Robyn McKenzie's wedding speech

Hello.

Good Evening.

My name is Robyn McKenzie and I'm an alc...... (no, that's Tuesdays)..... and I am a friend of Naomi's and Kevin's.

I take it one day at a time. But, it has been a long time. Naomi and I studied Fine Arts together at Melbourne University in the early 1980s, [along with others here tonight – Christina Davidson, Suzi Attiwill, Chris McAuliffe, Dena Kahan – founding members of FASS, the Fine Arts Student Society, that great engine of cultural change]. Kevin arrived on the scene not long after. Or rather our scene. He was at Melbourne University too, as looking around here tonight were many more of you, in other departments – in Kevin's case Psychology, where he was doing a Phd on how people narrativise (or make-up) their lives. I remember Kevin first I think from the opening of 'What is this thing called Science?' an exhibition at the University Gallery in 1987 curated by Naomi (always asking the difficult questions), with Kevin a contributor to the catalogue. His essay I found when I got it out the other night (doing research), curiously enough was titled 'Science/Seduction'. As amoebic forms of life we all swam in the same soup – an interest in art and ideas.

Now a caveat, about how peculiarly unsuited I am for this task. The friends speech at the wedding. And this is not because I am unaccustomed to public speaking. I am not. I love it, I put myself in for this, any opportunity.

Well, I'm as good a friend as they're likely to get. It's true.

And don't get me wrong, I love a wedding, as much as the next person.

A celebration of love, couldn't be better, as far as celebrations go....

But when it comes to the whole sentiment and meaning behind the event, I am rather bald on top..... It's just I've had no experience with what we are here to celebrate tonight – the couple thing.

Never gone there myself. It's not like I've been married and divorced. Not that I've just never married. I've never even coupled. Ever. Haven't even looked like coupling.

Although you know there is a saying, 'Two's company, three's a couple'. I've had a bit of experience there.

But basically, Coupledom, I don't get it, don't really understand it. And also quite frankly, I don't like it.

All of you out there. Well, most of you. You see my problem. I don't like couples.

The world is made for couples. The world thinks it's a couple. And I don't like it.

Just one example: I was witness to a planning committee meeting re table arrangements at the wedding, and the question came up as to whether or not to separate the couples. I don't think we were talking about flinging them around the room – just not seating them actually next to each other. A grave solemnity met this question of moral conscience. Could we, should we, separate the couples. They might have to fend for themselves, make conversation with someone they didn't even know, and without the support of their partner. But it could make it more interesting? It's up to you now.

[Although, I have been told that some of the couples that were separated, have already made it back together.]

So anyway, I am not on the inside of coupledom. But perhaps that gives me the advantage – as an objective observer.

In the friends speech, I'm supposed to talk about them (Naomi and Kevin) as individuals, sum up their qualities, and then talk about how coupling has changed their shape – deepened, strengthened, stretched this bit, and shrunk the other bit – but how their individual brands shine through in their particular couple patent. I can't do any of this.

I don't feel I can tell you anything about them as individuals, that you don't already know – and everyone will know different things. I could only tell my story of them, and that would be all about me.

But when it comes to their couplehood, I am particularly stymied. When it comes to Kevin and Naomi as a couple, and I've observed them quite a bit,

it is quite opaque to me. As I've said I don't get it, coupledom, but I particularly don't get it with them. Let me qualify.

I can see shared interests, but that doesn't make a couple. I can see quite a lot of room in there, which allows them to be who they are: – you'd need quite a bit of room in there. Let's take a look at the Kevin and Naomi House of Love – what it looks like. They have separate but adjoining rooms I think – with a walk through type arrangement. Then there are rooms for each of 13 different ethnic affinities – 'their gear and tackle and trim'. Ruby and Esther of course have their own rooms, and there is the whole of the Cass clan stuffed in the attic. Naomi's cooking would take up at least 2 rooms, and there would be a room or perhaps a large walk-in closet devoted to warehousing exotic substances: for eating, smelling, smoking, drinking – comestibles, unguents and potions, gold, fankincense and mhyrr. Finally assorted friends and acquaintances milling around in the dining room, some of us in our underwear or naked, crouched behind the furniture, gently rocking back and forth on the balls of our feet to a calming Klezmer ditty, while Yontie the dog, is weeing, because she is 'so pleased to see you'. I can tell you what's in their house, but I can't tell you what the glue is that keeps it together.

The mystery of love....according to a remark of Jacques Lacan....'love is giving something you haven't got to someone who doesn't exist'. Certainly that, I think, is our fear. [Alt. as the famous Jewish comedian Jacques Lacan once quipped.....]

Being couple illiterate, I have of course turned to books. Actually I was doing this research in any case.

As some of you know I will soom be moving to Bendigo to head up a new research Key Centre at La Trobe University, the McKenzie Institute of Love and Relationship.

Adam Philips – celebrity Brit Lit psychoanalyst – his essay 'On Love' in his book On Flirtation was where I landed. It provided me with a good way to think about 'the problem' of Naomi and Kevin.

[Relates to the idea of knowing – getting to know someone. Instead of an unveiling, an unearthing, a discovery of what is there already (and that you get to know yourself – more essentially – through getting to know the other) it is a process of becoming – constructing both the self and the other.]

It is assumed that knowing is prior to loving – that you have to know what you are loving, that you need to know in order to love.

In recent field research I said: 'I love you.'

He said: But you don't even know me. How could you love me.

I said: I don't need to know you to love you.

Falling in love – generally thought about as a getting of wisdom narrative. A similar narrative in the popular imagination as in psychoanalysis.

The 'mad delerium' of falling in love, when you unashamedly – although given licence by the notion of attraction, chemistry, something is happening – you make each other up. You know you're just projecting onto the other person, that it's possibly unfair, and imprudent probably, and could lead to egg on your face and/or tears.

And after that, if you advance, there is being in love, learning what the other person is really like, facing up to the disappointing slimness of some of the parts, the limitations – and then we have the need for compassion, and understanding, followed by working at it and yes, compromise.

Adam Phillips:

'Lovers begin as prolifically inventive, producing enthralling illusions about each other only to be disappointed into truth....this narrative offers us the romance of disillusionment in which falling in love is the (sometimes necessary) prelude to a better but diminished – better because diminished – thing; a more realistic appreciation of oneself and the other person.... After all the excitement there are revelations of dismay. Frustration is the aura of the real.'

But Phillips offers an alternative:

'It may be that in this twilight home of disappointment, which psychoanalysis promotes, people are not suffering from their knowledge, but from losing a more ruthless capacity for self and/or other reinvention. It is not truth that they have gained but their versionality, so to speak, that they have lost.'

When you think about it: inventive is the word you would use to describe them both.

Naomi: attentive in her work and in her life to the material texture of culture, its fabrication and embellishment: she thinks up new contexts in which we can find an excuse, to pick things up and turn them over.

Kevin: has a more speculative set to his mind. Always thinking up what ifs? If Kevin can give us in a public gallery, in the full light of day, 'What if Australia was colonised by the Phonecians?' – what – we can only guess at goes on within the privacy of his intimate love relationship, in the darkness behind closed doors.

What I think: is that Kevin and Naomi, obviously have not taken the disappointing narrative, rather they have gone for the invention option. It is all I can think: they have and are still and constantly reinventing themselves.

So, to the celebration of them as a couple: it is about the courage to invent something new, according to how you feel, to keep changing your skin.