.
the nelson mail

chalk & cheese

one

I was on a two day visit to Auckland for reasons that were both specific and unknown: some kind of business. While there I went to the art gallery and saw a Philip Clairmont painting that I'd never encountered before. It was a floor painting: not painted on the floor but spread out upon it and designed to be viewed in that way. Irregularly shaped, like a jigsaw piece or something torn from a map perhaps. At first sight abstract, patterned, rather more like a late Jackson Pollock, which were of course painted on the floor before being hung up on the wall. I remember repeated motifs of red and black bars. A curator, who was in fact an art gallery owner I met here in Sydney a week or two back, told me this was one of two (I never saw the other) and pointed out that there were figurative elements to the painting: concealed profile portraits of women in Phil's life, a quite startling bird's-eye view of the city, in black and white, that recalled the 1974 War Requiem #9, The Destruction of Germany, which has in it collaged elements from a book called Early Engravings of German Towns. There were a few people lounging around the painting, stretched out on the floor and with some surprise I realised that Phil was among them - even though he died in 1984, knowledge of his death was not part of the dream. I went and sat down next to him, we exchanged greetings and he asked me to come and visit him at home. A few hour's conversation with you will keep me going for weeks, he said. When I said that because of other commitments I wasn't able to do that, he took from his pocket a small pair of scissors and said, with a crooked sort of grin, Oh, well, I'll have to try the van Gogh solution then. While it didn't look likely that he'd be able to cut off any part of his ear with the small plastic handled scissors, I still insisted on taking them from him. Later in the dream, after I'd left the gallery, I realised that I'd also taken a small plastic sachet of white powder which I knew to be speed. I started going back, to return Phil his drugs, but then in a doorway paused. The seal on the sachet was faulty and some of the grains had escaped onto my fingers. I rubbed the gritty white powder onto my gums, fearfully tempted to keep the sachet and take all the speed myself.

two

I had discovered a formula, perhaps a spell, whereby I could make the right word appear in the empty white space previously apportioned to it. Enthralled by this new skill, I began to practise it, watching delightedly as a series of words, all nouns I believe, were conjured into view; but then the telephone rang (the real telling bone), waking me up. And in the waking I lost cognisance of what exactly this formula, or spell, or technique, consists of. All I had left in memory was the last of the half dozen or so words I had called up: Emmental or Emmentaler; Swiss cheese.

Image : Study for Head, Philip Clairmont, 1970 (?)

addenda : peacocks are so vain

Glen Oak Farm

pics by the redoubtable Maggie Hall


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The first step is to release breath from the inflated lobes of the lungs into the branched tubing of the respiratory system. The main channel, the trachea, is about eight inches long, rigid and segmented, a conduit for the breath toward the vocal cords, those twin infoldings of mucous membrane stretched horizontally across the larynx. They are thin muscular flaps, reminiscent of labia, that block the top of the trachea; when we breath, these flaps are loose; when we want to speak, they form a barrier by pressing together and sealing off the throat from the breath, which accumulates until the pressure becomes intense enough to release the cords - not all at once but fluidly, periodically, in a rippling motion. As the breath makes its dash upwards, the pressure below the vocal cords decreases, they seal again. More breath creates more pressure, another release point is reached, the pressure drops, the cords seal and so on in a rapid alternating dance of advance and retreat . . . in addition to the vocal cords, the respiratory system has a series of muscles, the depressor anguli oris, the posterior cricoarytenoid, the sternocleidomastoid, whose purpose is to manipulate the flow of breath as it passes out of the body. And then of course there are the tongue and the teeth and the lips. After crossing the lips, the breath collides with the air outside, its energy transforming into molecular movement. The air molecules in front of the mouth compress and open in pulses tuned to our words. These pulses travel forwards and outwards . . . if there is an ear handy, its pinna - those folds of cartilage that jut out from the sides of the head - will capture these pulses, this voice, and direct it into the auditory canal, where it will gain speed until it collides with the taut sheath of flesh called the tympanic membrane, or ear drum. The membrane booms, it vibrates and echoes, mimicking the complex vibrations of the air. Beyond lie three ossicles, little bones that rest lightly against each other so that the movement of one causes movement in the next. The hammer (malleus) strikes the anvil (incus) that strikes the stirrup (stapes) that strikes the cochlea - like a pin striking a bell. Very little energy is lost. The cochlea is snail-shell-shaped, hair-lined, fluid-filled. A spiralled, hollow, conical chamber of bone. Here molecular movement is converted to electricity, as the movement of fluid within the shell causes the hairs along its twisting length to vibrate. This vibration in turn stimulates the slender cells of the auditory nerve, the pathway to the brain, which transports the electrical signal of speech across the axons of its component neurons into that upper section of the brain known as the primary auditory cortex. This absorbs the incoming electrical impulses, somehow converting them into the comprehension of a voice. The exchange, from the lungs of the speaker to the brain of the listener, takes about one second to complete; but it is only a prologue. A voice does not begin its true existence until after the brain of the hearer has absorbed and converted the electrical signals of the neurons. We copy the external signal, discard the original and then remake the copy in our own image, based on the meaning the voice has for us. We mould and remould the voice over and over again, the copy deviating from the original that produced it and at the same time becoming inseparable from what it is stimulating. A voice has spoken and we have heard.

(Adapted from Daniel E Smith : Muses, Madmen and Prophets - Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity. Smith's own account depends upon Brian Moore's An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing and a website: www.voice-center.com which, he laments, no longer exists in the form in which it was when he accessed it.)

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Cuba for Taxi Drivers



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the bondi tenner


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surrealism in ashfield

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

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blue sun

otoliths xv


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

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beige


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enzymes

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

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The Mitchells

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

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

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

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



Les Murray on The Mitchells here


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qu'est ce que c'est ?

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drunks


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My sons Jesse & Liamh, a few months ago at Dark Point;
Jess, on the right, has just turned 13; Liamh will be 10 next Friday.

photo: Maggie Hall

all the remembered songs

The last book I remember reading before setting out from Auckland to Sydney in 1981 was Patrick White's The Vivisector - a Penguin paperback, as above, that I found somewhere and no longer have; perhaps it was a library book. Don't know who made that cover either though it does have echoes in it of Brett Whiteley's London paintings of the early 1960s. Anyway. The Vivisector, as books will, left me with an indelible impression of a Sydney I had not at that stage even seen: dark, visceral, stinking and steaming, a place of wild contrasts and elemental energies that were barely tamed by a vestigial and deformed social structure inherited from Great Britain. It is a portrait of an artist, Hurtle Duffield, and an account of his life and work. He has in his background gentlemanly forebears but is born into a slum in Surry Hills, one of the many and increasing kids of a bottle-o and a laundress, and then is sold - or bought - by a rich family, the Courtneys, for whom his mother works. For five hundred pounds. They live somewhere in the eastern suburbs, Rushcutters Bay White says, but he is always coy about places and times in the book, which is really charting an interior not an exterior geography, a spacetime that is as visceral as Duffield's paintings, which are powerfully evoked without ever really being described: a remarkable achievement in itself. Most of the action does happen in the eastern suburbs, where White lived later on in life. About of a third of the way into its 600+ pages Hurtle buys an old house in Flint Street, Paddington and lives the rest of his life there. Of course I didn't understand any of this when I first read The Vivisector and it was pure coincidence that the first house I lived in here, in Gipps Street, is just a stone's throw away from Flinton Street, which is maybe the inspiration for White's Flint Street. Paddington wasn't nearly as gentrified then as it is now, you could still pick up echoes and rumours of the working class suburb that grew up around the military barracks. Anyway. A few weeks ago, in the St. Vinnies around the corner, I saw a hardback copy, a 2nd edition, of The Vivisector for sale and almost bought it: but its spine was cracked and it had been written in in biro so I didn't. Then, not so very long afterwards, as if some power was importuning me, there was another, a first edition this time, without its dust jacket but otherwise in pretty good condition . . . so I did buy it. Even then I wasn't sure if I would re-read it, White's not easy, he doesn't write page turners and at 642 pps this is his longest book. Well, I got hooked. And I'm still hooked. About twenty pages from the end and I don't want it to finish. It is hardly the book I remember from 30 years ago, my memories of it were almost entirely taken up with the early stages, Hurtle's childhood and growing up, his love affair with the prostitute Nancy Lightfoot in pre- and post-World War One Sydney. And I was too young and too naive then to appreciate White's own presence in the book, his own amusement, delight, disgust, fascination, obsession with the character he has made, his habit of twitching Duffield's male or hetero drag aside to reveal flashes of his own lineaments as an artist and a man: I suppose I mean I read it quite literally the first time, as realism, and failed to realise the depth of White's duplicity and artistry - where the two can be distinguished. I hear his dry chuckle reverberating behind every other sentence, the enormous pleasure he takes in the construction of a mise en scene which he then, with even greater pleasure, reveals to be - fake. Or at least artificial. His satire on what passes for high society in Sydney is immaculate, cruelly accurate and yet, however much ridicule he heaps on people, you always feel his sympathy for their predicament, which is his own, and mine and belongs to all of us: that we are tied to a body that will in the end betray us. But the chief delight is his prose, which is highly wrought yet utterly convincing, sometimes Joycean in its coinages, psychologically acute, sensous and rich with a kind of rotting magnificence which is his as much as it is Hurtle Duffield's or the city's. Here's a passage from near the end: For instance: the blood of horses wallowing in sea shallows at dawn, milky water filling the satin troughs between belly and thighs as they shimmy on their lovely backs, before lunging to their feet to shake their barrels, all feathered with light and motion, flinging into the used sea the beads of water from their stringy manes. Where had he seen these bathers? He must convey something of the horses, not themselves, their spirit. In the same way the girl in the crushed pink hat and cotton frock strumming out of an old banjo all the remembered songs: fingers, nails blunted by the strumming, sanded texture of the arms, tremors of the breasts inside the gritty dress. As the girl entered the trees, her skin brindled by light and shade, the old banjo made a papery thump thump trailing behind her through the tussocks . . . he was also this girl with whom he might or might not have slept. Lying under the paperbarks, he identified the shammy-leather skin, the goose pimples growing in it, the sand tasted on interchangeable mouths. Now it was himself alone watching the great pantechnicon driving for what reason through the shallows. And the essence of smoky cat slipping through the long grass at dusk looking for a kill, at the same time to curl her tail around something in the name of love. Everything private perfect reduced to a kill if not by time the super-cat by the khaki klan of killers. Tear off a hand or leg it doesn't belong to you anyway for ever and blood is made to bleed. Like letters. My dear Cat. He composed letters just as he painted pictures in his mind and lost them before he could get them down. Everything comes back though, like the homing pigeons pensioned men keep in their yards. Stalagmites of white droppings, lacy scribbles of pigeon shit, a coral scratching over worm-eaten boards . . . from where did he know the horses, the shammy-skinned singer, the pigeon-loft held together by the rusty ends of kero tins? He didn't know. But he knew. Where and when doesn't in the end matter.

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Of Doubt & Wonder

on the island