I finished The Crocodile Fury with the last hours of August sticky on its pages. In the rapture of its ending — the book barrels toward its release with a rapid accumulation of sexual ecstasy that is both terrifying and enthralling — and warm under the autumn supermoon, it all felt so alive, the crocodile world close by and heavy against my own, tactile, thick. But every time I reach out to touch it with words, The Crocodile Fury grows more elusive and impenetrable. This pregnant and odorous book, teeming with sweat and foliage, only shrinks when I reach for its details. There’s so much to say. None of it is said.
Yahp’s narrator is a young girl — nearly fourteen, “two turns of a woman’s lifecycle,” not quite an adult but no longer a girl — who still believes what she’s been told by those she loves. Raised in a three-generation household in a colonized Asian country (never specified in the book but hinted at in the continued reference to Mat Salleh, a colloquial term from Yahp’s native Malaysia), she spends most of her time as a charity student in a Christian convent at the edge of the nearby jungle. The boarding school was once the mansion of a wealthy white colonist before it became a run-down hideaway for bandits and anti-colonial rebels. Now it has fences and steeples and soldiers that watch the entrance and nuns who sniff loudly at the superstition of young girls. But she knows better than to believe them. Her grandmother — nearing ninety, retired from her ghost-hunting days but not from her mysticism and content to spin stories from her throne on the porch — has told her all about the visions, specters, and strange happenings that took place inside those walls. Grandmother should know; back in its mansion days, she was the favorite child servant of the colonizer — that is, until the arrival of his pale and delicate lover. In a fit of jealousy, Grandmother cursed the rich man and the beautiful woman who seemed to float through the halls, wordless and haunting. The curse half-burned in the fire of her tears has chased her through the years, the lover always over her shoulder. But Grandmother has a plan to return all spirits to their proper place. It requires her granddaughter to listen carefully, to learn well how ghosts hide in plain sight, and to do as she says.
Her mother, a converted Christian who has left her own ghost-hunting days behind, disapproves of such plans. She works in the convent’s steam-thick laundromat, keeping her eyes trained on floor and muttering her prayers — only in passing does she let slip that her daughter was conceived on that same floor with a man better known as the Crocodile Bandit, the leader of the anti-colonial rebels (Crocodile because of his psoriasis, whose patchy skin has been passed to his daughter, though she’s never put two-and-two together). The mother has secrets of her own, ghosts that cling like shadows to her shoulders; but unlike grandmother, so keen to recount, she must be pried to reveal them.
The book unfolds between these three, coiling and looping through family memory rather than progressing toward a future. Its operative mode is accrual: Yahp establishes three points in the family history — the childhood of the grandmother, the young-womanhood of the mother, and the current time of the narration — and accumulates their details through constant retelling. The recursive structure is quickly hypnotic, so much so that by the midway point it becomes difficult to tell if whole paragraphs were being repeated verbatim — the book already has several narrative tics — or if the variations in retelling have become so subtle as to elide. You hardly notice the slow notching of intensity, scaled to ever-finer gradations, until you’re too far caught in its folds to find a way out.
The paradox is that all this detail cuts more holes than it fills in. The more we learn, the less sure we are that what is said is what is real. The Crocodile Fury takes place at limits — an Asian household holding fast to its slipping ancestral rituals and an insistent but compromised belief in ghosts; a country, colonized for so long that its third generation no longer remembers life without the strange bifurcation of culture — and with characters already set adrift — three generations of women who have suffered at the hands of colonization and power, and who tell one another stories and myths to normalize the discomfort of violence pressed into their bodies. The further the process of generational transmission curls the stories away from their origin, the more reality and fantasy become difficult to distinguish. The ghost of the rich man’s lover spotted twirling on the convent staircase could very well be that; — or a space could hold energetic memories of trauma for a young girl eager to preserve what once belonged to her. Behind every sentence, every figure, is this glimmering other, increasingly visible through the cracks in the narration but never stable enough to pin down. The daughter believes her grandmother’s tale of a young Lizard Boy, the son of the convent’s caretaker, possessed by a “crocodile fury” and transformed into a heaving animal run amok on the premises — and as she tells it, the image of a psoriatic child, unloved and overworked by a colonizing Christianity finally snapping under oppression, bubbles up behind it. The book never says which is which. It simply returns to the same few places, allowing the thrum of half-remembered violence to course louder and more potent underneath them.
I had thought, when I set out, that framing Yahp with the music of Liza Lim would help us to sift through all this unsaid thickness. The way Lim tells it, she came across The Crocodile Fury in the mid-‘90s, at a time when she was just beginning to explore her own Asian identity — Lim was born in the monsoon nation of Brunei to Chinese parents — in her creative work; Li Shang Yin, for soprano and ensemble, and hell for string quartet, date from the same period. (Though she’s never said so, I suspect the title’s soft resonance with Bruno Schultz’s The Street of Crocodiles — which served as the basis for her chamber work of the same name (1995) and, by cut-outs, for her 2016 opera Tree of Codes — may have also been part of the allure.) She loved the book so much she cold-called the author at her adopted home in Sydney: will you write an opera with me? Come to find out they both loved Tristan und Isolde, and grew up knowing variants on the same Chinese myths. They ate boxes of durian together and wrote an opera called Yuè Lìng Jié, all because Lim saw in the book something she recognized as also belonging to her. Naturally, I had hoped that setting Liza Lim between myself and Yahp would allow me to read the density of a 300-page novel with some finer specificity. I had assumed her love for the book would show me something I might have otherwise missed, a detail or location, how to think her in it. But no, in clearing away the much-ness, Liza has been no help at all. (Increasingly, I think she is much-ness.)
Like Yahp, Liza Lim believes in possession. She believes in the invisible and in hidden presences, in the ventriloquism of the living by the dead. She too sees lovers twirling in staircases, lizard boys with their fists curled around charred ghost-hunting knives. She believes the energetic memory of a space can be made visible with the proper activation [the instructions for Yuè Lìng Jié ask that the space be blessed by a Taoist priest before rehearsals begin]; music is her way of setting ghosts loose. There is always more to her music than first meets the eye, something invisible pressing up against it, inside it, clawing madly for a way out. Beneath, under, within, a second presence stretching and splintering the sound field. It is a restless music.
To better understand the space in which Lim’s music comes into being, take a look at the set for Yuè Lìng Jié (one of the few remaining photos from that opera):
Though it’s a bit blurry, you can see the traditional frame of East Asian street theater, the plank leading from shore to barge (the opera was sung floating on the Torrens River), the musicians all in costume, the black of the night and the open air. But that symbol slashed high against the sky was what initially caught my attention. It took me time to track it down because it’s not the kind of thing you see every day. It’s an obscure tantric ideogram, a combination-sign, an in-between. The symbol is a mixture of “夺” (duó), meaning “to take by force,” and “舍” (shè), “residence” or “place.” Taken together, it is an act of laying the body open. Writing duóshè sends a message to any nearby ghost: “I am ready; take me; enter me; fill me.” It uncorks the channels between their world and ours, offers up the body of the inscriber as conduit. The sexual vulnerability of its submission is part of its danger, as well as its power. It is the sign of preparedness, the sign for possession.
This idea of duóshè serves as a sort of paint primer for all of Lim’s work. It floods the hard surfaces of performance spaces with the threshold energy necessary for enacting material transformations: stages, floors, demolition grounds, floating barges, all become these slick permeable borders, meniscuses, membranes glimmering oily as bubble-skin so slippery you could pass your finger through them. The very presence of people gathered for performance is, for Lim, a way of writing duóshè, of inviting possession into the room. Bodies and instruments who take up the intense focus necessary for her music willingly submit themselves to that risk: a soprano, a trumpet, even a woodblock can slip into the current of an unappeased spirit or lingering energy and suddenly find a furious presence interfering with their sound, crowding their mouth, crawling its way out of their throat (literally a mouth-full, there is so much to say).
In pursuit of possession, her music occupies itself at the limit-states of existence: rage, ecstasy, grief, fear, lust. I mean “occupy” literally, in the sense of a forceful habitation; this is not a music that looks on from the outside, re-presenting the affective or poetic appearance of heightened emotions — which is a kind of Romanticism. It takes place [by force] inside a body caught in the throes of extremity and raises the haptic physicality of heightened sensation to the level of audibility. The music of Liza Lim is virtuosic spillage, a form reckoning with more than it can contain. “Animalistic” is too reductive a comparison, but it is something close to this rare liminality: in the ecstatic violence of mourning or of sex, for instance, the body rides the threshold of being, as though momentarily capable of leaping from its skin, curling into new shapes, transforming. (Think of rage, for instance: we fly into it, are contorted by it, filled with it, beyond control; someone in a rage is unrecognizable, spitting, spewing, flailing, morphed by what is unleashed within.) The ‘self’ flickers; there’s something else there, and the body has, if only transiently, the excess of energy necessary to shapeshift. Lim calls this presence, something (or things) clamoring for space in a single body (be it instrument, object, voice) alongside what is already there. It is what gives her music that characteristic sense of writhing shimmer, of overflow: distortion is the shuddering of the auditory field as more than one sound attempts to crawl its way forth. For the same reason, her music rarely reaches the classical satisfaction of what could be called an “arrival”; the climax of limit-states like lust or rage is paradoxically their abeyance (climax in the sexual sense of post-orgasmic clarity, the body drained of what was flooding it a moment ago). Liza’s music is ever cusping. It lives at a ragged edge, tracing the frays with a curious finger, aroused.
Already it’s not hard to spot how much they have in common: both work in spaces of hyphenated identity, of energetic extremes, of limits and of spiritual excess; both have a close affinity to nature and to feminine sexuality, both are fascinated by animal-human hybridization. Having known Lim’s work before I knew Beth Yahp, these were all things I knew instinctively to read for. But I also think these are things I would have noticed without an intimate knowledge of Lim’s practice. They are central in Yahp’s writing and unmissable; the book is built on them. And bringing the two together hasn’t revealed any one as more important than another. Despite reading in reverse, the surface of the book remains as inscrutable as ever, comprised of endless layers of accumulated detail which hide beneath their face a more.
No, what has stuck with me from The Crocodile Fury is the sense that isolating any one layer of the book would be insufficient for capturing what emerges only in their superimposition: their shimmer (a favorite word of Lim’s). Yahp’s local activity is in a constant state of becoming, and any singular moment/word/sound is charged with an emergent or unspoken other, an invisible presence (read between the lines, parenthetical, double-meaning). Take a technical detail out of context and it falls flat, drained of the invisible, accumulated excess that gave it breathtaking weight: isolation throws back the curtain, reveals magic to be nothing more than a trick of the light. Put it back into the sinuous body, however, and it shimmers again, suddenly repossessed. There’s so much being said, I kept telling myself as I read, knowing I could never quite explain how without it slipping away from me.
What stuck with me was much-ness. I found myself drawn toward thickness, density, and depth, toward what is present within. I noticed swelling, the distended burgeoning of form when forced to contain more than it was built to hold. I saw roiling bodies and things that spill, and especially spillage that doesn’t break what holds it but instead warps its container in weird and wondrous shapes. The further I read into The Crocodile Fury, the more aware I became of its recoiling form; the deeper it sank, the more certain I became that it was Lim who had taught me how recognize it.
Much-ness is different from many-ness, which is the assemblage or the collage. Many-ness is horizontal, the diversity of a side-by-side that is remarkable by nature of sheer quantity. Much-ness, by contrast, is vertical. It is a dawning awareness of immensity underneath the glistening surface. Much-ness buries its face in the folds of local-level detail, only to discover an organic activity that increases the further it descends. It burrows again, and then again.
Earlier I said Lim’s music doesn’t arrive, just as I said The Crocodile Fury unfolds rather than progresses. Both are true, but that’s not to suggest they’re static forms. There is still a place both artists reach that is different from where they set out. What emerges in the tangle of much-ness is something like a reconciliation, this magical moment when the surface material and its invisible presence finally begin to vibrate at sympathetic frequency, when telling one from the other becomes next to impossible. This motion is not a directional one — the two presences don’t progress toward an evolutionary elsewhere, one does not come to subdue the other. It’s more like a spiral or a sinking, a moving-in that is simultaneously an opening-out. In Yahp as in Lim, much-ness leads, somewhat unexpectedly (their endings often catch me by surprise) to a rich and sensuous interiority, achieved only at the point of submission (and perhaps even love), when the body/form relinquishes itself to the plurality within it. Accrual is also an act of discovery of the space capable of holding so much.
The word I think encapsulates this, and which I never really understood in Liza’s work until I read The Crocodile Fury, is swarming. Swarming is a much-ness that moves as one. It is both a rumble and a tinny buzz, mass throbbing of metallic insects, huge quantities of crowded energy simultaneously collected and dispersed. Think of the rapid murmurations made by thousands of starlings, or the rich buzz of locusts humming in a cloud: we perceive their constant shapeshifting not as a distortion (which is a change in state, a form no longer recognizable as pure), but as excess-as-form. The swarm reconciles its teeming plurality as an impossible singular, many-as-one.
The word shows up at the very end of Yuè Lìng Jié — Chang-O sings a swarming song almost entirely devoid of Lim’s characteristic distortion. In this final scene, the Moon Goddess has unshackled herself from the constructed feminine pronouns that bind her to masculinized myth. It is by coming to terms with her own plurality — she is all variants of her own myth, twinned with shadow-sisters, beauty and violence in the same body — that Chang-O is free to take a shape that is uniquely her own, feminine and coursing. Singing alone, the character is swarming. Meanwhile, in the body of the singer, a similar transformation has taken place. She has, over the course of the opera, willingly allowed the goddess’s voice to take over her own (duòshé). By offering up her body for possession, she has given the goddess room enough to reclaim her voice; now, they sing as one. The swarming song is knife-like in its incision, laser-focused and cleaving. What is physically happening — a singer is channeling a character — and what is spiritually happening — a character is at last taking a body of her own — are really one and the same, and though they’re stacked on top of one other, who can tell which is which?
While the word “swarming” never appears in such explicit contexts in Yahp’s novel, the final pages of The Crocodile Fury are revealed by the later work [see: preposterousness] to be exactly that. The lingering violence of colonialism passed through feminine bodies from generation to generation becomes a swirling mass with which the narrator must reconcile herself or be consumed. She sprawls on the forest floor, eyes shut to the world, and allows the invisible presences to merge with her own body (duòshé). She submits to their lead in the dance, learning how the wounds of time and family press into her womanhood, and as she does so the writhing underside joins seamlessly with the surface. The waters of her body become momentarily clear, the undercurrent rolling in parallel with the waves. For the briefest flash, the surface merges with its hidden second presence, visible as one, a combination-sign. And then, just as soon as it feels graspable, the swarm disperses in a climax that is also an abeyance.
—
I finished The Crocodile Fury with the last hours of August sticky on its pages. In the rapture of its ending — the book barrels toward its release with a rapid accumulation of sexual ecstasy that is both terrifying and enthralling — and warm under the autumn supermoon, I couldn’t help but nestle Chang-O between the final lines, to make coeval the swarm I knew so well with the swarm taking shape before me:
~
Imagine a woman, dressed all in white. The rest of the orchestra and cast have left the barge, all spirits returned to their proper place. Only she remains, floating high at the top of the scaffold, duóshè carved at her feet. The river wind catches in the folds of her dress, whipping about her like a silken mirage. Her voice, magically amplified, sears in blazes across the dusk. She is no longer a singer, in whom Chang-O growls hungry and desperate. She has let her in: the two are one now, no end and no beginning, shimmering.
“The gown fountains round my feet, my hands are lifted to stroke its fine pleatings, my chin to smile at the juxtaposition of branch and leaf patterings over the audience’s left shoulder, the sudden wreath of river mist curling to the shape of a woman turned. The woman turns to face me. She is young and beautiful, her face only partly singed. Her skin is white china, the pearly underbelly of a fish. Her hair is a slice of a long past night. The dawn edging its way up the jungle-covered hill crowns her head with a greenish light. Chang-O and I smile at each other. We look at each other with great thirst.
[…]
She pulls. In her arms I am a shape turning, I am a shape now suddenly long and scaly, now bloating, now ridged with spikes. Still the audience grips. When I turn to face them my teeth are long and pointed. I show them the hole in my neck where the Queen Mother woke me. I show them the smouldering space of my plucked scale, which Hao Yi burnt. The way my jaws click in and out, and then I swish my tail and widen my mouth to hiss my thirst, and the audience’s faces are pale.
[…]
So I laugh, and run. Chang-O matches me step for step. There's a wild whistling above our heads, a rush of wind. I turn for a last look at the audience slumped on their knees, shaking their fists. I run to the foot of the water, the edge of the river, my long hair flowing, Chang-O’s gown waterfalling in my wake. Chang-O’s gown shimmers like water in sunlight and wind. I run to start the next cycle. Chang-O clings to my hand like a promise, her hand fits the palm of my hand. Her joy is something I can touch. Our laughter shakes the birds and small animals from their perches, the jungle leaves from their trees. Our thirst is a scraping that makes us run and run.
East, towards the sea.”
~
Notice how Hers becomes Mine becomes Ours, a becoming-one with much-ness. This is swarming, a submission lovingly offered to the ghosts that make us whole.
—
I too am heading East, towards Berlin for a concert with MAM. Last night, Schallfeld Ensemble and I gave the premiere of Tim McCormack’s yours in the process of being absorbed for voice and sextet at the Klangspuren Festival in Innsbruck. Schallfeld was a joy to work with — I can’t have asked for better people with whom to undertake the immense vulnerability of that piece, and I can’t remember a project more intense and rewarding than this one. They’ve been the highlight of a festival with quite a few gems already: on Sunday night Klaus Lang gave a magical concert of Renaissance music alongside some of his own at the Innsbruck Hoffkirche, on the oldest working organ north of the Alps. And on Friday I heard the Tiroler Symphonieorchester play Rebecca Saunders’ traces; perfect timing, as I’m about to crack open Ed Atkins’ A Primer for Cadavers, which has captured Saunders’ imagination in recent years. I’ll return in a month or so with more thoughts on that. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Notes:
Yuè Lìng Jié is a bit of a blind-spot in scholarship on Lim because precious little of it actually remains. Primarily inspired by the Hokkien and Wayang-Kulit forms of East Asian street theater — which are performed for invisible audiences on makeshift stages during the Hungry Ghost Festival and meant to leave no trace — the opera was first staged at dusk on a green eight-sided barge floating in the Torrens River in Adelaide. Subsequent stagings on tour maintained the transience of space and the virtuosic physicality of its realization, and as a result there was little attempt made to capture it. There is a fuzzy tape, which Daryl Buckley keeps locked up in Melbourne, a digital score (the physical copy in the National Library of Australia is crinkled and waterlogged, rescued from an accidental swim in the river on opening night), a few blurry photos, and the recent audio release of Scene VI (“Chang-O Flies to the Moon”) on HCR. Last seen in Brisbane, the opera hasn’t been revived in almost 20 years. This photo is taken from designer Dorotka Sapinska’s collection, while the rest of the reconstruction is done from oral memories (my thanks to Daryl Buckley and Carl Rosman for lending their remembrances) and selected reviews of the premiere, as well as Liza’s own writing (in particular the essay Time, Possession, and Ventriloquism in my operas).
Many thanks to Flora Sun for her translation help, and for teaching me so much along the way.
Quotations from Beth Yahp, The Crocodile Fury (Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1992): 327-329.