell Sarah that, but it’s sort of sad because what about all the other Shanidar––

STEALING THE SHOW. ‘To outshine others,’ 25-across. By God she’s fucking done it. That one, that one had us for almost two glorious hours, we’d scratched our heads to widow peaks. God, what a showboat. God, gloat all she likes she can, what a diamond. That was 25-across, a total bitch, that one was the worst one. We keep exchanging that sentence between sips. 

‘That one was the worst one, hey?’

‘Oh God yeah, that one was the worst one.’ 

So good she got it. We’re ecstatic, elated, enthused, animated.

Right, so, I also thought about the Neanderthals having names. I know, it’s sort of ridiculous and selfish, but I think the archeologists should’ve given the Neanderthals real names instead of numbers, then I could pretend I was them, you know? Like, because I would be able to relate to them. I mean, they were so close to us. So evolutionarily petered, so primal, primary, fundamental, foundational, so––

But Sarah is saying P, it has a P, the 10-across. It can’t start with an F, so go back to P. What a total bitch, that one, and we’re huffing. 

Sorry, God, losing my train of thought. God, okay, so, where––right, so I surmised this, I realised that the archeologists called the skeletons Shanidar 1, 2, 3 and so on and on because they have no idea what their languages were, or if they even had languages, and therefore, if they even had names. What if Neanderthals did have names? Languages? Their own, you know? Sort of like a crossword, I suppose. I suppose, what’s the difference if they huff and moan? So? We have pens and they have stones. One is no better or worse.

Oh, God, that 10-down. She’s flirting with me. I tell Sarah that the archeologist and anthropologist grabbed in their hands a handful of dirt, and sifted these stones from the handful in the water from the Great Zab River. Then, they found this stone, like a diamond in the rubble, and they sort of gloated, showing it right off to the camera––those television cameras nowadays, you know how they are, they’re so perfect, they make it all look so wonderful, God. I mean, God, it looked like a normal stone to me, but the river and everything, and the millenia along with it, told me that this stone was not just some normal sort of primeval, prehistoric, primordial thing. 

PRIMITIVE. Oh my dear fucking God, that 19-down, God that bitch had me really going. She, just, oh God, fuck what in the––I tell Sarah, God, she’s elated, she’s just gulping it down, Jesus. God, that was a good one. 

‘Now, that one, that one was really the mother hen, wasn’t she? God, she really nearly got us, right? Don’t you agree?’

‘Yes, totally agree, oh my dear God. Primitive. That got me there for a little while, Jesus.’ Sarah and I are sort of gloating but that's alright, it’s so worth it when you get those ones with all the silly vowels and no consonants, and here we had only_ _ I_I_I_ _, I mean talk about ego. Talk about discovering my own ‘I’ and it’s right there in front of me on the television. You see those silly vowels in all the right places and you might think something like, ‘alright, well I didn’t get it right the first time, I might never, you know?’ Like the Neanderthals, I guess. But then you just get it, all the things that matter besides the ‘I’s’ and it’s just––God, it’s just a good feeling, you know? 

Right, sorry. So, anyways, that very stone in the archeologist’s hand was actually crafted from the Neanderthal 45,000 years ago, with a ‘razor-sharp-edge’. That's what the television told me and of course, I totally trusted it. I keep on telling Sarah––really, obsessed, I swear it. And this stone was ‘a spear head,’ which I thought was just so intelligent, intellectual, intuitive, inferred. How the fuck did they think to make a stone a spear head and they couldn’t figure out over thousands of years how to pick their own fucking name? It’s baffling. Bewildering, puzzling, abstruse, obscure.  

I tell Sarah that too and she’s just so chuffed with my poke at primitive, a total thunder, that 9-down. Honestly, I could’ve just melted ice with my heat, that’s how on I was, just after that 9-down. That’s how I felt. So good, I got that one.

And so when I woke up this morning, I tell Sarah, I thought to myself: why isn’t anyone talking about this? I think I’ve already said that to her, but I tell her again, because it’s not strictly a rhetorical question. She says its probably because Neanderthals are actually incredibly fucking boring to talk about. And yeah, I really got it then, you know? But watching it, you know? Watching that archeologist and anthropologist kneel by the river and pick up a new stone and chip it in the way our prehistoric cousins did, one stone after the other, all so uniformly, evenly, calculated, mirrored, replicated, of the other––do you know what I mean? When you watch human emotion brew over something, something––so uninteresting to a lot of people but so important, imperative, pertinent, intrinsic, to being human––I mean, God. It really just brought tears to my eyes, the way that guy looked at the stone. Almost, you know? 

What really got me though, was Shanidar 4. They said Shanidar 4 was an adult male, aged 30-45-years-old––right, so you, you can imagine him, no fucking different to the rest, right? But there he is, and not alone, because his body was buried with eight heads of different, dissimilar, disparate, divergent, discerned, dimensional, disassociated flowering plants, all these heads of flowers put there on purpose around him. 

How would those archeologists even know that? Sarah asks, barely raising what’s left of that eyebrow. 

The pollen samples, I tell her, because that’s what the television told me. 

They cut to a re-enactment, a Neanderthal girl, her face all covered in dirt with lines, streaks and trails down her cheeks from tears, holding a bunch of prehistoric flowers ready for burial. I also––you know while we’re here––I also need to tell you that those people on the television believe that what they found with Shanidar 4 is the first evidence of spirituality, religion, divinity, existentialism, evidence of God, a conceptual understanding of the afterlife. The Neanderthals were burying their dead. And with flowers! Why? I thought. By God, why isn’t anyone talking about this? 

‘Why aren’t more people talking about this?’ I ask it of Sarah and this time, it’s a rhetorical question. 

‘I need a 9-down, 5-letter word. Lubricant.’ 

Lube is four letters. Hmm. Lube is four letters. That isn’t said to one another, we just sort of moan it. We huff towards the breeze which now feels quite damp, soggy, sodden, drowned, ocean, beach, wave––ah, 15-across, fuck, ugh God––anyways, whatever it is––the breeze feels like its going to rain. I tell Sarah that. 

Can we do the other cryptic crossword while we think? I’m stressed out. Sarah tells me that while the clouds are kind of bellowing, they’re pillowing, sort of begging our sweet surrender. In that sense, it’s kind of nice to have a newspaper because then we’ll just let fate decide whether the rain will sort of finish us off or if we can––

WATER. It’s water. God, I’m just brilliant, I’m on fire today, Sarah. I’m on absolute fire. 

Sure you are, Sarah tells me. Can we do the Cryptic Crossword now, God please? 

Sure, the Cryptic. 

Right, 14-down, 8 letters, the clue is 4) name of a cave in Kurdistan by the Great Zab River.

Untitled 

Zefang Cui

The girl was coded into existence in the web of 0s and 1s before she had even learnt her 123s.

When her father brewed over the brown and white men playing laser tag on the telly, hmmming and hmmmphing like a grumbling bear and her mother hmmphhhhed and hahhhed over the contestants on the quiz show- her breath quickening when the man in the suit yelled “Jeopardy!”, the girl paid them no mind.

Head tucked behind her knees, the girl’s face was illuminated by a soft glow that was cast from her iPad, not too much unlike the glow radiating from her parent’s flatscreen 28-inch Sony KDL-40EX503. Not too dissimilar from the halo of divine grace suffusing on Jesus’ body. A halo which was imprinted on laminated paper and carefully blue tacked on the girl’s bedroom wall by her grandmother all those years ago. But the girl was godless, there was no heavenly kingdom to enter, no cycles of samsara to break and no pillars of Islam to uphold.

That is not to say that the girl did not worship, she was devoted, a martyr even. The girl’s rosary beads were the long, extensive submarine communications cable that snaked through the ocean floor and spewed across her floor. Her cross was the rigid antennas that stood erect on her blinking modem, and her scripture the everchanging html in the browser bar.

Before learning cursive writing and drawing the dots on her “i”s with love hearts, the girl became fluent in #hashtags, emojicons, ಥ‿ಥ. Studying the acronyms of “LOL” before knowing what an acronym even is. But that’s ok, because the internet taught her so many things.

“How to make friendship bracelets for beginners”

“How to take care of a hamster”

“10 signs of a boy liking you”

“How to practice French kissing alone”

“What does 2 girls one cup mean”

“Is the world going to end this year”

“How to lose weight FAST in 10 days”

“How to get more Instagram followers”

And so, the girl clicked and scrolled, and it went on like this for a while.

The girl then became fascinated with filters. Sweet puppy dog ears that made her look sickening neotenous, blurring her rosacea-pink and acne scarred skin to perfection. Her dull, sunken eyes artificially expanded as if to contain whole scores of the universe. Here she honed her practice of posed innocence, ferociousness, or seductiveness with every picture snapped. Every new selfie in her camera roll being a new step taken in her epic journey to conquer her sense of digital perfection.

Leaving no stone unturned. She also studied the pictures of her friends assiduously. She had many friends, friendships that were destined to begin and end through the clicking of the Follow or Unfollow button.

She liked looking at them through her little panopticon screen, scrolling through their curated images and videos as if she was flashing a flashlight into the cells posted from their cell-phones. They were beautiful creatures, each embellished with their own usernames and their aesthetics that are distinguishable but not strictly inaccessible. There was the Northern Californian girl with her tanned, bronze legs. There was the girl with her coquettishly bruised knees, wrapped in frilly socks that would have made Humbert blush. There was the girl with tastefully torn-up tights, tights that never looked quite right when the girl tried to do it herself. They contorted their waifish limbs for her, and she puckered her soft lips for them and for you too. It’s only fair.

And so, the girl clicked and scrolled for a little while longer.

The girl realised that she didn’t like to go outsidemuch. She never really understood the appeal of throwing a football with her dad or baking cookies with her mom. Why bother keeping up with social charades for an invite to a party. To tilt her head ever so slightly and to giggle harder for the attention for a boy, when all she ever needed exists in the parameters of her 6-inch screen. Putting on her red shoes, the girl was alive when her green *active* dot lit up.

Amongst the pixels, she danced and danced and danced. There were no corner of the world wide web that her red shoes didn’t not take her. Here, she never felt hunger or loneliness or stupidity. She gorged herself with mountains of saturated food with mukbangers, socialised with all of those resplendent girls in chat rooms, and learnt about the birth and fall of every empire that there ever was.

And she laughed and loved and cried too. Harder than she ever did with a joke her brother told that never landed quite right. Harder than she did at her grandfather’s funeral when he kind of just laidthere like a rubber dummy. Emotions felt so much more real and whole and concentrated online.

Funniest memes of the day. Top 25 Emotional videos That Will Make You Cry. INSANE close call Dashcam moments.

Her parents worried about her. That she didn’t go outside much. That she doesn’t talk to them much. That her only sign of life was the faint cacophony of audio clips bleeding through her wall.

But she didn’t care, and why would she?

With every twitch of her smile or the furrowing of her brow, she knew that there were millions of people laughing and crying with her. She was part of something big. Something bigger than herself and the kids at school and her family could ever conceive of. She was part of the 1.7 million people liked this video, she was involved in the ever tumultuous Twitter thread. She was in a movement, she was part of the conversation.

Like the morning star that persevered through the veil of the night, the girl’s green dot remained stagnant and unblinking. She wasn’t too sure how long she spent in front of those hypnotic gadgets, it felt like forever, it felt like a second. The laws of time and space didn’t apply in the world wide web.

The girl didn’t want to log off, and why would she? Qinshihuang had his mercury, Alexander has his Water of Life, the girl was on her noble quest of immortality too. Call her a Buddhist, a Gnostic even, the girl knew there was a life more than her material reality. She wanted to escape the cycles of samsara, to break through her FHD screen and to course through every cloud and server until her veins were nothing but a network of high-speed fibre optics.

And so she did.

Pushing her fingers through the troves of wires and liquid crystal, the girl wrestled to the other side of her screen until her soul was fragmented into a million little pieces. Darting through time and space as if she is just another packet of data, propelling to connec