Language.
 
Pregnancy is a discourse and a vocabulary unto itself. Some of that discourse is enjoyable, other parts of it are awful. Acronyms abound. Everyone has an opinion. Haemorrhage has a measurement. Age can be advanced. We are induced. Spontaneous. This bruise has a name. That tear has a degree. The pregnancy is lost. Like a sock.
 
I let Tom have the naked language of my pregnancy and loss so that he could clothe it. Not too heavily, but just enough to protect its intrinsic vulnerability. This exposes their flaws, but I don’t mind.
 
I don’t think music is a universal language, but I don’t really think anything is truly universal. Everyone is having a very specific individual life, although many of them look quite similar.

TH

We met as poets, but as writers and performers we were polar opposites. And still are, I think. My work tends to be purposefully didactic, and fast, side-stepping emotion but in a way that feels like an alien learning sincerity on the fly (Like this text). But Eleanor? I’ve seen her quell a rowdy hungry crowd with a pause. She made our mastering engineer cry. Hell, even her artist statement is worth putting on the wall.

I’ve never wanted to change anything about Eleanor’s work – not her words or her melodies. I think she can accomplish everything I can’t bring myself to do. I find it astonishing. Her work feels complete, whole, and everything it needs to be. Bold, and brave, but human, and sweet and sad and warm. I’ve seen her forget and fumble lines, or accidentally skip a verse, and I’m attuned to her tricks to salvage these moments, but I would also say she’s never made a mistake. It feels perfect, every time, and can have the audience in a hug that convinces them that the pause needs to be that long. She is, by far, my favourite performing poet. She’s on stage, looking you in the eye, and that’s the way it needs to be. You’re in the room with her, so she’s not alone.

But on a recording? A hovering voice. She’s by herself, and the audience can’t show appreciation by smiling warmly and looking her in the eye or, god forbid, clicking. The added hiss of a recording – or even worse: no hiss at all – just takes you further from the energy of live performance. Colder, or sad with no reprieve. The worst thing music can do, right now, is to try to emote more than these words.

So, I simply need to play enough so that Eleanor isn’t sitting in silence, otherwise she’s there on her own. I’m trying to be the crowd in a venue, leaning in, quietly. 

I’m trying to play in a way that draws out the emotion, in a way that asks you to hang on, until the final cadence. Blow your nose at the end, or when her work haunts you tomorrow. 

I need the music to pull your attention in the right moments, but never in a way that makes you miss a word. I’m the friend in the room saying, yes this is sad, but you don’t want to miss the unexpected moments of levity – they’re worth it. I’m trying to play in a way that is how I want the audience to feel. I’m playing exactly what I feel when I hear her perform, in the room.

Some collaborations are about making the work the middle of two people. But Eleanor is already giving us everything. I’m just welcoming you, to take a step closer, to meet her halfway.

EJ

Time.

Because we don’t live in the same city, I travel to Sydney to meet with Tom where we perform the entire first trimester together at a gig formerly hosted by our mutual friend, Candy Royalle. The air in Marrickville is dense with a sepia-toned smoke haze. A month later, I send him recordings from my lounge room, my voice scratchy and hoarse from hazardous smoke from yet more fires. We are entangled atmospherically. 

There is not enough time to do this right. I want to redo the recordings. Or find time with a studio for us to be in together. But then again, there is exactly the right amount of time required. Being pregnant and not being pregnant both remind you that the time you have is the time you have. This is the constraint. We collaborate in the ether. I like the way that performance and recording both shift a poem from a textual to temporal experience. Things end. It’s not unimportant, just unavoidable.