fons iuuentutis

At the head of this forest is the city of Polumbum; beside it is a mountain from which the city takes its name, for the mountain is called Polumbum; and at the foot of this mountain is a noble and beautiful well, whose water has a sweet taste, as if of different kinds of spices. Each hour of the day the water changes its smell and taste; and whoever drinks three times of that well on an empty stomach will be healed of whatever malady he has; and therefore those who live near that well drink of it very often, and so they are never ill, but always seem young. I, John Mandeville, saw this well, and drank of it three times, and so did all my companions; and since that time I have felt the better and healthier, and I think I shall do until such time as God in his grace causes me to pass out of this mortal life.

from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, ed. & trans. C W R D Moseley, Penguin Classics, 1983

PS I was tagged. This is what you do:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people: (soon ...)

acid haze on Venus ...

Astronomy Picture of the Day

色 戒

The orb spider waits under the eaves for the sun to go down. Crouched into a brown crouch, with one leg left out, hooked over the nearest silk support in case some insect blunders into the now ragged web. She will rebuild come twilight, and I will watch her spin and wait. The other day there was a praying mantis on the sill. It too had one leg hooked into a web but it was a different web and a different plan. I watched it raise and lower, raise and lower that trapped back leg. A delicate manoeuvre that seemed to require thought. Or, concentration. The black spider squatting inside the window sash didn't move, it must have known the mantis was too big to catch. Or was the mantis trying to lure the spider out? After a while I couldn't stand watching without being seen so I moved a finger to touch the mantis. It was almost comical, the brief scuttle then outraged turn of the head and stare. Then someone came to see me and I missed the rest of the story. They've painted out the alien that was on the wall of the medical centre, along with the bone fide shadows of bone fide patients; they may come back but not the alien. Unless the graffitist is local. That wall now so brilliant white I have to shade my eyes from the sun's reflection when I walk past it. Before the movie an ad for the medical centre ran, it featured those patient shadows, animated; then on the way back I saw the outline of the shadow of a body on the pavement, it was an advertisement for a TV show about criminal gangs in Melbourne. The show is as bad as the ad is tasteless but I hardly cared. I noted it and moved on, I was absorbed, the movie had got to me in a way that films rarely do anymore. Go now, she said. He didn't understand. She said again: Go now. He had just given her a ring that she had put on her finger and then tried to take off. So as not to be seen wearing it in the street. Or for another reason. Or both. The Arab jeweller had no idea what was going on. No-one did, except her, and she had just told him. It isn't just that whole lives can hinge on what is said in a moment, I already knew that. It was deeper, stranger, my complicity in plot and counter plot, surface and depth, so complete I knew she was wrong. And yet she said it. Then the denouement ... swift and fatal and again not understood by anyone except he who ordered it, who was told to go, who did go ... and lived. Or was she the one who really understood? Who stayed. And died. Now suddenly it looks as if in this world it is better to die than to live. I check the spider, she hasn't moved. She is innocent of everything. Or, nothing. I don't know. Where did the mantis go to make her/his lethal prayers? Don't know that either. The painted-over alien went back to Alpha Centauri and told its superiors we aren't ready, we don't yet know how to treat the heartache that comes from living on this earth - so how could we sooth an alien malady? It was just hunger. On its planet they eat spiders. Or, they are spiders, and eat each other. Or something else entirely. Whereas we remain, heartbroken, and we die. Or, live.

色 戒

presbyterianism

Preacher was a talkin' there's a sermon he gave,

He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved,

You cannot depend on it to be your guide

When it's you who must keep it satisfied.


from: The Man In The Long Black Coat

where's the play in screenplay?

For some weeks now - how many? four? six? - all I've been doing is working on this screenplay. When I say all I mean - all. There's been nothing else going on. Well, I did spend one week revising the Becker book, but that was the week my collaborator was away and I could afford to go at my own pace. Which maybe just means I could get away with more laxity than I can when we're working together. I don't know. The scenes I wrote in that week don't seem to be any worse than those we nut out together. But it's curious the way that, when the day's work ends, usually around three in the afternoon, I have no appetite, no inclination, to do anything else. I just sit around. Blank as a new page. I don't even think about the day's writing. Occasionally some problem, or solution to a problem, might drift into consciousness but if so, it's certainly not from trying. The opposite rather. It's more like a forgotten piece of a dream coming to light. If I'm writing prose I usually find that all sorts of threads spin out from the day's work, some pertinent, some not. I might hasten back to the document to make a change or an addition or I might go off on some other tangent that seems to require investigation. I like that sense of a constantly evolving inquiry going off in different directions and I miss it now. Miss it badly. Maybe it's just like a job that, once done for the day, demands forgetfulness. Which means perhaps that other kinds of writing I do are not work in that sense, but play. Play of the mind. Most current models for screenplay writing stress the need for total concentration, the marshalling of analytical skills, a fierce pursuit of story or character until you have it, or them, as they say, nailed. I don't read much theory, in any area, it confuses me. So maybe the analogy with dream is better. And maybe this end-of-day exhaustion is of the unconscious. Again I don't know - but I have noticed another kind of exhaustion, that of dream. Every night I've been dreaming at a scarcely sustainable rate. Hectic, intricate, disturbing dreams. I've been waking three or four times a night, just to draw breath; and then, rather than lying awake for half an hour or so to think things through, as I would usually do, I plunge straight back into that strangely complex netherworld. But I don't remember these dreams, or only as fugitive images turning to dust as I try to bring them back to mind. Yesterday was a day off but instead of analysis or reflection or re-reading, I spent it chucking out old stuff from the hard disk - acres of botched or misconceived or finished work, consigned to pixel dust. I thought I'd feel lighter afterwards but I didn't. Now I think I might need to defrag my mind. Couple more days. I'm holding on.

"this is the only painting by vincent van gogh on a biblical theme"

Thursday I emailed the two thirds complete screenplay to my collaborator in Hong Kong. She would have read it on the plane back yesterday, or she will be reading it this weekend. And Friday arvo I emailed the more or less revised ms of Fata Morgana to my travelling companion in Auckland ... so that she can see how she appears in it. Now I feel totally (though temporarily) bereft. I feel a bit mad. Like my compass is spinning and True North, or South, was only ever the memory of an illusion. I need a long trip ... perhaps The Bay of Rainbows? To visit Moon Maiden?

craic o' doom

The butcher's boy is walking up Morris Street in the rain to make a delivery. He does it about this time every Thursday. Most people hunch their shoulders when they're out in the wet but he walks straight and tall. He's a nice kid. I saw him in the back of the shop when I was buying a pork chop earlier today. Looks the world right in the eye and there's an excitement in his at the possibilities life might offer. It's black in the west and in the south but not as black as it was earlier. About eleven one of those thunder cracks that lift you out of your seat sounded right above. It's okay, I thought, the computer hasn't blown. Now it's shiny green after-the-storm light. A sip of wine, a drag on a panatella: suddenly I see the shape of my life spread out before me. As never before. In the mind's, not the world's, eye. I can see it! Well, the details don't matter and the end is obscure, as I suppose it must be, though closer. It's a beautiful thing to know. I sigh. Pure happiness.

the sun's not yellow it's chicken

from: Astronomy Today

Reality has always had too many heads

Sometimes I'm astounded by my own stupidity. You could even say impressed. I come from NZ where, if there's nothing else going on (often), there's always the rain, falling reliably from the grey sky. When I first came over here, I had a quip about the locals: If it's fine they say: it's always like this; if it's raining: it never rains. Now I find myself sitting here without coat or umbrella. Now my quip, if there was anyone to make it to, would be: it's too wet to go out for an umbrella.

* * *

It's like the way I'm unable to resist the temptation to buy trousers that are too small for me. Like the pair of black Levis (Made in Columbia) I picked up from the Sally Army store in Five Dock for five bucks on Friday. Long black legs, tight like a spider, brand new Foxton Straights ... it's just the belly roll that trembles above the waistband, the silver button that must bust someday soon, if I don't bust first. At least they solve the conundrum: belt / no belt.

* * *

But doncha love the rain? I do. And maybe getting my new jeans soaking wet when I go up to the shops for a few necessaries, maybe that'll help them strrrreeeeeetch. It's not all constriction: if it rains for a week, as they ('they') say it will, then I'll just sit here like I did today, tapping out a few scenes in the morning, mumbling through the ms of Fata Morgana in the afternoon, looking for revelations but finding only typos. And listening to the burn of I'm Not There which someone (thanks M) was kind enough to send me today.

* * *

Wasn't going to go to the movie but in the end I couldn't keep away. It's actually a good film. I was going to say great, but who knows what that means any more? A lot of people have raved about Cate Blanchett's role but for me, while a marvellous act of mimicry, it's the one sequence in the film that felt redundant - though perhaps only if you've seen the Pennebaker doco that that part recreates. I mean, why bother? Even then I felt ok about being there - just kicked back and listened to the soundtrack.

* * *

The one unforgettable performance is Heath Ledger's and I would have said that before he died, which I did. He plays an actor trapped in a role. Like Marcel Marceau's cage of silence that cannot be breached, that cannot be escaped from, that you take with you everywhere you go and is with you even when you don't go anywhere. Or do. Go, I mean.

* * *

The song that pulled me most at the time was Tom Verlaine's version of Cold Irons Bound. Late 1990s Dylan re-imagined as the Velvet Underground three decades earlier. Totally eerie. I'm beginning to hear voices / And there's no-one around ... chilled me to the bone.

* * *

Meanwhile, I'm meditating on something Sidney Nolan wrote in a letter to Bert Tucker. 26 January 1950. He was in Wahroonga, up there on the North Shore; Bert was in Europe. Sid said: I know what Nibbi means when he calls Australians brutal but I believe it is something in Melbourne that he refers to. In all the travelling round of the last two or three years I have found nothing of the cold stupidity I remember Melb. for. Sydney is almost a gracious and stimulating city. Melbourne is like badly written Kafka. I'm not saying I agree with this but I do like the way it's put. Gino Nibbi was an Italian who ran The Leonardo Bookshop where Melburnians gathered for news of the Beyond in the 1930s and 40s.

* * *

And then for light relief, there's John Forbes' Collected Poems that I bought at a funny / sad commemorative event for him on Saturday night. And Berlin Noir, a trilogy of Chandleresque thrillers by Philip Kerr, two set in Nazi Germany before the war, and the third in Vienna in the chaos afterwards. Well, the road is rocky and the hillside's mud / Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood ...

I want to say a few words about the job of a script-writer, if only to give a better understanding of my feelings at that time. As everyone knows, the script-writer is the one who - generally in collaboration with another script-writer and with the director - writes the script or scenario: that is, the canvas from which the film will later be taken. In this script, and according to the development of the action, are minutely indicated, one by one, the gestures and words of the actors and the various movements of the camera. The script is, therefore, drama, mime, cinematographic technique, mise en scene and direction, all at the same time. Now, although the script-writer's part in the film is of the first importance and comes immediately below that of the director, it remains always, for reasons inherent in the fashion in which the art of the cinema has hitherto developed, hopelessly subordinate and obscure. If, in fact, the arts are to be judged from the point of view of direct expression - and one does not really see how else they can be judged - the script-writer is an artist who, although he gives his best to the film, never has the comfort of knowing he has expressed himself. And so, with all his creative work, he can be nothing more than a provider of suggestions and inventions, of technical, psychological and literary ideas; it is then the director's task to make use of this material according to his own genius and, in fact, to express himself. The script-writer, in short, is the man who remains always in the background; who expends the best of his blood for the success of others; and who, although two-thirds of the film's fortune depends on him, will never see his own name on the posters where the names of the director, of the actors and of the producer are printed. He may, it is true - and as often happens - achieve excellence in his inferior trade, and be very well paid; but he can never say: "It was I who made this film ... in this film I expressed myself ... this film is me." This can only be said by the director, who is, in effect, the only one to sign the film. The script-writer, on the other hand, has to content himself with working for the money he receives, which, whether he likes it or not, ends by becoming the real and only purpose of his job. Thus all that is left for the script-writer is to enjoy life, if he is capable of it, on the money that is the sole result of his toil ... now, working together on a script means living together from morning to night, it means a marriage and fusion of one's own intelligence, one's own sensibility, one's own spirit, with that of other collaborators; it means, in short, the creation, during the two or three months that the work lasts, of a fictitious, artificial intimacy whose only purpose is the making of the film, and thereby, in a last analysis ... the making of money. This intimacy, moreover, is of the worst possible kind - that is, the most fatiguing, the most unnerving and the most cloying that can be imagined, since it is founded not on work that is done in silence, as might be that of scientists engaged together on some experiment, but on the spoken word ... indeed, the mechanical, stereotyped way in which scripts are fabricated strongly resembles a kind of rape of the intelligence, having its origin in determination and interest rather than in any sort of attraction or sympathy. Of course, it can also happen that the film is of superior quality, that the director and his collaborators were already, beforehand, bound together by mutual esteem and friendship, and that, in fact, that the work is carried out in the ideal conditions that may occur in any human activity, however disagreeable; but these favourable combinations are rare - as, indeed, good films are rare.

Alberto Moravia, A Ghost at Noon (1955)

keeper of the elephants memory

She was called Mollie. Bought from Thailand in 1947 for/by Bullens Circus. Aged sixteen years when she died. Was it 1956 or 57? Don't know yet. Was I four turning five or five turning six? Before or after that first year of school? Same answer. The six elephants walked down Railway Row to the Showground. One put a foot in Mr Brailey's potato patch. One took an orange from Mrs Brailey's shopping bag. One ate Tutu. There's more, much more ...

laureate log

The new New Zealand poet laureate, Michele Leggott, has a weblog.

updating the elephants

So far I have learned:

Wrigleys may have been a mis-hearing of Ridgeways but Ridgeways Circus could not have been the one that came to Ohakune in the late 1950s or early 1960s because they did not exist until 1966 - before then they were known as Cole Brothers Circus.

Ridgeways had three elephants, called Dolly, Bimbo and Sheba. Sheba choked to death in Christchurch on a small twig from a branch of a tree she was eating. She was buried there. Bimbo was put down because of a terminal bone disease late 1970's. Dolly was still in action in 1968.

Wirths lost an elephant called Betty to tutu poisoning in 1950.

Doug Ashton of Ashtons Circus is still alive and said it was certainly not one of his elephants - although one did suffer tutu poisoning in New Zealand - it survived.

Ginni, an elephant with Soles, in 1959 likewise survived hemlock poisoning - that was around Rotorua.

Bullens elephant Sally, 25 years old, 3 ton in weight, died on Sunday, April 17th 1960 at Riversdale railway siding (58 miles north-west of Invercargill) after drinking from a 44 gallon drum of water that had previously contained weed killer.

In 1964 Rill, an elephant with Soles/Wirths, ate tutu but eventually recovered.

There is known to be an elephant that died in the North Island around the probable time of the Ohakune incident but so far the name of the animal, nor that of the circus, nor the place of the event have been uncovered.

The Ohakune elephant was probably not called Rajah - generally a name given to lions.

This information kindly provided by New Zealand circus historian John Sullivan, who further says the Ohakune elephant was definitely not with Bullens, Wirths or Ashtons, all of which were large circuses with big elephant numbers – that is, six to nine animals. That leaves Coles/Ridgeways as the most likely.

I am still confused on the relation between Coles and Soles.

Mark St. Leon, scion of an Australian circus family and also a circus historian, told me that it is not uncommon, when the sites of old show grounds are excavated to build supermarkets, for elephant bones to be uncovered.

A fellow I met yesterday described a sequence from a documentary film he remembered from his youth. They interviewed an old lion tamer, whose then job was to give the elephants an enema before their performance. The interview was conducted in situ, he was wearing prophylactics, a raincoat and hat - when asked if he would ever retire and he said he could never give up show biz ...

I also learned, serendipitously, that elephants used in Burma to fell and bring out teak, sometimes contracted anthrax. Black spots would appear on their rumps, rapidly swelling into great buboes – eventually these would become of such size that the animal’s anus would become blocked, meaning that they could not shit. As soon as the signs appeared on an elephant, everyone else, men and beasts, would flee the logging camp; but the elephant’s keeper, joined by an indissoluble bond, would sometimes stay with his charge and share its agonizing fate.

Hone Tuwhare, 1922 - 2008

the seven ages of (a) man

When I was seven I saw the elephant's grave. In love with Florence Moule. And she with me. We lived happily never after.

At fourteen, my nipples swelled painfully and sometimes expressed a milky fluid. Judy Singer was my good friend. Her breasts were hardly larger than mine. I never told her. Never told anyone.

Woke up on my twenty-first in a cow paddock east of Murapara. Hitching to Wellington with Vic Filmer. Had left university to become a writer. Disastrously. Too young.

Twenty-eight. L.A. Red Mole's Numbered Days in Paradise at The Odyssey Theatre in Santa Monica. Lorraine, their secretary, gave me flowers. I didn't really know her.

Thirty-five. Kawau Island. Coming down from an acid trip. A beautiful swim in the gulf. Then a terrible yacht ride back to the Sandspit with a family friend. Ken Lawn. He died ten days later.

Cannot really remember turning forty-two. In Darlinghurst. Drug haze perhaps. Or a party. Or both.

Seven sevens are forty-nine. Pearl Beach, out on the deck. Drank too much port, there was a bad fight between my girlfriend and my friend. We split not long after. I think we're doing ok with the kids.

Fifty-six ...

The Elephant's Memory

When I was younger, so much younger than today ... the circus came to town. It was (maybe) the Wrigley Brothers Circus, and among their animals was an elephant called (I think) Rajah. This unfortunate beast had plucked from roadside vegetation enough of the local shrub known by us as Toot - that is, tutu or coriaria arborea - to cause its death. I imagine it extending its trunk through the bars of its trailer-borne cage as the circus trucks laboured up one of the steep, dusty, bush-flanked roads of the King Country on their way to Ohakune. The death of Rajah was a sensation in our town and crowds attended his burial at the old showgrounds at the Junction, just over the other side of the Main Trunk Line, where the road goes on up into Tongariro National Park and climbs the mountain, Ruapehu. I am unsure if I was at the actual funeral but have a very clear memory of the burial mound itself, a great pile of bulldozed yellow-brown dirt with a tiny bunch of flowers placed absurdly, poignantly, at the top. Anyway. Sometime in the 1970s, at a house in Wellington, I said to the room that there was an elephant buried at the Junction in Ohakune. A well known poet who was there seized upon this remark and incorporated it into a longish poem he was writing at the time. I didn't think he had a right to the story but was too much in awe of him to say anything. When I heard him read the poem at Downstage Theatre, I cringed when that line came out verbatim; and was relieved to find it dropped from the published version of the poem. So far so neurotic ... Later that same decade I discovered that the painter, Philip Clairmont, had also witnessed the elephant's burial. He was staying, with his mother, at the house of the local doctor, one Graeme Shanks. When I came to write my book on Phil's life and work, I put in a short account of the elephant's grave and also a rather longer version of a peculiar interview I conducted with Dr Shanks in his Christchurch home. Recently, that is, a couple of weeks ago, a friend wrote to me from Auckland saying she had been at a dinner party where the subject somehow came up. It turns out that, in the early 1960s, the elephant's bones were disinterred from their great pit and taken up to the university, where they became the property of the biology department and may even be on display in their museum. My friend gave me the source of this story and suggested I write to him for further details. He is someone I haven't met but did correspond with on another matter a couple of years ago. So I dropped him a line the other day ... the response came yesterday morning: Yes I do know most of what there is to be known about the Ohakune elephant. However it's a story I intend to use in a book of anecdotes I have in preparation and so you'll understand that at this stage I'm reluctant to pass it on to someone else ... Now my question is: why did this make me feel so bad? I thought I was immune to such disappointments. And yet, while I went about my usual occupations, all day there was an underlying feeling of desolation - not too strong a word. As if something had been taken from me. It wasn't that I wanted to write anything more about the elephant, just that I would have liked a bit more information. I don't know what year it was, only that it must have been before 1962, because that's when we left that town. I'm not sure if I have recalled the name, Rajah, correctly. How long between burial and disinterment? And so on. Another question: why should any of this matter? When the poet took my remark and put it in his poem, I was affronted because I felt the story belonged to me, not him. Now, I seem to be affronted because someone else has said the story belongs to him, not me. Do these stories belong to anyone exclusively or are they the property of a community? I remember the night that Phil and I discovered we had that unusual childhood experience in common. It was a perhaps minor coincidence that had a big effect: without that elusive shared memory, I'm not sure that I would have felt the impetus to take on the arduous and intimidating task of trying to write his life. I might not have felt the degree of fragile entitlement I did feel. Why won't this fellow tell me what he knows? It is an unthought consequence of his refusal that now I am resolved to find out all I can. Why? Not sure. Don't really know. For the elephant's memory ...

Tayan Pic

Look here

? ? ?

The Great God Pan is (not) Dead

Last night I dreamed I was turning into a goat. It was quite interesting, watching my arm grow a pelt of thick whitish hair, my fingers claw into a cloven hoof. I wasn't perturbed because I knew (in the dream) that this had happened before. The woman next to me, who in some respects resembled my dead sister (our birthdays are in January, a week apart), and who I thought perhaps was ill, admitted she too was undergoing the same metamorphosis ... we fell upon each other with a lust that was, well, goatish. Until my son, who was on the bed with us, asked us to stop because we were interrupting his TV watching. The bedroom was in an annex of the vast terminal of an airport. I went out into the concourse, I had no visa for onward travel ... and where, anyway, does a goat keep his passport? Then I was in a bathroom, hearing my name called in tannoy-speak ... I woke up. All day I have been looking, at odd moments, speculatively, at my right arm. As if awaiting the resumption of that impossible transformation ...