16.6.05
A jet flies in front of the sun, darkening my world. I call it Alexander, imagining, in the instant before light returns, that I am a Diogenes. Alexander goes on to occlude other worlds than mine. Later that evening I see the pinpoint that is Jupiter near the convexity of our moon and realise the moment of its occultation has passed without my observation. It will disappear on the dark side, said Dr Lomb. No matter, since it has surely reappeared. Was it then, as sister planet occluded gas giant and worlds seemed to but did not collide, that someone skimmed my bank account of all the little it contained? Was that when the violation occurred? Man’s luck is found in strange places, said Pelsaert to two criminal Dutchmen he marooned on the West Australian shore, circa 1629. When you think that you’ve lost everything/You find out you can always lose a little more … sings Dylan. Premonitory words I’ve been entertaining for a while. If I could have got them out of my head would the disaster (= unfavourable aspect of a star) not have happened? Is it even a disaster? At the bank they are sympathetic but powerless to help. I must report the fraud to the police so as to get a case number for the counter claim. It will take twenty-one days. The policewoman says: Fill out this form. Do you have a pen? I ask. No, she says. She rummages through a drawer and comes up with a green one. I write my stat. dec. in bilious ink. Later, waspishly: We’re only following procedure. Everyone gets treated the same. I know, I reply, knowing it isn’t so. But the stars are indifferent. The planets too … or are they? My horoscope for that yesterday says: Power plays are going on around you and your working life is now in the hands of brokers. Learn the subtle art of manipulation ... Today’s egregious suggestion is that I should try to see the positive in the situation. I’m not sure if I can. I need to be Diogenes for longer than the pause of an Alexander. When power confronts thought, is it always just a passing shadow? When thought encounters power … what? Jupiter hangs now yellowy and pendant to the boneyard moon. Stars glitter in the cold air. Planets shine, I recall, stars pulse. The moon waxes. Then it wanes. I would like to think that there will be a reckoning.
Memory ...
Memory is the only paradise we cannot be expelled from ... ascribed to Jean Luc Godard in the previous post, may not have originated with him. I came across it in Alan Brunton's script Grooves of Glory, published by Bumper Books, with two other performance scripts, in a book of the same title in 2004. But a Google search suggests it was the German writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, usually known as Jean Paul, who said it. Alan may have deliberately mis-ascribed the quotation, which occurs in dramatic dialogue. Or Godard may have been quoting Richter, with or without acknowledgment. Provenance aside, what does it mean? It came into my mind, perhaps, because of something David Hilbert wrote: No-one shall expel us from the paradise Cantor has created for us. Both remarks are full of irony. Cantor's mathematical paradise, while certainly fruitful for those who have continued his work, is vertiginous, intoxicating, fearful, enigmatic, in about equal degrees for the lay person. Memory as a paradise may be similarly described. We can be both tortured and exalted by things we recall. And isn't memory itself a record of something already gone, a paradise lost? Isn't it the case that we cannot be expelled from that paradise because we have left it already? Or should we look at it another way, and say that memory is a paradise because it endures in a way that the evanescent events it recalls never can? Another thing that was in my mind as I wrote yesterday was Jean Vengua's site Mnemosyne's Hem where Mnemosyne is currently doing battle, as it were, with Lethe. What if we were to say Forgetting is the only the paradise we cannot be expelled from? I've toyed for years now with a paradoxical description of what writing can be: We remember in order to write but we write to forget. I've wanted to ascribe this insight to its author and quote it as an epigraph to a book, but I haven't worked out yet who said it. I don't think it was Jean Luc or Jean Paul. It might have been one of Pessoa's heteronyms, but which one? Alexander Search? No, it would have to have been said by Bernardo Soares who was, I now recall, only a semi-heteronym. And maybe after all I've misquoted him, maybe what he really said was: We forget in order to write but we write to remember.
15.6.05
Zeno to Cantor
One of the griefs of my education was a choice I had to make at the beginning of my fourth year at secondary school. Although I no longer remember the actual marks, I do recall that, in the nationwide School Certificate examination the previous year (1967) I'd scored equally well in History and Maths. In the Sixth Form, however, which I was entering, these two subjects were mutually exclusive options: you couldn't 'do' both. I tried to work out a way. My father, a former History teacher who was then Headmaster of Huntly College, though leery of showing any favouritism, also tried. There were family discussions. I was going to attempt some kind of alternative study programme during free periods, sport etc. In all of this was an unspoken assumption, which I shared, that, if one of the two subjects was going to have to go, it would be Mathematics. So it proved. And, in the way of such things, a door closed that would never really open again.
Mathematical understanding, like memory, is a muscle: it strengthens with use and atrophies without. But while, as Jean Luc Godard said, memory is the only paradise we can't be expelled from, the subject matter of mathematics, if neglected, quickly turns into unbreakable code. I am as if stalled at age fifteen when it comes to the higher arcana of numbers. This doesn't mean my fascination with some, not all, of the conundrums of the count has faded, only that these puzzles seem forever beyond my reach, not simply to solve but even to formulate. I am like someone trapped in a darkened room, unable even to see the pencil and paper with which I might work out the formula that would show me the way to the door that closed so long ago.
It's the philosophical end of the subject that interests me. And I keep worrying away at those bits I can keep in mind. Among my books there is a two volume Pelican paperback called Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell. First published in 1937, republished by Penguin in 1953, reprinted in the 1960s, it consists of thirty odd essays that are mostly, though not exclusively, structured around the biographies of notable mathematicians. Bell writes beautifully. He is elegant, concise, witty, knowing and, if not exactly irreverent, certainly never misses an opportunity to burst a bubble or prick some pomposity.
As I read these essays (I have just reached Pascal by way of Descartes and Fermat), there always comes a point where the writing stops making sense and I have to skip forward to where it does again. These are the passages, of course, where history and/or biography recedes to make way for pure mathematics. There's something ineffably frustrating about my inability to understand the figures ... they seem to float just beyond my reach, in a zone that once looked as familiar to me as the garden of the house where I grew up, but is now as strange and threatening as the landscape of an Anselm Kiefer painting, say, or the planets of some other solar system than ours. I sigh, flick forward, and pick up the thread later.
Towards the end of the last essay, Paradise Lost?, about Georg Cantor, Bell writes: We are back once more asking the Sphinx to tell us what a number is ... thus closing the circle that began with Zeno and Pythagoras two and a half millenia before. Cantor's speculations with infinite sets opened the way for, among much else, Mandelbrot's insights. Chaos theory depends partly on what the Russian born German mathematician achieved. I was brought back to Men of Mathematics by a fascination with the so-called Cantor Set which, to my mind at least, is a variation upon Zeno's famous paradoxes of motion. I'll try, with the help of James Gleick, to give a non-mathematical explanation of this:
You take a line and remove the middle third; then remove the middle third of the remaining sections; and so on. The Cantor Set is the dust of points that remains. They are infinitely many, but their total length is zero.
Cantor was a tragic figure who ended his days in a mental asylum in 1918. Much of his later life was consumed by an attempt to prove that the Works of Shakespeare were written by Francis Bacon. Part of his depression originated in the implacable opposition German academic orthodoxy expressed against his work. They felt, in Gauss' 1831 phrase, horror of the actual infinite. Bell divides mathematicians into two classes: those who believe that mathematics is a purely human invention and those who think that it has an independent existence, containing universal truths we can discover. It was not so much horror of the infinite that sent Cantor mad, but rather the horror of the horrified for his work.
As for me, lacking the tools of understanding, I can't decide where I stand. I'm still back there in Egypt, asking the Sphinx to tell me what a number is ...
Mathematical understanding, like memory, is a muscle: it strengthens with use and atrophies without. But while, as Jean Luc Godard said, memory is the only paradise we can't be expelled from, the subject matter of mathematics, if neglected, quickly turns into unbreakable code. I am as if stalled at age fifteen when it comes to the higher arcana of numbers. This doesn't mean my fascination with some, not all, of the conundrums of the count has faded, only that these puzzles seem forever beyond my reach, not simply to solve but even to formulate. I am like someone trapped in a darkened room, unable even to see the pencil and paper with which I might work out the formula that would show me the way to the door that closed so long ago.
It's the philosophical end of the subject that interests me. And I keep worrying away at those bits I can keep in mind. Among my books there is a two volume Pelican paperback called Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell. First published in 1937, republished by Penguin in 1953, reprinted in the 1960s, it consists of thirty odd essays that are mostly, though not exclusively, structured around the biographies of notable mathematicians. Bell writes beautifully. He is elegant, concise, witty, knowing and, if not exactly irreverent, certainly never misses an opportunity to burst a bubble or prick some pomposity.
As I read these essays (I have just reached Pascal by way of Descartes and Fermat), there always comes a point where the writing stops making sense and I have to skip forward to where it does again. These are the passages, of course, where history and/or biography recedes to make way for pure mathematics. There's something ineffably frustrating about my inability to understand the figures ... they seem to float just beyond my reach, in a zone that once looked as familiar to me as the garden of the house where I grew up, but is now as strange and threatening as the landscape of an Anselm Kiefer painting, say, or the planets of some other solar system than ours. I sigh, flick forward, and pick up the thread later.
Towards the end of the last essay, Paradise Lost?, about Georg Cantor, Bell writes: We are back once more asking the Sphinx to tell us what a number is ... thus closing the circle that began with Zeno and Pythagoras two and a half millenia before. Cantor's speculations with infinite sets opened the way for, among much else, Mandelbrot's insights. Chaos theory depends partly on what the Russian born German mathematician achieved. I was brought back to Men of Mathematics by a fascination with the so-called Cantor Set which, to my mind at least, is a variation upon Zeno's famous paradoxes of motion. I'll try, with the help of James Gleick, to give a non-mathematical explanation of this:
You take a line and remove the middle third; then remove the middle third of the remaining sections; and so on. The Cantor Set is the dust of points that remains. They are infinitely many, but their total length is zero.
Cantor was a tragic figure who ended his days in a mental asylum in 1918. Much of his later life was consumed by an attempt to prove that the Works of Shakespeare were written by Francis Bacon. Part of his depression originated in the implacable opposition German academic orthodoxy expressed against his work. They felt, in Gauss' 1831 phrase, horror of the actual infinite. Bell divides mathematicians into two classes: those who believe that mathematics is a purely human invention and those who think that it has an independent existence, containing universal truths we can discover. It was not so much horror of the infinite that sent Cantor mad, but rather the horror of the horrified for his work.
As for me, lacking the tools of understanding, I can't decide where I stand. I'm still back there in Egypt, asking the Sphinx to tell me what a number is ...
13.6.05
limbo and/or cyberspace
I had meant to mark a year in the blogosphere with a post last Friday (10.6.05) but in a lather of disorientation I wrote something else entirely. So, belatedly ... a few thoughts. It was Mark Young who suggested I start this site and he who also helped me set it up. By remote control as it were, because at that stage we had corresponded but not met. It was something I approached with quite a deal of trepidation. An obsessive reviser, I was not used to the process of instant publication, as it were, and doubted that I would be able to sustain any long term engagement with what is effectively an electronic diary. In fact I now think of writing here as somehow analogous to what playing every day is for a musician ... a practice, a discipline perhaps, a means of increasing fluency. For a while I used to joke about feeding my blog, as if it were a demand I had to satisfy. I still feel like that, I don't like to let too long pass between posts. On the other hand, I don't always have something to say. I've also noticed, on the odd occasion I've taken something from the site and used it elsewhere, that the writing is more casual, or less rigorous, than I want it to be and must be revised. Sometimes the name bothers me: when I first started I was writing a book under the same title and much of what appeared here was outtakes from, or pieces of research that pertained to, the book. That book was finished earlier this year, though it has not yet found a publisher, and so the overflow from it into this site has ceased. I loved the tone of some of the exotica I was posting last year; now the writing seems more humdrum than I would like. It was to exile the humdrum to another place that I started a companion site, dérives which might paradoxically show more flash and gleam than this one does. Or not. I'm always dissatisfied when I'm not working on a book, which I'm not now, and maybe that's all I mean. I have two folders on my desktop, both with titles I really like, neither with any definite plan. One, I can't decide whether to write as a film or a book, which probably means it should be a film. The other is certainly a book but, although I know what the subject matter is, I still haven't found the voice in which to write it. And, because it is difficult subject matter, I keep shying away from really engaging with it. At the back of my mind is the thought that there might be some other thing that has not yet lurched forward into the light. I feel, I suppose, strangely adrift from my unconscious, or dream life, or whatever ... a state I recognise having been in before. A kind of limbo perhaps. I think of what Keats said about negative capability, to be able to be in a state of suspended disbelief without irritable reaching after fact or reason. (I might be misquoting here). I think of another phrase, the discipline of indiscipline. However. On the other side of the scales, outweighing all introspection and doubt, there is the wonderful, sustaining, always stimulating sense of being a part - however obscure, hesitant or refractory - of a community of writers also engaged in this extraordinary process of extending consciousness to cyberspace.
PS: ... capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason ...
PS: ... capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason ...
10.6.05
Hotel Centaur
Have just returned from three days (felt like years) in a swank hotel in Coogee. A marketing seminar hosted by the federal film development funding body for selected project teams working on low budget features. On those odd occasions when I get to stay in hotels of this kind I am unable to get the picture Barton Fink out of my mind. Those lowered ceilings in the corridors, the absolute uniformity of decor and doors, the perhaps sinister absence of anyone else at all, most of all the sense of some kind of ambient music playing just beyond the reach of my hearing ... how many times has this air been breathed, I wonder? Whose lungs was it in before mine? What will I find when I swipe the card through the slot and re-enter my room? Not a murdered Judy Davis? Not, surely, a dead horse head in my bed? Not ... another copy of New Idea? Yes! Michael Jackson is moving to Australia just as soon as his trial is over. Bad Pit is entering a monastry. Princess Anne is dating Camilla Parker-Bowles ex. Lindy Chamberlain will save Chapelle Corby from her doom. Or should that be room? Also staying in the hotel is the NSW State of Origin team. These guys look smaller than they do on TV (which is not saying much - they are massive on screen). They never meet your eye. They do not stand aside if you intersect on the way to the breakfast bar. On the third morning, one of the coaching staff collapses with pancreatitis. I become Barton Fink. I am someone from the East Coast sent down into the West, except the terms are reversed: West is East. It is suggested that this is what we call our currently untitled film: East : West. My mouth moves but no words come out of it. A fat man in the horseshoe of tables is shouting out Virus Marketing! Nobody knows if his girlfriend is a/hypnotised b/transexual c/an android. The components of the Mazda promotional device he has circulated through the room will not go back into their cylinder. It's something to do with Batman. I come to on the beach with a cardboard box in my hands. I know that it contains a severed head, I just don't know whose. After an age of prudence, I open it. It's the horse's head! I don't know who to thank, I only know it isn't god. Then I see the horse itself, headless, natch, galloping along the golden sands. With a salute to those who have accompanied me thus far, I vault onto its palomino back. We ride together into the sunset.
6.6.05
train of thought
The spire ... is just emerging from the morning mist. Looks strangely yellow today.
Hawksmoor, that Peter Ackroyd book about the occult placement of certain London cathedrals.
Actually he got his (psychogeographic) inspiration from Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat, was it?
Lud ... would never say how he got that nickname. Took the knowledge with him to the grave.
The William Golding book of the same name, do I still have it ... yes, a Faber paperback.
& then Alan's poem, also called The Spire, from Messengers in Blackface:
see the light on the flying buttress
surely a visitation from the other
the sailor's beldame you fucked
will see her face on the stone vault
at the crossing of the nave
when she rises from prayers
the boy you loved will hear his voice
in the windlass for a thousand years ...
Golding who in one of his last published pieces said of a bibliography of his works: So now let the book stand on the appointed library shelf in the long, long silence.
Must read The Inheritors one day. About neanderthals, is it? Or ... some extinct branch of us.
Must check on the possibility that the Flores hominin is related not to erectus but to habilis ... journey after journey out of Africa, all dead ends until ours ... which is not to say ...
The main street at Labuanbajo, what was it called? Where every stranger laughed a greeting.
J'ai enfin le droit de saluer des êtres que je ne connais pas ... which Apollinaire poem is that?
The Musician of Saint-Merry.
How brilliant his opening lines are:
You are tired at last of this old world ...
From red to green all the yellows fade ...
Always
we are going further without advancing
and from planet to planet ...
hmmm, this copy is broken backed at Les Fenêtres ... & I've misquoted the first line, it's
The yellow fades from red to green ...
but what does the French say?
Du rouge au vert tout le jaune se muert
I must have quoted another translation than Shattuck's? but whose? my own? The one in Calligrammes says all the yellow dies .... That's literal. I think I prefer fades. But I'm not sure.
The spire ... now buttery brown before the blue & haunted by sulphur-crested cockatoos. Guess I should ... do something ...
Hawksmoor, that Peter Ackroyd book about the occult placement of certain London cathedrals.
Actually he got his (psychogeographic) inspiration from Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat, was it?
Lud ... would never say how he got that nickname. Took the knowledge with him to the grave.
The William Golding book of the same name, do I still have it ... yes, a Faber paperback.
& then Alan's poem, also called The Spire, from Messengers in Blackface:
see the light on the flying buttress
surely a visitation from the other
the sailor's beldame you fucked
will see her face on the stone vault
at the crossing of the nave
when she rises from prayers
the boy you loved will hear his voice
in the windlass for a thousand years ...
Golding who in one of his last published pieces said of a bibliography of his works: So now let the book stand on the appointed library shelf in the long, long silence.
Must read The Inheritors one day. About neanderthals, is it? Or ... some extinct branch of us.
Must check on the possibility that the Flores hominin is related not to erectus but to habilis ... journey after journey out of Africa, all dead ends until ours ... which is not to say ...
The main street at Labuanbajo, what was it called? Where every stranger laughed a greeting.
J'ai enfin le droit de saluer des êtres que je ne connais pas ... which Apollinaire poem is that?
The Musician of Saint-Merry.
How brilliant his opening lines are:
You are tired at last of this old world ...
From red to green all the yellows fade ...
Always
we are going further without advancing
and from planet to planet ...
hmmm, this copy is broken backed at Les Fenêtres ... & I've misquoted the first line, it's
The yellow fades from red to green ...
but what does the French say?
Du rouge au vert tout le jaune se muert
I must have quoted another translation than Shattuck's? but whose? my own? The one in Calligrammes says all the yellow dies .... That's literal. I think I prefer fades. But I'm not sure.
The spire ... now buttery brown before the blue & haunted by sulphur-crested cockatoos. Guess I should ... do something ...
1.6.05
the listening room
Tagged by Jill Chan who has a fine interview on Navel Orange called Going Still to Listen. This is a disaster for me – I am far too secretive a person to feel comfortable divulging information of this sort. Anyway ...
The volume of music files on my computer … is unknown. I changed from PC to Mac earlier this year & all the music files I had on the PC refused to come across. So at the moment I just use the CD player. A young film maker I know is going to bring the story boards for his latest short film around sometime soon for me to look at &, as a quid pro quo, give me a tutorial on the finer points of i-tunes.
The last CDs I bought … were a couple of movie soundtracks: of John Sayle’s Lone Star & from a Canadian film called The Hanging Garden, written & directed by Thom Fitzgerald. One is Tex-Mex, the other, Celtic music out of, I think, Nova Scotia. I haven’t seen either movie. But I have just seen Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 & that has an absolutely gorgeous soundtrack to go with the equally gorgeous visuals.
I write listening only to the tap of the keys & the hum of the machinery. But I always have a song in my head & that could be anything. Lately I've been doing battle with Van Morrison's Astral Weeks which will NOT leave me alone.
In the next room … a Jimmy Reed compilation, You Don’t Have To Go; Césaria Évora’s Voz d’Amor; a Brian Eno collaboration with Harold Budd, produced by Daniel Lanois, called The Pearl; Buddhist Chants & Peace Music; and a burn of Chant Down Babylon, Bob Marley songs remixed by his son Steve with invited guests, which, dammit, won’t play.
The volume of music files on my computer … is unknown. I changed from PC to Mac earlier this year & all the music files I had on the PC refused to come across. So at the moment I just use the CD player. A young film maker I know is going to bring the story boards for his latest short film around sometime soon for me to look at &, as a quid pro quo, give me a tutorial on the finer points of i-tunes.
The last CDs I bought … were a couple of movie soundtracks: of John Sayle’s Lone Star & from a Canadian film called The Hanging Garden, written & directed by Thom Fitzgerald. One is Tex-Mex, the other, Celtic music out of, I think, Nova Scotia. I haven’t seen either movie. But I have just seen Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 & that has an absolutely gorgeous soundtrack to go with the equally gorgeous visuals.
I write listening only to the tap of the keys & the hum of the machinery. But I always have a song in my head & that could be anything. Lately I've been doing battle with Van Morrison's Astral Weeks which will NOT leave me alone.
In the next room … a Jimmy Reed compilation, You Don’t Have To Go; Césaria Évora’s Voz d’Amor; a Brian Eno collaboration with Harold Budd, produced by Daniel Lanois, called The Pearl; Buddhist Chants & Peace Music; and a burn of Chant Down Babylon, Bob Marley songs remixed by his son Steve with invited guests, which, dammit, won’t play.
30.5.05
words on maps (for peter baka)
The map is (not) the journey. The journey is (not) the map.
I once walked all the way from Gad’s Hill along the Hope Range to look out, off Middle Head, over Broken Bay. From Gad to Hope to Middle to Broken: I saw no names along the way, just rocks and trees and birds and the great river running into the sea.
No matter what you call a place – hill, valley, swamp, river-mouth, beach, headland – it will still be there after the name is forgotten.
A map of forgotten names is the country of another time. If you know the names you can call back the country. Sometimes you can hear the country saying its names so that you can learn how to call it back. These voices rise at unexpected times in lonely places. You have to listen tenderly and move your lips slowly. Even so, you will make mistakes.
Every mistake is an absence that cannot be recalled. Each forgotten name is a hole in the sky. But the nameless land endures.
A map is a palimpsest: writing on the land which is rubbed out and overwritten, names obscuring other older names, which themselves hide even older ones, like tattoo fading under tattoo under tattoo. You cannot excavate names, but you cannot wholly obscure them either: fragments will always show through, like skin showing through under a tattoo.
Land is skin; map is tattoo.
You can sometimes walk off a known map into an older time, when the names were different to what they are now. How do you know when you have strayed? By the way the names have changed - from those which are known to those which are unknown. The unknown names are strange, and they afflict you with strangeness: you become a stranger to a place you thought you knew, and you wander. It is possible to be lost like this even when you are walking from one known place to another. Your return to the familiar map is accompanied by feelings of relief mixed with sadness for the unknown country you have strayed into and are now leaving behind, perhaps forever.
You do not need to know the name of a place to go there; but, having been, you are sure to call it by some name or other, adding it to the map of your wanderings.
When I was younger I used sometimes to imagine my life as a tangle of journeys mapping all the places I had ever been, erasing themselves each time they were repeated. You can do the same thing with a day: picture it as a drawing on a map of where you have been. Some days I do not leave the house; yet still leave a snarl of paths.
The map of names. The names of maps. The names are (not) the map.
I once walked all the way from Gad’s Hill along the Hope Range to look out, off Middle Head, over Broken Bay. From Gad to Hope to Middle to Broken: I saw no names along the way, just rocks and trees and birds and the great river running into the sea.
No matter what you call a place – hill, valley, swamp, river-mouth, beach, headland – it will still be there after the name is forgotten.
A map of forgotten names is the country of another time. If you know the names you can call back the country. Sometimes you can hear the country saying its names so that you can learn how to call it back. These voices rise at unexpected times in lonely places. You have to listen tenderly and move your lips slowly. Even so, you will make mistakes.
Every mistake is an absence that cannot be recalled. Each forgotten name is a hole in the sky. But the nameless land endures.
A map is a palimpsest: writing on the land which is rubbed out and overwritten, names obscuring other older names, which themselves hide even older ones, like tattoo fading under tattoo under tattoo. You cannot excavate names, but you cannot wholly obscure them either: fragments will always show through, like skin showing through under a tattoo.
Land is skin; map is tattoo.
You can sometimes walk off a known map into an older time, when the names were different to what they are now. How do you know when you have strayed? By the way the names have changed - from those which are known to those which are unknown. The unknown names are strange, and they afflict you with strangeness: you become a stranger to a place you thought you knew, and you wander. It is possible to be lost like this even when you are walking from one known place to another. Your return to the familiar map is accompanied by feelings of relief mixed with sadness for the unknown country you have strayed into and are now leaving behind, perhaps forever.
You do not need to know the name of a place to go there; but, having been, you are sure to call it by some name or other, adding it to the map of your wanderings.
When I was younger I used sometimes to imagine my life as a tangle of journeys mapping all the places I had ever been, erasing themselves each time they were repeated. You can do the same thing with a day: picture it as a drawing on a map of where you have been. Some days I do not leave the house; yet still leave a snarl of paths.
The map of names. The names of maps. The names are (not) the map.
27.5.05
yellow tailed blacks
A couple of weeks ago I noticed some black cockatoos flying north west in the clear evening sky over Summer Hill. In contrast to the smaller, more raucous and far commoner white sulphur-crested cockatoos, the blacks have a remote and leisurely presence, perfectly expressed in their long loping wing beats and slow alterations of flight trajectory. They seem contemplative birds, with all the time in the world to do what they do, go where they go. I was quite surprised to see these ones in an urban area and wondered where they might be grazing. The three red-tailed blacks who live at Pearl Beach fed in the sheoak trees and, like these ones at Summer Hill, used to flap slowly to their roosts at the crespuscular hour. It was beautiful to spend time beneath one of the sheoaks where they ruminated over the hard cones ... gentle susurrus of beak on wood and a shower of shaved fragments falling softly onto the needle carpet under the tree. And then the loud feathery kerfuffle as one moved to another branch. Anyway, today as I was going into the pool for a swim I heard bird calls from the trees around Leichhardt Oval, a strange, reedy, keee-oww sound, one I had not come across before. I immediately thought bats, but then cancelled that option - bats? in trees? at 10.30 am? No way. Just then about half a dozen black cockatoos flew out of the tree tops, making that call to each other. They were not red-tailed blacks, which anyway have a different, more plaintive, creakier cry, but seemed to have white bars under their tails. However, on consulting the web, I learned that the white-tailed black is found only in south western Australia, and that these ones must have been yellow-tailed blacks. It's odd though - a feature of the yellow-tailed black is a prominent cheek spot, also yellow, and I did not notice that on any of these birds. They could have been young males, which have a smaller spot and lighter barred tails ... they are a bird which has adapted well to exotic plantings, being particularly fond of pine cones. In the Blue Mountains they are accused of spreading pinus radiata because of their habit of carrying half mumbled cones away from the tree then letting them fall to seed elsewhere. Well, what price purity? These ones circled above the pool for a couple of minutes, calling as they organised themselves into a flotilla, then flew away north across the Parramatta River. I went in to do my laps with their cry lingering in my ear, their slow, loping flight marking the rhythm of my strokes.
25.5.05
2 footnotes
Scholarship
Oxyrhynchus is named after the fish that ate the penis of Osiris.
Epitaph for the SoQ
When Robert Lowell … was found dead in the back of a Manhattan taxi in 1977, his fingers were clutching a parcel containing a Lucian Freud painting. It was a portrait of Lowell's wife, and Freud's former wife, Caroline Blackwood. That afternoon, Lowell's heart had given out while being driven along the Van Wyck Expressway from JFK. He had just flown from Dublin after himself splitting up with Blackwood, a woman by then ravaged by years of booze, chain-smoking and personal tragedy. Lowell had brought the painting of his wife to New York not for reasons of nostalgia, but for valuation.
John Cornwell. TimesOnline, May 22, 2005
Oxyrhynchus is named after the fish that ate the penis of Osiris.
Epitaph for the SoQ
When Robert Lowell … was found dead in the back of a Manhattan taxi in 1977, his fingers were clutching a parcel containing a Lucian Freud painting. It was a portrait of Lowell's wife, and Freud's former wife, Caroline Blackwood. That afternoon, Lowell's heart had given out while being driven along the Van Wyck Expressway from JFK. He had just flown from Dublin after himself splitting up with Blackwood, a woman by then ravaged by years of booze, chain-smoking and personal tragedy. Lowell had brought the painting of his wife to New York not for reasons of nostalgia, but for valuation.
John Cornwell. TimesOnline, May 22, 2005
24.5.05
rentier
Couple of weeks ago the owner of this flat decided to have it valued. Does this means she wants to sell? I asked the real estate agent, who just shrugged and said Maybe. The speed with which they repaired a couple of things I pointed out in the damage report when I moved in six months ago, suggested more than maybe. She - the agent - called up a week or so later to say yes, the owner was selling and would I like to move out immediately? No, thanks, I said. I'll wait and see. A few days silence and then I get a knock on the Other Door, the one I never use. It's the guy from the rival real estate agent who was, coincidentally, the first person to show me a house when I decided to move into the area last year. Course he'd forgotten. Anyway, it turns out the other agency asked too much ($5000.00) for advertising so the owner gave the job to this guy's firm. He seemed surprised at how co-operative I was, as if expecting sullen resistance. My attitude is more (I hope) one of gracious resignation. Emboldened, he asked if he could go and get his camera, take a couple of shots? Sure, I said. I guess I imagined these pictures appearing in some brochure I would never see. I certainly didn't expect what in fact happened: last Friday morning a bloke in a truck came round and erected an enormous sign on the front lawn. The picture on this sign is a picture of my sitting room. Kind of blurry, like a blow-up of a frame from a video, but instantly recognisable, at least to me. There's the twin red velvet armchairs, the blue couch with the blue satin star cushion on it; there's William Watson's The Last of the Templars (a superb novel, by the way) open, face down, on the arm of one of the chairs, the large Allen Maddox drawing, the small oil of Lion Island Peter Baka painted ... and so on. When I saw this image for the first time I felt a sense of utter breach of privacy that lasted all of five seconds; then I laughed. Inside had become outside in a perhaps exemplary manner but, I realised, the violation of my interiority was apparent, not real. Still, it's oddly disconcerting when people stop, look and comment. I heard a kid the other day say: That's a nice house, Daddy! I also feel it's ironic that my way of inhabiting this place should become a selling point for someone who might well then evict me. On the other hand, it is quite as likely that the apartment will be bought as an investment by a rentier who will want me to stay on ... probably, however, with an increased tariff. I like this flat but I'm not wedded to it. And if I do have to move, I'm thinking, I might be able to find somewhere that has advantages this one lacks. I might find a place with a bath.
19.5.05
purling
One of the glories of Sydney is its pools - pronounced purls - I mean swimming pearls. Almost every metropolitan beach has a concrete pool in the rocks at its southern or northern end, sometimes at both ends; every suburb, just about, has its municipal pool; when you fly into Sydney on a clear day it can seem that likewise there is an oblong or crescent of aqua in every backyard.
I grew up swimming in rivers and I still think river swimming is better than any other kind ... the softness of the water, the mysteries of depth and flow, the allure of the other bank ... but I love the sea too, particularly beaches where you can body surf. As kids we used to go to the baths a lot, especially when in the mid-sixties we moved to Greytown in the Wairarapa, where there was a strong swimming culture. One of my sisters became a national champion and we all attended the weekly swimming competitions held on Tuesday nights, not just for the excitement of racing but also because you could sit up the back under a blanket with whoever you wanted to so long as she wanted to sit with you.
After I left school I didn't swim, except very occasionally at the beach, for about twelve years. Just forgot all about it. Spent my time in pubs and theatres and nightclubs, abandoning all forms of exercise, all sport too, which I'd once been passionate about. Until I got to Sydney. Part of it was realising what a twisted wreck my body was becoming, how clotted with tar my lungs were, how sludgy in mind I felt; but a bigger part was my friend Lud. He was the one who inducted me into the Sydney swimming culture, partly by example, partly by subtle exhortation.
In those days he used to swim at the Sydney University pool and told me how to go about getting a badge for myself. Can't remember now how we worked this. Neither of us had any formal connection with the place, apart from the casual work I sometimes did as a stagehand at the Seymour Centre. Anyway, Lud's habit was to start the day with a smoke, usually of black putty, the Afghani hash that was so plentiful then, after which he'd go up to the pool and swim oh, I don't know, 60 laps? A lap is 50 metres, so 60 is what, 3 kilometres? He had a beautiful, languid, powerful stroke and could go, it seemed, for ever. I learned lap-swimming in imitation of him.
We used to speculate on the possibility that the Afghani hash was opiated; what isn't in doubt is that, after about 20 (Lud always said for him it was during the 17th) laps of an Olympic pool, you will get a rush of the body's natural opiate, endorphin. This, along with the near complete aeration of muscular tissue, will have you walking away from the pool after your swim feeling like one of the blessed: ambling across the rocking ground as over a deck above gentle seas, heart pumping large and slow, the sights and smells and sounds of the day entering your senses with a kind of velvety insinuation that is intensely pleasurable.
I got to know other Sydney pools: The Boy Charlton in Woolloomooloo, part salt, part fresh, where all the Gays (used to?) go, the North Sydney pool with its elaborate stucco murals of crustaceans and dolphins and the big face of Luna Park peering over the top, were probably my favourites. Later on, I used to go out to Shark Bay in Neilson Park and swim around the inside perimeter of the shark net there. Once we moved up to Pearl Beach, I became a committed sea swimmer.
Then I lost it ... to me, tobacco and swimming are alternative lung uses and, while I'm doing one, I won't generally be doing the other. And since last year in Auckland, when I became addicted to cigars and then, later, up in S.E. Asia, replaced that addiction with addiction to the kretek, the Indonesian clove cigarette, it's been tobacco tobacco tobacco ... until today. Today I finally dragged myself off to the Leichhardt Aquatic Centre and managed 13 rather halting laps of the Olympic pool there. Not enough to get an endorphin high, but enough to feel physically about 100 percent better. Mentally too perhaps ... I don't know.
Beautiful pool ... might describe it another day. Course it's brought Lud strongly back into my mind. He had one of the best intellects I ever encountered. His bent was philosophic, I guess; multi-talented, he was curiously without ambition. He was a hedonist, though not in any frivolous sense. Formidable chess player. Loved his Scotch. Born in Scotland, raised in the Pacific Islands - Fiji, Samoa, Papua Nuigini - educated in New Zealand, he sometimes seemed like a hybrid pakeha-polynesian. He had a special feeling for the works of Malcolm Lowry. And a vast medical and scientific knowledge gathered from his reading. Was fascinated with how things worked: he used to like taking his cameras and pushbikes apart and putting them back together again. For a brief season he painted, producing rainbow coloured abstracts; then stopped. The last few years of his working life he repaired photocopiers and then fax machines. He made me a fax machine out of bits and pieces cannibalised along the way. If he'd lived he would probably have gone further into computer technology.
Lud was diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease about, what, five years ago? Maybe more. He died from it late in 2002, in Byron Bay. MND is a cruel disease. It affects all muscular tissues in the body but leaves the mind, the vision and the sexual function intact. The last time I saw Lud, the disease was so advanced he had trouble enunciating. Nevertheless, he was re-reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and was acute enough to correct me when I said presbyoptia instead of presbyopia, a word I learned from him. The night he slipped away the big abstract of his I have, inside a heavy wooden map frame he scored from the GPO while working there, came crashing down off the wall in the hallway.
There's no remedy for the early death of a friend, no answer to the questions you ask about what they might have done if things had turned out differently, or what you might have done differently in the time you had with them. In the face of existential angst, hedonism, at least the way Lud practised it, does have one advantage: it means the life you live, evanescent as it is, is full of pleasures fully indulged. That part of pleasure which invokes memory is perhaps denied the dead, along with all other pleasures; but only once you are dead. Until then, you can lap your way into an endorphin daze as often as you like; and, after today, I intend to do just that.
I grew up swimming in rivers and I still think river swimming is better than any other kind ... the softness of the water, the mysteries of depth and flow, the allure of the other bank ... but I love the sea too, particularly beaches where you can body surf. As kids we used to go to the baths a lot, especially when in the mid-sixties we moved to Greytown in the Wairarapa, where there was a strong swimming culture. One of my sisters became a national champion and we all attended the weekly swimming competitions held on Tuesday nights, not just for the excitement of racing but also because you could sit up the back under a blanket with whoever you wanted to so long as she wanted to sit with you.
After I left school I didn't swim, except very occasionally at the beach, for about twelve years. Just forgot all about it. Spent my time in pubs and theatres and nightclubs, abandoning all forms of exercise, all sport too, which I'd once been passionate about. Until I got to Sydney. Part of it was realising what a twisted wreck my body was becoming, how clotted with tar my lungs were, how sludgy in mind I felt; but a bigger part was my friend Lud. He was the one who inducted me into the Sydney swimming culture, partly by example, partly by subtle exhortation.
In those days he used to swim at the Sydney University pool and told me how to go about getting a badge for myself. Can't remember now how we worked this. Neither of us had any formal connection with the place, apart from the casual work I sometimes did as a stagehand at the Seymour Centre. Anyway, Lud's habit was to start the day with a smoke, usually of black putty, the Afghani hash that was so plentiful then, after which he'd go up to the pool and swim oh, I don't know, 60 laps? A lap is 50 metres, so 60 is what, 3 kilometres? He had a beautiful, languid, powerful stroke and could go, it seemed, for ever. I learned lap-swimming in imitation of him.
We used to speculate on the possibility that the Afghani hash was opiated; what isn't in doubt is that, after about 20 (Lud always said for him it was during the 17th) laps of an Olympic pool, you will get a rush of the body's natural opiate, endorphin. This, along with the near complete aeration of muscular tissue, will have you walking away from the pool after your swim feeling like one of the blessed: ambling across the rocking ground as over a deck above gentle seas, heart pumping large and slow, the sights and smells and sounds of the day entering your senses with a kind of velvety insinuation that is intensely pleasurable.
I got to know other Sydney pools: The Boy Charlton in Woolloomooloo, part salt, part fresh, where all the Gays (used to?) go, the North Sydney pool with its elaborate stucco murals of crustaceans and dolphins and the big face of Luna Park peering over the top, were probably my favourites. Later on, I used to go out to Shark Bay in Neilson Park and swim around the inside perimeter of the shark net there. Once we moved up to Pearl Beach, I became a committed sea swimmer.
Then I lost it ... to me, tobacco and swimming are alternative lung uses and, while I'm doing one, I won't generally be doing the other. And since last year in Auckland, when I became addicted to cigars and then, later, up in S.E. Asia, replaced that addiction with addiction to the kretek, the Indonesian clove cigarette, it's been tobacco tobacco tobacco ... until today. Today I finally dragged myself off to the Leichhardt Aquatic Centre and managed 13 rather halting laps of the Olympic pool there. Not enough to get an endorphin high, but enough to feel physically about 100 percent better. Mentally too perhaps ... I don't know.
Beautiful pool ... might describe it another day. Course it's brought Lud strongly back into my mind. He had one of the best intellects I ever encountered. His bent was philosophic, I guess; multi-talented, he was curiously without ambition. He was a hedonist, though not in any frivolous sense. Formidable chess player. Loved his Scotch. Born in Scotland, raised in the Pacific Islands - Fiji, Samoa, Papua Nuigini - educated in New Zealand, he sometimes seemed like a hybrid pakeha-polynesian. He had a special feeling for the works of Malcolm Lowry. And a vast medical and scientific knowledge gathered from his reading. Was fascinated with how things worked: he used to like taking his cameras and pushbikes apart and putting them back together again. For a brief season he painted, producing rainbow coloured abstracts; then stopped. The last few years of his working life he repaired photocopiers and then fax machines. He made me a fax machine out of bits and pieces cannibalised along the way. If he'd lived he would probably have gone further into computer technology.
Lud was diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease about, what, five years ago? Maybe more. He died from it late in 2002, in Byron Bay. MND is a cruel disease. It affects all muscular tissues in the body but leaves the mind, the vision and the sexual function intact. The last time I saw Lud, the disease was so advanced he had trouble enunciating. Nevertheless, he was re-reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and was acute enough to correct me when I said presbyoptia instead of presbyopia, a word I learned from him. The night he slipped away the big abstract of his I have, inside a heavy wooden map frame he scored from the GPO while working there, came crashing down off the wall in the hallway.
There's no remedy for the early death of a friend, no answer to the questions you ask about what they might have done if things had turned out differently, or what you might have done differently in the time you had with them. In the face of existential angst, hedonism, at least the way Lud practised it, does have one advantage: it means the life you live, evanescent as it is, is full of pleasures fully indulged. That part of pleasure which invokes memory is perhaps denied the dead, along with all other pleasures; but only once you are dead. Until then, you can lap your way into an endorphin daze as often as you like; and, after today, I intend to do just that.
18.5.05
Rain Dance
It's raining in Sydney, Eastern Standard Time 19.43. It's raining! Rain! Il Pleut ... etcetera. Commuters run home from the station without umbrellas. The sky lours. There's a smell of mould as the long dried spores in the gutters are released into the air. Maybe that patch of scarlet-pink sick that's been glued for weeks to the pavement two doors down in Morris Street will shift? But already the shower is fading ...
On the nightly weather bulletin maps it is usually the case that Australia, the 'island continent', is surrounded by cloud masses, most days it rains over parts (many parts of island Asia, over New Guinea, over the archipelagos of Melanesia, over New Zealand; most days it doesn't rain here, we are as if sequestered behind a cordon sanitaire so far as precipitation is concerned.
That was last night. It didn't rain much after all though the patch of sick has gone. I don't know why thinking about these things makes me wonder if we shouldn't rewrite Australasia as Asiaustralia? Something to do perhaps, not just with the weather, but with our skewed relationship with our near neighbours. The Big Dry can seem emotional as much as meterological ... Australia is like a dessicated fruit, with a green rind and nothing much except dust within.
Now it's a few days later, and it's still raining, off and on. 18th May. The anniversary of my first arrival in Sydney, way back in 1981, full of rock 'n' roll dreams, looking for the way to movie heaven. I couldn't believe how drab were the streets you drive through from the airport into town. We stayed at the Springfield Lodge, a residential hotel in Kings Cross, with a view west over the City. It rained for ten days solid, the red and blue neon appearing and disappearing in the murk, the ragged banners of cloud rent and torn on the towers, the incessant gurgle and laughter of the gutters ...
I had imagined a land of blue and gold, celestial colours, not the dreary wet bedraggled streets through which I walked each day to the taxi training school in Paddington. Now, it is different: I long for rain like I have longed for it in other places I've lived, even San Francisco, not such a dry city, but where it did not rain for the first I don't know how many months I lived there. Are we living on the banks of an extinct river?
The promotion of Asiaustralia as an alternative designation for this part of the world might then be seen as a kind of sympathetic magic, a way of bringing the wet our way, a way out of the dryness of our present state, our Age of Beige. We are as if choking on dust: dust of detention, dust of rationalism, economic or otherwise, dust of the deserts within. Oh, the water ... let it run all over me ...
On the nightly weather bulletin maps it is usually the case that Australia, the 'island continent', is surrounded by cloud masses, most days it rains over parts (many parts of island Asia, over New Guinea, over the archipelagos of Melanesia, over New Zealand; most days it doesn't rain here, we are as if sequestered behind a cordon sanitaire so far as precipitation is concerned.
That was last night. It didn't rain much after all though the patch of sick has gone. I don't know why thinking about these things makes me wonder if we shouldn't rewrite Australasia as Asiaustralia? Something to do perhaps, not just with the weather, but with our skewed relationship with our near neighbours. The Big Dry can seem emotional as much as meterological ... Australia is like a dessicated fruit, with a green rind and nothing much except dust within.
Now it's a few days later, and it's still raining, off and on. 18th May. The anniversary of my first arrival in Sydney, way back in 1981, full of rock 'n' roll dreams, looking for the way to movie heaven. I couldn't believe how drab were the streets you drive through from the airport into town. We stayed at the Springfield Lodge, a residential hotel in Kings Cross, with a view west over the City. It rained for ten days solid, the red and blue neon appearing and disappearing in the murk, the ragged banners of cloud rent and torn on the towers, the incessant gurgle and laughter of the gutters ...
I had imagined a land of blue and gold, celestial colours, not the dreary wet bedraggled streets through which I walked each day to the taxi training school in Paddington. Now, it is different: I long for rain like I have longed for it in other places I've lived, even San Francisco, not such a dry city, but where it did not rain for the first I don't know how many months I lived there. Are we living on the banks of an extinct river?
The promotion of Asiaustralia as an alternative designation for this part of the world might then be seen as a kind of sympathetic magic, a way of bringing the wet our way, a way out of the dryness of our present state, our Age of Beige. We are as if choking on dust: dust of detention, dust of rationalism, economic or otherwise, dust of the deserts within. Oh, the water ... let it run all over me ...
14.5.05
Window
A completed book will never compensate me for what I destroyed in writing it: namely that experience which if preserved throughout the years of my life might have helped me compose my last book, and which in fact was sufficient only to write the first.
So ends the 1964 preface Italo Calvino wrote for his first book, The Path to the Spider's Nest (1947). The paradox contained in this sentence resonates particularly with me today, the twenty-first anniversary of the death of the artist Philip Clairmont. I spent a greater part of the 1990s trying to reproduce a generous selection of his paintings, prints and drawings within the covers of a book ... to no avail. Ultimately I was thwarted by copyright issues, exacerbated by bureaucratic meddling which was itself rooted in the petty malice which so often inflects small (and larger) art scenes. To this day most of Philip's work remains unrepresented apart from its sheer physical existence, which is in many cases threatened by his deliberate use of fugitive pigments and supports afflicted with inherent vice. The book I did publish sometimes seems to me to have obscured the ouevre it was meant to represent in the same way that Calvino feels his novel of the Resistance destroyed his experience of fighting in the Resistance. Yet my memory of the ouevre remains strong and the catalogue of works I assembled, while incomplete and out of date, does exist as probably the most complete record of what he made during his brief career. Whether Philip's work as a whole will ever get the representation it deserves is most likely out of my hands now, though I would still do everything I could to achieve such a goal. His son, Orlando, is presently putting together a documentary about his father and has further plans for a proper archive and perhaps even a somewhere to house it and the works that remain in the family. I guess time will tell. As to the paradox that ... the minute it (experience) gives shape to a work of literature it withers and dies. The writer, after writing, finds that he is the poorest of men ... there's not much I or anyone else can do about that. Every book both contains and obscures the ghost of the book it might have been; every screen that we compose upon is covered with erasures; every page marked with words that are not the words we wanted to write. Whether or not this is also true of paintings I don't know; it may be. Anyway, enfin, in commemoration of this day, here's an image.
So ends the 1964 preface Italo Calvino wrote for his first book, The Path to the Spider's Nest (1947). The paradox contained in this sentence resonates particularly with me today, the twenty-first anniversary of the death of the artist Philip Clairmont. I spent a greater part of the 1990s trying to reproduce a generous selection of his paintings, prints and drawings within the covers of a book ... to no avail. Ultimately I was thwarted by copyright issues, exacerbated by bureaucratic meddling which was itself rooted in the petty malice which so often inflects small (and larger) art scenes. To this day most of Philip's work remains unrepresented apart from its sheer physical existence, which is in many cases threatened by his deliberate use of fugitive pigments and supports afflicted with inherent vice. The book I did publish sometimes seems to me to have obscured the ouevre it was meant to represent in the same way that Calvino feels his novel of the Resistance destroyed his experience of fighting in the Resistance. Yet my memory of the ouevre remains strong and the catalogue of works I assembled, while incomplete and out of date, does exist as probably the most complete record of what he made during his brief career. Whether Philip's work as a whole will ever get the representation it deserves is most likely out of my hands now, though I would still do everything I could to achieve such a goal. His son, Orlando, is presently putting together a documentary about his father and has further plans for a proper archive and perhaps even a somewhere to house it and the works that remain in the family. I guess time will tell. As to the paradox that ... the minute it (experience) gives shape to a work of literature it withers and dies. The writer, after writing, finds that he is the poorest of men ... there's not much I or anyone else can do about that. Every book both contains and obscures the ghost of the book it might have been; every screen that we compose upon is covered with erasures; every page marked with words that are not the words we wanted to write. Whether or not this is also true of paintings I don't know; it may be. Anyway, enfin, in commemoration of this day, here's an image.
13.5.05
Tears
This is about a painting. Of my sister. Rachel. She died by her own hand in 1975. She was 21. In the early 90s I tried to prepare her diaries for publication. My mother and sisters did not think the plan was appropriate and nor did the one publisher who looked at the manuscript. That was fine, I accepted the decision. In the meantime, a friend, Lexia Murrell, who'd known Rachel in her youth, offered to do a painting for the cover. I gave Lexie some photos to work from. She chose to conflate two images, one the last photo of Rachel, taken a few days before she died, the other, a childhood picture of her with a friend, Sue Brierley, outside on the Brierley's farm in the backblocks of Ohakune sometime in the 1950s. The landscape from the one, the portrait from the other. Our youngest sister, Katherine, just 16, took the photo. Rachel is laughing so hard her eyes are closed, she's just washed her hair which looks kind of fuzzy ... the shot is a little out of focus. No matter. The painting is beautiful, there are bits in it like Monet water-lilies, it has symbolic force too - the stain of red around the shed window, the twiggy branch that makes a Y - but I've always found it hard to look at. And then, about ten years later, it was leaning against a wall in my room, gathering dust, when a painter came to paint the ceiling. John was his name, a decent, kindly, older man, a tradesman of the old fashioned kind. I covered everything with cloths but somehow the cloth over Rachel slipped or was dislodged and some flecks of white paint specked the canvas. This only made me feel worse. I turned it guiltily to the wall. However, when I moved in here, I hung it again, above the table in the sitting room. Often, without thinking, I find myself standing absently before it, as if in mute communciation. The image is life-size, just head and shoulders, her long black hair, her red collar, a sprig of jasmine on her lapel. The dark and light hills behind. The stones before. The shed. The sky. I've never been able to look at John's specks, until tonight. There are seven of them, like tears - I mean tear-shaped, droplet-shaped, rain on a window pane. One fell just below the dark line of the furthest range. Another below the light flushed horizon of the second range. A tiny speck beneath that, between ghostly fence posts. Three together on the clouds over the Y and one more in the blue sky above the shed with its bloody window. Suddenly they make perfect sense, I can see them, serendipitious as they are, as part of the composition. I feel, not so much that the painting has come back, but that it has arrrived.
11.5.05
Marine
They lunched on a beach with the odour of dead birds in their nostrils, an equivocal relish to the soft white Vienna loaf, browning avocado, vintage tasty cheese and quartered hard green apple. Drinking water flavoured with rose geranium leaves. Shoals of tiny crimson spiral shells lay in drifts in sand hollows. Pellucid water, a desultory surf, waves overlapping like the passing minutes. In the tide wrack, the keel of a shearwater, the carapace of a crab. Thirteen godwits flew across the sea: nine adults, four young, landing to graze the beach among piles of weed while they ate, slapping at the stinging flies and feeding them to a golden-flanked lizard. At Wreck Bay, in the odour of dead birds.
+ + +
In the Botanic Gardens they circumambulated a purple lake, in whose darker depths the long-necked lizard lives. A fringe of sand the colour of white ash, specked with black detritus. Red carnivorous plants grew in amongst the cropped grass of lawns where a plaque was set in a boulder. The farm had belonged to a maker of pianos. He had visited only rarely. Stock languished, pasture withered, men ran away into the bush until only an illiterate boy named Riley was left, whose fate is not otherwise recorded. On gravelled paths, sprays of water from circling sprinklers spotted their clothes. They chose their moment and ran laughing through the spangling light. In the pavilion, the ghost of a house they would never live in built itself around them. Outside time, at ease, they watched the agitation of wind in an horizon of trees across the lake, as if on every other evening of their lives together in this place.
+ + +
Another afternoon they parked the car at the end of a road and walked through tunnels of scrub to the ruined lighthouse. The echo of the tower falling still hung in the air. The stones immemorial in their disarray. It had fallen out toward the sea, the highest point landing just inside the cliff-edge fence. A snake coiled in the shade of the keystone. What light had shone in the dome, who tended the fire, who brought the fuel? At the apex of the pile they took turns looking through binoculars at the opposite headland where another lighthouse stood, flashing its beacon at intervals of five-five-five … fifteen … five-five-five … fifteen when shadows turned blue on the moon-coloured sand. A sea eagle passed over the roofless ruin, the graffiti-ed walls, the fire-blackened grate, as if over a temple from which the goddess had departed.
+ + +
Again the odour of dead bird. Surf curling between crumbled headlands, pale lilies sticky with nectar at the margins of the yellow sand, cuttlefish transparent under the hammer of the sun. Sculpted mauve plants in a rock pool, iridescent blue lichens, cockabullies speckled into the camouflage bottom. From one end of the half moon they turned to see a man on the rocks at the other make of his body a Y. The horizon a turbulence of distant swell on salt-scoured eyes. He hurled himself shoreward on a long exhalation of the ocean, roaring, blind, an arrow of flesh up the tremendous beach. While she sat mute in shade near the broken albatross, lily flowers in the black band of her sun hat.
+ + +
At night the walls of the tent were shaken by wind. Rain a faint braille on the nylon. Asleep in the air bed, they built a labyrinth of dreams. In lost corners sand drifted, the shells of days whitened. They heard the tongues of lizards speak a language in which each word was a pebble, each pause the pulse of a heartbeat under scaly skin. The cries of birds skirled halfway round the world to vibrate the delicate bones of their ears. Stars circled and blazed, an intaglio of light on the black. When they found each other, he placed his hands on her neck where the gills had been, feeling her blood sigh within. Her mouth made an O, she bent her head until her lips touched skin. Salt dissolving in saliva, a taste of smoke, eucalypt and dust. It was to remember these things that they had come. Waking, they drifted up into the waters of another day.
+ + +
In the Botanic Gardens they circumambulated a purple lake, in whose darker depths the long-necked lizard lives. A fringe of sand the colour of white ash, specked with black detritus. Red carnivorous plants grew in amongst the cropped grass of lawns where a plaque was set in a boulder. The farm had belonged to a maker of pianos. He had visited only rarely. Stock languished, pasture withered, men ran away into the bush until only an illiterate boy named Riley was left, whose fate is not otherwise recorded. On gravelled paths, sprays of water from circling sprinklers spotted their clothes. They chose their moment and ran laughing through the spangling light. In the pavilion, the ghost of a house they would never live in built itself around them. Outside time, at ease, they watched the agitation of wind in an horizon of trees across the lake, as if on every other evening of their lives together in this place.
+ + +
Another afternoon they parked the car at the end of a road and walked through tunnels of scrub to the ruined lighthouse. The echo of the tower falling still hung in the air. The stones immemorial in their disarray. It had fallen out toward the sea, the highest point landing just inside the cliff-edge fence. A snake coiled in the shade of the keystone. What light had shone in the dome, who tended the fire, who brought the fuel? At the apex of the pile they took turns looking through binoculars at the opposite headland where another lighthouse stood, flashing its beacon at intervals of five-five-five … fifteen … five-five-five … fifteen when shadows turned blue on the moon-coloured sand. A sea eagle passed over the roofless ruin, the graffiti-ed walls, the fire-blackened grate, as if over a temple from which the goddess had departed.
+ + +
Again the odour of dead bird. Surf curling between crumbled headlands, pale lilies sticky with nectar at the margins of the yellow sand, cuttlefish transparent under the hammer of the sun. Sculpted mauve plants in a rock pool, iridescent blue lichens, cockabullies speckled into the camouflage bottom. From one end of the half moon they turned to see a man on the rocks at the other make of his body a Y. The horizon a turbulence of distant swell on salt-scoured eyes. He hurled himself shoreward on a long exhalation of the ocean, roaring, blind, an arrow of flesh up the tremendous beach. While she sat mute in shade near the broken albatross, lily flowers in the black band of her sun hat.
+ + +
At night the walls of the tent were shaken by wind. Rain a faint braille on the nylon. Asleep in the air bed, they built a labyrinth of dreams. In lost corners sand drifted, the shells of days whitened. They heard the tongues of lizards speak a language in which each word was a pebble, each pause the pulse of a heartbeat under scaly skin. The cries of birds skirled halfway round the world to vibrate the delicate bones of their ears. Stars circled and blazed, an intaglio of light on the black. When they found each other, he placed his hands on her neck where the gills had been, feeling her blood sigh within. Her mouth made an O, she bent her head until her lips touched skin. Salt dissolving in saliva, a taste of smoke, eucalypt and dust. It was to remember these things that they had come. Waking, they drifted up into the waters of another day.
9.5.05
pandora's box
The National Library of Australia, now in collaboration with nine other libraries and cultural collecting organisations, has since 1996 been collecting and archiving Australian online publications. Not everything, like in some parts of Scandinavia, but a lot. The name of the project, PANDORA, is an acronym: Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia. You can find out more about this enterprise here.
7.5.05
... favourite Dylan songs? Tardy I know but how hard is it to choose? Like excerpting from the soundtrack of our unconscious, we of a certain age. Earlier (much earlier I recall nominating Blind Willie McTell as perhaps his greatest song. But favourite ... ? I've played Time out of Mind so many times the sprockets have all fallen out of the inside of the CD case. Other favourite albums ... World Gone Wrong, Oh Mercy, Blood on the Tracks, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, John Wesley Harding, Highway 61 Revisited. Like a Rolling Stone is the greatest whatever of all time I read the other day. Maybe it is a song off that record, maybe It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, not just for the title, for the groove. And the words ... well, perhaps not. Boots of Spanish Leather? Visions of Joanna? Shelter from the Storm? How's about ... hell, I don't know. So many of his songs recall other songs, so many of his lines are actually from other songs, that's probably why we feel like they're common property.
Anyway, tonight, when I'm feeling melancholy and it's VE day, my parents' wedding anniversary, and the Salvation Army Band is playing down at the Summer Hill shops, it's this I remember:
He hears the ticking of the clocks
Walks along with a parrot that talks
Hunts her down by the waterfront docks
Where the sailors all come in
Maybe she'll pick him out again
How long must he wait
Once more for a simple twist of fate ...
Anyway, tonight, when I'm feeling melancholy and it's VE day, my parents' wedding anniversary, and the Salvation Army Band is playing down at the Summer Hill shops, it's this I remember:
He hears the ticking of the clocks
Walks along with a parrot that talks
Hunts her down by the waterfront docks
Where the sailors all come in
Maybe she'll pick him out again
How long must he wait
Once more for a simple twist of fate ...
6.5.05
prosa on verso/verso on prosa
So what is the connection between prosody and prose? In terms of etymology, apparently none at all. Prose comes from Latin prosa (straightforward), usually coupled with oratio (discourse); an earlier form of the word is prorus (direct). So, plain speaking. Prosody is from Latin prosodia (accent), derived from Greek pros(oidia), in other words, towards an ode. No real convergence of meaning there. If you look up poetry and fiction, however, you do find a common thread. Fiction is from fictio, to fashion, while poetry, as everyone knows, has its root in a Greek word for maker. Fictio survives in another word, fictile, meaning made of earth or clay by a potter. Could non-fiction then be taken to mean not made?
Meanwhile I've been searching the Complete Posthumous Poems of César Vallejo for a line I remembered last night ... it comes from a poem he wrote foretelling his own death, the great Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca, which is worth quoting in full:
Me moriré en Paris con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en Paris—y no me corro—
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.
Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy me he vuelto
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.
César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro
también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos ...
This is a much translated poem but the only version in which the line I remembered appears is that by Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia:
Black Stone On a White Stone
I will die in Paris with a sudden shower
on a day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don't budge—
maybe a Thursday, like today is, in autumn.
Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday, when I prose
these poems, the humeri I have put on
by force and, never like today, have I turned,
with all my road, to see myself alone.
César Vallejo has died, they beat him
everyone, without him doing anything to them;
they gave it to him hard with a stick and hard
also with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursdays days and the humerus bones,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads . . .
He wrote this in 1929 I think; and died on April 15th, 1938, in Paris, just as the Fascist army swept down the Ebro valley to the Mediterranean, cutting Loyalist Spain in half. His last words, spoken in delirium, were I am going to Spain! I want to go to Spain! Although he had fallen into unconsciousness the day before, the 14th, a Thursday, the 15th was in fact Good Friday: not autumn in that latitude, but spring. And I do not know if it was raining. Not that it matters particularly.
I also found these lines, which I like a lot, from Guitarra:
Vales más que mi número, hombre solo,
y valen más que todo el diccionario,
con su prosa en verso,
con su verso en prosa,
tu función águila,
tu mecanismo tigre, blando prójimo ...
which might be rendered:
You are worthier than my number, man alone,
and worthier than all the dictionary
with its prose in poetry
with its poetry in prose
your eagle function,
your tiger mechanism, bland fellow man ...
Meanwhile I've been searching the Complete Posthumous Poems of César Vallejo for a line I remembered last night ... it comes from a poem he wrote foretelling his own death, the great Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca, which is worth quoting in full:
Me moriré en Paris con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en Paris—y no me corro—
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.
Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy me he vuelto
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.
César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro
también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos ...
This is a much translated poem but the only version in which the line I remembered appears is that by Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia:
Black Stone On a White Stone
I will die in Paris with a sudden shower
on a day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don't budge—
maybe a Thursday, like today is, in autumn.
Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday, when I prose
these poems, the humeri I have put on
by force and, never like today, have I turned,
with all my road, to see myself alone.
César Vallejo has died, they beat him
everyone, without him doing anything to them;
they gave it to him hard with a stick and hard
also with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursdays days and the humerus bones,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads . . .
He wrote this in 1929 I think; and died on April 15th, 1938, in Paris, just as the Fascist army swept down the Ebro valley to the Mediterranean, cutting Loyalist Spain in half. His last words, spoken in delirium, were I am going to Spain! I want to go to Spain! Although he had fallen into unconsciousness the day before, the 14th, a Thursday, the 15th was in fact Good Friday: not autumn in that latitude, but spring. And I do not know if it was raining. Not that it matters particularly.
I also found these lines, which I like a lot, from Guitarra:
Vales más que mi número, hombre solo,
y valen más que todo el diccionario,
con su prosa en verso,
con su verso en prosa,
tu función águila,
tu mecanismo tigre, blando prójimo ...
which might be rendered:
You are worthier than my number, man alone,
and worthier than all the dictionary
with its prose in poetry
with its poetry in prose
your eagle function,
your tiger mechanism, bland fellow man ...
5.5.05
prosody
In another of a number of generous and encouraging pieces about my endeavours Mark Young has posted at Pelican Dreaming, he stumbles - and admits he stumbles - over how the kind of writing I do may be described. He uses creative prose then revises that to speculative prose, which I like better though it still doesn't sound quite right. I considered imaginative prose but that has too much of a mid-twentieth century English Department feel to it. So, what? I'm self-taught as a writer and the path of my learning leads from school and university essays through occasional art criticism, writing for the theatre, marginally more successful screenplay writing, to (speculative?) prose writing. But my real education came over about two and a half decades of almost totally unproductive (in terms of finished works) attempts to write poems. Though I abandoned this practice about ten years ago, it was, along with the reading of other's poetry, which I still do a lot of, the single most important influence upon how I work now. One of the questions that is never asked of poetry is its status in the fiction/non-fiction opposition that haunts prose writing. The most that might be ventured is the suggestion that such and such a poem may be autobiographical. Otherwise, poetry is left to be what it is or is not in a kind of fire free zone. This is not the case with prose. How many times have I said, in answer to a well-intentioned query, that I'm writing a book, only to see the person's eyes light up as they say: A novel? and then sadly dim when I shake my head and say: No, non-fiction.? Non-fiction is so ... non. It is a huge field, naturally, stretching all the way from technical manuals to, say, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and includes in its almost limitless bounds many literary forms: history, biography, criticism, essay, memoir and more. They are all defined, more or less, by their fidelity to fact, or at least to how real things (as opposed perhaps to imaginary things) may be represented in words. But my books do not fit within any of these literary forms, though they do tend to stray in and out of traditional subject matters and approaches to the subject matter of those forms. I feel increasingly impatient with the fiction/non-fiction divide. I wonder why it is acceptable for a novel to include autobiographical material when the inclusion of fictional elements is proscribed from extended prose works which are not presented as novels. I'm aware that it has to do with perceptions of truth-telling but, in a world of liars in public places, I have suspicions about the veracity of our idea of truth. I suppose what I'm saying is that while I don't necessarily want to write novels, I do want the freedom to make things up if I feel like it - and not be called a liar for doing so. I have a perhaps scandalous sympathy for literary fraudsters and art forgers, precisely because they call into question that allegedly absolute line drawn between the 'true' and the 'false', the fictional and factual. But much of this is already familiar ground and does not solve the problem of nomenclature. This, however, might. It is from an interview with Italo Calvino published in Paese sera on January 7, 1978, called The Situation in 1978. The interviewer was Daniele del Giudice and I quote both the last question and Calvino's answer in full:
Calvino, I will not ask you what you are writing. I'll ask you what you will not write any more.
If you mean will I never write again what I have already written, there is nothing that I reject in any of my writing. Of course, some roads do close. What I keep open is fiction, a storytelling that is lively and inventive, as well as the more reflective kind of writing in which narrative and essay become one.
Calvino, I will not ask you what you are writing. I'll ask you what you will not write any more.
If you mean will I never write again what I have already written, there is nothing that I reject in any of my writing. Of course, some roads do close. What I keep open is fiction, a storytelling that is lively and inventive, as well as the more reflective kind of writing in which narrative and essay become one.
4.5.05
you must remember this ...
A few weeks ago I joined the Ashfield Library. It is another surprisingly good suburban library, as good, in its way, as the Umina Library I used on the Central Coast. At Ashfield there are no poetry books apart from a few anthologies and no section devoted to literatures not written in English, as there are at Umina; but these lacks or omissions are more than compensated for by excellent selections of fiction and biography. Last week I read Saramago's 'All the Names'; this week Ismail Kadare's 'The Palace of Dreams' is on my bedside table. And, in the biographies, I found a collection of autobiographical writings by Italo Calvino, which is fascinating. I haven't read a lot of Calvino's fiction, though 'Invisible Cities' remains for me one of the great books of the later 20th century, an inspired re-telling of Marco Polo's adventures on the premise that in some sense that epochal journey took place entirely within the city of Venice; and I knew nothing about his life. I did not know he fought in the Resistance, nor that he spent five years after the War in daily contact with his mentor and friend, Cesare Pavese, nor that his engagement in practical politics and in publishing was life-long. He can seem, in his fiction, the most impersonal of writers; but this volume reveals an engaging, intelligent, amusing, above all civilized man of the world. Most compelling for me so far is the 'American Diary, 1959-60'. Calvino went to the States on a grant from the Ford Foundation. His account is not really diary, rather it is excerpts from letters he wrote back to his colleagues at the Turin publishing house, Einaudi, where he worked. These excerpts were going to be published as a book called 'An Optimist in America' but at the last moment Calvino decided not to go ahead with it because he felt 'it was too slight as a work of literature and not original enough as a work of journalistic reportage.' Well, that may be so; but as autobiography it is wonderful. The writings perhaps have a particular force for me because they recalled in detail my own experiences of travelling to the States in the late 1970s, the first time I went overseas. Calvino went to many of the same cities I visited: New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, Montgomery ... and spent time, as I did, in Taos and Santa Fe in New Mexico. Although twenty years separated our visits, and he was primarily involved with literary publishing and politics on his trip, while I was travelling with a fairly eclectic, almost totally obscure band of actors and musicians, some of his observations are uncannily reminiscent of things I remember noticing at the time. I don't mean to put myself in the same company as him; it is just that his extremely astute insights into a timeless, not a contemporary, America, did remind me of the place I saw with innocent eyes in my mid-twenties. I guess I mean to say they took me back in a way encapsulated in what Calvino writes in another part of the book: 'One sees one's past more and more clearly as time goes by.' I have a scrapbook of my travels in 1978-80 but not much else; Calvino's Diary made me long to recover the almost mythological flavour of those times in the San Francisco of the assassinated Harvey Milk and George Mosconi, of the Jonestown Suicides; of New York in the shadow of the meltdown at Three Mile Island; of the high mesa beyond Taos where the young Rio Grande flowed and where you could see the lights of Los Alamos reflected in the night sky; most of all, perhaps, of the extraordinary community of fellow performers met in the small bars and theatres where we blithely played in a world that seemed utterly removed from the perturbations of a doomed geopolitic.
30.4.05
bifurcation
I've started a new site, called dérives (the link is there on the right) where I'm going to post everything that arises directly out of cab driving. That which has arisen already is already there. And has been deleted from here. Why? I felt like sequestering those work related experiences. I was starting to feel they conflicted with the more, or differently, serendipitous pieces that I put here. Serendipities versus stochastics perhaps (thanks, Mark!) Anyway, that's what I've done. dérives is unlinked at present, apart from this portal here. Who knows what will happen there? Or here for that matter.
28.4.05
El Camino Real
This is my summons of a dream, my dream of a summons. To the other side of the mountains you must go. There, Joseph Conrad waits.
The town is flat, dusty, brown. A dusty inland town in the wastes of Gondwanaland. The address is wrong. One hundred and ten El Camino Real … there’s no such place.
I walk down the street parallel. Dark pigment stains the adobe red, green, black. Murals on the walls of all the houses. Through a door I see in the ochre light these paintings the colours of earth. A woman turns, smiling. Her body is a deer pierced by arrows.
Through the arcade and back to El Camino. A friend joins me, together we search. A woman approaches, the same one older or another, I do not know. She takes my friend’s hand and draws her into the cool dark.
Joseph Conrad lies back on the big bed, his head monumental, his expression grave. He tells my friend: I have met the Irish every place I’ve been. Welcome, I am glad you came.
She sits on a wooden chest against the wall. The woman stands on the other side of the bed, before a draped window; perhaps she is two women. In the swell of whitish light it is hard to tell.
Joseph Conrad is lighting a cigar. I look at my feet. Cracked shoes, yellow painted boards. Why have I come? I belong to another century, a later one. Now I am here there is nothing to say.
He lies back on the pillows smoking his cigar. The head, monumental, the expression, grave.
+ + +
Perhaps it was not Joseph Conrad but someone else? No, this man was neither blind nor a librarian. He was a retired sea captain.
There was something I was trying to recall. A newspaper article about a hulk in Tasmania, once under the command of Joseph Conrad. Money was being sought to restore it.
The Otago … I began. He shook his head. No questions, he said. The details of my life are gathered like shards of a great mirror in which destiny will be revealed. It is not so. Nothing is revealed.
The cigar fumes were making my friend uncomfortable. She said to the woman: Could I have a glass of water please? The women took a hand each. Come with us, they said.
I was alone with Joseph Conrad. He drew on his cigar. Blue smoke layered the air, drifting toward the white window. The translucent drapes belled.
Oceans of paper, he said. Voyaging on. I lived at a time when kings were dying. We saw the ends of the earth. Contracted to a sphere. It was necessary to invent infinity.
I had not thought him contemporary with Einstein, Apollinaire. C’est vrai. He wrote letters in French, books in English. In what language did he think?
The man with the piano, I said. On the dock at Circular Quay. An Englishman. You spoke together for an hour. You were a young officer on a darkened deck. You never saw his face. His name was Senior.
The great head inclined forward once, acknowledging – what? That he had heard? Remembered? We return to every place we ever were, he said. Oceans of paper, voyaging on. It is necessary to invoke eternity.
+ + +
The globe is small. It stands on three plastic legs, on the dresser before the dusty window. Outside, paint peels from a yellow wall. The sky is radiant, blue as ink.
This is where we wake up. Sometimes it is dark, there are small brown stars we cannot name. Bats screeching in the avocado tree. Cats squalling in the laneway.
Here blood threads our flesh with longing. Here is where we leave from on our inland journeys. We go together, or alone. It has happened that we set out for different places, only to find each other there.
Other times we go nowhere. Comatose. Sunk in our bodies as into dank earth. Choking on flints, mumbling over bones, thirsting. Then water rises and we overflow, running into each other like underground rivers, sourceless springs.
How do I know this is her beside me? How do I know it is me? There is no chest here, only the dresser, the mirror, the racks of clothes. The bed where we lie dreaming or awake, mingled or apart. The globe.
I ask that the two women come forward as witnesses. In the works of Joseph Conrad you will not find them written, nor any mention of my friend, myself. Only Mr. Senior is real.
Leaning on a crate in the half-dark at the semi-circular quay he smokes a cigar and converses with a man he cannot see. Wide-ranging, far-reaching, their words drift out towards the stars.
We turn and turn. Sometimes we are one, sometimes two, sometimes many. Each night is an ocean. Waking, we find a shore, ochre and blue. We set out, maps in the palms of our hands.
The town is flat, dusty, brown. A dusty inland town in the wastes of Gondwanaland. The address is wrong. One hundred and ten El Camino Real … there’s no such place.
I walk down the street parallel. Dark pigment stains the adobe red, green, black. Murals on the walls of all the houses. Through a door I see in the ochre light these paintings the colours of earth. A woman turns, smiling. Her body is a deer pierced by arrows.
Through the arcade and back to El Camino. A friend joins me, together we search. A woman approaches, the same one older or another, I do not know. She takes my friend’s hand and draws her into the cool dark.
Joseph Conrad lies back on the big bed, his head monumental, his expression grave. He tells my friend: I have met the Irish every place I’ve been. Welcome, I am glad you came.
She sits on a wooden chest against the wall. The woman stands on the other side of the bed, before a draped window; perhaps she is two women. In the swell of whitish light it is hard to tell.
Joseph Conrad is lighting a cigar. I look at my feet. Cracked shoes, yellow painted boards. Why have I come? I belong to another century, a later one. Now I am here there is nothing to say.
He lies back on the pillows smoking his cigar. The head, monumental, the expression, grave.
+ + +
Perhaps it was not Joseph Conrad but someone else? No, this man was neither blind nor a librarian. He was a retired sea captain.
There was something I was trying to recall. A newspaper article about a hulk in Tasmania, once under the command of Joseph Conrad. Money was being sought to restore it.
The Otago … I began. He shook his head. No questions, he said. The details of my life are gathered like shards of a great mirror in which destiny will be revealed. It is not so. Nothing is revealed.
The cigar fumes were making my friend uncomfortable. She said to the woman: Could I have a glass of water please? The women took a hand each. Come with us, they said.
I was alone with Joseph Conrad. He drew on his cigar. Blue smoke layered the air, drifting toward the white window. The translucent drapes belled.
Oceans of paper, he said. Voyaging on. I lived at a time when kings were dying. We saw the ends of the earth. Contracted to a sphere. It was necessary to invent infinity.
I had not thought him contemporary with Einstein, Apollinaire. C’est vrai. He wrote letters in French, books in English. In what language did he think?
The man with the piano, I said. On the dock at Circular Quay. An Englishman. You spoke together for an hour. You were a young officer on a darkened deck. You never saw his face. His name was Senior.
The great head inclined forward once, acknowledging – what? That he had heard? Remembered? We return to every place we ever were, he said. Oceans of paper, voyaging on. It is necessary to invoke eternity.
+ + +
The globe is small. It stands on three plastic legs, on the dresser before the dusty window. Outside, paint peels from a yellow wall. The sky is radiant, blue as ink.
This is where we wake up. Sometimes it is dark, there are small brown stars we cannot name. Bats screeching in the avocado tree. Cats squalling in the laneway.
Here blood threads our flesh with longing. Here is where we leave from on our inland journeys. We go together, or alone. It has happened that we set out for different places, only to find each other there.
Other times we go nowhere. Comatose. Sunk in our bodies as into dank earth. Choking on flints, mumbling over bones, thirsting. Then water rises and we overflow, running into each other like underground rivers, sourceless springs.
How do I know this is her beside me? How do I know it is me? There is no chest here, only the dresser, the mirror, the racks of clothes. The bed where we lie dreaming or awake, mingled or apart. The globe.
I ask that the two women come forward as witnesses. In the works of Joseph Conrad you will not find them written, nor any mention of my friend, myself. Only Mr. Senior is real.
Leaning on a crate in the half-dark at the semi-circular quay he smokes a cigar and converses with a man he cannot see. Wide-ranging, far-reaching, their words drift out towards the stars.
We turn and turn. Sometimes we are one, sometimes two, sometimes many. Each night is an ocean. Waking, we find a shore, ochre and blue. We set out, maps in the palms of our hands.
25.4.05
the invention of mirrors
One of the weirdest things about Çatalhöyük may be the uniformity of the structures. The houses in the town of perhaps 8000 people were all more or less identical. Like cells in a hive perhaps. Or apartments in a contemporary apartment building. (As a point of comparison, a fare I had the other week told me that there are 8000 people working in 'his' building on George Street in the City.) The spatial arrangements were the same for every house. Entrances were always on the southern side, beside the kitchen area. The same domestic activites took place in the same areas of different houses. It has been suggested that people were restricted as to where they could actually be in this highly organised space - as they were, and in some case still are, so restricted in houses in Fiji and other parts of central Polynesia. Whether this formalised space was as oppressive as some think is perhaps a moot point. In purely physical terms, it may have been - many of the skeletons dis-interred there have carbon deposits in the chest cavity, apparently because of long term inhalation of smoke from the ovens, where animal dung and/or wood fires burned. The picture of this very large number of people packed in their family units into functionally identical houses in a vast walled compound is very strange. What sort of psychic world did they inhabit? Are those images of wild nature in their murals and sculptures nostalgic, propitiatory, celebratory, what? There were no streets in Çatalhöyük and no public buildings, or public spaces, have yet been uncovered - which may not mean that there were no communal activities, only that they took place outside the town. There is little evidence of violent death among the population and the walls of the town were not defensive fortifications, they were simply the external walls of the outermost houses. A far-ranging trade in obsidian was centred in that part of Anatolia and it's possible that the people of Çatalhöyük participated in this trade, though it isn't clear what they might have got in exchange for the volcanic glass. They certainly used it to make mirrors, which were sometimes buried with the women who, presumably, owned them. Men were more likely to have obsidian daggers in their graves. What are the implications of the invention of mirrors? Each in our cell, dreaming of a cell, in which another also lives; another just as we are; while in the next cell ...
24.4.05
more bull?
I probably shouldn't have been so hard on Balter's book, which I've now finished. It's not his fault that, despite our best efforts, no-one can figure out exactly what was going on in Anatolia nearly ten thousand years ago. It's hard enough to work out what's happening today. And there are nuggets of gold in amongst the inadvertance ... eg the people of Çatalhöyük, while they mostly ate domesticated sheep and goats, and the grains and legumes they cultivated quite some distance from the town they built among the marshes of a drying lake, had a special feeling for wild creatures and wild plants. They seem to have feasted ritually upon wild cattle, they enshrined the seeds of wild grasses in specially made pockets in the backs of goddess figurines. Even more fascinating, they apparently chose the site of their town not because of its proximity to cultivable fields or wild hunting grounds but because the raw material for the plaster they used on their floors and walls was bountiful in the lake bed. They - all 8000 of them - were obsessed with plaster and the reason for that may have been their linked obsession with the murals they painted onto the plastered walls of their houses and the sculptures they set into the floors and walls. And their art ... ? Like that of the great cave painters many millenia before in Western Europe, their subject matter was predominantly wild nature, especially wild animals, not fields of grain or flocks of herd animals. They also were in the habit of burning their houses before building new ones on top of the charred remain of the former dwelling, below the plastered floor of which lay their familiar dead. And, we learn, those plastered floors were swept meticulously clean at the end where the painted murals and sculpted skulls were; while at the other end, the living floors, where the ovens were and the ladders leading out onto the roofs - the only way they could enter and leave the house - were allowed to accumulate much more detritus. But why towns at all? One of the possible answers to this question is to rephrase it as another question: why houses? The house itself, the domus, some think, is the key: people stayed put because of their houses, and the domestication of plants and animals was subsequent to the (self) domestication of humans. Then again, why? Ian Hodder says: "It seems to me that this shift occurs through ritual, communal ritual ... at ... Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey ... enormous carved pillars (have been found) back around 9300 BC ... but ... there is no domestic architecture there ... you see similar things at Jericho in the Levant and Çanyönü in southeast Turkey, with its skull cult. The focus is on ceremonial ritual centres." The houses cluster around cathedrals, as it were. But at Çatalhöyük, 2000 years later, the church was in the house, or was the house. In the same way perhaps as it is for many of us today.
23.4.05
reaching natural
Many years ago, nearly forty, I was driving along Hakanoa Street in Huntly, where we lived at the time, in the front passenger seat of my mother's red and white Hillman Imp. I think it was after school, certainly afternoon. In what was obviously a pre-planned move, she pulled the car over to the side of the road, turned to me and said: "What's it going to be, a doctor or a lawyer?" To say I was gobsmacked doesn't answer the case. "Actually," I stammered, "I'm going to be an archaeologist." Of course I didn't, just as I didn't become a doctor or a lawyer; but I did investigate the option before deciding against it. Too boring, I decided. Too much hard yakka over minutiae. Not everyone, in fact hardly anyone, finds a Troy or a Çatalhöyük; furthermore, since the advent of processual archaeology in the 1970s and the post-processual archaeology that succeeded it, interpretation of the minutiae uncovered by archaeologists has itself become controversial if not actually proscribed. I've retained my interest in the subject, have continued to read widely, I'm still grappling with my own, perhaps idiosyncratic, explanations of how our distant ancestors lived, which is to say, how we came to be the way we are ... but I have to say it can still be hard yakka when it comes to the literature. This reflection is prompted by a book I bought recently, sight unseen, but with some excitement: 'The Goddess and the Bull' by Michael Balter. It purports to be a biography of the aforementioned Çatalhöyük, which has been of interest to me ever since I read James Mellaart's 'Ancient Civilizations of the Near East' not so very long after that epochal conversation with my mother. Indeed, she bought the book for me. Mellaart was a maverick, an enthusiast, a controversialist. By the time he came to excavate Çatalhöyük at the beginning of the 1960s, he had already dug, as it were, his own grave as far as working in Turkey was concerned. His involvement in the mysterious Dorak Affair ultimately meant that Çatalhöyük would be closed to him forever, and off limits to anyone else for thirty odd years. But in the early 1990s the site was re-opened and, under the direction of Ian Hodder, excavations have continued there for more than ten years now. And yet, in an index of how things have changed, in those ten years Hodder's team of a hundred specialists has excavated only a tiny fraction, not just of the mound itself, but of what Mellaart uncovered in less than half the time with a tenth of the people. And, somehow, no conclusions can yet be drawn from the meticulous forensics of this hundred-strong A team. Balter's book is full of brief, laudatory, mildly interesting bios of people on the site, of inadvertent impressionistic detail of their rather privileged lives, of 'dramatic' confrontations on the mound ... and reads not unlike a school magazine end of year report. Fine if you were there, if not, not. His account of the Dorak Affair, one of the main reasons I bought the book, is perfunctory and unconvincing, with no new information and several mis-readings of the excellent book written in the 1960s by two Sunday Times journalists. I can tell already, about three quarters of the way through, that 'The Goddess and the Bull' will end with a series of non-answers to resounding questions - like why and how people began living in cities at all? It is another case of a contemporary phenomenon, familiar from many other fields of inquiry, that the more facts you know, the less understanding you have. Science is perhaps a romance for those involved in it, but for those of us who are not it can seem like a massive, expensive, ultimately nugatory indulgence. At one point Balter writes: " ... archaeology is a destructive process. Excavating a Neolithic building means taking it apart piece by piece and layer by layer, until all that is left is the data on the archaeologist's recording sheet and the artifacts recovered ... the only way to get to the bottom levels is to take off the top ones." When you do that, when you do get to the bottom, you have, as they say, 'reached natural'. Where prehistory turns into geology perhaps. I know there are no incontrovertible answers to the big questions; but that doesn't seem to me a reason not to attempt answers. On the other hand, one of the truly unnerving images in Balter's book is that of goddess worshippers making their way past the labouring forensic diggers to join hands and dance on the top of the mound, in fealty to an ancient deity who, say the archaeologists, probably never existed. As if we were all, only differently, deluded.
20.4.05
Mohamed
Must be because of a profile I read recently in the press of Australian actor Arthur Dignam and his son that I've been thinking about Mohamed. Although I've never met Arthur, he and I were near neighbours for a while - he lived above a corner shop on Glebe Point Road while I rented a small flat in nearby Avona Avenue. It was on that corner I met Mohamed, who started talking to me one day, probably because my eyes were red like his from marijuana smoking, which I did a lot of in those days. I think I was also driving cabs at the time. Anyway, we struck up an acquaintance and he used to come and visit me at my flat sometimes. He was living - or rather, staying - with Arthur. He used to cook and clean and provide other services. Mohamed was a small time drug dealer, a hustler, perhaps a gigolo too. He was Gambian and his story was a strange one. One day, just a teenager, he'd jumped a ship, a freighter, visiting his home country and become a sailor. He'd jumped off this ship, or another, in Sydney some time later and then found himself unable to leave again. He was in fact stateless, without a passport or any other forms of identity which could have got him one. He had family in The Gambia but they weren't able to help him establish his nationality; and the Australian authorities seemed unsympathetic although far more tolerant than they are now, when he would probably be in a detention centre. Mohamed was an engaging soul, generous, cheerful, inclined only towards brief spells of melancholy at his singular fate. I never became his customer, but we used sometimes to share what we had with each other - marijuana mostly, occasionally ecstasy, and sometimes he would offer me unknown substances which I would usually, out of caution, refuse. He also liked to blow off steam, complaining about the things Arthur wanted him to do; but I think Arthur was kind to him too, giving him food and shelter and a place to sleep in return for those services. I have a couple of indelible memories of Mohamed: there was a small bone carving of a man, a Paul Klee like figure, which a friend brought back from Africa, the Congo I think, hanging on a nail just inside the door of my flat. Mohamed was looking at it one day when I remarked casually that I thought it might be carved from human bone. Mohamed, who was about to touch it with one finger, flew backwards in the air across the room as if recoiling from contact with a major electric current. Another time when he came around, a newspaper was lying open on the floor at a full page advertisement for women's lingerie with provocative, if somewhat smudgy, models showing it off. 'Oh, man,' said Mohamed, heartfelt. 'We going to die!' The last time I saw Mohamed was one day on Oxford Street. I was in a car - a taxi perhaps? - and he, resplendent in a somewhat disheveled white suit, with a white hat and white shoes, was walking along the pavement with a louche, sexy woman on either arm. He looked brilliantly happy, like King Alpha with two Queen Omegas. I say this because for some reason Mohamed's story always makes me think of the great song by the Melodians, Rivers of Babylon, which Boney M had a hit with in the 1980s was it? Anyway, the lyrics are in fact adapted from the Book of Psalms, #137 and #19:
By the rivers of Babylon,
Where we sat down,
And there we wept
When we remembered Zion.
Oh, the wicked carried us away in captivity,
Required from us a song,
How can we sing King Alpha's song
In a strange land?
So, let the words of our mouth
And the meditations of our heart
Be acceptable in Thy sight.
O Far I ...
As for Mohamed, that far I, I wonder where, or if, he is now?
By the rivers of Babylon,
Where we sat down,
And there we wept
When we remembered Zion.
Oh, the wicked carried us away in captivity,
Required from us a song,
How can we sing King Alpha's song
In a strange land?
So, let the words of our mouth
And the meditations of our heart
Be acceptable in Thy sight.
O Far I ...
As for Mohamed, that far I, I wonder where, or if, he is now?
14.4.05
Yeah / No
A few years ago a friend pointed out to me "that New Zealanders say 'Yeah / No'". As is the way with such things, having become aware of this language habit, I now notice it all the time. It's not confined to New Zealanders - Australians do it too. What does it mean? It doesn't signal outright disagreement so much as a kind of reflexive acknowledgment of the other's position - remark, statement, supposition, whatever - followed by an assertion of one's own version. If the 'yeah' is an agreement, the 'no' is almost an apology. One person might say: "I thought you guys were going away this weekend?" and the other reply: "Yeah, no, we are." Is this a simultaneous registration of the other's doubt that the weekend was going to happen, followed by a denial that this doubt is valid? It seems to be. And yet ... there's often something fugitive in this surely bizarre conjunction of the positive and the negative. The shades of meaning conveyed can feel contradictory and, at the same time, ineffable. Perhaps 'yeah / no' speaks from a deep layer of the antipodean psyche, so deep that ultimate clarification is problematic, even, perhaps, impossible. Yeah, no, I know what you mean.
10.4.05
the ole dream factory
One of my earliest memories returned in a dream last night. This memory is olfactory before all else, though it has texture, place and context as well. It is the smell of my father's sports coat, a mingling of tweedy cloth, tobacco smoke and his own incommunicable personal scent. I have my face buried in the roughness of his shoulder or chest, he must have picked me up in his arms. It's round the back of the house we lived in in Burns Street, Ohakune on some lost afternoon in the 1950s. I don't know this but I think I must have been running out to greet him when he returned home from the secondary school where he taught. There's the car garage, the old flatbed of a truck next to it, the almond tree, the overgrown crumbly asphalt of the disused tennis court. The day is fine and I am happy beyond words. In the dream we were walking away from all this into a kind of whiteness which was both Burns Street running out into scrubby, derelict farms, and the future. Nothing happened. Just this wonderful sense of his nearness and the aching familiarity of that smell. Don't know why this should have surfaced now. It's fifteen years since he died. But it might have something to do with the book I was reading before I went to sleep: "Innocents in Africa" by Drury Pifer. It's a memoir about growing up in South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s and there are aspects of his tender and beautiful evocations of family life in the midst of hellish deserts and even more hellish mines in those deserts, which do recall my 1950s childhood in a remote rural town in New Zealand. The landscapes are of course entirely different but something about the way the Pifers constructed a rich and satisfying life out of almost nothing is reminscent of my own parents' halcyon days in 'Kune. As are the dark shadows of impending dissolution Pifer conjures from hindsight - he wrote the book as a sixty year old living in Delaware and this copy was published by Granta Books in the mid 1990s. It is a lovely read and if the book was what triggered this early memory - which I have been half aware of for a long time without ever quite clarifying - then I am grateful for that too. Even though there is an almost unbearable melancholy that comes along with it.
19.3.05
neighbours
It's a while since I lived in a densely populated part of a large city. Not that Summer Hill is that crowded, in fact to the casual eye it looks like a fairly quiet suburban neighbourhood. A few terraces, a few federation houses, the odd mansion and lots of apartment buildings. I live in one of these, with similar, older buildings on either side. I have the ground floor flat at the front, facing the street. There's six flats in the building, three up and three down. The ones on either side have four each I think, though I could be wrong about that. You get to know people by sight and there's a few I say hello to or stop and chat with. There are oddities - a couple of times when I've been up early I've seen a big white fluffy rabbit that seems to live around the back of the building opposite, nosing around on the front lawn by the dahlias. The other thing that happens is that you hear a lot of what goes on in other peoples' lives without necessarily knowing who it is you are hearing. Two examples. In the next door building on the right lives the Coughing Man. I have no idea who he is, have never seen anyone I could match to the extraordinary sounds that come from over there every morning, as he clears his passages in the aftermath of another day of what sounds like a lifetime of heavy smoking. And then, on the other side, there are The Lovers. Again I have no idea who these two are. They may be Chinese but I don't know why I think that. I believe the half grown handsome black cat who comes over sometimes is theirs; I hear a woman's voice in the evening calling Simba! Siiiimba! This is generally after they have done their washing up. I guess she's calling him in for the night. I hear their TV. Sometimes I hear him talking to her in a low voice, too low to make out the words. Whatever he is saying makes her laugh helplessly. Their bedroom is all red, not sure why, whether it's red curtains or a red light. I don't look that closely. My bedroom faces out towards their flat and sometimes, usually quite late, I wake up to the sound of their love-making. They're not really loud. I never hear him at all, I just hear her. It is the sound of a woman being exquisitely pleasured. It goes on for a long time. I like to sleep with the window open, for the fresh air, and I know that if I close it I won't hear her anymore. On the other hand, closing it makes quite a loud noise and I wouldn't like them to hear it and think they are annoying me. So I don't. Usually I tune out and drop back off to sleep before they finish. I'm not sure what to think about it. It feels illicit, being privy to such private moments between strangers. But it's sweet too. Much better than over-hearing a fight or an argument. I guess my main feeling is that I don't want to disturb them. I don't want them to know I can hear them because it might make them feel self-conscious or shy. I'm just in this weird position, an anonymous sometime witness to their transports of delight.
13.3.05
answering the door
The police knocked on my door last night - well, I think it was them. I was sleeping in the sitting room on the sofa bed because my younger son Liamh was staying and he was tired and went to bed early in my room. I'd fallen into a deep sleep so that when the rat-tat-tat on the door sounded, it seemed part of some other world, not even my dream world. Kept on happening. Attention must be paid. I rolled over and realised it was my door being knocked upon. There's two doors to this flat, one that leads out into the front garden, which is where I come and go, and another, always locked, that comes off the hallway where the official entrance to the building is. They were rapping on the official door. Oh, god, I thought, where's the key? Now they changed from knocking on the wood to banging the metal knocker that's there. It sounded much more urgent. Where was my dressing gown? In the room where Liamh was. He hadn't woken yet, which suggested he wasn't going to. Okay. Maybe I would get up to see who it was. It was on the third rap-rap-rap on the knocker that they said: "Police ..." They always drop their voices to the lowest register when they say that - I don't know why. "Police ..." comes out gravelly and low, like a warning: irony free zone impending. Fuck it, I thought, I'm not getting up for the police. Doesn't sound like they're here for me. Doesn't feel like they're going to break the door down. And anyway I haven't done anything wrong. Or at least nothing chargeable. Course I did get up, did get my dressing gown, did pace around the flat with my heart hammering, feeling furtive and guilty as hell. No longer secure in my own place, one of the usual suspects, a miscreant or a fugitive. Didn't dare turn on a light. Heard them through the bathroom window saying something to someone about a radio. That was when they were walking away. Their car started up and off they went. Now of course I'm consumed by curiosity. What did they want? What was happening? Wha ... ? I asked my next door neighbour but she slept through the whole thing. The Chinese across the hall? Seems unlikely it was to do with them. Liamh didn't hear anything either, though he was entertained by the tale. Damn! Wish I'd answered the door. Wish I knew ...
6.3.05
Hawthorne Canal
Today there was that first faint chill in the air cold climate people wait for. A cool wind whipping horse tails in the otherwise clear sky. A mix of nostalgia for winters past, anticipation for the one to come. Benign, anyway, in the temperate zone. It was also Clean-Up Australia Day. Remote from community affairs, I did not realise this until I watched the evening news on TV. Oh well. Went for a walk in the afternoon, seeking the sea in this inland suburb. North, I thought. The Dog Park I'd heard about. There's a canal running through Summer Hill, it marks the border between the Leichhardt and Ashfield municipalities. Once it would have been a stream but that's more than a hundred years ago by the look of the sandstock blocks with which parts of the canal are lined. Those neglected areas of a metropolis which belong to no-one but the graffitists. That are not real estate. In parts even the tree trunks are tagged. Coming out by the canal I caught the river scent that is so much a part of my childhood. There's no cleaner smell than clear running water, even when it's only a trickle in a concrete drain. Three sacred ibis were investigating the riverine wildlife. Schools of tiny transparent fish. Blue iridescent flash of a kingfisher's wing. Then startling green weed at what I took to be the intermingling of the fresh water and the salt. Two black teal beating up stream. A white-faced heron only feet away, pooling in the shallows. I ended up in a depot of some kind: old bricks, sandstone blocks, newly sawn timber, bark mulch, a disused bridge. Had to climb a hurricane wire fence to get into the Dog Park. Barefoot all the way to the bay without once stepping in the shit. There was the sea smell. Leaning over the side of the bridge leading back to the People Park I saw strange creatures moving through the khaki water of that arm of the Parramatta River which, by now, was surely all salt. Medusas. They looked like uprooted brownish-grey mushrooms the size of a fat-headed man's head, with a stem trailing stumpy limbs and a kind of grilled or gridded cauliflower membrane that expanded and contracted rhythmically as they moved upstream. Images from the Bridget Riley show I saw yesterday at the MCA came to mind ... the Rileys gave me a headache as well as a dangerous sense of the instability of my perceptual world, but these medusas, though grotesque, were calm. There were plovers in the People Park. The tide was creeping up the canal. I saw toadfish in the shallows, more schools of the tiny transparents and then, splash! a big fish jumping. Don't know what they were - mullet perhaps. There were lots of them, heading downstream to greet the incoming tide, undulating in slow waves from side to side in the canal waters, black from above but sometimes showing a startling silver flank. At the vivid green bit where salt and fresh mingled, the smaller medusas which had made it this far were a delicate lavender colour. Another flash of kingfisher wing, then another. I saw it perching in the branch of a tree, the dusty ochre colour they have on their breast. The nightsweet, which has nearly finished where I live, was here still covered with tubular yellow flowers. I imagine the heavy scent on the air now darkness has fallen and only the graffitists are out, inscribing that almost wilderness with their arcana.
4.3.05
The Undead
The other night I went with my neice to see Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre, a remake of F.W.Murnau's 1921 classic Nosferatu. It's a long time since I saw a Herzog film and I didn't know quite how I would go with it. The professionally and constitutionally dispeptic film writer John Walker's summary in the 1995 Halliwell's was not encouraging: 'Excruciatingly slow retread of the German silent film' he wrote. Yes, it is slow. Excruciatingly? No, I didn't think so. Camilla, who is 23, did. She also found it funny. And it is. But for me it was ... totally absorbing. Some of the time I was thinking about how it was made - the rats that invade the European city once the Count has arrived were a strange and changeable colour, because they were white Hungarian laboratory rats that had each been painted grey; the city also changed because the good people of Delft, where most of the European scenes were shot, would not allow even a limited release of re-painted lab rats on their clean streets and so the production had to move to Schiedam for those bits; the colour, as Walker does not fail to point out, is 'quite dreadful' at times. But ... as drama? Extraordinary. It probably does not surpass Murnau's version for sheer creepiness and starkness of image; on the other hand, there is nearly sixty years of European history between the two films and that counts. The film is about the contagion of history. And the tragedy that our shared dream of immortality has become. And the doomed eroticism that seems sometimes to be our one consolation, however inconsolable we may be. The slowness was like a bath. You could sink into the images because they lingered so long on the screen, as long as Isabelle Ardjani's white neck and dark hair, say, or Klaus Kinksi's immortal loneliness or even the foolishness of Bruno Ganz, the innocent who brings the plague back yet again. The ship motionless upon the ocean with its dusky, dried blood red sails and dead captain lashed to the wheel. The processional of coffins into the great empty square of the city. The shadows ... 1979 was when the governments of the Us and the Uk moved nuclear armed Persching and cruise missiles into Germany, a major play in the endgame of the Cold War. Where are those warheads now? Somewhere. At the end of the film, when Klaus is dead, having stayed too long in Isabelle's bed, and Isabelle is dead too, thinking she has prevailed, and her lover Bruno has become Klaus' avatar and is galloping across what look like salt pans or perhaps the deserts of Iraq with 'so much still to do', is chilling: there is a world out there that is yet to be infected with evil but he will do what he can. Which will be everything. Anyway. We walked away into the warm night apparently not much affected by what we had seen. Told stories about funny t shirts we had seen coming down the street. I kept thinking about the Gypsies who warn Bruno against going up to the Castle: their absolute knowledge that evil is there and can be awakened, along with their absolute refusal to do so. And, I guess, their forbearance, their stamina, once, yet again, it has been.
3.3.05
Luca goes to London (& Adelaide
Luca Antara (the book) is going to the London Book Fair, which this year is concentrating on work from the Antipodes. Also to Adelaide, where it will be read by a new publisher who thus far seem mostly to have done books on food and wine, along with Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton's autobiography 'Through My Eyes'. They are publishing a book on early Portuguese voyages to Australia, which is how the Luca connection came about. For the London package, my agent asked for a Content's page to go along with the cv, synopsis, excerpt and so forth. I don't usually like representing a whole with a part, but I enjoyed doing the Contents page in the manner of 19th century explorers' books - not a too far-fetched analogy. Here it is, as a teaser (it's just the words):
CONTENTS
I : Castaway
Antiquarian Books – Taxi Driving – The Ern Malley Affair – Fernando Pessoa – Simon & Margit – the QVB – the Marquesas – Jean Cabri – Pekio? – the Russian American Company – the Hordern Building – Leroy, Lautréamont & the Ville d’Orleans – Rouault & McCahon – Demolition
II : Salvation
The Cova da Iria Apparitions – Johnny Bear – Ricardo Reis at Fátima – Womerah Lane – the Third Secret Revealed – Elle – the Heroin Weddings – Essay on Poetry – the Wreck of the Batavia – Gnosticism – Houtmans Abrolhos – Heironymo & Lucretia – Jimmy Bonus – a Stranding – Convicts – Ventriloquism
III : Voyage
Pearl Beach – Portuguese Ventures – Manoel Godinho de Eredia – the MBRAS – Henry Klang – the Voyage of António da Nova – Mataram – Waingapu – the Timor Sea – Kaju Djawa – Marege – Estrela, the Degredado’s Daughter – the Aru Islands – Tanimbar – Malacca – Aftermath
IV : Return
Across Australia – Kuala Lumpur – Melaka – Museums – Henry Klang again – the Ray Bradbury Experience – MBRAS again – Ubud – the Wallace Line – Lombok – Sumbawa by Night – Labuanbajo – Mirror Cave – Rinca – Darwin – Da Nova’s Boat – Sydney – the Drowned Continent of Sundaland
... would you want to read a book like this?
CONTENTS
I : Castaway
Antiquarian Books – Taxi Driving – The Ern Malley Affair – Fernando Pessoa – Simon & Margit – the QVB – the Marquesas – Jean Cabri – Pekio? – the Russian American Company – the Hordern Building – Leroy, Lautréamont & the Ville d’Orleans – Rouault & McCahon – Demolition
II : Salvation
The Cova da Iria Apparitions – Johnny Bear – Ricardo Reis at Fátima – Womerah Lane – the Third Secret Revealed – Elle – the Heroin Weddings – Essay on Poetry – the Wreck of the Batavia – Gnosticism – Houtmans Abrolhos – Heironymo & Lucretia – Jimmy Bonus – a Stranding – Convicts – Ventriloquism
III : Voyage
Pearl Beach – Portuguese Ventures – Manoel Godinho de Eredia – the MBRAS – Henry Klang – the Voyage of António da Nova – Mataram – Waingapu – the Timor Sea – Kaju Djawa – Marege – Estrela, the Degredado’s Daughter – the Aru Islands – Tanimbar – Malacca – Aftermath
IV : Return
Across Australia – Kuala Lumpur – Melaka – Museums – Henry Klang again – the Ray Bradbury Experience – MBRAS again – Ubud – the Wallace Line – Lombok – Sumbawa by Night – Labuanbajo – Mirror Cave – Rinca – Darwin – Da Nova’s Boat – Sydney – the Drowned Continent of Sundaland
... would you want to read a book like this?
21.2.05
i.m. HST
but it is truly the West
as no other place,
ruined by an ambition and religion
cut, by a cowboy use of her nearly virgin self
unannealed
by a real placement
this,
this
is the birthplace
of Mr. Pound
and Hemingway in his own mouth
chose to put a shotgun.
Edward Dorn: Idaho Out
as no other place,
ruined by an ambition and religion
cut, by a cowboy use of her nearly virgin self
unannealed
by a real placement
this,
this
is the birthplace
of Mr. Pound
and Hemingway in his own mouth
chose to put a shotgun.
Edward Dorn: Idaho Out
10.2.05
sisters of mercy
Sometimes on Sundays I like to go for a walk. Who doesn't? I find my walks tend towards the east, I often visit Petersham Oval in the hope that there will be a cricket match going on and I can watch a few overs. On the way to the Oval you go past the Australian HQ of the Sisters of Mercy, which I find comforting too; it recalls the Leonard Cohen song, singing on in my head for a few hours afterwards. There's a Primary School with white marble statues of saints lining the asphelt pathways, a 19th century sandstock church with the stones blackened by soot from, probably, the railway line only about a hundred metres away, quiet green lawns where no-one walks under the eucalypt trees. Going up that way last Sunday I found a throwout, as they are called here: a line of things someone didn't want any more neatly arranged on the footpath. Naturally I stopped and looked: some crockery, some books, a brand new kettle still in its box, a whole range of differently flavoured skin conditioners, a few children's toys ... melancholy remainders of a shared life? Or just surplus from someone who had too much? Or not enough? I sorted through the box of books and chose two of them. One, a novel, is by Irish writer Michael Collins who is both a relative of the famous political figure and a world class extreme sportsman: he has run and won marathons in the Antarctic and on the Himalaya. He writes a good thriller too. This one is called The Keepers of Truth and is set out on the Great Plains of America at the dawn of the Reagan Era. The other, a Picador from 1975 with browning pages, was The New Journalism, edited by Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson. I've read some of the books from which selections have been made for the anthology but I hadn't come across the anthology itself before. Course I sat down and read the introduction first: why would I not, since the perhaps problematic relationship between fiction and non has been interesting me lately. I'm not going to write an essay on Tom Wolfe here. I'm not going to say much at all, except that, at a certain point last night, I started wondering who he was? Was he the same guy who wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities? was my question. Even though I knew he was, I had to go on the Net to find out for sure - and there was an article about what George Bush is reading these days. The point of the article was that, not on Dubya's official reading list but, according to the cognoscenti, on his bedside table anyway, is Tom Wolfe's latest, I am Charlotte Simmons. Tom supported George's re-election, by the way - as surprising (not) as the news that British novelist Ian McEwan thinks Tony Blair might be doing the right thing in Iraq. The placement - of the article, of the book on the bedside table, of the news that Dubya reads - was impeccable. I went back to Tom Wolfe's intro with new eyes. It is an immaculate act of self-promotion. It is a kind of virgin birth of himself. His later career as the Balzac or Dickens of late 20th century and early 21st century America is prefigured here. His disastrous relationship with the movies, likewise. His politics ... are nowhere evident. You could assume he was as cynical as Daniel Defoe. In fact it is Defoe who comes most strongly to mind. The Defoe sketched in Diana Souhami's Selkirk's Island, the writer and poltical advisor who did whatever he needed to do to keep the wheels of commerce turning. The Defoe who was a friend of William Dampier, whose fate is so strangely entwined with that of Alexander Selkirk. The Defoe of whom Virginia Woolf wrote: There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face, nothing but a large earthenware pot.
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