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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

ghosts of the red dust

Around dusk I'm driving someone to the airport when I see the big black cloud towering in the south. Storm is rising . . . blues fall down like drops of rain . . . later on, after the forked lightning and the heavy showers, a drunk lawyer going to Bankstown tells me that the forecast, which he does not believe, is for one hundred kilometre an hour winds. They come through in the night, bringing the red dust, and next morning the air is a sinister orange colour, car headlamps and streetlights glow silver and beamless, unable to penetrate the murk. We can feel the fine particulate matter in our nostrils, in our eyes, on our tongues as we wait out by the letterbox for the taxi. We are early or it is late so we hail a cruiser, a mad Arab who nearly tears M's fingers off as he grabs at her suitcase and drives through the apocalyptic streets as if he himself has a date with destiny. On the railway overbridge at Sydenham a truck has spilled its load of turf, the driver is out on the road with a mask around his mouth rolling up the unrolled rolls of someone's new lawn while the red wind whips by. No planes are leaving because no planes are coming in: the dust sucked into their jet engines might turn to mud once they fly up again into wet layers of atmospheric cloud. The airline disavows all responsibility and leaves it to us to re-book on a later flight. When that is done we check into the Ibis for the day, eat, shower, rest, unaware that the ferrous dust contains microbes, viruses, that have lain quiescent out there in the Lake Eyre Basin since before the Phanerozoic Eon began. They came perhaps from that epochal collision between proto-earth and the very large, Mars-sized planetesimal that split off the moon; and have been biding their time ever since: older than the 4404 Ma zircon crystals of Alcheringa, older than Cryptozoic bacteria found in the Greenland permafrost; almost older than time. We don't at first realise we are playing host to aliens, the knowledge comes upon us only slowly, as blessed incomprehension gives way to the kind of clarity I wouldn't wish upon anyone else; except that we are all equally infected or soon will be. For instance I did not know that the molecules of blood and chlorophyll are nearly identical, iron in the one replaced by magnesium in the other, but now I see it at a glance. I look down at the palm of my hand and watch there, past skin and fat and bone and blood, the double helix untwining, the mitochondria exorcising their vesicles, the RNA . . . I keeping thinking Rodinia but that is the wrong word. These Martian viruses are not responsible for our arcane nomenclature, they have no interest in any of that, all they want to do is replicate as fast as possible. I have a nose full of the red dust that I don't unload until we are in the hotel room in Auckland and have slept and woken and it is morning again. It's in the creases of my big black sports bag and all through the back pack I use to carry smaller things around. Auckland is rainy, all grey and white and blue, muted and dazzling at once. I get wet walking up to the publishers on Anzac Avenue and notice a slightly orange tinge in the drips falling from my eyebrows. Out on the island we explore military fortifications from World War Two: gun emplacements, observation decks, radar rooms, underground bunkers where the big shells were stored. Long concrete tunnels for unspecified purposes. All the stock has been taken off while some poison that thins the blood is dropped to make a dent in the populations of rodents and mustelids and feral cats infesting the island. It's killed all the native wildlife too, as well as a few dogs, and without sheep to crop it the grass grows tall and lush and green and looks like something out of a film, perhaps of the Mongolian steppe . . . or would if there were not saucers and slabs of blue gulf everywhere you look. Our X Ray eyes trouble us less out here, it's only in the city, among the uninfected or not yet infected populations that the extrasensory seems an affliction. After all who really wants to know what others are thinking? Or rather, not thinking so much as just aimlessly moving around the clutter we keep in our minds. I weary of this too great an insight into things, I try instead to open up a channel of communication with the beings I now harbour; but the only language they understand is chemical. On the plane back we drink Bloody Marys and watch a very funny film about a Bucks Night in Vegas. At the duty free I buy a bottle of Kentucky bourbon because I've learned that alcohol sends a strong signal into the recesses of my body where the particulate beings have established their beachheads. In Summer Hill I see the red dust everywhere, all over the cars in the street, in the cracks between every paving stone up at the village, gathered on the leaves of the dry sclerophyll trees. My apartment smells of it, dry, slightly metallic, utterly without aura. We have left two wine glasses in the sink, rinsed but with the grey water still in them. A skin of red dust has formed on top of each one and when I look closely at it I see cities of the red night incandescing, their outlandish tribes contending for mastery, their orgies and massacres, their carnage, their sadness and their fear. I quickly tip the glasses' contents away down the drain even though I know it is useless: the ghosts of the red dust are with us now forever and those changes of perception noted above are only the beginning of a process of mutation that will soon make us unrecognisable to each other; except as the aliens we are now fast becoming.

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Ganymede

. . . the andromeda galaxy




empurpled . . .

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cyborgs at the junction

Some things are hard to shift out of the head. Monday arvo I saw a guy knocked down by a taxi ... he survived what was in the scheme of things not that bad an accident; but still. I was idling third on the Bondi Junction rank when I saw him cross between the two cabs ahead of me. Youngish, chubby, non-descript clothes. Soon as I realised he wasn't getting into the point cab I lost interest, but did see him give a little skip in preparation for running across the road after the bus just then passing had gone by. Then, the bang. Looked up again, there he was, spread-eagled on the tar-seal, having apparently bounced off the side of a moving taxi the way people bounce off invisible force fields in the movies. Accidents in the aftermath are strange: you see things with great clarity but don't necessarily know what they mean. This fellow scrambled to his feet, went over to the passenger side window of the now stationary cab and, with hands together as if in prayer, bowed to the driver within. It was then I noticed that the wing mirror on that side of the car had been torn off and was lying next to the front wheel of the cab in front of mine. I climbed out and picked it up, just as the driver of the damaged cab, looking exasperated and ignoring the guy he hit, came out to retrieve it. Thinking about it afterwards, watching the guy massaging his upper arm and shoulder, I realised that the mirror must have hit him there with force strong enough to rip it from its mooring. Here's the strange thing: somehow my mind has transposed the mirror, broken off, glass still intact, trailing electrical wires, with the guy's arm. As if he were a cyborg and his arm some kind of bionic attachment. I mean when I close my eyes I see him holding his dun shoulder with wires protruding from the empty socket where his arm used to be. Waiting for the robot repair men to come and make him whole again.

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