This is a collection of half baked musings gathered together in a quick gasp before the end of the weekend. It has been a moving time. It has been a time. What a time it has been.

The image above typifies my life and the bizarre topologies in which I am enmeshed. a Paling Fence and mowed grass in front of brick veneer bungalows in suburban Melbourne. Settler colonial artefacts on unceded Wurundjeri land, not too far from the freshwater flows of the Merri Merri and Birrarung. The Birkenstock Belt on a winter afternoon. Lens flare as I shoot against the afternoon sun. It makes us squint a bit to view the words on the fence: a 6 metre crochet rug, draped along the palings. Saying STOP THE CRUELTY in one line. Underneath STOP; GENOCIDE…. so it also reads STOP THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA.It’s a clunky collection of broken words phrasing together. I am hoping this description works as alt text for this image for people who can’t view it. The photo doesn’t clearly show that the words are made from crochet.

Each Sunday that I am able – for the past 36 weeks, I have joined my fellow citizens to march on the streets in the city, in mourning, rage, solidarity, speechless horror at the unspeakable but must be spoken horrors that the Israeli Defence Force have inflicted on the civilians in Gaza. I think the death toll is now 40,000? or 45,000? my brain lost count at 30,000 a few months ago. This post is not about Palestine or Settler Colonisation, or bearing witness to Genocide as an unsettled settler colonial myself. This is about the closer intimacies, of acts of solidarity and gathering, and of queer kinship.

The spaces in which I dwell are not pure. They are messy and mixed up and porous. I am smashing these words out now – while my heart still holds these feelings… and in doing so I am delaying doing a copy edit on the testimony of a friend… because I know that once I return to his words… my own words and thoughts will be drowned out by horror. This is the quotidian weight of bearing witness, of holding space and holding connections to refugee communities. In my twenties, LatinX refugee communities accepted me, and shared their stories, and I learnt the heterotopias of exile that Homi Bhabha wrote so well about. In my 50s, I live with and alongside Tamil refugees, who carry horror and trauma in so many layers. A friend gave me a copy of Mosab Abu Tohar’s book of poems… It reads almost identically to the stories narrated by one close Tamil friend whom I have collaborated in not enough writing projects together. Mostly we write for friends; letters to NGOs, forms for government departments, letters for lawyers. It’s always more urgent, more pressing. Lives are at stake.

But this post is not about that kind of life or death, or solidarity. Only to note that these things are not in the background… and not something that I can untangle from the other exquisite mess of my not-quite-middle-class urbane suburban queer connections. They are amidst the tangled mess of threads on my bed – the latest craftivist project, the space where I retreat when my bodily pain takes me away from the street protests, or the dance floors or creek tracks along whose watery rocky edges I came to love this country that is not my own.

This is about my own personal death experience, and navigating the spaces of long grief. I have a friend that I have come to know more through our weekly train journeys into the Sunday rallies for Palestine. I lug ridiculously long crochet rugs, which need a posse to hold them. They draw people in, and create a sweet bloc of solidarity. Viewers love the craft. the ‘Nanna Core Vibe”. It’ which clashes ebuliantly with the motley queers gathered to hold such words as “No Pride in Genocide” with the progressive rainbow flag. People are drawn to the text, the textures and the very evident hours embedded in the slow stitching of letters and colours. People ask ‘how many hours’? not as many as the dead bodies. A few hundred maybe….

But this post is not about that craft or that crochet, or that queer gathering. It’s about a deeply intimate and very first world space that my friends and fiends created. For about 18 months I have been part of a Queer Death Collective in Melbourne. We gather to sit and talk about death and dying, and its relationships to queerness: be that chosen families (logical vs biologicals), or the barriers to trans folk in having their correct gender on their death certificate (instead of the one matching the birth certificate).

Today my rally comrade-in-crochet, was a facilitator for an event held today, which meant we both missed the rally for Palestine. Last week the Queer Death Collective hosted a webinar from the amazing Dr. Pia Interlandi; who has researched, practiced and taught in the areas of dressing/cladding bodies in and beyond the ‘threshold spaces’ of shedding our mortal coil. The webinar was compelling. I watched it as a recording, alone and quiet in the dead of night. And then today we had a workshop, where 3 people volunteered to play dead; as corpses that would be dressed and ornamented by our grieving kin.

I felt really lucky that I was invited to be one of the corpses. It enabled me to think through and organise my own end of life preferences. The practice is mostly speculative, because I don’t know when I will die, and I hate the thought of my beloveds having to outlive and grieve for me, as much as I would grieve for them if they die before me. I am not scared of death, but I don’t like it either. this exercise was well timed. I seem to have taken the burden of bearing witness to genocide into an internal slow death. Not moving, eating junk food. Escaping reality onto silly animated phone games and the bizarre netherworld of phone app advertising. I stare wide eyed through the night into wide eyed assurances that anyone can win hundreds or thousands of dollars on a free solitaire app. Or wince at some animated game based on a homeless woman and child in the freezing snow (I kid you not). My cultural studies brain makes me fascinated by the sheer overwhelming shitness of this sous-culture. (underculture). It’s a private, volume down, glasses off secret little world of mine, and I wonder who else engages in this.

I digress. I should write about playing dead, rather than playing numb, or playing at what Lauren Berlant called “slow death” as the only rational response to bearing witness to mass death of state sanctioned industrially produced genocide, in the context of planet destroying frenzy of late capitalism. We call it late capitalism because surely this cannot go on much longer, surely!

I really liked the creative speculative process of imagining a good death. I imagined a civilised process of Voluntary Assisted Dying, where I am surrounded by my beloveds. My biological family are dead, and I don’t have or envisage an amonormative kinship (of one or more lovers). But I need a word that is better than friends, so beloveds seems to be kind and intimate enough. so today I imagined a good death. I imagined the threshold space after the death rattle had ceased, the charge in my fingers had ebbed and rigor mortis had come and gone, to be physically supported by the body workers at life rites funerals on Gadigal/Wangal land. I also imagined my death here on Wurundjeri country, where I have so many beloveds…. although I have interstate fiends that I want with me. You know who you are. I will have to put aside some plane fares in my end of life plans.

Today – some of my beloveds were there as next of kin, and kin… who wiped and dressed and decorated my still body in ridiculous queer muppet raiments, sex toys, and ad-hoc crochet shibari binds. They were gathered with tender guests who I did not know, who joined our circle, and put on my socks and helped lift me into a coffin. The beloveds and kin all took turns reading from Chapter 1: Exhortation to the Great Unseen from SJ Norman’s liturgy of the Saprophyte, written for Deborah Kelly’s Creation Project. It’s a beautiful prayer that I adore. You can read and hear it here: https://www.creationtheproject.com/liturgy

We the carnate.

I am still carnate. And in playing dead, and spending time in a space of feeling and hearing the care and love of those carnate people around me, as I meditated in the liminal space between what I am as a carnate, vocal, seeing fleshing being, and in my connections to my intimate incarnates (my mother and brother, whose fragments I held today) and the less intimate incarnates of those who have been murdered by genocidal regimes or subsist in the bare life of those who have barely escaped them. I apologise for this long sentence…

And in playing dead, I felt so connected to life, and a life that is also connected to the incarnate world as much as the beautiful connections to the other folk around me. I am very grateful for this.