.



Cuba for Taxi Drivers



.

.

.


the bondi tenner


.

surrealism in ashfield

Yesterday in the Ashfield library I felt the earth move. I was sitting in one of the courtesy seats looking at a book on Surrealism. Great book, wish I'd borrowed it now. It wasn't the writing, it wasn't the pictures of the artworks, it was the photographs - excellent b & w pics of all the main suspects, including the women. Especially the women. I've just read Ruth Brandon's wonderful Surreal Lives, whose only defect might be a paucity of pictures of the people she's writing and you're reading about. Elsa Triolet, Helena Diakanova . . . and more. And then the earth moved. I'd just come off a heavy three day stint driving, 1 pm to 11 pm or thereabouts; five or six hour sleeps, left over adrenaline still coursing through my veins, the peculiar ear thing I still have that manifests as a feeling that at any moment I am about to pitch forward onto my face . . . but don't. Or will I? So I thought, whoa! This is worse than usual, am I about to come to grief? Laid the book down and sat still for a mo'. No-one else seemed alert or alarmed, it must have been just me. Picked up the book again . . . there it was again, a definite lurch. I felt the beginnings of panic, manifest in the thought: I need to lie down, how will I get home? Didn't bring the car, it's a kilometer walk, hot day outside, how? And then, the third displacement and I thought, no, that wasn't me. That was the world. I stood up very carefully, replaced the book on the shelf and walked as steadily as I could towards the exit. Distantly I heard the sound of heavy machinery and remembered, too late, that they are constructing a new municipal building next door to the library, to replace the old one that stood there, the one they tore down. A line from a poem about Gilgamesh came to mind: He walks the tilting earth / unknowing . . . On into the furnace of the afternoon, the tipping, changeable world, the conditional uncertainty, the false certainty of our perceptual, conceptual, accommodations.

.

blue sun

otoliths xv


.

. . . and the colour of the universe is . . .

.

beige


.

enzymes

Yesterday I got back the results from my annual check up / blood test, which I've been having done for the last three years now. Somewhat delayed because this year I watched myself indulging in classic male avoidance behaviour . . . because of certain family matters I won't go into here, I went in too early (May) for the test, so the Doc filled out the forms and told me to come back in August; which I didn't do, waiting until mid-October, all along stressing about what the results might be. It's interesting what they can find out just by looking at a bit (actually, it looked, in the one swift, nauseating glance I allowed myself, like rather a lot) of blood: cholesterol levels, blood sugar / diabetes, the chance that you have prostate cancer, kidney function, liver function . . . I was in the normal range for everything except the last which, given my habits, is hardly surprising. The first time I did this test Dr. Chan observed that I drink too much red wine and I said how to do you know that? but he went all sphinx-like and just muttered something about the enzymes. The next year, ditto; but this year I couldn't get to see Dr. Chan, who is in demand as a skin specialist, and made an appointment with Dr. Hsu instead . . . who, unprompted, explained: the alcohol causes wear and tear on cell membranes which then leak enzymes into the blood, which must then (I think) be cleaned up by the liver . . . or maybe it's just their presence signals excess of all this other junk that the liver has to clean up. Not sure. Dr. Hsu even went so far as to show me the figures: I was in the late seventies on the first test, went up into the mid-eighties last year, but this year was down at 68; below 55 is the safe or normal zone. This intrigued me too: the last two times I've been tested I abstained for the four or five days preceding the test but this year didn't bother. Which means, I think, that what is being measured is not so much usage as a state of being. As with anything of this nature, the fact that I can understand some little part of what I'm doing to myself makes it easier to come to some sensible resolution of the issue. Moderation, I suppose. Whatever that means.

.

The Mitchells

I am seeing this: two men are sitting on a pole
they have dug a hole for and will, after dinner, raise
I think for wires. They are boiling water in a prune tin.
Bees hum their shift in unthinning mists of white

busaria blossom, under the noon of wattles.
The men eat big meat sandwiches out of a styrofoam
box with a handle. One is overheard saying:
drought that year. Yes. Like trying to farm the road.

The first man, if asked, would say I'm one of the Mitchells.
The other would gaze for a while, dried leaves in his palm,
and looking up, with pain and subtle amusement,

say I'm one of the Mitchells. Of the pair, one has been rich
but never stopped wearing his oil-stained felt hat. Nearly everything
they say is ritual. Sometimes the scene is an avenue.



Les Murray on The Mitchells here


.