Surface Reading of Ten Thousand Waves After Isaac Julien

Caitlin Maling

To write the poem, I must take off my glasses

To watch the film, keep them on

My favourite part is the gap between screens imagining their placements whether deliberately within or without my arms-span whether the walls of the gallery are flexible enough to move: how many of these are structural beams and loadbearing walls?

In the film a woman in red shoes smokes a cigarette, a tram journeys back and forth, she can walk in pin-thin heels on cobblestones without turning an ankle and I am sitting on the floor because I am too lazy to sit on the bench provided for me to always be comfortable

The voiceover says ‘the shore is ending and now the land’; I am working on a poem about a bay where stromatolites lie reliant on sea level regression and the accumulation of bivalves into a cocquina shelf. The people in the film are always by the ocean we can hear it in the soundtrack Now the woman is high in the type of tower which would be destroyed if it was made by sedimentary rock, only it isn’t it’s concrete and rebar. A new voiceover whispers of rape and death

I do not like it, but I do not imagine I am to like it. On the centre screen somehow a woman flies out of shot I am on the continent, all about me are reefs I never thought of them as protecting me from the potential of ghosts There are now many historical shots

I do not know what I am looking at Before, finally, a body floats in water and I pull my apple out and eat it Later, I read the show is originally designed for nine screens see photos of them hung in a perfect arc

There are always more ways to see a thing I learn the show is nothing about oceans and all about greed and those journeys

The voiceover is Benedict Wong from Dr Strange making this not, not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe I use to teach my students perspective and poetry ‘you know the multiverse’, I say and they nod seriously, I would like them to see each of the nine screens (or even three) and understand the tragedy of the multiverse is the inescapability of this verse where the sea moves imperceptibly higher as if to consume us by licking softly on our bones

Author’s note

I first visited Isaac Julien’s piece directly after teaching two three-hour creative writing seminars, one on short fiction and one on poetry. I remember sitting on the floor and letting the work move over me, switching my brain from output to input and free-drafting the poem in the light of the screens. I was interested in having the piece maintain this sense of improvisation and the conditions of its making – both physical and the other influences I bought into the theatre space with me. I wanted the poem to have a similar sense of mutability to what I encountered in Ten Thousand Waves, which shifts depending on the number of screens on which it is shown, when you enter or exit the room, how many people are there with you, etc.

Caitlin Maling is a lecturer in creative writing at Curtin University. She has published five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Spore or Seed (Fremantle Press, 2023).