• Gabriel Curtin

Gabriel Curtin

  • Gabriel Curtin

Text commissioned to accompany Watch This Space Ari’s inaugural Squash Court Commission

How the World is Scored

I imagine an oat-field at dusk— 
a crop I’ve never heard swish in alternations 
of intensity and subsiding intensity 
tandemed to my step, a crop my knees have never felt unzip 
around them as river rocks encourage rivers to do. 

Surrounded by historic cacophonies—
which are pending cacophonies too, 
since imagining is a kind of prediction 
based on precedence, or a kind of presence 
based on prediction—

I imagine the sound of activity 
evidenced in smudges, divots and dents,
the meatier stuff too: where and how 
a car is parked, post-ops, demographic shifts. 

Since the half-moon smudges patterning the squash court’s 
red Coca-Cola ad look like rising 
bubbles, I imagine the sensation of sipping 
something fizzy and the desire to experience 
that sensation again. 

I imagine the sound of smacked aluminium
surveying every smudge posing as a bubble— each deposited 
by misplaced shots, balls dipped below the Coca-Cola logo 
marking out-of-bounds. 

Energy branches over history. You can’t choose 
where it starts, though it could start with soil. 
Soil gave energy to oats which found their way 
to my bowl, gave energy to me. But it starts with something 
earlier than soil. It could start with a gesture—the mis-struck 
backhand adding a bubble to the group. But it starts 
with something earlier than gesture, since gesture 
starts with oats. I imagine energy. However it started, 
today it became sound, heat, trajectory—a shot 
and a crescent—then continued elsewhere.

In lieu of an ad, one court sports 
a series of printed images—drum cymbals, basket of eggs, 
ancient urn, laptop, space
hopper, seven glasses of 
Beaujolais, house of cards, two-tiered
cake, balloon, pillows, complete
crockery set.

Half-moon smudges will litter these too 
and I’ll imagine multiple
sounds—the ball colliding with the panel 
and the object, if it were real
and not a print, suffering
the same collision—disappointed sigh 
of card tower folding in, high exclamation of wine 
glass shattering or bulkier sob of the urn. 

The ball pings from the panel and dribbles
to a stop after leaving a smudge after being
propelled from my racket after
I swung after I gleaned 
energy from oats after they grew in
soil in fields I’ve never visited but even now
hear—swishhh swishhh— even now even here—
seeds nodding in late light—all this time 
you’ve been reading, still I’m wading 
through that diaphanous crowd. 

Living and labouring on unceded Arrernte Country.