I think I now know who David Malley is, whose alias he is: thank you. I have read your book, it is a worthy addition to that equivocal corpus, that body of undead work, those irreducible traces of the zombie poet and his numerous avatars who cannot and will not be stilled or silenced, that rhizome proliferating endlessly in the underground of the mind's divigations . . .

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Days Like This

Today I posted off to AUP in Auckland the corrected proofs of Steal Away Boy, the Selected Poems of David Mitchell. This book, which has consumed much of my free time and also that of my fellow editor, Nigel Roberts, over the last year or so, will be published in early April; there'll be a launch at the Gus Fisher gallery in Auckland on the evening of Tuesday 30th March. It's always a strange moment when you let a book go for the last time; but this was stranger than most. I was sorting out what kind of envelope, postage etc. with the clerk at the Summer Hill post office when the manager, a charming man whom I sometimes get to witness contracts for me, leaned over and gave me a thick brown package. No flat number, he said. That's why they couldn't deliver. My name was spelled correctly, the address was otherwise accurate . . . what could it be? I wasn't expecting anything. I flipped it over and saw on the reverse, neatly typed, the name and address of the sender: David Malley, 40 Dalmar Street, Croydon. That's when the hairs began to rise on the back of my neck; because 40 Dalmar Street is, or was, the address of Ern Malley's sister Ethel, it was from that veritable house that the hoax poems and the letters were sent. I've seen it, it's still there, an anonymous red brick house with a frangi pani in the front yard and a tradesman's ute parked in the drive. So who is David Malley and what was in the packet? It was meticulously wrapped and about the size of an A4 manuscript. Postmarked Croydon. $7.50. A hastily scrawled D Malley handwritten below the address. As I walked home I ripped open the sturdy brown envelope and found within another package, also meticulously wrapped, in brown paper, with a white envelope taped to the outside. My name was typed on this envelope, which I tore open and then read the typed letter within. Same address at the top. A date, the 9th of January, my dead sister's birthday; must have been a couple of weeks in the PO; I think that's the first time I've been in there this year. No signature, just the typed name at the bottom. Perhaps with a sense of dejavu, it began, I should begin by saying that when I went through my mother's things after her death I found a letter Lois had written . . . all sorts of things were now rocketing through my head. Today, 28 January, is the anniversary of my mother's death ten years ago now; her name was Lauris, not Lois, but she was the one I thought of when I read that first sentence. How she would have loved to have known that she died on the same day W. B. Yeats did, in Sligo, 1939 . . . I read on: Hence my book Beyond is Anything tells the story of the real Ern Malley . . . the letter is in fact a kind of parody of Ethel Malley's first letter to Max Harris and, within the second brown paper package, there was indeed a book of that title. A4 sized, thick high quality paper bound between covers of stiff black card; with a picture of the moon eclipsing the sun on the cover and the words TOTAL ECLIPSE printed inside the round face of the moon. It's #7 of a numbered edition of 20, privately printed and would have cost a bit to do. There are 24 colour plates including a Durer Self Portrait on the inside front cover and a Durer Portrait of a Woman on the inside back; both portraits are reproduced in miniature on the outside back cover. All of the poems from Malley's The Darkening Ecliptic are reproduced within, some with revisions that are authorised by manuscript corrections in Malley's hand (some of these corrected and/or annotated sheets are reproduced in the illustrations); the poems are divided into three sections (Melbourne; Townsville; and Hospital poems); there is one extra, previously unknown poem included; and the sequence as a whole is re-titled Total Eclipse. Otherwise, the book consists of a prologue, Lois' letter, a new introduction to the poems and a Life Retold. More than that I can't at this stage say because I haven't yet had a chance to read the book; so back to the letter. It says I've been selected because I seem to be a Malley supporter, that I can use any of it on-line and that I have permission to quote from it or reproduce it in part; but that, if I do not use it I should treat it as strictly confidential. It concludes: I must close now, and regret you will be unable to contact me to let me know if there is anything else I can do . . . Yours sincerely . . .




I'm about to stop making sense. I don't know who this mysterious, other, DM, might be. Not a clue. Not, I think, anyone I know. He (is it a he?) knows that I blog but he doesn't, not really, know where I live. (Unit Four (4) if you're reading this and want to send more mail.) Does he know that I too have written a life of Ern Malley? An autobiography, no less. Called White City (2006) and thus far unpublished, it is as if surrounded by an aura of palpable silence. Though there were a couple a pieces from it in a recent Landfall. When, not so very long ago, a NZ publisher expressed interest in White City, I found myself uncharacteristically shy of surrendering the ms. But I would give it to the putative DM, should he want to see it . . . that way we could perhaps see if his recollections and my proxy account have anything in common, anything that might be shared. Anything . . . germane.

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the liminal days

In my peculiar chronology, the old year ends around the summer solstice and the new one doesn't begin until today, or perhaps tomorrow. The days between are liminal days, intercalary days . . . sometimes I feel like proclaiming an idiosyncratic Decree of Canopus but it would of course have effect only in my own private universe. Or within these four walls, whichever is the larger. So, there's time in there not so much for reflection as for casting ahead, for attempts at precognition, that sweep of mind-light into the near and far of the future. In 1977, perhaps foolishly, I refused the option of a university career (was a Junior Lecturer in the English Dept. at Victoria Uni in Wellington that year, with the possibility of doing a PhD OE and then joining a faculty somewhere) and ran away instead with the Red Mole circus for five delirious years on the road in NZ, the US, the UK . . . that led onto working with various rock 'n' roll bands. And so on and so forth. Now, thirty-three years later, I've enrolled at the University of Western Sydney and will, on February 1, formally begin study towards a DCA . . . which means, portentously, Doctorate of Creative Arts. The good thing about that is the generous scholarship I'll be paid to do it over the next three years. It isn't quite enough to live in the high style I've always wanted to become accustomed to; but will mean I'll spend far less time sitting on the rank at Bondi Junction wondering where it all went wrong. As if I don't already know all the many ways there are to roast that old chestnut. My subject . . . is not an easy one and I feel some trepidation even naming it here; the proposal is called Double Lives and the idea is to research and write a dual biography of two Australian painters of the mid-years of the 20th century. Sounds fairly straight forward; until you realise the two are Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira and therein lies a tale of infinite complexity. Well, I wouldn't be content with anything simple, now, would I? As long as I've lived here I have, like many Australians, shied away from both the idea and the reality of the Centre, as it's sometimes called; but following along in the steps of Ludwig Becker in late 2007 somehow changed all that. Two things determined my shift in focus: one was an inadvertent speculation arising from contemplation of one of Becker's images: I wondered if a line of influence might be traced from his work to Namatijira's; they were both Lutherans, both water-colourists . . . and both something more than any such categories can comprehend: if a line could be found, the intermediary would have to have been Battarbee. The other was a moment on the trip itself, when I stood on a bluff about twenty-five ks from Broken Hill and looked west towards . . . whatever is out there. There's a strangely active, almost cacophonous silence that rises from those desert lands. Like a clamour of unheard voices. Once you have heard the unheard, you then wish to see the unseen. Various coincidences since, which I won't go into, have transformed this vague hope into something that now feels more like an imperative.

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Currawong Dreaming

One of the joys of not driving, as I have not been these last ten days, is sitting out on the balcony watching the evening redness fading in the west . . . well, that was then. Next thing I'm seeing this tall spindly guy dressed like an undertaker without his jacket waving both arms outrageously on the other side of the road opposite the Waverley Court and Police Station. I go up to the intersection at Birrell Street and when I'm sure there's no vacant cabs coming towards me or in the rearview mirror turn around and go back for him. His face is bent the wrong way around the mouth and his head like a football with the air leaked out of it but he's non-threatening, raving in fact, he's been drinking with the old guys in the Robin Hood and then up to the court 'for entertainment' only to find that neither of his two favourite blonde magistrates is presiding today so he was going to go to the Coach & Horses in Randwick to have a few more drinks. Three in the afternoon or a bit after. Hot. He appreciates the air-con. My local, he observes. After a pause. Eight generations. You have a genealogy that long here? I ask incredulously. What are you? he comes back with. And then has a good look at me. Oh, I see. An actor. It turns out we've both been stage managers in the theatre so that's alright. The Pet Shop Boys are playing, real low, but he hears the song. I love this fucking song! Can I turn it up? More? More? He could and he did. I've got the brains / You've got the looks / Let's make / lotsa money blasting out all down the somnolent streets of Bronte with their nursing homes where superannuated poets live out their long exile from the word. They're genius! I'm not gay by the way but they're just . . . fucking genius. Can I turn it up a bit more? It's three days of this kind of thing before I get back to the balcony and by then whatever the currawongs were up to has passed, instead it's a crow with the crust of a sandwich that it gurgles over on a branch in the gum tree out front. While a timorous soldier bird contemplates the crumbs from further up the leafy end. I can remember one (currawong) perched like a black flag on the steeple tip on the horizon while two others, one with a raggedy tail, sang and chased, chased and sang, athletically and operatically, one almost skewering me in the forehead with its beak as I looked out on a swoop and pursuit past the building. Attended by vengeful, not timorous, soldier birds. As if I could ever work out anyway what it was they were up to. Ornithology is for the birds. Then a sacred ibis passes white and black on the powder blue sky. All the way from the Pleistocene to ancient Egypt to now. Or whatever. Thoth's bird. It brings the gift of forgetting. Forgetting in words.

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hypnogeographies [ 7 ] [ the wedding party ]

It was a wedding party. My own. And my beloved’s. In a high clear room whose south windows looked out over the landscape from a Renaissance painting; whose north rose up above the canals that threaded the cobbled streets below. Not that anyone was looking out the windows. At tables on the mezzanine, down on the black and white checked floor, in galleries and alcoves, all the people I have ever known and many I did not were gathered in conversation, in eating and drinking, in laughter and forgetting. Such a wealth of acquaintance! And yet no family. I stepped down from the mezzanine to a table where a heavily bound, ancient book was opened by a gentleman with moustaches and the words on a page therein read by him to the lady at his side. It was a parallel text, each read from the page before them, and each read the same words. What were they? A spell, a recipe, an instruction, a poem? I could not tell and then I could not hear: on the black and white floor a band advanced, playing. A horn section, drums, accordion and guitar. Some of them I knew, they were musicians I had worked with in my youth. Now another band came from the other side of the floor, identical instrumentation, different players. It was a duel, a battle of the bands, wonderful! And where was my beloved? I looked up towards the windows in the south, the green leafy trees, the yellow fields where tiny black peasants laboured, the distant white towers and the architecture of clouds in the sky. She came walking down out of that magnificence, the people fell back on either side, the musicians too, the wizard with his book, the lady, everyone, holding up in their hands peculiar U-shaped glasses full of purple wine. It was a party, my own and my beloved’s, not a wedding; for the wedding had already been. We raised the U-shaped glasses and we drank. And then the bands began to march and to play, to advance and retreat, back and forth, like miniature armies, across the black and white floor.

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hypnogeographies [ 6 ] [ lullaby ]

He was sitting next to the gas stove in the corner of the kitchen of the flat in Womerah Lane, with guitar, writing a song. Even though he looked nothing like the wizened old rhubarb—pencil-line moustache, black hat, quizzical eyes—of the photographs, I recognised him instantly. Nor was his voice, when he sang, that of the antediluvian reptilian croaker familiar from the recordings. Still, I didn’t say anything, just asked him how it was going? He showed me what he was working on: there were lines of lyrics and then cloudy spaces in which the words had not yet appeared. I considered telling him about the dream gadget I invented, the Emmental Effecter, that makes the right ones come; but then thought better of it. Who was I to advise the Master? Anyway, he said, the words would come, it was just a matter of making the place ready for ’em. My sons were over by the door, each also with a guitar in hand, singing sweetly, in harmony, like junior bards: a nursery rhyme they’d written themselves. They put up their instruments and said they were going to the studio to work on it some more. Trepidation: it was the dark of the Darlo night outside, they were just boys, would they be alright? Of course we’ll be alright, Daaaaaad, they drawled in affectionate derision, and left. He also put up his guitar and went out into the hallway: a tall, elegant young man who carried himself in the full knowledge of his isolate splendour. Something about him reminded me of a Scottish friend, from Glasgow, who also moves in the consciousness of his particular difference from the rest of us. It isn’t arrogance, it isn’t pride or scorn, just a sombre recognition of the code immortals must live by. Now he was joined by his girlfriend, tall, elegant, lissom as he was. They stood in the bathroom door, turned away from me, and bared their backs to show me their tattoos. I don’t recall ever having seen 3D tattoos before, though I have read of them in books. Samuel R. Delany springs to mind. His was a red cockerel rampant on a dunghill below a halo of stars, like a barnyard version of the logo of Paramount Films; hers, the letters of her own name—R A C H—inside another starry marquee. Somehow, standing side by side together like that, they made their tattoos merge into one image: the Chanticleer of the Boulevards with his Hen. Trailing ambiguous clouds of noblesse oblige, they sashayed back down the hall, through the kitchen, along the cat walk and out into the clamorous night. And then we found ourselves waiting at a bus stop, stranded under yellow neons on Parramatta Road, Petersham. I thought I should be calling a cab so that these immortals might return to their Olympus; or else a rainbow. He said: I like to stay a night or two sometimes with anonymous friends; I like it even more when they show discretion. I said I had to go and see where my sons were at. He said he was sure they would be fine and to send along a copy of the lullaby when they finished recording it. And then we parted in the yellow gloom outside the Marco Polo Motel. Just before I woke I saw words begin to form in the empty spaces he had left for them: Well now what’s the use in dreamin’ / You got better things to do / Dreams never did work for me anyway / Even when they did come true . . .

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hypnogeographies [ 5 ]

There is a third place that I have been to only a few times and then much against my will; although its grandeur and its gloom linger like a prodigy in the waking mind. It can be reached only by traversing, one by one, from zero to a hundred, each of the massive steps strung out and bending like the bridge on Jupiter over the methane haunted abyss clouding the planet below. Once you reach three figures you will find there, on the right, an adamantine gate into the Encyclopaedic City beyond. It is laid out on an infinite grid whose streets are designated only by combinations of letters and numerals and whose dwellings, halls, palaces, utilities and vacant lots resemble volumes which no sight can resolve, no eye can read, no thought may comprehend. To enter therein is to become lost without recourse, without hope and without egress. I have been stranded on the corner of K and L in great fear of my life, while avenues of gloom temples stretched north and south into the murk forever. I have seen the shadowy arcades opening before me, with their impossible illusions, their unsaleable goods, their currency that is made up of whispers and sighs, their denizens who are without faces or names or even bodily form—and yet they persist. There is no sky above, no earth below, the air is made of darkness and yet you can still sense through the grey insubstantial atmos the rows of buildings curving away down the endless streets. Perhaps after all it is the city of the dead and that is the source both of its horror and its grandeur. Once I visited a house there, which was my house, or at least it was the house where I lived. A rotting mansion built on the side of a gully, where one wall, the east, opened onto the nothing of a vista of roofs like clouds. There were many storeys to this mansion, five or six, but most of the rooms lacked floors and some lacked ceilings too: so how could they be rooms? The walls were bare wood where ragged sheets of scrim hung and breathed in the wind of souls. There were gowns of satin and ermine thrown over chairs and eaten away by mould; piles of paste jewellery gleaming before mirrors on falling down dressing tables; wardrobes in which black undertaker suits greened in the damp; velvets whose plush was devoured by rodents. We who lived there were the outcast, the deranged, the unregenerate, the free; we never went out. Brezhnev and Hood and China West; Jenny Tits, Help Help Me Rhonda and the rest of the Hole Sick Crew. To keep ourselves entertained we made extravagant costumes out of that lordly detritus; played music that came from I don’t know where; took drugs of whose nature only traces remain in the demonic visions of PCT; and comported on beds that floated somehow above those rotten or absent floors, beneath those rumoured ceilings. Our lives were made of confected drama and real grief, we were fictions in search of a plot that would restore us to meaning, bodies without souls or souls without bodies, who knew? And when, in a terror that had no motive but which I recognise from my most alienated waking moments, I tried to flee that place, it was down a hallway of infinite extension, pursued by ghosts, that I ran. One of those nightmares from which you implore your own self to wake you; and wake I did, but only into another fragment of the dream. On the north side of the house, below the crumpled iron of the balconies, tough pale grass grew among white fallen stones, the grey lead of water pipes, festooned with defunct taps, stepped down the hill to where the letter box leaned on its splintered post; there was a wire gate half off its hinges and through that I went into the nameless beyond: turning once to look back at the ruin looming above me, white faces, red mouths, black eyes, imploring at every window for my return.

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In the Land of Ice and Snow

Although I could not quite bring myself to name the dream country I wrote about in the last post, I can say this: it is curiously reminiscent of the landscape of my father's childhood and I think perhaps that when I go there I am not so much wandering in my own hypnogeography as in his; if such a thing can be. There is another dream country I visit that is more my own - the mountain that stands over the town in which I grew up. I went there last night. In this incarnation the mountain was vast as ever, more conical than in fact it is, and I was toiling past oddly shaped granite outcrops, through snow and ice, heading upwards around the bulge of the peak towards an alpine lake that was always just around the bend. Along the way I found a lost archive assembled by previous explorers, amongst which there were many open receptacles full of moulded figures like dolls that were in themselves examples of various forms of cultural miscegenation. In their mixed expressions meanings were expressed, for instance the bitterness of racial hatred combined with the self-contempt such feelings can engender. And, at the other end of the scale, the exaltation of true understanding along with dread insight into the arcana of sorcery. I can still see some of these wizened faces, with their wild and tangled black hair, like something from the profligate pen of an artist (Tony Fomison comes to mind; and Ralph Hotere) uninhibited by previous or protected views of the way ahead. The same man who'd made the dolls, I learned as I went on (I could now see silver glints from the lake ahead) had published many pamphlets and these too lay before me in laminated stacks that I was avid to sort through. But there was no time so instead, not without trepidation, I took one to read later and went on towards that seductive silver lake. Some ghostly interlocutor intervened at this point and I turned back from the lake's shores to speak with him. I think I was trying to justify taking the pamphlet, and in so doing pointed out that my own father's book was included with those others in the archive of explorers' journals. I found his thesis and opened it up; learning to my surprise that it was a four volume work, not the actual single book in only three extant copies, one of which I own. I cannot now recall volumes 2 and 3 but #4, which was smaller, contained poems he had written that had certain affinities with the moulded doll-like figures mentioned above. In other words my father's poems, which were structured like a family tree, gave voice to those who had no other, to the silent and forgotten among us, those who lived and died and left no record of their activities and experiences. He had somehow extracted the memories of these forgotten ones from the recall of those who had left account of themselves behind; and although his poems were made of words, as poems are, I could also sense between or behind the lines the actual faces of these unknown ones. I say this is a place I have visited before and so it is; but this is the first time I have been allowed to look into the archives contained there, high up on the mountain, on the shores of the silver lake, among the ice and the snow and the whistling wind.

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lost horizon

There's a place I keep going back to in dreams. It is a land between two ranges of hills, the sea to the north, the sea to the south, and a complex pattern of creeks and ponds and lakes threading the flat green plains which are not uninhabited but not populous either. I can remember specific parts of this dream geography: a long, narrow apartment under a house on the eastern flank of the western hills where I lived and to which I have since tried to return - though only to recover elements of the library I lost when I moved precipitately away from there. In the shadow of the eastern hills I once, many years before, embarked on an expedition with my youngest sister, in quest of what precisely I cannot now say, if I ever knew; but I remember, as we made our way north through the blue ponds and the green marshes, that we came to a place where the colours bled from the landscape, the features of the map we were on faded to white, surmise replaced navigation . . . in the way of such things I cannot return there except involuntarily, neither will nor desire is enough, and so those parts of the country I have not yet explored remain unknown though I can sometimes sense their contours. Now I think that when I have flying dreams it is always this land that I am flying above; and when I crash, as inevitably I do, it is here that I fall to earth - except that I always wake just before hitting the ground. Where is this place? After a conversation I had yesterday with a friend who lives across the road, during which the question of hypnogeography was raised, and I told him about this place, and he asked me where it is . . . suddenly I thought I knew. And then, just as suddenly, thought I must never say. Even writing this bare outline down here now makes me fear that I will not again be allowed to visit this land between two seas, this green valley amongst low craggy hills, this placeless place, this shangri-la that I feel I know in my bones as much as I do in my dreaming mind.

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another view of the lakes of titan

. . . that's Kraken Mare to the left of Ligeia Mare and the smaller lake to the north is called Punga Mare (Maori Latin); while elsewhere, but I don't know where, is Mayda Insula, named after the legendary island in the North Atlantic ocean on our beleaguered planet . . .

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titanic sailing

One of the places on the world wide web I like sometimes to go is the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. There you will find, among much else, that the geographical feature pictured above is called Ligeia Mare, a hydrocarbon lake towards the north of the northern hemisphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Ligeia Mare is about 500 km in breadth and has a sister lake, Kraken Mare; they are fed by rivers that wash down valleys whenever it rains - huge pools of methane, ethane, propane and (probably) other hydrocarbon compounds which remain liquid in the frigid Titanian temperatures. NASA's epochal probe, Cassini, has photographed sunlight flashing from Ligeia Mare (see below) and its Huygens lander in 2005 reached the surface of Titan near the equator, sending back a picture of some orange rocks; now there is proposal to land some kind of craft on, or in, one of the methane lakes. Boating on Titan . . .

Authenticity is the abiding perversion of our times. It is indulged as a vice, worshipped as a fetish, embraced as a virtue. Like a deity it is pervasive, rapacious, and demanding: authenticity is the underwriter of history and culture, the guarantor of social legitimacy and personal integrity; it is the theorist of truth. Everything it touches turns to gold - or is at least burnished with a scrape of lustre - and in that sense it is the mark of genius, the Midas touch, the apotheosis of capitalism.

As a vehicle of thought and critical idiom, authenticity carries to the very heart of culture the aesthetics of Romantic authorship - the conceits of genius, creativity, and especially that of originality . . . in doing so it carries falsehood and fraudulence there as well. This is a straightforward ideological contradiction . . . that maintains the primacy of the authentic and so authenticity shimmers rather than falls. Hence the streets are packed with counterfeit goods; the galleries are replete with forged paintings and the archives threaded with fraudulent documents; copyright law is entranced by the worldwide web; a sheep is cloned (and neatly turns out to be a fake); resting actors find work posing as citizens on television chat shows, documentaries are revealed to be staged fictions or, perhaps worse, comedy shows; a troupe of imposters don clerical vestments and charitably cock their ears to confession; Faux Art is cooed over by faux women; prize-winning authors shrug off accusations of plagiarism; theme parks replace museums and the cinema rewrites history; credit card fraud is booming; and on the internet and elsewhere, everywhere, identities are blurred, swapped, falsified, multiplied, invented, dissolved.

The thirst for authenticity is nowise slaked by this superfluity of copies. Jeans and software now carry the same security measures as paper money - from signatures to holograms - false signs; artists make cults of themselves and register as trademarks; television turns to protracted fly-on-the-wall documentary soap operas; the issue-memoir becomes the degree-zero of literature, judged primarily not by quality of writing but by the truth of the writer's testimony; politicians cock-a-doodle-do their personal provenance to confirm policy and win votes.

In art criticism, the authentic becomes the synonym for taste . . .

from The Forger's Shadow : How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature, by Nick Groom (Picador, 2002), p 292-3


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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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