On reality checks, dead car batteries, and the Tao Te Ching
I’m having a lively Microsoft Teams chat with my PWE compadres. The topic: our upcoming Advanced Editing project — a collaboration with RMIT’s photo-imaging students. We’ve been ordained with the task of editing their photobook copy. An eerie pall descends on the group as Rowan confesses he’s worried about treading on his partner’s toes. I tell him not to worry, and suggest, somewhat facetiously, that we take to the task like someone crashing through bushes with machete in hand. It earns a laugh emoticon from Sarah, who crowns me with a new nickname: Machete Matt.
Some weeks later, Jess, my photobook partner, emails me her work. It’s at such a high standard that it leaves me a little dismayed, wondering whether I have what it takes to match her skills. We catch up at Coffee on Cardigan where she tells me the project is a testament to her brother’s creative process as a musician. Throughout our conversation, one thing becomes ominously clear: the project means the world to her. I can see it in the way she looks at her images with equal-parts pride and equal-parts concern. It’s something I’ve never encountered — probably because my previous editorial collaboration took place over a Zoom screen with someone who didn’t seem to take much interest in their work.
To my surprise, I experience a creeping sense of pressure — that I am working with a living, breathing person. All of a sudden, the cavalier notion that I am going to crash through her work with a machete in hand now seems absurd — and even a little distasteful. Her stakes suddenly become my stakes as well, and I leave the meeting with my stomach churning.
Arthur Plotnik: ‘Editing itself is an excruciating act of self-discipline…If it seems like a pleasure, something is probably wrong.’
Later that week, I opt to edit Jess’s work at my holiday house in Gipsy Point. Somewhere in my rushed excitement to get away, I don’t realise that I’m doing everything I can to avoid another dreaded in-person meeting where I’ll have to care a little too much. It also escapes me that Jess and I have arranged a call later that night, and that there are probably only two places in the world that still don’t have phone reception: the Arctic sea and my chosen destination.
This being the case, as the sun drops off the edge of the horizon, I drive up a steep, winding hill in the dark of night to squeeze out a single bar of reception from the nearest cell-tower, and use my phone to hotspot my laptop so I can access her work on a larger screen. I make sure to keep the car headlights activated throughout the meeting — not least because I watched The Blair Witch Project some nights before and I’m not exactly thrilled at the idea of sitting in complete darkness.
Half an hour later, we’re still stuck on a single caption and my editorial confidence is taking an exponential dip. We continue to converse about what to put in and what to take out when the car battery decides that, because I’ve left the headlights on, now would be an opportune moment to sputter out, leaving me stranded in the middle of nowhere.
After purging a ceaseless stream of enraged expletives that are too unsavoury for this essay, I hang up my call with Jess and set off down the hill, breathing columns of steam in the cold — wondering whether this assignment will lead to death by hypothermia. As I slip my way down a winding slope, tick-infested branches swat my head in rebuke for my hare-brained schemes, and I think, again, of my name: Machete Matt. Now, it seems I actually need one — only not for words, but maybe for survival.
When I make it home, my self-esteem is in tatters, so I console myself with the words of Arthur Plotnik: ‘Editing itself is an excruciating act of self-discipline…If it seems like a pleasure, something is probably wrong.’
Jess and I decide to work through things in-person back in Melbourne. Over time, and with each meeting, our relationship takes on a deeper warmth, respect and trust, and the book is submitted on time with copy we can both be proud of.
Tellingly enough, the most powerful moment in the photobook is the part in which Jess and I choose to use no words at all.
Lao Tzu comes to mind here: “You can mould clay into a vessel; yet it is its emptiness that makes it useful.”
As it turns out, Jess’s writing was of such a good standard that my editing skills seemed akin to the way a yoga instructor will lightly tweak your posture to achieve complete alignment: a word removed here; another added there. In summary, no machetes were needed in the making of this book.
