a rude awakening

Some nights it is as if I do not so much sleep as dream I am sleeping: like being adrift on a lake of dark water, which is a lake of dreams, into which sometimes I can sink and sometimes not. Often I know I am dreaming, which is not to say that I am lucid dreaming: the flow of images is involuntary as ever, but I seem to have some awareness of the nature of the flow, even if I cannot control it. Occasionally, too, I feel as if delayed at some interface between thinking and dreaming, only halfway through the elastic meniscus of that dark lake water. It's not necessarily unpleasant, it can even be quite illuminating. Writing problems might find sudden solutions, or new directions, in the watery transparent lens of that meniscus. Last night was like that, lord knows why; but in the middle of that broken image stream a rude awakening came. I heard a voice cry inarticulately out and, in the dream, wondered if I had really heard it or if it was just some ghostly intrusion on the reverie (which I do not otherwise remember). Anyway. The next thing I heard was the sound of someone pissing, quite loudly, nearby. And then I thought (in the dream): this is no dream! And woke up. And someone was indeed pissing, loudly, down beneath my bedroom window - I live on the top floor of a two storey building. Not just that, he was talking on his mobile phone. I heard him say: She wanted to fuck in the taxi! Can you believe that, mate? Then laughed. In a Bristol accent, so I knew it was my next door neighbour. He's a young bloke, harmless, quite pleasant really; lives there with his girlfriend who I think may be Thai. She's nice enough too, though both of them, as young people do, don't really notice an old bloke like me. Anyway. I heard him zip up, cut the connection (possibly the other way round) then leap the stairs to their apartment. Rat-tat-tat ... on the door; then silence. This young couple often go out on a Friday or a Saturday night and come home quite late. Dancing, clubbing, whatever. A bit drunk perhaps. I don't care; they're otherwise benign, as I say, and the woman who lived there before went out of her way to make everybody's life a misery, especially mine - she'd hammer on the door if I played my stereo, got her lawyer to send me threatening letters, even called the cops on me once. As long as these two don't mind my music, or my kids kicking up a racket, I'm happy to let them do whatever they like. But this incident intrigued me: why didn't he wait until he went inside to pee? Was it so he could call his mate and tell him that fascinating bit of information? Was the she in the taxi the woman upstairs or another? Who knows? By the time I'd rattled through these possibilities, the way back to the dreamy dark waters was lost for the moment; so I flicked on the light, checked the time (3.30 am), made a cup of chamomile tea and read for a bit while I drank it ... later slipping slowly back into quasi-insensibility. Wondering ... is it true that my grandfather painted railway stations (the real thing, not pictures of them)? Any of the ones that I've stood and waited at? Was it his mother or his grandmother who had second sight? And, in either case, was it thus he who carried the schizophrenic gene, if indeed there is such a thing? Did he really believe every word of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that my mother said he owned and read? Why didn't she go to his funeral? This gentle, unassuming man, with his passion for compost and for Douglas Social Credit? How is it that, every time I go back to her autobiography looking for answers, all I end up with is more questions? And then for some reason, just before I sank into true insensibility, I remembered the floor of the house at Pukapuka Road ... and drifted uneasily off into depthless black and suddenly perilous waters.

At Pukapuka Road

Electrical Storm on Saturn

Otoliths #9

Ramshackle Day Parade

When I was a student in the early 1970s there was a fashion among us for wearing army surplus gear. Especially greatcoats. I had one, an enormous, prickly, khaki job that still had its brass military buttons with embossed crowns illegally attached. These clothes acted as a provocation to old soldiers, who became predictably enraged to see scruffy long-haired youths wearing their sacred uniforms. That was of course part of the point for us. Another fashion, or provocation, was to stay up all night drinking or drugging and then, dressed in these outre garments, attend the Dawn Parade on Anzac Day. A mixed up thing to do, because part of our fascination was with the ceremony itself, the peculiar emotion that hearing a bugler play the Last Post as the sun comes up seems to evoke in almost anyone, as well as the perhaps more familiar rush of feeling the Lawrence Binyon words also reliably call forth: They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old .... I can't remember now if I ever actually did stay up all night and go to the Dawn Parade or if I only imagined doing so after the accounts of others who did, or said they did, or said they were going to. Likewise, I can't quite pick the moment when I ceased to feel derisive of, or critical towards, ceremonies like Anzac Day and began to experience them with something like an unequivocal response ... never entirely without equivocation, but still. I remember reading Les Carlyon's book Gallipoli a few years ago and weeping involuntary tears at some of the descriptions he gives of that campaign. Maybe my father's death, nearly twenty years ago now, had something to do with my change of heart. Dad's war was reduced to a few ironic anecdotes, with himself as the butt of some kind of cosmic joke that wasn't even that funny. He liked to belittle both himself and his war but behind that was a well of deeper emotion - he'd had two of his close friends killed and continued to mourn them all his life. The last conversation I had with him, on the phone, a few weeks before he died, he mentioned one of these fellows, a Maori bloke called Bill Wilson lost when his plane disappeared somewhere off Rabaul. Dad also used to like saying the names of the places he'd served, a kind of mantra that managed to suggest an enormous amount without ever really saying anything much at all. Perhaps his passing has left whatever mourning still remains to be done with me, I don't know. Anyway, although I haven't been to an Anzac Day ceremony for a very long time, this year I decided I would. And take my kids along. After all, everybody loves a parade. We ended up on George Street near Town Hall station, just where Park crosses over and becomes Druitt. It was a grey morning but the rain was holding off. The parade had already begun. I don't know what it was, but as soon as I saw the first straggle of old blokes walking by, the tears started flowing. There they were, men looking exactly like Dad would have looked if he was still around, with their bad clothes sense and misshapen bodies, their peculiar hats. Some in wheelchairs, some sitting on seats in the trays of jeeps, some walking along unaided. Some even sprightly. It was without doubt a procession of grotesques, except that element of the outlandish that makes for true weirdness was missing - these were just ordinary men, ordinary women, who'd come out from their ordinary houses all over the city to march. You wouldn't otherwise, or anywhere else, see that generation altogether at once like this. The other thing was, they were so few; and yet there were so many categories - infantry men, artillery men, tank corps, transport, ambos, nurses, land girls, intelligence, the war correspondents, each marching behind their oddly home-made looking banners with wonky applique lettering marking out who they were and the places they had been and fought. Again, the names seemed replete with feeling that did not require any further explanation, even when they weren't names I know - Scarlet Beach? Scrubby Ridge? Tarakan? And who would have thought there are still so many brass and pipe bands around? With their bizarre choice of tunes. One was playing Coming through the Rye; another, Marie's Wedding; along with the more familiar Scotland the Brave and a plethora of versions of Waltzing Matilda, the tune of which is, or alleged to be, that of an 18th century Scottish song which may itself be based upon an earlier Irish ballad called Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself ... anyway it makes a good marching song. The kids of all shapes, sizes, ages, sexes, ethnicities in their ill-fitting uniforms scarcely less grotesque. When the pipe band of Clan McLeod went by I couldn't help but tell my own kids that it was their tartan they were wearing, even though it's an almost fanciful and quite distant connection. After a while I managed to stop the tears from squeezing out the corners of my eyes and rolling down my cheeks. A few soft and gentle rain showers passed over and umbrellas flowered all along both sides of the street. My kids had wormed their way up to the front and were sitting on the road in front of the barriers. I leaned over them with the umbrella as the rain got heavier. Next to us were three Chinese girls with little plastic Australian flags that had sprigs of rosemary strapped to them, which they waved dutifully as the parade passed by. I could not begin to imagine what the day meant to them but didn't quite know how to ask; one of them gave me a sultry, enigmatic glance but then wouldn't meet my eyes again. A line from a poem kept running through my head - the many men so beautiful - and it took me ages to track it down to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Course they weren't really beautiful any more, nor were they all men, but it was possible to see in most of them the boy or girl they had once been and that perhaps was the point. The bell on the Town Hall tower tolled the hour. It was eleven o'clock. The kids were ready to move on so I said once the next pipe band came by, we'd go. It was Knox College and they were easily the best of the lot, skirling and shouting down the wide rainy street. And all this time, the traffic lights on that busy corner, whose sequence I know intimately and by heart because of the number of times I've sat there in a taxi waiting, turned from green to amber to red and then back to green again, as if some vast array of ghostly phantom cohorts mingled with us were pausing then passing, pausing then passing on - unseen, unheard, but somehow not unapprehended.

... on a dissecting table ...

When I smoke I always think about giving up; when I drink, of stopping. If writing, I cannot help but imagine not writing. I go out to buy an umbrella and come back, wet through, with a copy of the Koran; keeping the book dry under my shirt. In a local shop window there is an advertisement from a local poet, looking for a small flatette for himself and his few pet birds. Outside the medical centre on the corner is a pair of shoes; they've been there for days - first saw them when I was going for the paper one grey dawn. Small, round-toed, black leather slip-ons; a woman's shoes. One has a sponge inlay, they other, some kind of red felt inside. They are placed neatly side by side near the door of the medical centre, facing away, just beyond the locked box where the pathologist's samples are left to be collected. Where did she go, so early in the morning, so late in the evening? Who could she have been? It is impossible not to think of transubstantiation but whether she rose in grace or fell in despair is not certain. Or did she just shuck them off, wearily, with relief, and go barefoot up the narrow canyon of Lackey Street to the station? Catch a cab to the City? What are the chances of spontaneous combustion? The other day, outside Ashfield police station, I saw a woman holding an empty baby capsule of the kind used to carry very small children in cars; she was sobbing uncontrollably. Did someone kidnap her kid? The burly cop was rubbing his hand up and down her upper arm as she bent forward in hopeless grief. While two other women, one another cop, the other perhaps a friend, stood mute at the remaining corners of their huddled square. It is clear enough that every action, every thought, carries the ghost of its contrary within it. Presence suggests absence; danger, safety; grief, joy; indulgence, abstinence; a chance meeting is revealed to have been pre-ordained. While silence is both the condition, and corollary, of writing, as well as its ultimate fate. And yet sometimes there is a suspension of contraries in a singularity; sometimes people do disappear without trace, leaving only their shoes behind. Poets do find tiny improbable rooms where they can sing along with their few small birds. Books may turn out to be, after all, umbrellas. Or sewing machines.

loot

Reliving the past is the most fantastic adventure of all. The event, relived, grows more and more enigmatic, and richer and richer in meaning. Turning to the past, I reach the future, I recall people I never knew. In the time/space continuum of consciousness, Was and Will Be occupy the same point.


from A Feast in the Garden by György Konrád

there is continually Something

You can become used to living in an unstable perceptual world, but there will still be times when what you think you see is not what you see; or perhaps, what you see is not what you think you see. Last night, after a long telephone conversation, I went out onto my little deck to smoke and look at the sky, as I am wont to do. There was an inky black cloud, shaped like a scorpion with tail upraised, floating near the steeple of St. Andrews. Intricate, very dark, unusually detailed. Floating in front of the paler, greyish clouds behind, that were drifting slowly northwards. Except - was it? A cloud? Or smoke? A chemical exhalation from some burning factory? I looked into the sky over the apartment block next door, to see if there were any other black clouds about. No, but there were black spaces opening between the cumulonimbus that have been intermittently dumping heavy showers on us over the last couple of days. Back to Scorpio, but Scorpio had gone lumpish and vague, far too quickly for it to have been made of water vapour. It was in fact a briefly scorpion-shaped gap in the clouds I had been looking at, a figure-ground ambiguity that sent me, as briefly, into a reverie of here be monsters. Fragments of a dream of an explorer came back, I was Tasman navigating pent up seas, threading the weedy stone walls of a canal that separated Utopia from the main: I had met a looming figure along this dark causeway and he had hammered down fists of adamant upon me in the seconds before I woke up sweating beneath the duvet. The candle-lit banquet hall beyond forever lost to me; but not the semi-circular quays of Utopia, or not at least their image. The mind as an autonomous zone, out beyond wolf-howl, making its accommodations with the ambiguous shapes of perception. Orion now lay where the scorpion had been, not a hunter, not at this latitude, but Te Waka o Tama-rereti perhaps; or something that is not yet thought; or something that can never be thought. And now the veritable words of Abel Tasman, no longer in a dream, return, written just a couple of days before he did at last see the merest tip, islanded, of the Great South Land: ... also our compasses did not stay stable as they ought or here are some mines of Loadstones, is indeed possible for our Compasses do not stay stable up to 8 points, there is continually Something which makes the compasses move or run. And heard the sound of horns blowing from the misty forests of Van Dieman's Land; and saw the giant steps cut in the trees, where men who are other than we are climbed to make their inscrutable imaginings real.

resplendance


(for Mark Young)

voices & echoes

some mother's son

Tom Carment: people, paddocks, coastlines

Hawkesbury Regional Gallery invites you to

Tom Carment

people, paddocks, coastlines

Please join us for the opening at 6pm Friday 4 April, 2008 by artist Euan Macleod

In conjunction with

The Alan Cleary Collection

5 April – 4 May 2008

HAWKESBURY REGIONAL GALLERY

Deerubbin Centre (1st Floor), 300 George St (PO BOX 146) WINDSOR 2756

T: 02 4560 4441 gallery@hawkesbury.nsw.gov.au
Weekdays 10am – 4pm (closed Tuesdays & public holidays) Weekends 10am – 3pm

image:
Redgate Beach
watercolour & gouache on arches paper 11 X 15 cms. 2007

(this is not the image that's being used to advertise the show, and the work may not even be in it; but I think I remember Tom telling me it was bought by someone who lives, not just in Summer Hill, but further up this actual street; so even though it's of a beach in WA, it's also local)

Can we fix it? / Yes we can!

I'm like everybody else - fragments of songs, words and tunes, pass continually through my mind. Sometimes I recognise them, sometimes not. Perhaps they are very old, as old as the species; perhaps not. It's hard to say. They might be from some kid's show I used to see when my boys were little and I still lived with them. If they become too insistent, and if I can find the song among the cds, I'll play it as a way of laying the ghost. Or not - given air, it may persist past distraction. There's a bird on the witch's spike at the top of the spire: like a bird on a wire ... under louring skies. Should that be lowering. Flying the black flag of himself. In the grey light of dawn, when the frogs are just quieting and the koels, the currawongs or some other corvid begin to make their exploratory morning calls, I'm liable to host lines of verse, not random, not unknown: Desolate is the crow's puckered cry, I'll think. As an old woman's mouth / When the eyelids have finished / And the hills continue ... Lines can come unbidden at any hour; or are they bidden, or biddable? Why am I subject to these invasions? A lifetime of listening, yes, of reading; but still. As the dull gunshot and its after-râle / Among conifers, in rainy twilight. Since I have been reading Colin Tudge's The Secret Life of Trees, they, the trees, look different to me. Look differently at me. Xylem and phloem, I say to myself, when I see their beautiful variety growing around the oval of the local park. Chlorophyll. Stomata. What is the music of trees? Sentient, surely; but not. Or are they? Silent? No. Unless the wind is. He speaks of meeting trees. Sometimes, not often, he gets their names wrong: I only know this when he's writing about the Aotearoans. This afternoon, at NV, lunching with a friend, I had the rare luxury of saying out loud the words in my head: To want nothing is / The only possible freedom ... And then the next bit, that reduces me almost to tears, which I don't shed, but tears anyway: But I prefer to think of / An afternoon spent drinking rum and cloves / In a little bar, just after the rain had started, in another time / Before we began to die ... It doesn't matter, but those lines always return me to the Queens Ferry in Vulcan Lane, Auckland, which I think they are about. And that in turn sends me back to when I was so much younger, younger than today, and I might or might not have drunk, not rum and cloves, but beer, in the same pub. Or the one next door, whose name I can't now remember: ... the taste of boredom on the tongue / Easily dissolving, and the lights coming on - / With what company? I forget ... And so it goes, day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, a song in the head, a fragment of a poem always at the lip of speech. This Buick's a Century, '73 like you / Some strange religion ... Or: The voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown ... Or: Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing ... And:

The art really is in isolating yourself and letting as few things into your head as possible. To only admit those things into your head that come from a direction where no one else ever looks. That is the difficult thing.

Vertigo

debriefing the phantasmagoria

the world before & after the flood

Hieronymus Bosch, The World before and after the Flood, ca. 1514

The top two panels are the inner sides of the wing panels of the Flood triptych; the bottom two, the reverse sides of those above. The central panel is lost.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Guerre

Last night, out with friends, I remembered something I haven't thought of in years. It came back to mind like a dream, although I know it is something that really happened. Summer of 1980/81, in Auckland, not long before I came over here for the first time. I'd been crewing on a feature film that was made by a group of Americans, South Africans, Australians and, in the lower echelons of the hierarchy, New Zealanders. Started out as Third Assistant to the Director, ended up in the Art Department. One of the crew, a fellow by the name of Jonno, perhaps a props buyer or something similar, called me up one day after the shoot was over and asked if I'd like to go with him up north to the Hokianga to pick up - what? Feel like saying it was a piano but likely some other piece of more utilitarian furniture. I didn't know Jonno very well and I've never seen him again. He was tanned and easy, with a wide white smile and an insouciant air. Some kind of truck. We drove up to Helensville, skirted the Kaipara, went through Dargaville and the Waipoua forest, then crossed at Rawene by ferry to Kohukohu? Or did we drive around the top of the harbour? The place where we were going was on the north side, we went out along a bad road until we found the turn off then took a long twisting track down through thick bush to the water's edge. The house was a grand old two storey mansion built above a quiet bay. It was empty and deserted. Dust along the wooden floors. The furniture all gone. Whatever we had come for wasn't there anymore. Its history was fragmentary, perhaps fictional. The owner and builder had made a lot of money, in timber or kauri gum or land sales - or all three. He had gone to Europe to look for a wife and in Paris wooed and won a Frenchwoman, said to have been a dancer. This was probably between the wars but may have been earlier. He had built this house for her and they had lived there together in loneliness and strife. The track down was new, in the old days the only way in and out was by boat to and from the cove below. What had she done? There were no children. There was perhaps no love either. Had she left, or died? Had he blown his brains out with a shotgun at the boat landing? Or was the denouement more prosaic but no less heartbreaking? It was one of the most desolate and beautiful places I have been. Afterwards, empty, we bumped back up the track to the road and, with white dust pluming from our wheels, went back the way we had come. I recall trying to write something, a film script, about this place but nothing came of it, I was many years away from being able to make sense of an event this resonant, this compelling, in words. It seemed that a forlorn music rose from among the dust along the splintery wooden floors. Made of ennui, of longing, of misplaced hopes and impossible dreams. Perhaps she went back to Paris and resumed whatever life she had before or could find again in Europe after the rain. Et la maison? Is it still there? The memory I have of it is so delusive I do not think I could ever find that place again; and, if I did, that it would not in the least resemble what I have made of it. New Zealand is a young country, full of premature disappointments such as this one is or might have been; but the north is old, sandy and old and more like an island of the Pacific than anywhere else in Aotearoa. It whispers to you, sotto voce, and the stories it tells are never more than fragmentary, always just below sense, replete with meaning that you cannot quite retrieve. I hear it now, subliminally talking: C'est aussi simple qu'une phrase musicale.

... & dunes thawing on Mars

more here