I was in time for the rehearsal and easily found the venue, even though its designation—the Masonic Hall—appeared nowhere on the small, much altered brick building, which seemed rather an outpost of the nearby Anglican Church. There were Gaelic names everywhere but the town was called after an Aboriginal word meaning either thinly wooded hills or clear sky. It was under the one that I sat on a long wooden bench and looked over the disused playing field and across the railway line to the other. Long grass around the basketball court behind and also on the football field in the gully below. The late morning air soft and golden and still. Eastern rosellas grazing on seedheads. A magpie with rain in its throat carolling in the stunted pines. Someone at one or other of the blank windows must have been watching but what would they see? I ate my roll, I smoked a cigarette. There was something about it that reminded me of the Rec in Greytown where I played my first games of football with a future All Black running interference to my dreams. I always thought Wreck but actually it was short for Recreation Ground. Those only partially incorporated spaces in small country towns that you wander in perfect freedom when the world was bigger than now. So much at peace until I realised I had the details wrong and should have been somewhere else. Down the other end of town. No matter ... much later, the reading over, dinner over, the party in the marquee dissolving into song, I left the tent and went to sit in the grandstand at the west of the oval. I saw the singer in her high heels teeter towards the loo in the break between sets. Girls like fillies galloping out into the field. The phantom horses and their riders from the rodeo two weeks away brief against the rural dark and then I thought, as briefly, it might have been Raetihi. Later again, the volcanic plumbing exploded in the Royal Hotel and I heard some rural stock buyer or sojourning truck salesman clearing his passages in the 4 am half dark. Looking up at one of those high blank ceilings that make you wonder if this is the room to which death will come. And may have already for another. In the morning mist rolled between the trees turning everything to dripping grief or else a cover under which survivors of the night's misadventures might escape into the hills. I drove north through town and over the heritage bridge then turned the car around and, leaving behind the whispering enticements of that unknown country, headed down towards the flatlands.

Artemis Cooper

... the names it has blown ...

When I was fifteen or sixteen and living in Huntly, I went one night down to the local disco and heard a three piece Maori band from Auckland play ... Purple Haze. In an intoxicating wash of magenta light. The rumour that Jimi Hendrix was, like they say really, a Maori from New Zealand, is still current in some parts. A Ngai-te-Rangi from the Bay of Plenty perhaps. Not long afterwards I heard on the radio the first Bob Dylan song I remember - Hendrix doing All Along the Watchtower. I still love the radio, for the way you hear on it things you'd never otherwise encounter. Not so very long ago, on 2SER, I came across the thrilling voice of Cassandra Wilson. She was singing The Band song, The Weight. I pulled into Nazareth / I was feeling about half past dead ... Nazareth is a small town in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. Been listening to her a lot lately. On one of her records, she covers a Hendrix song. Not an easy thing to do. I remember this one from the radio in the sixties as well. Is there a better lyric evoking the night time desolation of streets in a big city ...

After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footsteps dressed in red ...

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife ...

The traffic lights turn blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags down stream
Because the life that it lived is dead ...

Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
And with its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last ...

That's the words without the refrain, which is so well known it probably doesn't need repeating. Hendrix is said to have written the song in London when his girlfriend ran out into the streets one night after a fight. A band member said the riff came from Curtis Mayfield, and that Jimi had been obsessing over it for years ... Cassandra Wilson's version, like many of her covers, opens the song out so it sounds like a raga that she riffs along in front of with that fabulous voice. She has a new cd, called Loverly, but I haven't heard it yet. Recorded in a rented house in Jackson, Mississippi, her home town, it includes a version of Wouldn't It Be Loverly from My Fair Lady. The album of songs from that show, with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews (and Stanley Holloway), was one of the very few long playing records we had in our house when I was growing up. I know the whole thing by heart. In those days, I thought Pygmalion was about a diminutive feral cat.

Bismarck's Dream

New Rimbaud!

... or is it?

OTS aka TWA aka TLA

Last night my friends the Maroubrans asked me to join a monthly comp they're instituting. To be called OTS perhaps, the prize goes, by mutual agreement, to the best street find during the month in question. Or it might be called Freegans. If that's the word. Anyway the streets are a perpetual harvest and a moveable feast if you want to look at them that way. And so on the way to the laundry this morning, on a small old-fashioned low red-painted concrete ledge that runs along the frontage of Smith Street Motor Repairs, there were two books. My heart leapt up. As you can imagine: the first one was W G Sebald's Austerlitz, which I have read and even bought a copy of once, but didn't until today own. What happened was, we took a friend's copy away on a holiday to Seal Rocks, it rained, the tent flooded, Austerlitz was inside, it blew up to twice its normal size and then turned to smeary brown pulp. So I had to buy Peter another copy, even though he demurred and said he probably wouldn't read it again. Bet he will though. The other book was The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. I haven't read this, nor any other work by her - but I'm intrigued. So far as I can tell, it's a novel, but there are bona fide photographs of real people between pages 177 and 178, as if the fictional characters in the family chronicle that the book is have, or had, real existences in the world. Also in this copy, at the back, on the very last page, is a list written with a black felt tip pen. I didn't discover this until after I brought the books home and had I seen it at the time, might have left them there. It reads:

- clean

- vacuum
- ring real estate
- return library DVD's
- collect shirts
- dinner
bibs

Well I think it's bibs, it might be bits; mysterious either way.


BTW TWA stands for three word acronym and to decode TLA you substitute letter for word. They are also possible alternate titles for the comp. OTS is on the street.

Springfield Lodge

I've lived in Australia almost half my life - tho' it seems shorter than that, because it's the second half, and the first was much longer. Anyway, I always mark the anniversary of my arrival here in some way or other. This year, on the actual day, I was in Newcastle wittering on about the muses (never thought that would happen) but today, a few weeks later, I found myself up at Kings Cross, sitting on a bench in the early afternoon sun, eating sushi and looking at a Thames & Hudson book of Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings ... right outside the hotel I first stayed at way back when. Various toothless or otherwise subtracted locals passed or paused, making their accommodations with fate and/or addiction. Amongst the smart people, who clip by fast and don't stop. And the workers lounging ironically around in their Blundstones and shorts and fluorescent yellow-green safety vests. A classy looking hooker was standing outside the ice cream parlour. We almost smiled at each other. The Manzil Room is long gone and I couldn't work out if the allegedly legendary nightclub Baron's (it did exist, I've been) has been demolished yet or not but the Piccolo Bar is still there. It felt ... familiar. Like it hasn't really changed that much, or not in essence. I was happy. As if I was home, even though I wasn't. No regrets. The sushi was good too.

The Elephant's Memory Revisited

Recently a friend forwarded to me a quote by Umberto Eco on his reading habits: If they are different than me, he said, I hate them, and if they are like me, I hate them. It reminded me of what Nora Barnacle said when, after his death, she was asked what her husband, James Joyce, read. He mostly read himself, she said. There's a glimpse of this in the Brenda Maddox biography Nora, in which Nora remembers lying in bed and hearing Jim in the next room, chuckling over the manuscript of Finnegans Wake. If you write, you do have to spend a lot of time reading yourself, if only to free yourself, by publication, of what you have written ... and even then you might find yourself going back to recall what it was you did put down. I had this experience yesterday, picking up Waimarino County, just to see how it read. I got as far as page 8 before the first shock of embarrassment and shame. It was this passage: Next morning we went up the mountain. To get there you have to pass the elephant's grave. The ghost of Rajah stands gate-keeper to that entrance to the Tongariro National Park. He came with Wirth's Bros. circus back in the 1950s and remains because he ate tutu berries in autumn when they are poisonous to animals ... almost every 'fact' in the last two of those four sentences is wrong. The elephant was called Mollie, not Rajah (circus historian John Sullivan told me Rajah was a name given only to lions); obviously, Mollie was a she not a he; the circus was Bullen's, not Wirth's; it was probably tutu foliage, not berries, that Mollie ate; and tutu is poisonous over the summer months rather than in autumn. The version in the book is the one I grew up with, imperfectly remembered in the family; it took quite a lot of research, most of it not done by me, to establish the real story, which could itself make the subject of a book that, who knows, one day may be written. Meanwhile ... what to do? If it was a blog post I would just go in and alter it but you can't do that with books. I could annotate my own copy, if I didn't have a superstitious horror of inscribing printed pages in my execrable hand. And that wouldn't change the fact that the erroneous version is the one that all other readers of the book are left with. It seems to be without remedy for the moment, unless this post is a remedy. That first paragraph on page 8 concludes: I remember as child going to look at the mound of dirt; perched on top was a tiny bunch of flowers, bittersweet, so funny, so sad. This memory, which is still vivid in mind, may also be false. Newspaper reports of the event mention that a white cross, not a bunch of flowers, was placed on the grave mound, apparently by a circus clown. How can you erase a false memory? If I ever return to the subject, all I can do is put the two versions, the memory and the newspaper report, side by side ... and yet I doubt that anything will shift my five year old self's quite possibly delusive image of a faded, wilting bunch of flowers on top of a huge mound of yellow-brown earth there on the other side of the railway tracks in Brailey's Bush at Ohakune Junction.

Genre Confusion

Learned yesterday that my 2007 book of essays, Waimarino County (& other excursions), has been shortlisted for the 2008 Montana NZ Book Awards - in the Biography category. While delighted at the recognition and proud of the book itself, I'm also confused - in what sense is it a biography? Who is it a biography of? There are a few pieces in there that could be described as (auto)biographical essays, but most of the book doesn't focus upon particular lives, not even my own. Where other lives do enter into it - Alan Brunton's, Ern Malley's, Ronald Hugh Morrieson's - the inquiry is focussed not so much on their biographies as their works. The other two shortlisted books are Ray Fargher's book on Donald McLean and Judy Siers' on architect James Walter Chapman-Taylor - both, by the look of them, bona fide biographies in the classic sense. I've very happy to be in this company however, especially since Ray Fargher was a mate of my father's and came to our house sometimes when I was still living at home in the 1960s. I hope he wins it ... if I don't, which I probably won't. Or I hope Judy Siers does. Trying to imagine Waimarino County as a biography is a bit like seeing Saturn from the other side, as in this image, which views the planet and its rings from a POV unavailable to us here on earth but clear enough to our probe, Cassini. It looks the same, only different, like a photographic negative perhaps:

home

Go here for key to map

B.O.A.T.S

Based on a True Story is the title of a 2005 album recorded by 7 piece dub/reggae band Fat Freddy’s Drop in their own studio in Wellington, New Zealand. The elegant irony of that title is repeated in the CD’s liner notes, where the band members are named alongside their aliases—or should that be the other way round? The 'drop' of the band name is similarly ambivalent. I’ve heard many suggestions, from some kind of psychedelic elixir to those country dunnies still known as long drops. Of course it's probably just homebrew. The art work of that 2005 album is elaborated around a picture of an octopus, most likely the grand mythological beast Te Wheke-a-Muturangi, who lived, and perhaps died at the hands of Kupe, in Cook Strait at the time of the early Polynesian navigators. Although there are some who maintain that the rush of tidal waters through the Strait means Te Wheke lurks there still. So what’s the true story? Who knows? When did movies start using that particular form of enticement on their posters? What’s it got to do with the current, and somehow wearying, debate over the border between fiction and non-fiction? Couple of weeks ago I went to a conference that focused upon the many varieties that now exist of what’s being called, increasingly, Creative Non-Fiction. Though Literary Non-Fiction is preferred in some circles. It was a good weekend, I enjoyed both curricular and extra-curricular activities there in Newcastle. One or two things bothered me—that there is already an academic industry dealing with this ‘new’ genre; that some, not all, academic prose is now repositioning itself as ‘creative’ while exhibiting the old defects of that form along with the more risible aspects of the 'creative'. I can remember, in the vernacular of my youth, that to get a bit creative with the truth used to mean lying; now it can be a serious endeavour with a doctorate at the end of it. Nothing wrong with that, or not in principle. But I wonder … of the five non-fiction books I’ve published, the first two are straight up documentary, at least in my own mind; the second two introduce fictional elements into the narrative, the first, minimally, guiltily, and clandestinely, the other flagrantly or at least it’s meant to be flagrant—one reviewer, an academic from Dubai who’s specialty is Albert Camus, angrily accused me of attempting to write a novel by stealth. The fifth’s a book of essays so I guess the question doesn’t arise there. As everyone who pays attention to these matters knows, the fiction / non-fiction border is patrolled by thought police these days, who periodically haul some malefactor into the light of day and snap them in the pillory so we can all throw our rotten guilts in their faces. That’s become a wearisome process too I think. As with so much else, the primal scene of literary forgery is very old and found among early Greek writings. Herodotus tells it thus: Onomacritus had been expelled from Athens by Pisastratus for inserting in the verses of Musaeus a prophecy that the islands off Lemnos would disappear under water—Lasus of Hermione caught him in the very act of this forgery. Onomacritus is described as a collector of oracles; Musaeus was one of the shadowy poets who can be glimpsed around the equally shadowy form of the Ur-poet, Orpheus. Some say he was Orpheus’ son and most accounts agree that he was a prophet. To re-write the prophecies of a prophet was thus Onomacritus’ crime—but he was himself a writer, as well as a collector, of oracles, and was said during his exile in Susa to have been partly responsible, by selective quotation of oracles, for persuading Xerxes to undertake the invasion of Greece. Onomacritus was also involved, some say, in the writing down of the first 'official' texts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; perhaps, one writer suggests, although he doubts it in the next breath, he ‘forged’ the Iliad and the Odyssey out of legendary or other material. Later, the tyrant Solon, himself a poet, is said to have inserted a line in the Iliad’s catalogue of ships in order to reinforce Athen’s claim to Salamis. I think it’s clear from these few brief examples, all over two and half thousand years old, that the legitimacy of written texts as a source of truth is always questionable. And that authenticity can always be traded for short-term efficacy. So how are we to know what’s what? How negotiate these murky, octopus-haunted waters? It probably sounds flippant, but I still think you can go by feel, the way musicians do. Here’s something Tom Waits said recently in an interview: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. And then, I guess, he wandered off humming that song he wrote with Keith Richard: Well there's one thing you can't lose / It's that feel / Your pants, your shirt, your shoes / But not that feel ...

In the mid 1970s, in Wellington, I used to do a bit of arts journalism. There was a magazine that went out to secondary schools, published by maverick Alister Taylor. Can't remember what it was called. I did a few things for it, one was a commission to interview two kids from New Plymouth who'd won art prizes. Their names were Andrew Davie and Richard Penny and they came down to the big smoke for the interview, which I duly wrote up and the mag published. They were, like, 18, and I was 22. A few weeks later I got a phone call from Andrew in New Plymouth. He'd won a radio competition; the prize was dinner with Bo Diddley; would I like to come along? It was in the dining room on the first floor of the Waterloo Hotel opposite the Wellington Railway Station. Bo had an entourage - some of his band, some of his minders. So far as I recall, everyone was black apart from me and Andrew. The food was awful - NZ pub cuisine of the era, tough meat, limp vegetables, some kind of gravy. Fruit and custard afterwards. Maybe they were drinking beer but we weren't. Bo was very grand. He barely spoke to us - what was there to say to two spotty awestruck white boys? - and I remember realising that he was probably disappointed that we weren't girls. I asked him what he thought of Hendrix and he waved the query away with a kind of magnificent indifference. Jimi was cool, he said. He could play guitar real well. Later on we went to the concert. The square white guitar, the sweat pouring down, that beat, that beat ... his signature tune: Got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind / I'm just twenty-two and don't mind dying / Now come on baby take a walk with me and tell me / Who do you love? He wrote that song in 1956. His given name was Ellas McDaniel. When he died, he'd just been back to his home town of McComb, Mississippi. He was a lordly man.

Henson Street

There's a Henson Street in Summer Hill. Four streets over from where I live, in the direction of Ashfield. Just an ordinary suburban street - if ordinary is ever the word for such places. One of the houses has a topiary garden out front where the bushes are cut into animal shapes, a kind of diminutive fantasia of strangeness. Another house in Henson Street always puts on one of those outre, extravagant displays of Christmas lights, that people from miles around come in their cars to look at. Who lives there? I have no idea. Ditto for the topiary house. Never seen anyone outside clipping or, more likely, shaving with one of those annoying little hand-held machine tools. The guy who owns the next door building here spends hours shaving his cypresses with one, but not into any identifiable shape that I can see. Every time I cross or, more rarely, walk down Henson Street, I think of the Melbourne artist, Bill Henson. Not for any particular reason, it's just the coincidence of names that brings him to mind. I went to the 2005 retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW. I already knew his work, where from, I cannot say. I don't remember the show very well. Some of them were large nocturnal landscapes, with burnt areas that had, I think, the charred margins edged with gold paint. Some of them had a Dantesque feel, as if we were in one of the circles of hell. Cars. Dark trees. Country roads. That white flooding light that has a forensic feel, as if a crime scene were being exposed. I think there might have been some portraits of faces in the street as well, that were revelatory of the grotesque among the ordinary. The grim aspect of daily lives in antipodean cities. Then there were the portraits of boys and girls, about which there is now so much controversy. I admit to feeling troubled by them. No amount of sophisticated rationalisation can obscure the fact that you are looking at highly sexualised images of young adolescents. That's what they are, although it's not all that they are. Many of them share the sense that the nocturnes have, that you are happening upon a moment of crisis in an ongoing drama, from which the prior and subsequent scenes, with their potential to uncover some kind of narrative, have been erased. The way these images are lit is stunning. You think of Caravaggio, those deep blacks out of which an episode from a vivid, ultimately inscrutable, drama emerges. The gold rimmed skin of boy or girl, the glistening promise of their flesh, the equivocal zone between childhood and maturity that, as the artist has said, they inhabit at once so easily and uneasily. How do you look at them? That frisson of a glimpse of the forbidden - how is that to be seen? He has also said he cannot be held responsible for the uses to which people might put his images. Cannot police them perhaps. The ABC re-played a documentary, made a few years ago, the other night. I wasn't able to watch it but I did look at the promos. Two things struck me: one was the artist, in interview, saying why he was so drawn towards these young models. He made the remark paraphrased above, about that equivocal zone, and then said he found it ... interesting. This was the word he used, but the slight hesitation before he said it made me wonder if he might have more truthfully said fascinating, compelling, even addictive. The other thing was a glimpse of him at work in his Melbourne studio. Someone told me that it is a vast space on the verge of an industrial wasteland, with a vista perhaps over a part of the ruined shore of Port Phillip Bay. He was climbing a ladder to adjust an arc light, a great silver bowl with an incandescent lamp burning at its heart. We did not see what was being illuminated by what seemed a suddenly pitiless beam: forensic, yes, and excoriating, perhaps even with the power to light up the insides of bodies, to go right down to the bone. That's about as far as I can get down Henson Street at the moment. Beyond this: it's lamentable how public debate of these matters so quickly turns into mindless stoush, the kind of conflict that may have been best summed up in that Frankie Goes To Hollywood video for their hit song Two Tribes. A slugfest where nuance is the first casualty. There's something deeply disturbing about police going into art galleries and confiscating exhibits. There's something just as disturbing about the way many of those who are defending the artist against this outrageous censorship feel they must at the same time secure his work against all accusations of disturbing content. For there is, undoubtedly, something troubling, and perhaps also troubled, about Bill Henson's work. I think that might be the point.

uru-anna

Orion does a one-handed handstand over the spire of St Andrews. Balancing precariously on Bellatrix. Or is it Saiph? The maps are all the wrong way round. Every night, later and later, and how come I'm here to see it? Not every night. Feel better calling it Te Waka o Tainui. But I live here. Where too it is seen as a canoe. Julpan. Makes more sense. Two blokes in Arnhemland, brothers, went fishing and caught one they weren't allowed - up their boat went into the sky, a lesson to us all. Now I'm thinking of Noe's waka snagged on the steeple of Ararat. When Joseph Banks went climbing on Tahiti-nui, 1769, he wondered if the Great South Land had somehow submerged and that the peak he was on was a remnant. He may have been wiser than he knew. We used to call it the pot. And that's still what I think. First constellation I ever saw, or remember seeing. Out on the broken asphalt of the old tennis court at the Burns Street house. Held up my father's arms probably, after we got out of the car. Whispering star, at once a hushed intake and an outgiving of breath. Amazed to see it, and to see it yet - but how could it be otherwise? The self-centredness of the child, rocking along the continuum of spacetime. The self-centredness of the universe. Anyway, the pot. Boiling up dark matter in its silver pan. If you enter the magnification of telescopes, you discover unimaginable fires, dust clouds, births of suns, the whole violent panoply of creation. You imagine the unimaginable. And you can. Every night. Then say the names: Rigel. Betelgeuse. Bellatrix and Saiph. Alnitak, Mintaka and Alnilam: they're the belt. Don't know what the stars of the sword are called. The Shepherd of Anu, Sumerians said, they saw a crook in there somewhere. Uru-anna, the light of heaven: that's where the word came from. I see a pot. Then a boat. Then ... a dancing man, or acrobat, pirouetting around a steeple. Later and later.

kaka, kea, kakariki, kakapo

I get most of my books in second hand shops. Not sure why I prefer this kind of buying - perhaps it's the vertigo that a well-stocked shop full of brand new titles induces; maybe just because I'm cheap; or it could be that amongst the already-read you find things you've not only never heard of, but never imagined. Course, the ratio of misses to hits is fairly high but, on reflection, no higher than among the never-before-read. And you can always afford to take a punt. I went up to Newcastle last weekend with a book in my bag that is one of the best novels I've read. The Bird Artist, by Howard Norman, published in this edition by Faber and Faber in 1994. (If you go here you'll find a brief account of both the man and the circumstance out of which he wrote the book.) Two fifty it says on the flyleaf, but I can't recall if it came from St Vinnies or Anglicare. No matter. I was thinking about Bellingshausen's parrots on the way up, the story as told by Alan Moorehead in the Appendix to The Fatal Impact ($2.00, Vinnies, a hardback Reprint Society edition from 1966). The Russian explorer - well, actually, he was a Baltic German from one of the Estonian islands, but the expedition itself was Russian - paused to refit at Port Jackson in 1820 on his way back from the Pacific Islands. He and his crew became enamoured of Australian birdlife and when they left Sydney took with them on the Vostok and the Mirnyi 84 birds, including cockatoos, parrots, doves, a lory and a parakeet, along with a small kangaroo that was allowed to hop around the deck.


The astonishing thing about this event is that Bellingshausen was heading south, to resume the circumnavigation of Antarctica that he had broken off during the southern winter. The navigators seemed surprised when, at higher latitudes, the birds declined to sing. And that, even though they were kept in cages below decks, nevertheless began to die. One, a black cockatoo - whether red-tailed or yellow-tailed I do not know - collapsed after eating a stuffed kookaburra. On Macquarie Island, so early, fur seals had already been exterminated and the sealers were killing sea-elephants; whether, as in some other places, they were rendering them down using live penguins as fuel, is not recorded; but Bellingshausen was one of the last to see alive the parrot indigenous to the island, which the sealers were eating, along with albatross eggs.


In 1821, the circumnavigation complete and the southern continent observed, perhaps for the very first time, the two ships turned for home; as they sailed into warmer waters off the Atlantic coast of South America the surviving birds were brought up on deck after three and a half months below and at once burst into song. One parrot escaped and climbed into the rigging. A sailor was sent aloft to recapture it but it flew away and then tried to settle on, or fell into, the water ahead of the ship. A pole was thrust out towards it and the bird managed to grasp it, holding on so tightly it did not let go for hours. I do not know what happened to these birds after the voyage was over; but when, in the excellent Indigo bookshop in Newcastle I came across Parrot, by Paul Carter ($10.00, Reaktion Books, 2006), I hoped that it might tell me. Carter doesn't rehearse this story however, although he tells fragments of many others; and the illustrations (101, 77 in colour) in his small paperback are superb. One thing he says interests me particularly. Three New Zealand parrots, the kaka, the kea and the kakapo, are thought to be the most ancient species of the bird in the world: ur-parrots. I've never seen the latter two birds but, one lunch time, Jill Jones told me an enthralling account of her meeting with some kea on the slopes of the Southern Alps.


At the same shop I also picked up a copy of a recent life of William Dampier, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind by Diana and Michael Preston ($9.00, Doubleday, 2004). I had this book out of the Sydney Public Library last month and did not wish to take it back. The title comes from a remark S. T. Coleridge made about the Old Pyrating Dog. I'm not sure if it is in this biography or another that I came across the information that on one his voyages, his last, on the Duchess, Dampier carried a one legged cook by the name of John Silver. With or without a parrot on his shoulder.


The four NZ parrots illustrated are in the order given in the title; the third is of a kind of parakeet that still lives on some sub-antarctic islands, thought to be related to the extinct Macquarie Island variety.

flying over mars

There is another shoe, single this time, outside the medical centre. Alone, on the small ledge below the big window that looks up Lackey Street towards the railway station, round the corner from the entrance. A woman's shoe, high-heeled, a bit clunky, in brown suede with small diamante inlays picking out a pattern around the instep and along the toe. Italian, perhaps. When I first saw it, the other day, it was standing upright but now it's fallen over. The heel, which is thick as well as high, makes it unlikely that whoever left it there could have walked away on the other one. Or only with a most peculiar gait. Hopping. Or on crutches. It does not look much worn and yet its dancing days are surely over.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 ...