Blueback (2022) Robert Connolly

Abby, a young woman working as a marine biologist, recalls her teenage years with her mother in Western Australia. She is introduced to the diverse marine life in the bay she grew up in, makes friends with a blue groper and helps her mother fight to protect the bay's marine life from encroaching property developers.

A straight-forward, heart-felt film with a pleasant, leisurely pace about pursuing a passion to protect something you care about, aimed at a young audience. The flash-back narrative structure is nostalgic and makes clear why the adult Abby is working to protect the bleaching coral reef, but it obviates any emotional or dramatic impact from either time-period. The underwater photography of the ocean life, and the actors interacting with it, is very beautifully shot, tranquil and convincing of the film's thesis, to protect ocean life. Though short on depth and complexity the film successfully depicts the simplicity and integrity of spending your life caring for your immediate environment.

Hot breath and the dangerous ocean

Your body draws me towards you, especially your eyes, emanating depth and mystery.  I am standing upon the beach looking out at the dark and dangerous ocean, taunting me and compelling me to strip off and dive in.  I move towards you simply to hear your voice clearly amidst all this ambient noise, and I can smell your breath, warm and familiar.  I can taste it in my mouth like we're already kissing, but I don't want to impose my hasty intensity on you just yet.  I lean closer because the noise is surrounding us like waves crashing upon our rocks, but somehow this proximity and focus keeps us both dry and it's like I don't even hear that noise.

Nothing has more clarity to me right now than your beauty calling to me softly.  Is that the heat emanating from your body that fills me with warmth right now?  Or is it all that extra blood my heart is pumping to my extremities?  Every waft of rich breath I taste from your speech makes my cock swell just a little.  There is a voice in my head compelling me to kiss you right now in front of all these people, but no, now's the time to listen and see you and discover what common ground we have to stand on.

When we experience what proximity provokes, what is mutually possible in this moment, maybe we can experience each other directly.  But first we have to look each other in the eyes, we have to feel intensely into the reality of the moment, we have to try to speak without hiding behind chatter and culture.  We have to engage with how safe we feel to reveal ourselves, to be vulnerable and pathetic and beautiful and unique.  I want to get naked with you in a profound sense that is not visible to anyone else in the room, but I can't be sure that's what we both want.

Maybe first we have to find ourselves a little island we can share and feel safe, if only for one momentary delightful conversation.  Or maybe in this shared moment we can get naked together in the most basic sense and so start from there, start from the simple tangible undeniably present flesh of our mortal forms, where we can wordlessly touch each other in the terrestrial sensory ocean of incarnation.

In the danger of this swelling, sucking and crushing beach we must navigate between the earth and the divine, stability and chaos, between heaven and hell, the sacred and the profane, flesh and inevitable death.  We can grasp at each other's overwhelming but tenuous bodies before we're inevitably torn apart again in the rip, before we're washed up on the shore or dragged out into the depths.

Strip Ourselves

I am barren with desolation.
My life is a well of emptiness with a ladder that I choose not to climb up and out of.
I am trapped in my own assumptions and conveniences.
Pity me not, but love me and desire me and invite me to foreign paradises.
Become a yearning throbbing genital of the earth and draw me in, become my lover or my confidant, exist with me in the most intense sobriety of presence.
Cry with me, become pathetic, sob into my warm body and slap me 'til I sob too.
Let our naked bodies feel exposed and safe together, let our genitals meet in calm acceptance.
And then we shall dive into the ocean and she shall take us as we are and strip us of our pretensions.
We do not enter her with togs or with surfboards to hide from her or conquer her, we allow her salty goodness to refresh us and deposit us in a sandy sunny world not entirely the same as the one we dived in from.
And then we burn our hair and our clothes in a fire of driftwood and we no longer subscribe to the shame and personality that have obscured our power most of our lives.
I am naked beneath my clothes and I am a real living human being beneath my culture.
I am hot-blooded, breathing and desiring, weeping alone and overwhelmed with the beauty of a veiled humanity before me.
I cannot rave at the masses because my sanity holds me back almost as much as my fear of arrest.
I am the masses and I am listening carefully for the secret to unlock my life from the profane time adulthood has thrust upon me.
I remember sacred time from childhood, and I have rediscovered it in the wild, in the pure wilderness of earth, in the wildman in my body and in the purity of my fellows.
How can I tell you I want to eat you without appearing as a sexual predator?
How can I tell the world I want to be eaten when I am so comfortably marginalised by my comfy social democracy?

I transform the moment I am experiencing into the eternity we all deserve.  I reject the historical crisis we have talked ourselves into as I reject the culture that has structured this conversation.  Time begins anew whenever we choose, when we celebrate the New Year, when we submit to the ocean, when we strip ourselves and walk out into the night.

When it's in my stomach it's mine

I translate memory into language and store them in stories.  I believe too much of what I tell myself to be free and too little of what I am told to be respectable.  I fluctuate with drastic anarchy and return to some temporary equilibrium.  Technically I'm always me but I don't know who that is when I'm not at home and my home can change from day to day. 

I am surrounded by a beauty I cannot possess so I eat stolen food because when it's in my stomach it's mine.  I want to kick the habit of disempowerment but I'm paranoid I'll offend the state.  Prohibition signs scare me more than anthills or strangers.

I want to receive the human glory of every beautiful man I meet but to receive one must first ask.  Only the vast ocean is big enough to receive the expanse of my love. 

I choose not to limit my imagination with boundaries nor my life by imagination.  The best things happen to those who are ignorant.  I breathe myself into existence; I breathe myself into intense presence; I try to breathe in unison with my lover.

I am free to run but must dodge the psychopathy of uniforms.  I bleed only when it is necessary to rupture my aura with the mini-death of healing or pain.  I am a hyper-dimensional psychic entity and must eat a lot to sustain my social normality.  I reluctantly explain and justify my presence and observe my form become syntax; this disturbs a part of myself I cannot attribute linguistically and therefore does not exist. 

Theoretically much of my behaviour is illegal, but no one arrests me.

The storage capabilities of water

I fall in love frequently. I refuse to see this as a problem. I love love. Even when it drives me crazy. Perhaps because it drives me crazy. In a society in which people are constantly talking about how normal they are while behaving with pathological insanity, I enjoy the state of insanity supported by a deep and profound reassurance of a sanity based in the pervasive love that I am living in the depths of.


Often this love is not a natural and beautiful and powerful ocean. This weak desperate perverse urban love is more like an underground sewer, where all the people of the city flush away the part of themselves they would rather not look at, the part of their humanity they don't like the smell of, the part of their expression of life they consider superfluous. Their love.


These people are comforted by the knowledge that they love their spouse and their children and maybe even their parents and their friends; this they consider to be sufficient. There is an excess of love that is so unnecessary that it turns their urine a dark yellow and they flush it all away to this dark and unknown place beneath the concrete pathways that represent the trajectories of their lives. These people never consider what this place is like, or even that it exists. They are certain, at least they claim to be certain, they tell themselves they are certain, that the flush of the toilet is a natural process akin to opening up a wound in the earth and filling it up with their abundance.


However inside this non-biodegradable wound lined with concrete and metal pipes the excesses of human civilisation are not rotting into the earth but festering and fermenting and being consumed by rats who become drunk off the fermented faeces of our denial.


How can I look at this beautiful young man who sits peacefully only meters away from my body and though I have no social permission to talk to him and so only stare, how can I deny my secret knowledge that despite his uncaring expression and his subdued behaviour, he has an abundance of love in his heart and nowhere to put it? I can be sure that he spends a great deal of time and energy masturbating this love out and flushing it down the toilet.


Sometimes I wake up in a dream and I am in the sewer of the human soul and I am wading through the waste and I see his abandoned abundance floating away and while I see it and desire it I cannot entirely reject the imprinted ideology that it is dirty and contains disease and I shouldn't touch it and so I watch as it floats away into the unknown.


Of course what right do I have to break through the emphatic denial sometimes called social etiquette that claims to be more correct than the simple fact that I am here and you are here and we are looking at each other and we even speak the same language but probably don't have anything to say to one another. I have nothing to say to you of course but I want to look into your eyes and I can only look into your eyes if one of us is talking and neither of us have anything to say. I see your shit floating away and that means all that is left are our bodies and they are young and strong and yet we can't help but doubt and perpetuate the feeling that we may not survive the expression of the love spilling fourth at convenient ashamed lonely moments from our body and our soul.


I am one of the lucky ones and I have found a process in which to express much of the love that pours fourth incessantly from my mind and my soul; this process of languaging into literature or onto the internet. In this way, despite the fact that I never touched you while I had the chance, while we were intensely experiencing the reality of each others' presence, I can now use language to create another reality, a reality in which I proudly declare my love for all the beautiful persons I share this dimension with. I appeal to you now, in this form, to love as excessively and sanely as you like and not to worry about the expectation of social and emotional repression that we all pretend to agree with.


If you feel a little uncomfortable then spend less time on trains and avoid regulated cubicle-style working and shitting environments and rather than shitting down a sewerage pipe dive instead into the ocean.


I am not saddened by the sewer of urbanity because I know there is always an abundant ocean of love waiting for me when I return to that place I know is safe from all this illusion of insanity. There is room for everyone on these long beaches to offer up their love to the earth. She will take it compassionately and distribute it to the most deserving, those who ask and appreciate and are open to receive their piece of the collective love stored in the oceans that we all use to divide the continents on which we live our lives.

The God of the Ocean

He feels guilt, as usual.  He feels guilty for the little touching he desires.  He stares at them in their shorts and thinks thoughts and is comforted only by the knowledge that his thoughts cannot be read.  This is when he sits alone.  He knows he shouldn't look like that, he should see them as people like him rather than bodies to be desired.  They deserve respect, of course they deserve respect, they don't need to be looked at in this objectifying manner.  His desire is clearly perverse, there is no love in it.  Maybe what he lacks is love and so he tries to fill his love with touching bodies, or at least perverse thoughts about touching bodies.

His favourite half-naked bodies eventually depart and he trudges heavily up the hill, unable to cease his scanning of the myriad human bodies lying about on the grass and sand for one that fits the age gender bodytype requirements to receive his perverse attention.  Always this guilt with it though.  He walks along in the sun with a beautiful ocean view trying to be peaceful for a while and coming to a public toilet with a picture of an archetypal man on the door.  He picks a cubicle, hoping for graffiti, finding none.  He takes out his penis and after urinating can't help but masturbate.  He can hear the other guys around him, coming in, undoing their belt, urinating, washing their hands, leaving, as he continues to silently masturbate in the locked cubicle.  When it is time to leave he waits for a quiet moment and slips out as quickly as possible, not forgetting to quickly wash away the residue of semen from his hands.

He returns to the bright sunshine and the many people walking around together, holding hands, alone, sitting around, busy or leisurely.  He feels an intense shame wash over his body and he probably even goes red in the face.  He knows they don't know what he's just done and again he is comforted by the fact that his thoughts cannot be read.  This time as he walks amongst the people he feels not the guilt of perversion but the shame of having degraded himself in such a dank repressed environment.  There was noone to share his pleasure with openly in his own bedroom; only he masturbates silently and shamefully in public toilets.  Only he.

He remembers a time when he didn't have to masturbate at all.  There was a time in his life when he did not feel alone.  He was always amongst people who loved him and had no shame of expressing their love to him frequently and with ease.  He was the same because he was one of them.  They touched each other, they loved each other, they looked each other in the eye; he had no shame and no guilt of the love that he needed and the love he offered.  He knew that if he asked for a hug he would receive one and sometimes he needed a hug and there was always a hug ready for him.  He did not need perverse stares and masturbation to close the gap in which he was not feeling close to the most beautiful people in the vicinity of his life.

He also remembers the strangeness of what happened when he defecated during this period of his life.  Every time he squatted to release the pressure in his bowels he would also release some semen from his penis.  This was not connected to any orgasm, but the stronger the defecation the more semen he expelled.  He did not understand why his body continued to produce and release semen when he felt no need to produce orgasm.  He knew he needed to store his sexual energy for higher purposes but his body always found a way of getting rid of it, inevitably.

The sun is so hot and the day is so dry that he steps barefoot down to the water.  There aren't too many people around at this point.  He wears a t-shirt and a pair of shorts which he quickly removes and places in a careful pile.  He decides he is not ashamed of his naked body at least and feels no need to wear shorts in the ocean.  He dives through the waves and into the water.  He enters the ocean and she accepts him.  The Ocean God laughs at those who wear shorts into her waters and reserves special feelings for those who dive into her naked and unashamed and allowing her to cleanse them of all their desires.