White City

El Camino Real

2010-11-03T09:43:00.003+11:00

This is my summons of a dream, my dream of a summons. To the other side of the mountains you must go. There, Joseph Conrad waits. The town is flat, dusty, brown. A dusty inland town in the wastes of Gondwanaland. The address is wrong. One hundred and ten El Camino Real . . . there’s no such place. I walk down the street parallel. Dark pigment stains the adobe red, green, black. Murals on the walls of all the houses. Through a door I see in the ochre light these paintings the colours of earth. A woman turns, smiling. Her body is a deer pierced by arrows. Through the arcade and back to El Camino. A friend joins me, together we search. A woman approaches, the same one older or another, I do not know. She takes my friend’s hand and draws her into the cool dark. Joseph Conrad lies back on the big bed, his head monumental, his expression grave. He tells my friend: I have met the Irish every place I’ve been. Welcome, I am glad you came. She sits on a wooden chest against the wall. The woman stands on the other side of the bed, before a draped window; perhaps she is two women. In the swell of whitish light it is hard to tell. Joseph Conrad is lighting a cigar. I look at my feet. Cracked shoes, yellow painted boards. Why have I come? I belong to another century, a later one. Now I am here there is nothing to say. He lies back on the pillows smoking his cigar. The head, monumental, the expression, grave. Perhaps it was not Joseph Conrad but someone else? No, this man was neither blind nor a librarian. He was a retired sea captain.

There was something I was trying to recall. A newspaper article about a hulk in Tasmania, once under the command of Joseph Conrad. Money was being sought to restore it. The Otago . . . I began. He shook his head. No questions, he said. The details of my life are gathered like the shards of a great mirror in which destiny will be revealed. It is not so. Nothing is revealed. The cigar fumes were making my friend uncomfortable. She said to the woman: Could I have a glass of water please? The women took a hand each. Come with us, they said. I was alone with Joseph Conrad. He drew on his cigar. Blue smoke layered the air, drifting toward the white window. The translucent drapes belled. Oceans of paper, he said. Voyaging on. I lived at a time when kings were dying. We saw the ends of the earth. Contracted to a sphere. It was necessary to reinvent infinity. I had not thought him contemporary with Einstein, Apollinaire. C’est vrai. He wrote letters in French, books in English. In what language did he think? The man with the piano, I said. On the dock at Circular Quay. An Englishman. You spoke together for an hour. You were a young officer on a darkened deck. You never saw his face. His name was Senior. The great head inclined forward once, acknowledging—what? That he had heard? Remembered? We return to every place we ever were, he said. Oceans of paper, voyaging on. It is necessary to invoke eternity.

III

The globe is small. It stands on three plastic legs, on the dresser before the dusty window. Outside, paint peels from a yellow wall. The sky is radiant, blue as ink. This is where we wake up. Sometimes it is dark, sometimes there are small brown stars we cannot name. Bats screeching in the avocado tree. Cats squalling in the laneway. Here blood threads our flesh with longing. Here is where we leave from on our inland journeys. We go together, or alone. It has happened that we set out for different places, only to find each other there. Other times we go nowhere. Comatose. Sunk in our bodies as into dank earth. Choking on flints, mumbling over bones, thirsting. Then water rises and we overflow, running into each other like underground rivers, sourceless springs. How do I know this is you beside me? How do I know it is me? There is no chest here, only the dresser, the mirror, the racks of clothes. The bed where we lie dreaming or awake, mingled or apart. The globe. I ask that the two women come forward as witnesses. In the works of Joseph Conrad you will not find them written, nor any mention of my friend, myself. Only Mr Senior is real. Leaning on a crate in the half-dark at semi-circular quay he smokes a cigar and converses with a man he cannot see. Wide-ranging, far-reaching, their words drift out towards the stars. We turn and turn. Sometimes we are one, sometimes two, sometimes many. Each night is an ocean. Waking, we find a shore, ochre and blue. We set out, maps in the palms of our hands.

from : Waimarino County (& other excursions) (AUP, 2007)

2010-08-02T08:48:00.001+10:00

Isinglass

The Supply Party

2009-03-02T09:03:00.005+11:00

Introduction

It was Tom Carment first mentioned Ludwig Becker to me. He’d just come back from Melbourne where he’d seen the works held in the Manuscript Room at the State Library of Victoria—the so-called Becker Sketchbook. Tom’s eyes behind his glasses were blue and wide with enthusiasm and emotion. He described exquisite, jewel-like water colours, vivid, radiant, even after all this time. He liked the scale of the works too, their ability to evoke a grandeur of space within a tiny compass. In that sense they mirrored his own paintings, which are small in size but large in other respects: ambition, scope, sensitivity, drama, intensity. Beauty. I was intrigued: I’m an admirer of Tom’s work and I trust his judgment where the work of others is concerned. Who was this Ludwig Becker? Where was he from? How could I see some paintings? Tom told me a few things about him. He was German. He was dead. There was a book. One thing did lodge in my mind: a connection with Burke and Wills, the famously doomed 19th century outback explorers. I didn’t know anything much about them either and, to tell the truth, wasn’t particularly interested. Another time, perhaps. This was years ago, in the early 1990s, when I rented a writing room under Tom’s kitchen in Womerah Lane, Darlinghurst. I lived a few doors up the laneway and, in the mornings, would walk down there, unlock my room and type away while a fine dust fell on the keyboard from above as Tom or his flatmate Shelley K walked back and forth across the floor above making their morning tea or coffee or breakfast. This was before Tom got together with Jan Idle, before their three children were born in that same house where they still live. The room was small, painted yellow inside, and perfectly suited my needs at the time. A Thai Buddhist had lived in it before me. He’d been a kitchen hand in a local restaurant but had no visa and one day got deported. His Australian friend, Robert Brain, had left behind a pair of louche white leather shoes that fitted me, that I wore, absurdly, when walking back and forth from writing room to flat to writing room. It was cool and dark, there was a dusty window onto a disused laundry area, a door I could close behind me, no telephone, no internet or email, almost no chance of being disturbed, with the prospect of casual conversation and company if I wanted them. I can’t now recall what rent I paid but it wasn’t much and I always felt generously treated there where I wrote my first two books.

I didn’t follow up the Becker lead and in time even forgot his name. And then, in a curious piece of serendipity, late in 2006 I came across it again. Browsing in the Ashfield library one day I picked up a newly-published book called The True Face of William Shakespeare. By Hildegard Hammerschimidt-Hummel, a professor of English Literature and Culture at the Universities of Marburg and Mainz. The book has a subtitle: The Poet’s Death Mask and Likenesses from Three Periods of His Life. It’s an exhaustive, even forensic, study of the half dozen supposed likenesses of William Shakespeare that have come down to us, seeking to determine if they are indeed portraits of the same man and if that man is the Shakespeare of the plays and poems. I was familiar with all of the portraits, and the funerary bust in the church at Stratford, but hadn’t heard before of the existence of a death mask. Anything of a biographical nature about Shakespeare interests me so I borrowed the book and brought it home to read. It was a bit of a slog actually, the meticulous, indeed stolid, argument the book constructs was hard to fix in the mind. I didn’t really engage with it until I came to the bit about the death mask, and the alleged portrait of the poet on his deathbed with which it is associated. To my astonishment I found that the man who’d rescued both portrait and death mask from the oblivion into which they had fallen was Ludwig Becker—the same man Tom had told me about, the one who had gone with Burke and Wills. Whose sketchbook was in a library in Melbourne. As I read this part of Ms Hammerschimidt-Hummel’s book I began to wonder: if Ludwig Becker was a connection between Shakespeare’s death mask and the Burke and Wills Expedition, what else might he not be? What was his story? The biographical details, such as they are, I found in a 1979 book that also reproduces, entire, the contents of the Becker Sketchbook. That too I borrowed, via interloan, from the Ashfield library. Later I bought a copy. It’s by Marjorie Tipping and is called Ludwig Becker: Artist & Naturalist with the Burke & Wills Expedition. The life story told in the introduction is quite detailed but raises more questions than it answers; and there are earlier and later versions of it by the same author that vary significantly in some of the detail; that was troubling. As for the images, they are fascinating and beautiful in the way Tom described and the book is scholarly and precise and includes a great deal of valuable documentation: Becker’s letters and reports from the Burke and Wills Expedition are all there, as well as other material written by him at the time. And all of Becker’s notes, which he was in the habit of writing in a tiny, elegant hand on the bottom of his equally tiny pictures, are transcribed. There is a great deal of ancillary information about the pictures too: where they were made, their media, what their subject matter consists of. It’s as complete an account as you could want of the part Becker played in the famous expedition. And yet …

Two things bothered me. One was that I couldn’t get a sense of the inwardness of the man. His life seemed to be made up entirely of external detail, in the same way that his paintings and drawings are firmly posited as objective descriptions of aspects of the real world. They too claim to be without inwardness. But are they? On closer examination, I thought I could detect a fantastical quality in some of them, a subtle and sparsely articulated tendency towards the gothic and the estranged. No-one is without preconceptions; no-one, no matter how hard they try, is capable of a purely objective account of the world, in words or paint or any other medium; just as no-one is without an interior life, howsoever private, reticent or hidden they may be. Which is not to say that that inwardness is accessible to another. The other thing I couldn’t get a handle on was the Burke and Wills imbroglio itself. There are many accounts and I set out to read those I could find. Some, like Alan Moorehead’s Coopers Creek (1963), are models of concision with a clearly articulated, though not indisputable, position on what happened and why. Others, like Tim Bonyhady’s Burke & Wills: From Melbourne to Myth (1991), by including everything run the risk of saying nothing. Which may be unfair: Bonyhady’s is a thorough account of extremely complex events and he has sought to tell the tale without inflecting it, the way Moorehead did, towards any particular position or point of view on the events. It’s more useful to me now as a reference book than it is as a narrative, though it does touch all points in the story. It soon became apparent that there was a third problem, the solving of which looked like it might be a key to the other two: I hadn’t been further west than Dubbo in twenty years; my one other big overland trip, Sydney to Adelaide driving a van for a rock ‘n’ roll band, even longer ago, had completely faded from memory. Too much speed, probably. It didn’t seem possible to understand either Becker or the Burke and Wills story without traversing the actual country in which it unfolded. I thought it over, and over. And over.

Then, while all of this was fresh in my mind, I had word from the publishers of my 2006 book Luca Antara, asking if I had any ideas for a non-fiction book? As it happened I thought I did. I wrote a two page proposal for a book about Ludwig Becker that would on the one hand retrace his steps and on the other seek to evoke passages from his earlier life in Europe and the Antipodes. In time, the proposal was accepted and with the advance so provided I was able to plan a trip from Melbourne along the route that Burke and Wills took, and in particular to follow the track of The Supply Party, which was to bring up to the depot at Coopers Creek food and equipment that Burke, in his haste, decided not to take with him. Ludwig Becker, the educated and highly skilled artist and naturalist, had died a fearful death on that doomed mission. His last days were spent in almost insensible invalidism while the men he was with were under siege from Aboriginal tribes trying to drive them away from a planned ceremonial gathering. I was hoping to find his grave on what is now a lonely stock route in south western Queensland. What follows, then, is an account of, and some digressions from, that trip into the heart of a country that still appears delusive, if not actually dangerous.

Cut Price Mirror Sale

2008-08-06T11:55:00.003+10:00

Mark Young's extraordinary Otoliths imprint is this month publishing a collection of shorter prose pieces of mine, most of which have appeared here or at one or other of my two other weblogs over the last year or so. The collection is available at a reduced price until the book goes officially live at Otoliths - if you want to get in early, go here:

The Evolution of Mirrors

The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll

2008-06-19T12:05:00.011+10:00

Ask the music what it means
Joe Strummer

how do you do it?

Moments of awakening can be sudden, absolute, irrevocable. There is no going back because there is no way back. The new has cancelled the old. It was a Sunday night above the chemist shop at 201 Main Street, Greytown. About six o’clock in the evening. Maybe autumn. I was on the upstairs landing, a wide and generous space off which opened all four family bedrooms as well as the bathroom that, right now, was billowing steam as someone—probably one my older sisters—ran a bath. The radio was playing, a small dark brown bakelite mantle receiver, and out of that heavy cloudy fragrant wetness I heard, crystal clear, as if he was singing solely for me, the nasal, slightly whiney voice of Gerry Marsden: How do you do what you do to me / I wish I knew / If I knew how you do it to me / I’d do it to you … and my world changed. Of course I’d heard music on the radio before. And on record. Our parents had at least two long playing records that I knew more or less by heart: My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews and one of Scandinavian comedian / singer William Clauson. My eldest sister had a few singles—Adam Faith, Cliff Richard, Pat Boone doing Speedy Gonzales—and my second oldest sister was a bona fide Beatles fan. She’d been, or would go, to their concert in Wellington and afterwards, when I asked her if she’d screamed, to my perplexity and amazement, said yes, she had. This was different. I didn’t just hear the song on the radio, it spoke to me. Or perhaps I should say it reached out and took me physically to itself. I think now what happened was that my own inchoate emotions were broadcast back to me in a way that I understood, instantly and perfectly, as never before. Whoever was singing knew exactly how it felt when I looked longingly across the classroom at Ngaire Woolcott and she, sensible and solid as she was, completely ignored me. Knew what it felt like to be in love with Michele Hayes, a dark-haired girl with Bambi eyes who wore sophisticated checked slacks to school when all the other girls wore only dresses. Or Diane Gates, her improbably yellow blonde hair cut in a bob and her cornflower blue eyes wide and innocent seeming as Marilyn Monroe’s. None of these three—and there were many more, before and since—ever once, not even for a moment, considered me a possibility. They were queens, or at least princesses, of the unrequited. They couldn’t have cared less. I knew this to be true and yet I continued to adore and, hopelessly, to hope. What the song told me was that this was a feeling others had and, more important, you could do something with it. For instance, sing a song about it. Or sing along to a song about it. You could dissolve, or indulge, or console the feeling in a song. If you knew how, you could even write a song about it. And after the song, whatever you did or however you did it, you’d feel better. Better than better: you’d feel great. And then you’d want to hear the song again: You give me a feeling in my heart / Like an arrow, passin’ through it / Suppose that you think you’re very smart / But won’t you tell me how do you do it …

love potion number nine
After How Do You Do It? had been turned down by Adam Faith and The Beatles—who recorded Please Please Me instead—Gerry and the Pacemakers had a number one hit with their George Martin-produced version in 1963. My revelation in the flat above the chemist shop might have been that year, but was probably the next; I was most likely twelve years old. That was my last year at primary school, in a composite class of other eleven and twelve year olds. I don’t recall any discussions with friends about pop music at that stage, beyond a certain disposition we had to disparage the excesses of Beatles fans, who were our older siblings, mostly our sisters. I think I probably kept my awakening to myself. There was no need to do so the following year. At Kuranui College there was an annual end-of-summer Gala Day and an institution at this event was the dance—actually a disco—in the student cafeteria. Although it was daylight, and a Saturday, and hot, all the windows were blacked out, there were coloured lights beating or revolving in the darkness, perhaps a mirror ball, maybe even a strobe, and a set of songs that came round again and again. The one I remember dancing to in the equivocal dark-and-light, not once but many times, was Love Potion Number 9. Written by Leiber and Stoller, this was, I’m almost sure, the version by The Searchers, who took it to number one in 1964, as The Clovers had done before in 1959. A song of ecstasy and derangement, of folly and enlightenment, of sex and drugs and mystery: I took my troubles down to Madame Rue / You know that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth … which I always heard, and hear still, as gypsy with the gold tattoo. All my siblings were sisters and I never did, like so many boys, go through a period of girl-hating in my youth. There were always girls among my friends and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in love with someone or other, often distant, beautiful and unattainable like Michele Hayes, but not always. That year, 1965, it was a healthy, happy girl from Martinborough called Gail Sanders whose mother, remarkably, had only one leg and who would, in time, break my heart by going off with someone else; but this day in the cafeteria-cum-disco was not for puppy love, it was a rite of passage in which all of us, indiscriminately, boys and girls together, participated. We became, in that dim and rapturous space, wholly caught up, lost and found, made and unmade, in the music. It was the crucial, the indispensable, other half of that first awakening: to listening was added dancing.

radio
When my eldest sister went away to University I had a room of my own for the very first time. It was small and narrow and looked out over the corrugated iron roof of the downstairs at the back of the chemist shop to the lawn and the asparagus patch and the huge old walnut tree that grew in the carpark behind our place. It was here, acting on the advice of David Cameron, who would later be the bass player in a band called the Kal-Q-Lated Risk, that I first attempted masturbation—with disappointing results. It was here too that I kept my imperfectly preserved beetle collection, which decayed and filled the air with a stale dry rotten smell like the stinky black insects we called Maori Bugs. I didn’t yet have a radio. For that, I had to wait until we moved to Huntly in the May holidays of 1966. Here I didn’t just have a room of my own, I had a whole building. It was a one room module that the Education Department sent around on the back of a truck, painted the same shade of blue as the main house and set down next to the patio at 5 Dudley Avenue above the long sloping lawn and the gorse and the Rugby League ground where test matches were sometimes played. It had wooden steps leading up to the door and a rough and ugly carpet square on the floor; a divan bed with drawers underneath for clothes; the kitset pine desk where I did my homework … and a radio. It was another old mantle receiver, bigger than the bakelite one and in a varnished wooden case with strange cloth that had a metallic thread running through it over the speakers at the front. Winding the dial, watching the vertical line move in the soft amber light among the arcane letters and numbers written on the discoloured plastic, you’d pick up weird blips and beeps, static, subterranean noises, snatches of faraway music and voices speaking unknown languages on the shortwave band; and if you looked round the back you’d see the dim yellow and red glow of valves mysteriously amping up the volume of those signals transmitted through the ether. Every Thursday night at 7.30 I’d listen to the Hit Parade broadcast by 1ZB from Auckland and write down the songs, in order, from 1 to 20, on a sheet of lined paper, to send to my penfriend, a Hermann’s Hermits fan from Cleethorpes, England, a girl whose name I have forgotten. Most often lying prone on the rough carpet with the pad in front of me. This was the era when everyone had to decide whether they liked the Beatles or the Rolling Stones best and the choice said who you were in a way that was definitive, unarguable and deeply satisfying. In 1967 the Rolling Stones put out Ruby Tuesday b/w Let’s Spend the Night Together, the NZBC banned it, and I was hooked. But there were so many other wonderful bands, and songs, that it hardly mattered where your primary allegiance lay. Everything from the Yardbirds to Eric Burdon and the Animals to Jimi Hendrix. The Move. The Hollies. The Troggs. Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. The Kinks. The Beach Boys. Dusty Springfield. Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood. Roy Orbison. The Doors. P P Arnold singing The First Cut is the Deepest. Traffic. The Small Faces. Cream. And literally hundreds of others. The first single I bought was Procul Harem’s A Whiter Shade of Pale, which I never actually played because I left it on the back seat of my mother’s Hillman Imp and it buckled in the sun. My first album was The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed, followed closely by the same band’s In Search of the Lost Chord. Solemn, symphonic, overblown art rock but I loved it, especially the two singles Nights in White Satin and Tuesday Afternoon. As a counter balance, perhaps, there were Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Martha and the Vandellas, The Supremes, The Four Tops … The list seems, and perhaps is, endless and includes (not that we cared) songs from groups that were local—The Avengers, The La De Das, Ray Columbus and the Invaders—as well as many from people you never otherwise heard from or never heard of again; and also songs that turned up later in other versions: The Left Banke’s Walk Away Renee reprised by The Four Tops left me breathless, both at their temerity in covering a much loved favourite and the panache with which they did it. Manfred Mann’s version of Just Like a Woman may have been my first conscious intimation of the universe that is Bob Dylan, or it may have been Jimi Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower. Dusty Springfield singing Goin’ Back can still make me weep for that time as, at the time, I wept in anticipation of the now in which, looking back, I would weep.

yummy yummy yummy
There was a disco in Huntly where we used to go to listen to music and dance on Wednesday nights but, run by a church group, it was predictably anodyne. However, elsewhere, in or out of town, you’d sometimes get acts from Auckland coming to perform. When I saw The Chicks live in Huntly, two muscular, yellow-bikin-ed, go-go dancers in cages were part of the act. It seemed intoxicatingly sinful, deliciously wicked. I heard Larry’s Rebels play at a dance in a country hall out the back of Morrinsville one Saturday night, but hardly noticed the band because I was so intent on attracting, unsuccessfully, the attention of a girl in a tartan frock. A Maori band, whose name I can’t remember and perhaps never knew, did their version of Hendrix’s Purple Haze out of the depths of a profound magenta wash and acres of dry ice, and it was like stepping through into another, hitherto unimaginable, dimension of spacetime. There were also dances at the Rugby League Club hall next to the football ground at which local bands would play. Favourite sons in Huntly were The Sapphires and included in their line up was Shane Smith, from our school, whose sexy younger sister, Cherie, I lusted ineffectually after. Later they turned into The Surfires, for reasons that are obvious, and later still Shane became a successful DJ on an Auckland radio station, maybe even on 1ZB. Or was it Radio Hauraki? This was the era when the pirate radio station transmitter on a leaky old ship called the Tiri moored out in the gulf broadcast illegally into every teenager’s bedroom. We wore reefer jackets, shirts with button-down collars, ties cut off square at the bottom, checked cotton Carnaby Street trousers with a slight flare, chisel-toed shoes. The dances were decorous and well-behaved, there was no alcohol or drunkenness that I recall, no necking or smoking, as we attempted to waltz or foxtrot to the slower numbers, or to twist and shout on the more up beat ones. I used to go with a sweet and lovely girl called Julie Till, whose father would always pick her up straight after the dance was over so that nothing untoward could happen between us, unlikely as that anyway was. My feeling, looking back on that time now, is one of nostalgia: not so much for the music, which is if anything more available now than it was then, as for the unitary nature of the experience. We were as one, we listened to the same songs, watched the same TV shows, went to the same dances, shared the same mode of thought, perhaps the very same thoughts. I remember a school sports trip to Tauranga, the rugby and the netball teams travelling together, Peter Toka sitting up the back with the guitar playing that dumb song by Ohio Express: Yummy yummy yummy / I’ve got love in my tummy … while the whole busload of us, boys and girls, sang along. We knew all the words. We all knew the tune. It was bubblegum music, but who cared? For the moment, it was ours. And we were everyone.

who do you love?
My cohort changed, several times, yet remained unitary. In Auckland in the early 1970s, we swirled at the edge of university circles, crossing and recrossing the invisible boundary between town and gown randomly or at will, it wasn’t clear which. We were joined one day by a quiet, fair young man who wore a soft hat with feathers in it: we called him Robin Hood. There was another, dark and handsome, with the moody good looks of a hero in a 1950s Italian movie. He was usually known as Brezhnev, after the then Russian leader. The first was Dave McCartney, still sometimes addressed as Hood, the second, Graham Brazier. To our table in the Kiwi, where we would sometimes drink all afternoon and into the night, Dave would bring his guitar, Graham his harmonica and they’d improvise around a few much-loved standards: The Who’s Magic Bus in the version from the legendary Who Live at Leeds; the Bo Diddley classic Who Do You Love?; Robert Johnson’s Come On in My Kitchen; a few others. These sessions could get raucous, with the rest of us round the table beating on our beer glasses, on the tabletop, stamping our feet, singing along: I got a tombstone head and a graveyard mind / I’m just twenty two and I don't mind dyin' / Now come on baby take a walk with me / And tell me who do you love? I didn’t know it then, but these were the beginnings of the band Hello Sailor; by the time they were playing regular gigs in the other, the front bar of the Kiwi, I was down in Wellington, living with a classically trained pianist who, in the spring of 1974, was invited to compose music for the first ever Red Mole show, Whimsy and the Seven Spectacles. Jan Preston was her name and over the next four years she would transform herself from a specialist interpreter of the works of dead composers, with a particular affinity for Franz Schubert and Igor Stravinsky, into a fine blues / rock ‘n’ roll piano player and avant-garde composer of evocative and atmospheric theatre music. It would be a mistake to assume this transition was easy or uncomplicated. Or that it can be described in any straightforward manner—if at all. There is too much complexity involved and, anyway, it’s not really my story. I was an observer-participant, as they used to call those who outline events they also took part in. If I came from anywhere authentic, it was from rock ‘n’ roll but, although I loved music and knew it to be an intrinsic part of my life, I wasn’t and didn’t want to be, a musician. On the other hand, I was impressed, perhaps too impressed, by those who were. And especially, at that stage in my life, by classical musicians. One of the first things I did upon arriving at university in Auckland in 1970 was join the World Record Club, who used to send along through the post the LPs I haphazardly ordered. These records by Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Dvorak, Sibelius, Bartok, took their place alongside the three staple albums we played and replayed in that house: Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks; The Songs of Leonard Cohen; and the second, the black album by The Band. I had an urgent desire to understand classical music, a desire whose origin wasn’t far away from the sense of inferiority I felt with respect to its particular mysterium. And its adepts. My girlfriend in those years was a viola player; she kept a beautiful kauri cello on a stand in the corner of her bedroom. There was something indescribable about the way she looked when she played, lips parted, eyes both there and not there, tranced and yet fully aware. It was also how she looked when we made love. Jan wore the same expression when she played piano. It was the look of an human instrument through which the music flows on its way from the mechanical instrument into the air. But this wasn’t simple either. Jan would usually be in a state of high nervous tension in the lead-up to a recital and was inclined to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. I was usually the unwitting target of these attacks, for which she might later apologise. The world of classical music turned out to be an uneasy mix of the cosseted and the intensely neurotic, in which gifted people were protected and indulged because of their (allegedly) superior gifts. On closer contact, while I still admired and was impressed by it, I also found it slightly repellent. Jan was in demand for her ability to provide music for all kinds of other activities and, as well as working with Red Mole, she wrote and/or played music for Downstage or other theatre productions, for the touring Opera Quartet, for dances classes and performances, for documentary films made out of the National Film Unit by directors Barry Barclay and Sam Neill, for Jack Body’s experiments in the Sonic Circuses and elsewhere, and much else besides. But it was only with Red Mole that she was pushed beyond what was comfortable for her to do. Only there was she persuaded to compose in ways that were truly innovative. Only there was she stretched. She made some wonderful music, most of it, alas, never recorded.

sailin’ shoes
During those mid-1970s years, Red Mole started using rock bands as a part of some shows. Often what would happen is that Alan Brunton would offer a song off one of the LPs in his own collection as a possible cover version. A lot of his music was country rock and there were two excellent country rock bands already gigging in Wellington: The Country Flyers and Rocking Horse. Both played the kind of music Red Mole liked to use in their shows. Songs by Link Wray, perhaps, or J J Cale, or Ry Cooder. Little Feat. The Grateful Dead. Jimmy Buffet. Leon Russell. Midge Marsden, who formed and led The Country Flyers, himself had an enormous repertoire of songs that he could bring to the table, with a particular affinity for the tunes of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. While both bands worked with Red Mole, the relationship with the Country Flyers proved more enduring. This may have been because they didn’t have a keyboard player, while Rocking Horse, in the person of Wayne Mason, did. And a fine one at that. Jan learned to play rock ‘n’ roll as a fifth member of the Flyers, though only when they worked with the Moles. This made sense, because she was also composing and performing the music that accompanied the other parts of the shows, where a full rock band wasn’t required. In the same way, individual members of The Country Flyers—Richard Kennedy on guitar, Neil Hannan on bass, Bud Hooper on drums, Midge himself—might chip in with incidental music of their own. Or even make appearances on the stage. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves in those years to ‘write originals’. Nobody wanted to be in a cover band forever, nobody wanted just to do covers; but nobody knew quite how to write songs either. Red Mole, as a poet’s theatre, was full of people—Arthur Baysting, Alan Brunton, myself—who fancied themselves as lyricists and, on the other hand, there were all these musicians with their licks and their riffs, their guitars and pianos. Sometimes what we did was take the tune of an already extant, usually popular, song, and write alternative lyrics for it; Liberty Bus, the finale of Red Mole’s 1978 extravaganza, Ghost Rite, was Bob Marley’s Exodus re-written with lyrics by Alan Brunton. Other times, someone would come up with original lyrics and someone else would try to put them to music and make a brand new song. This happened less often than anyone wanted but, when it did, they were the best tunes. Like The Country Flyers’ reggae charmer O Rangitoto, words by Arthur Baysting, music by Neil Hannan, that was included in the 1977 Red Mole show Slaughter on Cockroach Avenue. Jan was still a volatile person and there were usually sparks flying, or about to fly, when she was around. Perhaps because of her training as a solo performer, she was never really comfortable anywhere but centre stage; and this isn’t possible when you’re part of an ensemble working in the theatre. She often seemed to feel herself to be in competition with ‘the action’, as it was known; meanwhile, she faced the exigencies of fitting in with a rock band that was all male and remote from the hothouse world of the classical musician. Somewhere along the way she’d conceived the ambition of becoming a singer. And, like everyone else, she was learning how to write original songs. By the time we—Red Mole, Country Flyers, Beaver, assorted others—had moved to Auckland late in 1977, Jan had decided to form her own band. The core of it was made up of The Methylated Spirits, musicians she’d enlisted to play the score she wrote for Ghost Rite, which toured the North Island early in 1978. In the middle of that year, Red Mole left for the Americas, and these musicians—Jan, vocalist Jean McAlister, ex-Country Flyers guitarist Richard Kennedy, bassist Tony McMaster and drummer Stanley John Mitchell—became Red Alert, aka The Red Mole Orchestra.

california dreamin’
Five young Kiwi musos cry out in unison and alarm as a bronze 1972 Buick Estate wagon with Hebrew bumper stickers and a knock in the differential turns the wrong way into a one way street. I’m sweating. I try to ignore the cries of fright, the thump in the diff, the outraged horns of other drivers, as I reverse back around the corner before the three lanes of traffic bearing down upon us arrive. I make it without mishap and we carry on down the wide boulevard to wherever it is we are going. We’d arrived in Los Angeles a few weeks before and booked into the Howard’s Weekly Apartments just off Hollywood Boulevard. It was a place of amazements. You drove through a wasteland of oil wells on the way in from the airport, where great rocking derricks like primeval birds disinterred from the La Brea tarpits bent and fed on the earth. Hollywood was not the luxe and glam we’d imagined, but grubby, desperate, sad. We were about midway along, where the classy restaurants and the show biz hangouts gave way to porno bars, head shops and liquor stores and there were drug dealers and prostitutes on every corner. The relentless American search for celebrity was disquieting: Jan, with her short hennaed hair and tight silver trousers was asked in the street if she was David Bowie’s sister. When we tried to buy some marijuana in the carpark behind a fast food outlet, the guy in the passenger seat took the cash then the car accelerated away, leaving us bereft of both money and drugs. The supermarkets stayed open all night and you could walk over there in the fragrant midnight air to buy cantaloupes for 29c each. Stan and Tony, the rhythm section of the band, jazz freaks both, were astonished to find that artists they had idolised for years could be found playing at little clubs nearby, where you could hear them for the price of a drink. In the daytime, if you looked out the window, past the labouring, ineffectual, ice-covered air conditioner, everything shimmered in a yellow-brown gasoline haze and there was always that strange, petro-chemical smell in the air. Big cars like sharks cruised the wide streets day and night; they all seemed to travel at the same pace, accentuating their resemblance to schools of predatory fish. We bought the Buick over in Brentwood for a price I no longer recall, because it was large enough for all six of us to sit in with room at the back for our gear. We didn’t find out about the noise in the diff until afterwards and we never worked out what it was. When we went out in it to see Commander Cody at the Palomino, he stood at the door of the club afterwards and shook the hand of every person who’d taken the trouble to come and hear him play. Before we left LA we drove up into the Hollywood Hills to visit Hello Sailor. Tony had been their bass player in an earlier incarnation of the band. There were five large saloon cars parked on the road outside and, up some steps and around the pool, five proto-rock stars were lounging, some with, some without, girlfriends. In the gloom of the house, David Gapes, their manager, and an ex-Radio Hauraki DJ, was on the phone. He looked frantic but the boys seemed pretty relaxed. We discussed the rumour that Ray Manzarek of The Doors wanted to reform the band with Graham as their new lead singer. Graham wasn’t into that. I’m my own man, he said. We left feeling faintly abashed, like poor copies of the real thing; yet Hello Sailor were already in disarray and would soon retreat back to Auckland.

nowhere to run
We drove north up Highway 1 to San Francisco because we knew someone there: Rachel Stace, from Wellington, was a friend of Jean’s. After dropping her off in the midst of Rachel’s complicated, Haight-Ashbury ménage, we went down to the Tenderloin, thinking to book ourselves into a cheap hotel: the room up the rickety stairs had a lime green candlewick bedspread spread over a thin mattress on the double bed and smelt so strongly of piss that we didn’t even go in; they were asking $24 dollars a day. I can’t remember where we did stay that night but, soon enough, we moved into a flat above a Chinese laundry near the corner of Greenwich and Gough just a couple of blocks from Highway 101, where Van Ness Avenue turns into Lombard Street on the approaches to the Golden Gate bridge. The flat belonged to a girl named Tina, an anthropology student from Connecticut who thought Maori in New Zealand still wore grass skirts and even, sometimes, ate each other. Richard and Tony and Stan found a place of their own in the basement of a grand old house on Steiner Street in the Fillmore that was a Therapy Centre where Rolfing, among other bizarre things, went on. It doubled as a rehearsal room and there was a hot tub next door that kept them warm in the damp winter climate the way the drying machines underneath in Roosevelt Chung’s laundry did us. Jan bought some pieces of taffeta and sewed patchwork curtains for our room; always when I think of that time I remember the grey milky light falling through those pale pinks and soft ambers and transparent blues and greens while foghorns sounded at the Gate and mists rolled in past the Presidio from the Pacific. One of the first gigs we went to was Pearl Harbor and the Explosions at The Palms in Polk Street, an elegant venue at which we immediately wanted to play. Our inquiries about how to do that led us to a couple of booking agents called Stephen and Michelle and they agreed to take us on. Pretty soon the band had their gear together, Tony had bought a small white van to drive it around in, and we started to do supports, and even the odd headline gig, around the Bay Area. The music scene was confusing to us and that confusion was mirrored in the band itself. We did not expect to support sixties bands like Country Joe and Fish, still gigging around as if the last ten years hadn’t happened. We didn’t anticipate the ubiquity of guitar hero bands. We didn’t know how to relate to the black clad, chalk-white, super cool punks and new wavers we sometimes met at rehearsal studios. Nor to wild acts like the Dead Kennedys whose singer, Jello Biafra, when we supported them in an old hall out at Santa Rosa, sprayed the audience with beer from a shook-up can while screaming out Kill the Poor. (Stephen had refused point blank to represent them, because of their name, but he didn’t seem to mind booking us onto the same gig.) Most of all, we didn’t know who we were as a band. Stan and Tony could play anything but their first love was jazz; Richard, a southpaw who held his guitar, like Hendrix did, upside down and back to front, was a virtuoso with his roots in country rock and the New Orleans sound. Jean was a beautiful singer but, at this point in her life, only wanted to do back-up vocals. And Jan was … Jan. An electrifying piano player, a developing singer, a big stage personality who nevertheless caused some people to feel a strange disquiet. Red Alert was all over the place. It had no one style, no one sound; no idea. Half the set was covers and the other half originals, but the originals were as heterogenous as the covers and, together or apart, they did not add up to a whole. Stephen, who had been around San Francisco for yonks and knew everybody, set himself to shape the band into a marketable entity. He offered a couple of cover songs, one of which, Martha and the Vandella’s Nowhere to Run, became a staple. He suggested dropping some of the more bizarre among the covers, and re-writing the more eclectic of the originals; he provided plenty of advice and guidance. And lots of drugs. As the only non-playing member of the band (I did lights when required, shifted boxes, drove, and talked to whoever needed to be talked to at venues and elsewhere), I spent a lot of time with Stephen. We’d meet up mid-morning in his office or in a café at North Beach, and Stephen would invariably have with him a bag of dope which he’d ‘clean’ by tipping a portion out onto an album cover and angling it this way and that until the seeds rolled free. Then he’d make a joint and we’d smoke. There was something old and corrupt and venal about Stephen that made him difficult to like. In his world, everything was for sale; there was no respect beyond that engendered by money and power; you let yourself be fucked over by those more powerful than you, you fucked those less powerful … that was how things worked. This aspect to his personality was expressed for me by his mouth, a gaping black, red rimmed hole in which teeth were set. I’d look at that wet orifice, talking, and shudder. It seemed like a maw out of which the stench of the world arose. And yet he was not a bad-looking man, quite handsome really. And his wife, full name Michele Marie Bourgeois, was attractive. But, together or apart, they gave me the creeps. Besides, they couldn’t seem to get us into The Palms.

dancing with mister d
The whiff of corruption that hung around Stephen was present in the city itself. San Francisco seemed death-obsessed. In the peculiar constellation of American cities, Frisco is in fact the last chance saloon. Here people who have tried and failed elsewhere end up. Here, if they fail again, they can always go out to the Golden Gate and jump off, as hundreds have, and continue to do. This gives the city its eclectic, alternative, free-spirited ambience; but it also gives it that doomed edge. We, innocents abroad, were alienated, homesick and suffering. It was all too much. Stan, the drummer, decided he wanted to go back to Palmerston North and it was only with great difficulty that we managed to talk him out of it. Then news started filtering back from the jungles of Guyana of a bizarre mass suicide of members of a San Francisco-based cult. The Peoples Temple was on the bus route we travelled each day to the rehearsal room in the Steiner Centre in the Fillmore. The metal containers stacked up there contained the possessions of those deluded pilgrims who’d died after drinking grape Kool Aid laced with cyanide and Valium. Day after day, black banner headlines in the San Francisco Chronicle ramped up the number of the dead at Jonestown through the sevens, into the eights, then the nine hundreds. It was while this was going on that I answered a knock on the door one morning to find Richard, the guitarist, standing there. The Mayor’s been shot, he said, and I’m going home. Mayor George Moscone and the recently elected, first ever openly gay member of the Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk, were both gunned down at City Hall by another Supervisor, an ex-cop by the name of Dan White who owned a fast food stall down on Fisherman’s Wharf. Or was it just that he had eaten there before the deed? Fast food somehow figured in his defence, which was more or less successful: he only got seven years. A right-winger, he had resigned from the Board apparently without realising this would hand the balance of power to the liberal faction. When he did, he tried to rescind his resignation, demanding Moscone re-appoint him; the Mayor refused, so he shot him dead then walked down the hall and shot Harvey Milk too. It was chillingly like something out of the Wild West, where justice spoke from the barrel of a gun. Not like—it was the Wild West.

washington bullets
Somehow we persuaded Richard to stay as well; oddly enough, like Stan, he never did return to New Zealand to live. But things didn’t get any less fraught. There was, for instance, Andreas. Andreas and his girlfriend Marcia had moved in with us at Greenwich and Gough. He was Chilean, a small red-haired man with pale skin and an unquenchable anger at what had been done to his country. That he had ended up living in the nation whose government had destroyed his was an irony which would not let him rest. The assassination of his former commanding officer during the time of his military service, Orlando Letelier, blown apart in Washington DC in 1976 by agents of Pinochet's junta with the collusion of the US authorities, was a constant goad to him. But he had more pressing problems of his own. He was a fugitive from justice. Andreas and Marcia, a very beautiful young woman whose father was the Guatemalan ambassador to the United States, had been hanging out one day in the house they lived in over in the Avenues, when a drunken sailor stopped at their window. This guy lingered, wanting a smoke, offering them speed, trying to join them. He wasn't welcome, especially when he started hitting on Marcia. Andreas warned him but he took no notice. He was given a second warning, also unheeded. Andreas went to the kitchen and came back with a knife, which he used to widen the smile of the sailor. Widening the smile, Andreas explained, is a ritual punishment in his culture for the type of harassment the guy was guilty of. It involves cutting the skin at either corner of the mouth, just where top and bottom lip meet. Grotesque as that sounds. After that they had to leave their place in the Avenues in a hurry, going to live with an Israeli couple in another part of town. That was another story: when I met the Israelis I asked the boy, Uli, who I knew worked for El Al, what he actually did? He replied, grimly, theatrically: My job is to die. He was trained as an anti-terrorism operative and flew incognito, as a civilian, on commercial flights. If there was an attempt to hijack the plane, he was to thwart it, even if it meant dying in the attempt. The rest of the time Uli and his girlfriend, Rebecca, lived the life of the idle rich. Andreas worked as a cook at a restaurant round the corner from Greenwich and Gough in Union Street. It specialised in omelettes and he was assiduous, even passionate, in his desire to master the technique of making them. He didn't let on right away the trouble he was in, waiting, I suppose, until he knew us better. The sailor had an influential family, including an older brother in the military, and they were determined to hunt Andreas down and get their revenge. There was a warrant out for his arrest, the charge was mayhem. He'd been eluding capture, as he saw it, for about nine months. His political anger had somehow fused with his personal predicament and he clearly felt no guilt about the 'crime' he'd committed, not so much because the guy was connected to the US military as because he got what he deserved. One place we played regularly was the Miramar Beach Inn, south of the city on the coast, a lovely room looking out over the ocean where both management and punters liked us and we liked them. They always fed us, seafood chowder or a superb onion soup, and served a good house red; there was a wooden floor where graceful dancers turned as the band played a song called Dr. Sanctify. One night Andreas and Marcia came down there with us, as they sometimes did. It was a good gig and we were happy as we drove back to town in the wee small hours. Our habit was to go in convoy, the Buick and the van, to the Steiner Centre in the Fillmore to unload the gear before heading home. We were bumping the black boxes into the basement when some cops pulled up. This wasn't unusual, we were always having to deal with cops for some reason or other and usually managed to avoid trouble simply because a bunch of Kiwi musicians seemed so improbable, even exotic, even to cops. We had to be extra careful what we said though because, by now, we had overstayed our three month tourist visas and were technically illegal aliens. Andreas and Marcia were asleep in the back of the van. Maybe he'd had a bit to drink, maybe he was just tired, but when one of the cops shone a high-powered torch in Andreas' face and asked him who he was, he told them his real name. It was startling how quickly they came up with the information that he was a wanted man, distressing to see him manacled and hauled away, horrible to witness the cops' gleeful brutality ... He got two years. I visited him in the city jail, where he was awaiting trial, just before we left San Francisco. We talked on telephones through a smeared plastic screen. A year or so later, when we were back in LA and about to return to New Zealand, I called him up and learned that he'd been released after serving just nine months of the sentence. It was a strange conversation; there was no ease or lightness in it as there had always been between us before. Andreas seemed dulled, perhaps diminished, by his experience in jail, which he did not want to talk about at all. It might be too much to say that his spirit was broken, it might just have been the exigencies of a long distance call between two people who, after all, did not know each other all that well ... I don't know. I never heard of, or from, him again.

hysteria
It may have been Andreas, or it may have been someone else, who murmured to me one day that California is a police state. After nine months there, I was sick of the place. What was the rest of America like? I wanted to go to New York, where the Moles, having arrived there recently via Mexico, were putting on their first American show. Being manager / road manager / lighting roadie or whatever I was didn’t have the same attraction that theatre did. I felt starved of images … and words. Besides, I felt an obligation to the Moles, since we’d more or less promised we’d join up with them eventually. When? they wanted to know. Could we make it in time for their next show, due to open in the East Village in April? I started putting pressure of my own on the band, who were by this time in a makeshift studio recording a single. We received the one hundred vinyl copies of Hysteria b/w Red Sky around about the same time Stephen and Michele finally got us a gig at The Palms. He, Stephen, went pale when I told him we were off to New York the day after the gig. You’re going to have to stop somewhere, Morton, Michele said, bitterly. It was only then, too late, that I realised they’d invested far more in us than we’d thought. More, in fact, than we believed in ourselves. They even threatened legal action and we were sufficiently intimidated to slip an envelope of cash under their door before leaving town in another Buick, the property of a Jewish podiatrist from Staten Island. We’d already sold the first Buick as a bad job; Tony and Richard were going to travel across with the gear in the white van, while Jan and Jean and Stan and me would take turns, and lots of speed, driving this Buick back to its owner. The vehicle was said to be haunted. Its last drivers, spooked, had abandoned it in Fresno; the driveaway car company flew me down to pick it up. Driving back, thinking to test it out, I opened up on a long stretch of deserted highway and, at the top of the rise, was pulled over for speeding by the Highway Patrol. When the cop asked to see my license, and I reached into the breast pocket of my jacket for my wallet, he stiffened and his hand went to his gun; I had to talk very slowly and calmly as I explained what I was doing. Then, as so often before, the very improbability of a Kiwi on the high road from Fresno persuaded him to let me off with a warning. Once the car was loaded up and we set off, we found out what had spooked the other drivers. Fully-loaded, as you approached sixty miles per hour, the shell of the vehicle would begin to vibrate; a high-pitched whine began, increasing in volume to a banshee wail that was distressing and even, to the musicians with their sensitive ears, painful. However, after a while we discovered that you could, as it were, break this sound barrier: if you kept accelerating, at around seventy mph the sound started to die away again. So we carried on, either below, or above, this peculiar frequency, rolling down the wide and beautiful highways of America. In the badlands of Utah we drove through an improbable landscape of red and white snow-capped and snow-banded mesas, like a set made in the far past expressly for the cowboy movies that would one day be shot in it. We climbed the Rockies in darkness and a snowstorm out of which, during the descent to Denver, we heard another banshee wail, this time the klaxon of a runaway semi-trailer coming fast up behind. We wrestled the car off the road just before this behemoth howled past and disappeared forever into the white out. Next morning, out on the great plains, we came across numerous other wrecked trucks like dinosaurs stranded on the shoulders of the blacktop. Somewhere in the phantasmagoria, I found I’d mislaid my wallet and, thinking back, realised I’d last used it buying cigarettes from a machine at the back of a café in a little place called Green River, Utah. In Kansas City, Missouri, I got on the phone to try to see if I could track down that café. An operator in Atlanta, Georgia, a woman, decided to help me. She consulted her directory, said there eleven possible venues in Green River, and set out to call them one by one. At the second, the man said he’d go and have a look. Incredibly, my wallet was still sitting where I’d left it on top of the cigarette machine. I gave the man the address of the NZ Consulate in New York, and told him to take some money for the postage and his trouble, but he said he wouldn’t do that. It was there when we arrived, addressed to Sweet, not Suite, 6 … Hysteria increased exponentially when we started hearing on the car radio about a place called Three Mile Island, where a nuclear reactor seemed to be melting down to the core. It wasn’t far north from our planned route, so we bent a little to the south to avoid it, crossing northern Kentucky on our way to Washington DC and a kind of sanctuary at the home of ex-Red Molers Jim and Jenny Stevenson, who were there as part of the New Zealand Trade Mission. They gave us a five kilogram block of Mainland cheese that kept us going for weeks afterwards. We reached a still panic-stricken New York on April Fools Day and drove through the slushy streets straight to The Theatre for the New City, where the Moles were rehearsing the show that would open in five days time. The Last Days of Mankind seemed as apt a title as Hysteria. They found us rooms in the hotel where they were already staying, the Consulate on 49th Street and Broadway. More hysteria: when I came to take the Buick back to Staten Island, I arrived at the toll booth with only a one hundred dollar note to tender in payment. This made me an object of suspicion; they pulled me over and gave me the third degree. The fact that it wasn’t my car only made matters worse. It was extraordinary how volatile everybody in a uniform seemed to be. I couldn’t believe that possession of a large denomination note was enough to get you detained; nor how the mere suspicion of criminal intent could so easily translate into actual crime, actual punishment. I was sweating when they finally gave me change and let me go. There were problems with the foot doctor too. When I’d picked the car up in Fresno, it had two snow tyres lashed to the roof. Now, three or four days later and on the other side of the continent, they were still there. We hadn’t touched them. But the doctor was annoyed: there had originally been four of them. I couldn’t help him, beyond suggesting that the previous drivers, the ones who had abandoned the so-called haunted car, might have either jettisoned or stolen them. It took a while but, like the Port Authority men at the toll gate, in the end he believed me. I rode the ferry back to Battery Park in Manhattan looking quizzically at the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles, standing out there in the water.

heart of glass
Red Alert played rather more spasmodically round Manhattan than we did in San Francisco, partly because of the exigencies of fitting gigs in around theatre performances—the old rivalry between the music and action came back to trouble us—and partly because the band’s identity crisis was ongoing, exacerbated by the vacant certainties of the prevailing ethos. The scene in New York was different; though far larger and more diverse it seemed, paradoxically, more unitary than that in San Francisco. You didn’t stumble across those dinosaur bands, nor relics from the sixties either; here everything was new and real: Punk, New Wave, No Wave. Nervus Rex, Suicide and Richard Hell and Voidoids didn’t seem to carry any baggage from the past, nor to have much of a future either. We did play a couple of times at the legendary CBGBs in the Bowery. It was a long, narrow room with PA and lights already extant, sensibly, so you could turn up just with instruments and amplifiers. The band’s set was received with a mixture of mild interest and polite indifference, which was better than the raging contempt often given acts there. We also scored a gig, how I don’t remember, perhaps through a guy from Tennessee called Moonshine who was sweet on Jan, with the Yippies (Youth International Party) at their clubhouse at 9 Bleecker Street in the East Village. These beautifully appointed rooms were still under construction when we arrived to set up and, not long after, the local branch of the New York Fire Department came round and closed them down: no permit. The Yippies took it on the chin, cheerfully abusing the firemen and telling us we could play instead at their old club rooms across the street. In the sitting room of a small, poky terrace house we set up on a mezzanine so close to the ceiling that taller band members would have to bow their heads to play. Then a battered saloon car drew up outside and five young black men got out and said they were playing this gig. These were the Bad Brains and they had just arrived in New York, having driven up that very day from Washington DC. We worked something out between ourselves and shared the bill; their bass player was so tall that he had to bend almost double to play. The Bad Brains were a jazz band that re-invented themselves as black punks; in amongst a fast and furious set they played one startling beautiful reggae tune that has remained in my head ever since: Oh the man there / He was a lawyer / But he couldn’t get across … The other super hip venue we longed to get into was Max’s Kansas City, where Blondie used to play. Here the thin, tired, terminally cool booker, a man dressed in entirely in black, solved the problem of the band’s identity once and for all. He listened to Hysteria, a frantic twelve-bar with proto-punk lyrics—Civilization is a strange disease / You have to empty your pockets / And go down on your knees / In a three-piece suit god sits on this throne / He’ll answer your prayers / When he gets off the phone …—shook his head sadly and pronounced. You are, he said, almost as if it was an affliction, a rock ‘n’ roll band. It was such a relief that Red Alert broke up soon afterwards. Jean, Tony and Stan, as Stanley Slumber and the Rude Awakenings, remained busking the theatre district in New York while the rest of us hopped across with the Moles to London; when Richard rejoined the others upon our return to New York some months later, they became The Flying Sheep.

spanish stroll
Walter Benjamin once speculated upon the (revolutionary?) nature of a reality determined by the popular song last on everyone’s lips. That April in New York, it was Anita Ward’s Ring My Bell. It seemed to come out of every doorway, every car stereo, every boombox in Times Square … You can ring my be-e-ell, ring my bell, ring my bell … There was a warp in the song, Ma Bell was the common name for the Bell Telephone Company that carried so many calls and perhaps, as ITT certainly did in Chile, oppressed as many as it helped to communicate; it seemed that Anita Ward was not just longing for her boyfriend but also telling us all to get on the phone at once. To whom? To—anyone. A few weeks later, the song was Miss You by The Rolling Stones: I’ve been walking in Central Park / Singing after dark / People think I’m crazy / I’ve been stumbling on my feet / Shuffling through the street … It was that unitary thing again, perhaps because Manhattan is, after all, an island. It could be unexpectedly kindly too: at the Consulate Hotel, they refunded our sales tax because, Alex the big black sad-faced night clerk explained, after three months you were considered a resident and residents didn’t pay tax. It amounted to a week’s free rent and was a nice counter-point to our continuing status as illegals. New York could be startling in other ways. After we’d decided to accompany the Moles across to London for the summer, Jan and I tried to regularise our immigration status. We stood in line for half a day at the office in downtown Manhattan, in amongst a shuffling crowd of your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … from all parts of the world. At the head of the queue we explained our predicament to the clerk, a tired black man with more than a passing resemblance to Alex the night clerk. He looked disbelieving at us through his thick spectacles. We have people here with real problems, he said. You two go along now. We went along. But it could be sinister too. A power blackout in Manhattan, which happened one night, was a true intimation of apocalypse. Another night, after a big sports event (baseball? football?) in Queens, as rogue and drunken males poured into Hell’s Kitchen, and the air filled up with a golden brown haze made of pheromones and cordite as much as it was of exhaust fumes, it seemed there was an unspeakable atrocity waiting to happen around every street corner. The progress of King Tut—an exhibition of the Treasures of Tutankhamen—suggested not just one city but an entire country that was death-obsessed. In Times Square, at any hour of the day or night, the dealers sidled up to you in the ceaseless masses of people passing in the street and whispered in your ear: Coke, smoke, Bo, Bo, wanna buy some Bo? ‘Bo’ was short for Columbian but if you did buy a joint off one of these guys, you might find it artfully concocted out of five single rice grains laid end to end. One night some of the musos went two blocks east of the Theatre for the New City at Second and Tenth to buy some dope and found a pool of blood on the stoop where their Puerto Rican contact usually was. He’d been stabbed to death in a turf war with dealers further down the block. After that we didn’t shop there any more. Yet I was happier in New York, not just because I was back at the (presumed) centre but also because the Moles asked me to light their shows. Lighting was something I’d done in an erratic, ad hoc way with Red Alert and I knew I had one essential for the job, good timing. That timing could be explored much more evocatively in theatre than it could with music and I grew to love the way I could add to, or accentuate, a theatrical moment by throwing light upon it. I lit shows in New York, in London, on a small tour of the eastern seaboard we did—Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia—on our much bigger cross country tour, which included an interlude of six weeks or so on the high plains of New Mexico, mostly in Taos. And, finally, on a return tour of New Zealand in 1980.

stand down margaret
In London we gigged around even more spasmodically than in New York. This was not just because of the fabulous snootiness of the English; it was because we didn’t have a drummer. Drummers, in my limited experience, were always the most precarious of band members, liable to defect, sulk, disappear, go mad, lose time for the most unpredictable of reasons. Yet you had to humour them, because without a drummer, you didn’t have a band. Bud Hooper, from The Country Flyers, was in London, but although we went down to Clapham where he lived in a dim-lit flat with his wife Gabe and their kids, and spent an entire evening trying to persuade him, he didn’t want to do it. The drummer with The Methylated Spirits, Spencer Probet, was also in town, but he didn’t have a kit. Eventually, bass player Neil Hannan, who’d joined us in New York about the time Red Alert split, found Chris Whitten, a nineteen year old tyro from Leeds and he took the seat in a band now known, provisionally but more or less accurately, as The Shakey Islanders. Chris was intensely rhythmic, with a beautiful, high action, a powerful sound, and was full of the grit and mustard of talented youth. His passion was for jazz-rock and he responded with incredulity to some of the things he was asked to do, especially in the theatre. A stand-out, though, was the solo percussion accompaniment he devised for a rap that Alan Brunton did as Denis Thatcher, whose Maggie had just been elected PM: I’m the man … I’m the man … I’m the man / Who gives the Iron Lady / Her monthly oil and grease. Chris didn’t like the notion of importing politically correct or socially aware sentiments into song writing. I still remember the beam of withering contempt he directed at my attempt to construct a lyric out of a piece of graffiti: Justice for Jo-Jo Smith. Smith, it turned out, was a bovver boy who’d beaten someone else’s head in; but his friends thought there was just cause for what he’d done. An aura of violence hung over south London then, and it wasn’t necessarily politically inspired. When my largely luckless search for work for both band and theatre group encountered a rare opportunity, I went down one morning to a pub in New Cross to meet some people. They were two large bodied, pale-faced Cockneys, brothers, who were promoting a band called The Craze. The Craze (I didn’t realize at first that they were also, and deliberately, The Krays), were a mod band who performed in front of a huge Union Jack. In the hierarchy of the times, that didn’t make them punks but did affiliate them with the skinheads and boot boys who were part of the rapidly decaying punk scene. What we were being offered, behind the drawn curtains of the closed for lunchtime pub, was a support of The Craze at the Albany Empire. A big, old, elegant room in Deptford, the Albany Empire was famous as the venue where Dire Straits established their following. It was packed when we came out to play: a deep floor of massed, shoulder to shoulder punters standing, crowded galleries around the walls, hundreds of people. The Shakey Islanders went down pretty well considering their diverse origins and eclectic material. They got an encore and there was one particular voice in the crowd, belonging to a tall, long-haired, vociferous hippie, that was especially enthusiastic. Unfortunately this fellow did not know when to stop and continued to heckle through The Craze’ set, which was primitive, intense, short on musician-ship but long on energy and commitment. Their singer somehow managed to climb up onto the speakers where he rode the precariously swaying stack while continuing to belt out the vocals. Rolling Stones … our hippie friend called in the break between each song. Rolling Stones … it was hot and sweaty and loud and there was an alarming sense of events tipping out of control. The bruvvers from New Cross didn’t like this guy’s chant. They were becoming irate. They told him to stop but, whatever he was on (he was probably just drunk), it made no difference. I was in one of the galleries at the side; I didn’t see exactly what happened, only the swirl in the heart of the crowd as the man was dealt to. It turned out they’d taken a fire extinguisher and beaten his head in. People were shocked, someone called an ambulance but, when it arrived, the medicos weren’t allowed inside. Nor were the cops, and they didn’t insist; it wasn’t their turf. Instead, the broken hippie was carried out and dumped. I don’t know what happened to him, whether he died or if anyone was charged; all I remember is the bruvvers, with specks of blood on their cream silk shirts, their chests puffed out, their eyes still shining with lust for violence, strutting around the Empire afterwards as if daring someone else to have a go. No-one insulted their Craze. Our other London gigs, none of which I now recall, paled into insignificance beside this disquieting event. We silently gathered up our gear afterwards, accepted the money the bruvvers gave us, but declined their offer of further supports of The Craze and trundled off into the night in the antique green van we’d borrowed off a fellow from Intergalactic Art in Elephant and Castle who specialized in undersea photography. Soon, fatigued by the difficulty of London we, music and action both, packed up and returned to New York. Chris hitched a ride with us then left the group; later, he became the drummer for (who else?) Dire Straits and now lives, improbably, in New South Wales.

on the road again
Neil Hannan, Jan Preston and I left New York on our cross country tour with the Moles in the autumn of 1979, driving a green 1972 Pontiac station wagon with false license plates. To avoid paying the several hundred dollars it cost to register a car in New York State—which we were leaving, for good or at least for now—we bought illegal plates for twelve dollars off some Nuyoricans in Alphabet City. We made the contact, I no longer recall how, parked outside an apartment building, were handed, by a shadowy figure, the plates wrapped in newspaper, gave over the money … and drove off into the American night. We piled all the gear in the back, with the seat down, and the three of us sat side by side on the bench seat in the front, Jan in the middle because she was the smallest and Neil and I taking turns driving. (Sometimes, when we could only afford one motel room, we slept in the same arrangement in a double bed.) The car, unfortunately, proved to be as dodgy as the plates. Outside of Roanoke in Virginia, the bearings in the right back wheel went. Neil, who was handy, with the help of parts bought and tools borrowed from a local garage, managed to fix it himself. It was strange to stand amidst the green rolling hills thinking about Walter Raleigh while watching him dirty his musician’s hands on a task I could not help him with. I was a bystander to so much that happened in those days, condemned to idleness by my lack of skills, of talents, of anything much except a general, mostly inarticulate, will to contribute. Not that Neil complained, or was ever likely to. Taciturn by nature, steady, reliable but with deep wells of emotion, he was in many ways an ideal travelling companion, even if you didn’t always know what he was thinking or feeling. He was on the road without his beloved, customized bass guitar, which had been stolen in a coffee shop on 45th Street in Manhattan not long before we left. An audacious theft: Neil had put his case down next to him on the floor beside the booth where we were sitting, and someone just spirited it away. By that time we knew the score, and as soon as we discovered the loss, went straight around to the pawn shops in 46th Street to see if it was there yet. It was; but because of a bizarre city ordinance that said pawned goods had to be retained for two weeks in case they were stolen, Neil was prevented from recovering the guitar (he had to buy it back) until a fortnight had elapsed. He fixed the car and we carried on. A few days later, after we’d completed our performances in Knoxville, Tennessee, we were driving through Alabama listening on talkback radio to a caller shouting that the Iranians—who were holding 66 Americans hostage in Tehran—should be nuked back to the Stone Age. Outside of Birmingham, we were pulled over by some cops. They must have noticed the out-of-state plates and run a check on them. We turned, as directed, off the highway onto a side road and stopped. One of the cops, cautious, as always, in case we had guns, approached. This here car you’re driving is a 1972 Pontiac, he said. But these here plates belong to a 1970 Ford. Can you explain how that came to be? It was a reasonable question under the circumstances, to which we played dumb. Do they? we asked. We didn’t know. This was true as far as it went, since no-one had told us what car the plates actually belonged to; but it was a lie to say, as we did, that they were on the car when we bought it; yet how would these guys know that? Like many Americans, they had only the vaguest idea where New Zealand was—up by Norway, perhaps? They began a desultory search of the gear piled high in the back but gave up before they found the bag of marijuana in Jan’s suitcase, and let us go so long as we promised to regularise the car’s registration in the next place we stopped. We agreed, but never did. The car still had those plates on it when we plugged a hole in the petrol tank with chewing gum and sold it, for not very much, to a black man in Hollywood.

before the next teardrop falls
New Orleans was gracious and melancholy, with long, tree-lined avenues down which the street cars sedately clanged. On Bourbon Street it felt, as nowhere else I went in America, that the two or three hundred year old past of the city was still alive: gentlemen in stove-pipe hats, high-collared shirts, embroidered waistcoats and tooled leather cowboy boots drank bourbon in bars or roistered drunkenly in the street with their high-toned women; but when we went down to Tipitina’s hoping to hear (something like) Dr John or the Neville Brothers play, it was disappointing to find an undistinguished band covering the Talking Heads version of Al Green’s Take Me To The River. Houston, where we stopped next, was dark, gloomy and sinister; in a café under the freeway we met a Mexican with one arm in a sling who swore that he was Freddy Fender and sang a song to prove it: Si te quiere de verdad y te da felicidad / te deseo lo mas bueno para los dos / Pero si te hace llorar a mi me puedes hablar / Y estar contigo cuando triste esta … It was 4 am when we reached San Antonio. We parked the car next to The Alamo and tried to catch up on our sleep as dawn fingered those old adobe walls. Later that day, Neil took a flight to New York to collect his bass guitar, buying the beloved instrument its own ticket so he could have it on the seat next to him as he flew back to rejoin us. On the outskirts of El Paso, the bearings on the other back wheel went. Neil now knew exactly what to do; we unloaded the car so he could do it. It was in a poor part of town and a crowd of curious and apparently friendly Hispanics gathered to watch, to ask questions, to offer advice. In the middle of all this, the Moles arrived in their blue soft topped Buick; they pulled up, shook their heads at our predicament, smiled ruefully and carried on. When Neil completed the repairs and we started loading the gear back into the car, we found we’d been robbed: a suitcase in which Jan and I kept the precious things we were taking back to New Zealand with us, and Neil’s small amplifier that he used while busking, had been lifted from under our very noses. This was a low point; we had enough money to buy the gas we needed to get to Albuquerque but not for food as well. The strategy of eating in supermarkets, which we sometimes did, was too high risk now that our luck had evidently deserted us. Instead, we decided to try busking, even though Neil could no longer properly amplify his bass. When the good people of El Paso proved unmoved by our efforts, we crossed the Rio Grande into Juarez to see what might be happening there. The poor Mexican shop-keepers selling day-glo Christs, Elvises and skulls, the children wearing horror masks, the pimps with knives in their boots lounging outside the ubiquitous dental parlours, were more generous, even though it turned out the piles of heavy round coins they gave us were worth almost nothing in America. Still, we felt good as we gathered it up and headed, under a green evening sky, for El Paso. On the bridge back across the river, which was a different bridge to the one we had crossed earlier in the day, a member of the Border Patrol detained us, wanting to see our passports. Our passports, we explained, were in the car, over there in El Paso. We hadn’t thought to bring them with us. There were no problems going into Mexico. This man, fat, uniformed, wearing a belt hung with all kinds of lethal hardware, looked disparagingly at us and spoke a sentence I’ve never since been able to forget: We don’t care who leaves the United States, he said. But we sure as hell care who comes in here. In the end, incredulous, as so many others, at our naivety, he detained Jan and I as hostages and allowed Neil go back to the car for the passports; he scarcely glanced at the documents and we returned to the right side of the border with enough money, it turned out, to buy a single roast chicken. We carried on, north, through Truth or Consequences to Albuquerque and beyond to Santa Fe and then Taos, up on the high plains of New Mexico where the Rio Grande rises. I saw its thin silver in a deep narrow canyon one evening wandering out on the mesa, where I picked up the green and purple and black iridescent feathers of a crow lying dead in a deserted sauna; while overhead jet planes from the Kirtland Air Force Base left vapour trails on the deep blue sky and the last of the sun reddened the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the east. We were staying in a solar house on the mesa, with walls constructed out of adobe and old bottles laid side by side, through which the pale winter light filtered. It was here, on a Santa Fe station, that we heard Hysteria played for the very first time on radio. It sounded good; but by then the band that made it was just a memory.

allende
I saw two unforgettable light shows on this jaunt through the west at the end of the seventies: The Ramones at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco used a classic set up of white, red, blue, green par cans, switched from hue to hue with the chord changes. I never saw a band with such precision as The Ramones, and their lights, falling from high above, and wonderfully intense, were as tightly synchronised with the music as it was possible to be. Those four lank black-clad figures, even the drummer, seemed almost immobile in the deep, saturated washes as that enormous sound roared from their Marshall stacks like something immemorial, antediluvian, mad and somehow very funny as well. The other was in London, at the Hammersmith Odeon, an old cinema. Dire Straits were then on the cusp of world wide fame with their first album and the single with which they achieved it, The Sultans of Swing. Their light show was the antithesis of The Ramones, it was constructed of soft blues and pinks, with a lot of white, and the changes were painted through the transitions in the music, the washes altering as subtly as moods in an impressionist painting. It was very beautiful in an amorphous, almost nerveless way, the kind of lighting that surrounds and permeates rather than shows anything in hard or stark outline. In Los Angeles again, at the last gasp of the 1970s, thinking to try something new myself, I bought some rolls of lighting gel in a range of shades that I had not seen before—not the deep, saturated colours used by The Ramones nor the muted pastels of Dire Straits either; they were lighter, brighter, whiter. They reminded me of the colours of the squares of taffeta out of which Jan had made the patchwork curtains in San Francisco (lost with the rest of our stuff in El Paso) and I was keen to use them to design and light the gigs she was planning to do with the group she would start once we returned to Auckland and set out to make our own careers: a psychic necessity, we had realised, perhaps belatedly, after seven years with the Moles. That band was called Coup D’Etat and was formed by Jan, Neil and ex-Hello Sailor guitarist Harry Lyon. Coup D’Etat had various drummers without ever really finding the right one; in the time I worked with them, Steve Osborne had the seat. Some of those early gigs in Auckland were magic. Coup D’Etat had a light, poppy sound, reggae and ska influenced and, especially at first, they were wonderful. The new gels, those light pinks and greens and yellows, with their bright white look, were a perfect match for the sound. With a floor full of dancers, the music soaring and a shimmering cast of rainbow light playing across the bright metal of the instruments, the glam and spandex of their clothes, their shining hair—it could look like the aurora australis. I’m probably only talking about a handful of actual gigs—one at the Windsor Castle in Parnell, another at Kicks nightclub on the North Shore, at the Gluepot, at a venue on Ponsonby Road whose name I’ve forgotten, perhaps a few of others on the road, in Hamilton, in Wellington, a pub in Barbados Street in Christchurch. Coup D’Etat had a song of Harry’s that was sometimes used as an encore. Called Allende, it was about the Chilean leader’s murder and the destruction of the elected socialist government he led. Thanks very much I don’t like to cha cha / That old Latin beat you know it’s bad for my feet / I don’t like to tango / I don’t want to hang though … it began and then worked through, like a Roy Orbison composition, to an operatic crescendo with the band in full flight and the vocals keening one single word, his name, Allende … I would pour on all the wattage I had as the climax came, bathing the stage in an intense white glare that still had fugitive washes of other colours through it. Then, as that almost wordless, one word, skirling lament ended and with it the song, I’d cut everything. Blackness. I didn’t stay long with Coup D’Etat; instead, I switched to lighting another band that came out of the shipwreck of Hello Sailor, the Dave McCartney-led Pink Flamingos, with the legendary Dragon, Paul Hewson, on keyboards, Paul Woolwright, ex-Ticket, on bass, Jim Lawry, ex-Rocking Horse, on drums. I’m not sure now why this happened—perhaps Jan and I felt it would be better for our relationship if we didn’t work together? Couples were sometimes in bands together, woman singers often married their managers, but liaisons between musicians and roadies, which is what I was, were very uncommon. Almost a category mistake. The Pink Flamingos were a heavier band than Coup D’Etat, and, while I liked Dave and admired the set of songs he’d put together, I never felt the intrinsic connection to them that I had with acts I’d worked with previously. Towards the end of the year, I told Dave I was leaving in order to devote myself to writing.

under the house
That wasn’t quite the end of my life in rock ‘n’ roll. After Coup D’Etat split up, Jan and I moved to Sydney, Australia, where she put another band together, called The Tribe, signed a record contract with CBS Records, made an album, toured interstate, supported bands like INXS and The Eurogliders and almost … almost became the pop or rock star she wanted to be. The Tribe were on the brink of that longed-for commercial success, their second single, Dreams, climbing in the charts when, one night just before a gig, in cahoots with her drummer, Jan fired the bass player. It was heartbreaking to see, after all the work we’d put in, the fans drifting away, the other musicians losing faith, the publisher no longer returning phone calls, the record company resiling from their commitments. Especially since more or less the same thing had happened with Coup D’Etat, only in that case it was a dispute about what the next single would be that broke up the band. For me, although this Australian experience was as long in years as the whole of my previous time working with bands, it was somehow also perfunctory, probably because I was reprising things I’d already seen and done elsewhere. There were differences of course: in Australia, you didn’t have to lug a PA system around with you as you did in New Zealand; you only did that if you were the headline act. If you were doing supports, you paid the main billing for your access to PA and lights and they only ever gave you the bare minimum: I never once had the opportunity to design my own light show. The Australian scene was tougher in many way than the American and certainly tougher than New Zealand had been. And that gracious, generous respect Americans extend to entertainers was lacking. Aussies tended to be more hard-bitten, more competitive, less forgiving. If you fucked up, as I sometimes, wilfully or not, did, you could easily find yourself getting a beating. A couple of anecdotes, out of many possible: On Christmas Eve, 1983, in need of a vehicle, Ricky, our roadie, and I wandered on a very hot morning up Parramatta Road with a thousand dollars to spend. At the back of a lot in Five Dock we saw a metallic blue Ford Falcon station wagon with $999 on its windscreen. I remember Ricky’s credulous Irish eyes shining at me. We took it for a test drive over to Burwood, it checked out, we offered fifty dollars less for it, laid the money down and went on our way in the car afterwards always called the Tribesmobile. Next day, I got a phone call from Ricky. He and his American partner, Vicky, also our roadie, had loaded the Tribesmobile up with all the gear and parked it in the laneway behind their flat off Chapel Lane above the Black Rose anarchist bookshop in Redfern, in readiness for an early start. We were supporting INXS over two nights in Newcastle. But when they went to go that morning, they found the car had no reverse gear. Shit. I got on my bike and rode over there. The car was parked headfirst, facing downhill, in the lane way. To get it out we’d have to unload and then push it uphill. It was a drag, but it was possible. I went inside. Vicky was sitting at the formica kitchen table with a black eye and a bandaged ankle resting on the chair next to her. She looked terrible. There was no sign of Ricky. I never found out exactly what happened, just that they’d had a blue the night before and Ricky had hurt her. Then he’d taken her down to A & E to have her ankle strapped. She was OK, rueful and sad, not angry. Where was he now? In the Redfern Leagues Club. I walked up the hill to the club opposite the station. In the dim, smoky light, among the popping and whizzing poker machines, Ricky, schooner at his elbow, smoking Black and White cigarettes, sat alone playing a one-armed bandit. He didn’t look at me but I knew he knew I was there. I sat down on the stool next to him and waited. It was about 10.30 am, maybe earlier. Christmas morning. Minutes passed. Ricky stopped playing, finished his beer. Shall we do it? he said. We went (with no reverse) to Newcastle then came back to Sydney; a few days later, on New Years Eve, we did another support at the Metro on George Street with John Lydon’s Public Image Limited. In the afternoon, I watched their prolonged, meticulous sound check. They played an extended version of Under the House: Solid the grave / Stone cold ambition / It came out of the wall / A single cadaver / It went under the house … During their set that night, I was perched in the lighting rig above the stage when I saw Johnny glance up and realise that the plush red velvet front-of-house curtain had not been fully raised. He reached out and grabbed at the hem, pulling the heavy scalloped curtain far enough down so that the punks dancing in front of the stage could get their hands on it. They dragged that beautiful curtain down, tore and trampled it to rags. While Johnny Rotten, anarchic master of this ceremony of destruction, danced with a mad glee in his eyes. Later, the bouncers took even greater pleasure in throwing the more obstreperous of the punters bloodily down the concrete stairs into the street. By then, it was 1984. I became weary of the life, weary of giving my time and energy to something that didn’t engage the deepest part of myself. Weary, too, of the quest for success in a world where that success seemed either to be arbitrary or to go to those who were the most single-minded, the most ferocious in its pursuit, and not necessarily the most talented or deserving. I often thought back to Stephen, whose lesson was that you must be prepared to do anything, say anything, suffer any humiliation, for the sake of success. I didn’t believe him then, and I don’t believe that now. Nor, in fact, do most of the musicians I’ve known: they are in it for the music. And so am I.

soulmaker
What was it all for? What was it about? The revelation I had, aged twelve, in Greytown, has never quite gone away. Music—fado, dubstep, house, techno, alternative country, new folk and all the million other categories we now have—can still read back to me wordless emotions, or emotions I haven’t yet found words for, expressing states of feeling in ways that language can’t seem to do. In the same way, dancing makes spoken or written (or even thought) language superfluous for as long as the experience lasts. It may be a question why someone dedicated to finding out what words can do should take such pleasure and satisfaction in wordless things; but I think the answer is obvious. I recall a Sunday night at the Island of Real in Auckland, with a not very large crowd in, and Coup D’Etat playing Closer to You, a song Jan Preston wrote to lyrics by Alan Brunton. There were maybe twenty people on the dance floor when it happened: something almost indescribable that isn’t confined to small rooms or big bands, but can happen anywhere music is played. Spirits join, minds and bodies follow. A group entity forms that is larger than the sum of its parts yet doesn’t challenge the autonomy of those parts. You become one with the music but you stay yourself. There on the dance floor we began to describe graceful, complex arabesques that were a physical, or perhaps spatial, expression of the sound shapes the band were making. These days, in Sydney, I sometimes go round the corner to the Lewisham Hotel on Parramatta Road to hear the Soulmaker Sound System play reggae tunes through speakers bought from Jamaica to Australia forty years ago; the System has a big heavy mellow bass beat, and plays vintage tracks alongside the latest imports. Not exactly live music then, though the Selector and the Operator, the MC and the Arranger (usually only two people at a time) laying down power / from the control tower are certainly live: more like that long ago and faraway afternoon in the Kuranui College café, perhaps. People go there to dance and everyone does—the whole room. And in the dance we become, for the duration of the song, immortal, gods and goddesses. We become the best we ever can be and, what’s more, we know that’s who we are. We also know that it will have to end. But, and this is perhaps the point, while it lasts, it is forever.

Artists & Songs

The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros, ‘Rock Art & the X Ray Style’, 1999; Joe wrote the song for Johnny Cash, who said he didn’t understand it; maybe that’s why the recorded version includes the line quoted as an epigraph.

How Do You Do It?
Gerry & the Pacemakers, 1963.

Love Potion #9
The Searchers, 1964.

Radio
The Members, 1981; I heard them play at the Hot Club in Philadelphia in 1979. Our Philadelphia gigs were at a bar where George Thorogood & the Destroyers—who had a hit in 1979 with ‘Who Do You Love?’—used to have the residency.

Yummy Yummy Yummy
Ohio Express, 1967.

Who Do You Love?
Bo Diddley, 1956; Andrew Davie and I had dinner with Bo at the Waterloo Hotel in Wellington in 1974, after Andrew won a radio competition and asked me to go along with him. Bo didn’t say much; I think he was disappointed that we weren’t girls.

Sailin’ Shoes
Little Feat, 1972; title track of the album of the same name.

California Dreamin’
The Mommas & the Poppas, 1965.

Nowhere To Run
Martha & the Vandellas, 1965.

Dancing With Mr. D
The Rolling Stones, ‘Goat’s Head Soup’, 1973.

Washington Bullets
The Clash, ‘Sandinista!’, 1981; the song includes the lines: ‘Please remember Victor Jara / In the Santiago Stadium / Es verdad – those Washington Bullets again.’

Hysteria
Red Alert, San Francisco, 1979. ‘Red Sky’, the flip side, is a further rewrite of ‘Liberty Bus’, op. cit.

Heart Of Glass
Blondie, ‘Parallel Lines’, 1978. Their disco hit, which caused many people to say they’d sold out.

Spanish Stroll
Mink DeVille, ‘Cabretta’, 1977. Mink DeVille, a band formed in San Francisco, played CBGBs the way early Blondie played Max’s Kansas City.

Stand Down Margaret
The Beat, ‘I Just Can’t Stop It’, 1980. The third component of that effervescent late-1970s scene, after disco and punk, was reggae/ska. The so-called English Beat were a ska band.

On The Road Again
Canned Heat, ‘Boogie With Canned Heat’, 1968.

Before The Next Teardrop Falls
Freddy Fender, 1965; his version includes the lines in Spanish quoted in the text.

Allende
Coup D’Etat, 1981. The flip side of the band’s third single, ‘Permanent Hire’.

Under The House
PiL, ‘Flowers of Romance’, 1981

Soulmaker
J J Roberts; MCs with Soulmaker over the years have included luminaries such as the Great Danny Ranks, the Original Starman, Rasta, Young Jono and Driver Dom, to whom this essay is dedicated.

2008-05-10T12:57:00.008+10:00

At Pukapuka Road

I

The house at Pukapuka Road had a golden floor. Like pale fire or liquid honey. Planks of kauri, sanded back and oiled so you could see the close regular grain glowing all the way from the window onto the orchard at one end of the room to the tiny kitchen and bathroom, side by side, at the other. We never cooked in the kitchen, only washed up in there; the flat round metal elements of the electric stove flaking with rust. Instead we burned wood in the coal range, a cast-iron furnace with red and yellow lights within, to boil up our porridge in the morning, to bake bread or roast the goats we shot, or the thin wild turkeys we sometimes caught, to stir fry vegetables, if we had any, with field mushrooms in their black juice in the wok. Or just to sit around smoking roll-your-owns or joints and throwing the butts on the hearth to be pulled apart later and the contents rolled up again when, inevitably, we ran out once more. My friend loved that floor. He swept it every morning when he got up and sometimes in the afternoon as well. If it was stained with mud from people walking across it in their boots, or with wood ash or beer or wine spillages, or when the chooks had come in and shat on it, he washed it with soap and water and a mop; then he’d oil it using the linseed oil with which he mixed his paints. He painted in his bedroom at the front of the house, down the other end of the hallway that led off from that room in which we mostly lived. There was also a small dark sitting room with an open fireplace where we sometimes huddled in our coats on winter evenings; my own bedroom across the hall from it, with a chaise longue and desk and typewriter and not much else; and a larger bedroom on the other side at the front that wasn’t used until someone took pity on me and gave me an iron frame three quarter size bed so that I didn’t have to sleep tossing uneasily on the chaise longue any more. The house was halfway down a small open valley; from the creaky veranda at the front you could see the mangroves growing along the blurred shores of an arm of Mahurangi Harbour. Glints of silver light on the blue water. At the back, you walked straight out off the floor onto a flat broken concrete area that had been some kind of courtyard. There was a crumbling barn where the farmer kept a few supplies, sacks of grass seed for instance that the chooks ate, then a long rutted drive climbing under enormous raggedy macrocarpa trees to the road. Another line of trees straggled straight up the valley towards the farmer’s house and it was under these that we dug small holes in which to crap because the outside toilet was blocked and unusable. The orchard would never again bear fruit: aging plums and peaches and apples, bearded with grey-green lichen, whose small further branches were just knobbled sticks where, in spring, a few tiny blossoms might struggle from the bud before being swept away by wind or rain. Everywhere the sound of water. Masses of arum lilies grew in clumps among the marshy clods and along the streambeds, flowering that May in such profusion that we could gather them by the armload, day after day, and never see a gap in the ranks. White trumpets with a golden spike within. The pollen dust falling on the creamy spathe, the green arrow-shaped leaves with the curl at the end like the tip of an elfin shoe. We were artists; the idle poor; we subsisted on what we could gather or else upon the skinny cheques we sometimes earned slashing down manuka on the rainy hills for local farmers. Or on the charity of friends, whom we would entice up from Auckland to visit then shame into handing over their cash so we could hitch hike to Warkworth and buy more supplies of flour and rolled oats and tobacco and alcohol. No telephone, so that you wouldn’t know anyone was coming until you saw them walking in their bright clothes down the drive or cutting across the paddocks towards the house.

You were one of these, appearing unannounced at the door one Tuesday afternoon in your saffron tights and long red coat. Your slender hesitancy. Who else was there that time? I seem to recall a fourth, perhaps even a fifth, roistering on the broken patio outside after nightfall, when the acid had begun to work and we were delusively crying out the splendour of our transient immortality. Or putting on our boots and going off into the marshy paddocks to pick more lilies. Or listening in the room with the golden floor to: The kings of Tyrus with their convict list / are waiting in line for their geranium kiss / and you wouldn't know it would happen like this … I did not really know who you were but that was at least partly because I did not know who I was either. And yet I knew you all my life. All your life. You were quiet, reticent, self-contained; not unobtrusive, too beautiful for that with your pale oval face and long black hair, your changeable eyes; that buried intensity. Your grave voice which I can still sometimes almost hear, conflated forever into the lines you quoted to me once, in a letter, with scorn: ever soft / gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman. So much I cannot remember, so much lost. If you don’t see it when it is happening, it cannot come back in memory; unaware in the present, you destroy both future and past. The future in the past and the past in the future. You began to eat a lily: I remember that. Tearing off pieces of the plump white flesh of the spathe with your fingers and putting them in your mouth. They are poisonous: swelling of the tongue and throat, stomach pain, vomiting and severe diarrhoea. Severe swelling or gastric irritation may become life threatening. Perhaps it was the beginnings of toxicity in your system that made you start to cry. Your face swollen, suddenly ugly with grief. Did we even know they were poison? I can’t say. You blamed yourself, anyway; a characteristic self laceration I would not even now comprehend, had you not written about it afterwards; writing I would not read until long after laceration became fatal. The lily was my friend, you said, over and over, sobbing: What kind of person eats her friends? We gave you water to drink and you drank it. We took you inside and sat you by the coal range, with a blanket around your shoulders; we looked after you in so far as we were able. I recall seeking out the flower with its nibbled edge: not much was gone. Later, and I do not know how much later, we discovered you had gone as well; and we did nothing. You would have got up from the divan where we’d laid you down and walked across the paddocks, up to the road, then along that pale thread of gravel to the turn off, to wait until a car stopped and took you the thirty miles or so back to the City. Days after, when we made our ritual weekend visit to town, I would have found out you survived, never suspecting how brief that survival would turn out to be; not understanding how the lily marked the beginning of your end. That night, after we had all gone to bed and the house was quiet, I woke and sensed a rushing in the hallway, soundless and yet with great tumult. As if some immense conurbation of souls had gone through. It was not the first time I felt that in this house; but when I opened my eyes and saw a tall woman shrouded in antique dress sitting on the end of my bed, that was something that had never happened before, nor would again. She too was weeping out of some unutterable sorrow. Again, I did nothing; but watched her stand up, lean and angular and frail as our grandmother was, and move towards the door; seeing the old splintery timbers of the bare walls of my room through her transparency as she drifted out into the hallway and disappeared along the golden floor.

some dreams

2007-06-22T12:40:00.001+10:00

... are very persistent. One from long ago: I must have been less than ten, we are driving along in the Hillman, in the King Country, somewhere west of Ohakune. My mother is at the wheel and my father, in the front passenger seat, is not happy about this. Us kids are in the back, me and an indeterminate number of my sisters, who total five in all but I don't think we're all there ... anyway. The road leads to one of those enormous, wonderful, terrifying viaducts that span rivers and bush-choked gorges in that dissected hill country west of the mountain. Viaducts made of girdered steel. Hand built, at the beginning of last century. That are not for vehicular traffic but for trains to cross. As we approach the approach, for no apparent reason, the car veers off the road to the right then soars into the vast, eerie space spanned by the viaduct. My father says, in exasperation rather than alarm: Oh, Lauris, I told you ... while I, seriously alarmed, cry out: Everybody, put your hands on the floor! In the belief that putting our hands on the floor will somehow parachute the free-falling car to safety. Much later, the Hillman does settle, unaccountably, on the grey river sand beside the silvery twisted skeins of the Manga nui a te ao, the great river of dawn, where thin green weed grows slinkily on the downside of boulders, streaming in the flow. There is the silence that follows catastrophe and catastrophe averted alike. We have survived. Above, the brown-black steel span of the viaduct still leaps across the chasm the family car could not manage. But we have survived.

Unheard Melodies

2007-06-12T11:51:00.000+10:00

I’ve always considered myself ill-educated, a feeling that’s survived thirteen years in the New Zealand state school system, two university degrees, and most of a Diploma in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language, as well as sundry and diverse experience in the school of hard knocks. In this, as in some other respects, I’m like my mother who, despite her worldly and artistic achievements, was always troubled by a feeling of inauthenticity arising perhaps from her own sense of being poorly educated. If this dim conviction of fraudulence can be said to come from anywhere, it may be from the lack of a classical education.

It was probably because of this perceived deficit that, in the summer of 1968-9, when we moved from Huntly to Upper Hutt, my mother advanced a serious proposal that I complete my secondary schooling at Hutt Valley High School because there, unusually, Greek and Latin were still taught. The scheme foundered, to my mingled regret and relief, for two main reasons: my father always wanted his children to attend the schools where he worked, and I had already shown, in French classes, a lack of ability in foreign languages which would certainly have turned the plan into a tedious mistake. I would remain one of the well-enough-educated, knowing just enough to know how much I do not know.

Greek myths fascinated me from an early age and by 1968 I had already souvenired from the Huntly College library H A Guerber’s The Myths of Greece and Rome (1907; 1963), a book I still have; for many years however it was on my mother’s shelves and when I retrieved it I found among its pages a note addressed to Chère Madame from a woman of Menton, suggesting she had taken it with her to France when she held the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship there in 1981. The note, inserted at the point in the tale of Perseus when the hero has killed the sea monster and is burying the Gorgon’s head face down in the sand so that he can marry Andromeda without turning the wedding guests to stone, is an invitation to attend, vendredi prochaine, a concert in the Ambassador’s Club.

I still sometimes consult Guerber, but only after I’ve already looked at what Robert Graves has to say in his two volume Penguin paperback The Greek Myths (1960), which I’ve owned for almost as long. Graves, who is extraordinarily knowledgeable and maddeningly perverse, first retells the tale and then, in the notes, says what it really means, in arcane terms that will be familiar to those who have read The White Goddess (1948; 1966) His retellings are as graceful and economical as his explanations are alternately luminous and bizarre. Then there is the rest of my paperback library, Homer and Herodotus, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, Plato and Apollonius, Ovid … none of which I can, nor ever will, read in the originals.

On the other hand, ignorance has its advantages, one of which is that there is always more to learn. Another, more dubious, may be that you approach the material without the preconceptions your interlocutors and educators might otherwise have instilled in you. A (related) third could be an ability to think outside the limits of previous understandings, not because you are informed about them but because you are not. I’ve often thought that my unawareness of the proper way to do things, my lack of formal training as a writer, has its benefits, not least of which is that I’ve ended up working in the only way possible for me: a kind of autism which might on occasion attain lucidity.

A central curiosity of the Western tradition, rooted in Greek thought, is the habit of invoking the muse, or muses, at the inauguration of a work. Who were, or are, the muses? What do we know about them and how are we to understand them today? Homer speaks indiscriminately of the muse and the muses and doesn’t name them; Hesoid says they are nine, naming all, though without giving them the specific attributes common only since the Renaissance, and is explicit about just one, Calliope, whose name means beauty of voice. The nine, he says, are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or memory. The Greek word mousa may be related to the verb mimnesko, to remind, to bring to, or put in, mind; which, in turn, can be derived from Proto-Indo-European men-, think. The central act inspired by the muses would seem to be that of remembering.

If we leap a millennium and recall what historian and traveller Pausanias has to say, we find a different, perhaps older, tradition. Pausanias, a Lydian who wrote in the second century AD when Roman emperors ruled most of the known the world, recounts in his Description of Greece many versions of muse worship from different parts of the country. In his account of the rites at Helicon, he says that there were originally only three and that they were the children of Uranus (the sky) and Gaia (the earth). These three are: Mneme (memory), Aoide (voice) and Melete (occasion). He mentions that at Delphi also three muses were worshipped, but they had different names: Nete, Mesi and Hypate, which are what the three chords of that ancient instrument, the lyre, are called.

While mneme seems always to be memory, aoide may also be translated as song, while melete can mean both meditation and practice as well as occasion. Whichever way you look at them, the three attributes are essential to any musical, poetic or theatrical act: you memorise, you practice, you perform. It has been said that together they form the complete picture of the preconditions of poetic art. With this rider: in cult practice, which seems to take us far away from modernity into the mysteries of the ancient occasions for art. Or perhaps not—if you read Homer, it’s clear that minstrels played and sang at great feasts, when visitors were entertained or marriages made, or at funerals as the great dead were interred with games and songs.

In an essay published in Oral Tradition (21/1; 2006: 210-228) Penelope Skarsouli quotes this passage from the Proem to Hesoid’s Theogony:

Happy is he whom the Muses love: speech flows sweetly from his mouth. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul and lives in dread because his heart is distressed, yet when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus, at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all; the gifts of the goddesses soon turn him away from these.

and then points out the conjunction of memory and forgetting: whoever hears the Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne, no longer remembers his own ills. There is perhaps an ambiguity here: is it the singer who forgets his miseries or is it his singing that allows the audience to forget? Or both?

Skarsouli also mentions that in some parts of Greece the muses were known as the Memories, and it was often said that their closest companion was Hypnos or Sleep, whose three sons by Nyx or Night, Phobetor, Phantasos and Morpheus, are the bringer of dreams. Phobetor conjured animals and nightmares and gives us our word phobia; Phantasos, whose visions were delusive and made out of inanimate things, is the origin of our word fantasy; and from Morpheus, who gives human shape to our dreams, we have derived, among other things, morphine, a drug that eases pain.

In her paper Skarsouli is teasing out a particular strain in Greek thought, that which identifies Calliope as the chief of the nine muses and puts her in a particular relation with worshipful princes. Her thesis is that those in power, dispensing justice, need both the true thought and the eloquent voice granted by the muse in order to act righteously: that is, to arrive at a just solution and then to persuade the people of its rightness. This venerable dimension to inspiration is still sometimes evoked when we recall the phrase, speaking truth to power.

Our legal system is based on precedent and this appears to have been so in Greece in pre-literate times as well, where memory was understood as an aid to dispensing justice; there were in some Greek cities judicial officials called mnemones or rememberers whose precise function was to recall and cite precedents. There was another class, the hieromnemones or sacred rememberers with a particular duty to recall sarcedotal history. An analogous function perhaps is that of the servant required to stand next to a king or emperor and remind him that he is, after all, a mortal man. This role too has persisted, it is probably the source of the character of the Jester or Fool who is allowed to speak a truth that others might face execution for uttering.

Calliope is not simply first among the muses, she is also the mother, by the Thracian King Oeagrus, of Orpheus. I don’t wish to rehearse the entirety of the Orpheus story here, only its later, less well known, component. After losing Eurydice forever, Orpheus wandered mourning over the earth; Ovid says he refused the love of women and makes him the father of pederasty; it is for this, he writes, and for condemning their promiscuity, that the Maenads tore his body limb from limb. In another version they destroy him because he can’t or won’t sing joyful songs for their dances. A third reason given is that Orpheus insisted on worshiping one god only, the sun, Apollo.

His decapitated head, still singing, floated down the Hebrus to the Mediterranean, later coming ashore at Lesbos, where it continued to prophesy from a cave sacred to Dionysus until the oracle was silenced by a jealous Apollo. Lesbos was considered the home of lyric poetry and Sappho, whose island it was, is sometimes called the tenth muse. Meanwhile the other nine muses gathered up the rest of Orpheus’ dismembered body and buried it at Helicon, at the foot of Olympus, where the nightingales still sing more sweetly than anywhere else. As for his golden lyre, that too drifted to Lesbos, where it was placed in a shrine dedicated to Apollo, before being set up among the stars as the constellation Lyra.

There are curious contradictions here: the great exemplar of romantic love become a spurner of women; the supreme poet of nature turned monotheist; the bequeathing of his prophetic head to Dionysus while his lyre returns to Apollo, the god who gave it to him in the first place. However, it is certainly a mistake to think that among the many extant versions of this story, there is one that is definitive. Over a thousand years of antiquity, and two thousand years since, it has been told and retold in what amounts to a practical infinity of versions … and yet, we persist in our belief that across all versions there is something incontrovertible, a substratum of truth; just as, when we look at the many accounts of who the muses were, we continue to think that they are, or could be, one.

This may be because, in both stories, we find a narrative that encloses a mystery. It may even be the case that it is this mystery, precisely, that gives us the notion of the incontrovertible, which would then be something that both is and is not; or rather, something that is but is not to be spoken. No-one who reads, hears, or sees enacted the story of Orpheus is immune from the desire that he not look back to see his beloved walking out of hell behind him; equally, no-one can fail to imagine that he will not just want to look back, but that he will do so.

In somewhat the same way, the irrationality of supposing that, when we write or paint or compose or otherwise make art—and even perhaps dispense justice—we do so by entertaining within us a spirit that is somehow both other to, and kin with, our deepest selves, alien and yet not alien, at once us and not us, has survived all attempts to banish or ridicule it. There are too many testimonies by people who say they have felt taken over, possessed or made into a vessel by some power, for us entirely to dismiss either the experience or the possibility. This does not mean that it is not a human capacity we are speaking of—just that it is one that is peculiarly resistant to rational explanation.

In voodoo dancing, a god, as the Greeks would say, enters the dancer; which god—or loa—will be known by the steps the dancer takes. Whether it be Damballah, Ezili, Ogu, Agwe, Legba or another can be recognised by others and has significance both for them and for the individual dancer. This is not the only example of a dance tradition where there is a definite relationship between the steps a dancer takes and the spirit, loa or god who has entered them. Even on today’s dance floors you can see how a different beat will call forth a different step and how some steps seem perfectly to express some beats. Every riddim seems to have its own dance, its own set of moves.

This relationship is best expressed for me by a silent thing, a photograph:

It is called Dancers, New York, 1956 and was taken by jazz photographer Roy DeCarava at the Manor Social Club, now demolished, that stood at 110th Street and Madison Avenue in Harlem. In dim light, on the wide, otherwise empty wooden floor, two men, seen only in silhouette, are dancing with each other. The one closest to the camera has his back to us. He is a big bald head with a single highlight on the right of the dome; an oblong jacket tilted by the movement of his shoulders to a trapezoid; one arm so hung down it almost drags its knuckles along the floor, the other raised up, with the fingers extended and flexed; two shapeless almost bulbous legs disappearing into the shadowy floor.

The other, facing us, is his echo or mirror. A slighter man, perhaps shorter, he too is elegantly poised about the oblong of his jacket, his knees bent, together, one foot, the right, raised from the floor; his right arm, like his partner’s left, hanging down with all the fingers spread, his left bent ninety degrees at the elbow, the hand flat, held out, the fingers arched. A waiter in a white shirt with a tray of drinks moves up the left hand edge of the dance floor and, at either side, we see the shapes of people sitting on chairs at tables. Behind, through a mosque or pyramid shaped arch, perhaps the entrance to the hall, a bright flare of light comes in along the floor but does not quite reach the second dancer, while in the roof seven white lamps glow but do not illuminate the vast, dark space.

No faces can be seen in the dimness, nor much other detail and certainly no musicians or any source of recorded music; they are probably dancing to a gramophone record. Nevertheless, and here is the paradox, the photograph sings. Somehow, despite or because of the stillness of the silhouettes, those bodies frozen in motion, you feel yourself to be inside the actual moment of the music to which they are making these particular moves. This paradox, which I cannot give any better account of, is perfectly expressed in the title of the book in which the photograph appears: The Sound I Saw.

You don’t have to subscribe to any particular religion, or other form of spirituality, to dance to music, even though music and dance do have an long history of entanglement with the sacred. What’s interesting is that we can still act as if possessed, we can still actually become possessed, even when we don’t believe in possession as such. There is some intrinsic human relation to beats, to music, to song and we best express that relation in movement, in dance. This seems to be true across all ages, all cultures, all times. Even very small children will move to music; even the aged and infirm; even the clod-hopping or tone deaf will try or want to try.

To dance we need those three original muses: memory, voice, occasion, however paradoxical or hidden their expression may be. Memory, when it comes to dance, may not inhere in the mind at all, but in the body or perhaps somewhere else entirely, like the soul; voice will be there in the song or the music to which we dance, even if that be, as it sometimes is, an unheard melody … which Keats reminds us are sweeter, piping to the spirit ditties of no tone. He was remembering dancers on a Grecian urn when he wrote that. Occasion, too, is various, you can as easily dance to a song on the radio in your car, to the stereo in your sitting room, at a vast outdoor concert or in a club or pub or bar somewhere. You can even dance in your mind.

And, it appears, just as you must remember in order to dance, the dance itself will help you to forget. This central paradox—memory (mneme) and forgetting (lethe) entwined together—is there from the beginning, right back in Hesoid where it is said that the muses make us forget our sorrows by remembering, not joy as such, but the great deeds of heroes and the gods. Those are not our subject any more, we who write, but it is still the case that writing is intimately involved with memory and forgetting. I formulated this once as follows: We remember in order to write but we write to forget. How this might be expressed with respect to reading I’m not entirely sure, but it could be said that reading, too, is an act of remembrance that allows one to forget … the quotidian. To become, in other words, lost in story, enchanted, possessed, perhaps even changed.

But there is an even more obvious sense in which the muses are present in the act of writing, even, say, the writing of this essay, which I began by going back briefly to memories of childhood and adolescence, and continued by searching in those great repositories of cultural memory, books; then I wrote down my thoughts on these matters in a manner as coherent, indeed eloquent as I was able, trying to find my own voice, speaking my sentences to myself or aloud into the air. Finally, the occasion for this meditation is surely, like Janus, two-faced: one is that of my own perplexity, in my ignorance attempting understanding of a very old tradition of which I am, howsoever insignificant, still a part; while the other is your face, looking perhaps with a similar perplexity, perhaps with something more like illumination, at the trail of words I’ve left here.

And if there is an illumination to be had amidst the perplexity, this may be what it is: I’m not possessed by a god or goddess or any other alien or familiar spirit, I’m not speaking in the precinct of a temple, I’m not intoxicated or deranged, my words are not prophetic or otherwise revelatory of the sacred; and yet, mysteriously, even here, even now, in this most prosaic of circumstances, a man sitting at a computer in a small flat in a modern city, the ancient conditions of vatic speech continue to manifest: memory, voice, occasion.

Opening the Envelope

2007-06-02T09:47:00.001+10:00

When the envelope arrives, I find myself unable to open it. I remember another occasion when I didn't open one of these, joking that, since it was bound to be a rejection, I might as well throw it straight in the bin ... that one turned out to contain a cheque but we all know history never repeats or rather, only in the sense of tragedy becoming farce. I leave it sitting on the table and move on to other things.

On the last page of the last essay in Waimarino County there's a quote from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg about dreams. I didn't use the whole aphorism and I'm not going to repeat it here, or at least not yet. The drift of it is that dreams are as much a part of our real life as our waking experience and that the two are not really distinct from each other. It's also the case that what are sometimes called daydreams, sometimes speculation, sometimes delusion, sometimes even more unflattering names, are a significant part of our waking life. For some of us—I wouldn't like to say how many—this strange daily intermingling of fact and fantasy is a defining quality of our experience.

We're usually taught these days that imagination is a positive quality, something to be valued. On the other hand, there are many examples, from the criminal courts, from news reports and from direct personal experience, of people who have come to grief precisely because they could not distinguish fact from fantasy. We value the ability to project a possible future and then work to make it work, but when an enterprise fails, as often they must, those who dreamed that particular dream usually suffer consequences that might run from private or public humiliation to state punishment, even, in extreme cases, to death.

People who spend their lives trying to make art in its various guises are committed to the projection of futures which they then attempt to realise, but so are those who open businesses, go into politics, become professional sportspeople, travel, get religion, grow old ... inescapable, the urge to dream and then realise the dream. There are even those among the physicists, Paul Davies for instance, who suggest the very processes by which we observe the universe are of this nature, partaking of observation that feeds speculation that then influences further observation. Davies was in the newspaper this week suggesting that we need to revise our understanding of the so-called laws of physics to include the possibility that they are not immutable but evolve, like everything else does, over time. He's the latest to send Plato back to his cave.

One of the sections of Waimarino County, the third, is in fact called Illusions and many of the short prose pieces it contains are transcriptions of dreams, while others are transcriptions of real life experiences as if they were, or could be, dreams. When I look at them now I cannot honestly say where the real life experience ends and the dream begins, or vice versa. Because, as in the mutable universe, the experience changes once it is put into words, somehow leaving the dream/reality conundrum behind. This is what I hope and also, if the hope is realised, what I love.

Meanwhile, the envelope still sits upon the table; like Schroeder's cat the dream it contains is either dead or alive and I won't know which until I open it. I go looking instead for Lichtenberg, one of my favourite books, with its own mystery, since I have no idea how or when or where I acquired it, not new, it's a battered second hand Cape Editions Paperback #8, from 1969. Aphorisms & Letters, it's called. Here it is, page 45, the dream aphorism, I'll give it in full:

I commend dreams again: we live and feel as much dreaming as waking and are the one as much as the other. It is one of the superiorities of man that he dreams and knows it. We have hardly made the right use of this yet. Dream is a life which, combined with the rest of us, makes up what we call human life. Dreams gradually merge into our waking; we cannot say where man's waking state begins.

This seems even more profoundly true than I remembered and gives me a feeling almost of dizziness, especially that last about not knowing where the waking state begins. The envelope on the table will be a kind of awakening, as well as a signpost pointing in one of two directions: either I'll spend the next few months pursuing an artist who was thought to be dead but may still be alive, through the underbelly of Sydney, in the relics of shanty towns and communes, housing commission flats where teenagers deal drugs, bars and gambling joints and brothels ... or I'll follow another artist, like Lichtenberg from Darmstadt, definitely dead but possibly restorable in print, through the arid wastes of the western lands, from Kow Swamp to Lake Mungo to Menindee to Bulloo ... which will it be?

I find my paper knife, shaped like a crocodile, made of hard black wood, insert the point beneath the flap on the envelope and begin the sawing motion with the sharpened underside of the tail that will open it. I carefully pull out the couple of sheets of thrice-folded A4 and smooth them flat. I read ...

forking paths

2007-05-28T07:50:00.000+10:00

When someone says to me, as sometimes happens, that cab driving is a good job for a writer, I don't usually disagree, even though my feeling is that writing is the best job for a writer and almost anything else, whatever residual benefits there may be, is a distraction. Teaching never worked for me, nor did journalism, nor proof-reading nor any other of the various things I've done to earn money. Taxi driving does, sort of, or I wouldn't still be doing it; but that doesn't mean I don't regret the time it takes away from other pursuits.

What they mean is that, driving a taxi, you meet many different kinds of people, which is true; what they perhaps forget, or don't realise, is that most of these meetings are brief and superficial and never lead to anything much apart from an exchange of money, a goodbye and a disappearance into the night. It's better like that: the more interesting the ride, the more likely it is to have unintended consequences. While knowledge of where the brothels are, the nightclubs, the gambling dens and the rest, is to my mind a poor substitute for knowledge, say, of the human heart. Which isn't to say that you won't find out something about that taking a working girl to work, you might.

One thing you do gain is an ability to make swift, hopefully accurate, assessments of character - you have to. Another is that you become almost preternaturally aware of the contingent nature of events. Time as a garden of forking paths is in plain view around every corner, down every straight: if this, then this; if not this, then that; if the other, then the other, will be your fate. You are always, as the tag on my taxi driving blog has it, at a nodal point where destinies fork. I do value this knowledge.

I was thinking about it today while walking over to Dulwich Hill … among other things. There's a new second hand shop in Junction Road I wanted to check out on the way. Just as I left it, I came into one of those moments of stillness you are sometimes lucky enough to find. I was looking at the strangely crenellated roof of the block of old shops on the corner of Junction and Moonbie. There was a dove mourning nearby, children chanting in the school across the road, a magpie in a jacaranda tree gargling the rain in its throat and, in the next street, one old man haranguing another, without malice, in Greek or Italian. All these distant, evocative sounds under the cerulean of the autumn sky, that ineffable blue you never see anywhere else.

Always at such moments I feel, below the recent past (the 200 year old one) something far more ancient that still survives, even in the humdrum of the suburbs, even here, inhering in the stones perhaps, in the gums, that blue air ... I'm walking on by now in the pleasant state in which sentences begin to form in the mind when another voice impinges on my consciousness, a familiar one, although I cannot at first place it ... angels and ministers of grace defend us! It's Little Johnny at his most unctuous, someone's broadcasting Question Time, very loud, out across the very suburb where the malheureux was spawned and grew up, although I think the family home might have been a little to the south of Dulwich Hill, in Earlwood.

This too, though not exactly welcome, enters my meditation on forking paths, because it is at least possible, some say likely, that the 2007 election will see his dead hand raised at last from across our necks: who knows, we've had him for eleven years now, that's longer than the nine years Muldoon, whom in some respects he resembles, stole from us.

At the Sally Army store in Old Canterbury Road there are blown emu eggs for sale for five dollars each but I manage to resist buying one, I’d only break it. Instead, I pick up a Penguin Classic from the 1950s, E V Rieu, the translator of Homer, this time turning his attention to The Four Gospels (1952). I've just re-read my father's copy of his The Odyssey (1946), passed on The Iliad (1950) and hadn't realised the Greek of the gospels was what he'd done next. Also, for a dollar, a small leather bound notebook of handmade paper that I'll probably never have the courage to write anything in. Round the corner is an immaculately restored 1938 McLaughlan Buick limo, a straight eight, which I examine carefully and with great admiration ... well, there's more, but I haven't got to the point yet, have I?

The point is, I'll hear next week about a grant application I've made. If it's successful, I'll stop driving for the next few months and write a book. It's a book about Sydney and may even include some of the anecdotes I've gathered from taxi driving, although the subject is not driving per se, rather it is a quest to find an artist, a New Zealander originally, who's lost, presumed dead but may still be alive and, even if he isn't, has certainly gone on a lot longer than anybody thought and produced a body of work nobody knows much about ...

And if they don't grant me the grant, well, I probably won't be able to write the book. This may sound peculiar, and it hurts me to say it, but I think it's right. If I can't do it this year I'd have somehow to fit it in around the two books I've got planned for next year, one of which I'll definitely write (I've been offered an advance, the email came just now, literally now, while I was drafting this) and the other ... yes, that too, hopefully. The funding body decision has already been made and is on its way towards me, which gives me a breathless feeling, either I'll have to keep on driving for the rest of the year or I'll start a new book, which is like embarking on a voyage of no return into a country without a name.

Meanwhile I'm ambling past a grubby looking corner building that I half remember dropping someone off outside of one Sunday night, he had a pushbike, I recall, I picked him up at a railway station, maybe Ashfield ... the windows down the side are open, I glance in, yes, I'm right, there are two bikes in there, in bits, the frames leaning against stacks of books in a low and messy room and I'm looking out for the bloke now, I liked him, to say hello, maybe we could chat about the contingencies of fate, he must be around if the windows are open but no, I don't see him and I'm not going to impose, I wouldn't do that, I just carry on walking until I get home and start ... doing this.

Time Tells

2007-05-18T08:05:00.000+10:00

Today, May 18, is the anniversary of my arrival in Australia. A whole alphabet of years has elapsed since then, it's the Zed year that's just ended and so I can start again, perhaps in Arabic or Cyrillic. It was a grey, wet day back then in 1981, just like today; the rain didn't stop for two weeks, while I sloshed from the hotel in Kings Cross down to the Combined Services base in Paddington to do my taxi training. I got into driving because, within days of arriving in Sydney, I met a fellow called Graeme Shepherd who was in the Merchant Marine but moonlighted as a cabbie while ashore. Graeme, whose brother Roger founded Flying Nun records, extolled the virtues of the job and, like a fool, I believed him. Graeme will have his Master Mariner's ticket by now, he lives in Tasmania and commands one of those huge floating behemoths that come in and out of the harbour; I haven't seen him for years.

In May, 1981, Bob Marley had just died, of cancer, in a Florida clinic. I remember flying back from Napier to Auckland after hearing the news, looking at the back of the neck of a shinehead sitting in front of me on the Fokker Friendship, and singing under my breath: Jah would never give the power to a baldhead / Run come crucify the dread / Time alone, oh! time will tell / Think you're in heaven, but you living in hell ... a few weeks before that, Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington DC; later the Gipper famously said: Getting shot hurts. Then a few days after Bob died, on the 64th anniversary of the Fatima revelation, the Pope was shot in Rome. There were shots sounding all around the world: later that May, someone popped off six in the direction of the Queen, but they were blanks.

What else? Mitterand had just been elected in France, Red Ken Livingstone, now Lord Mayor, as Leader of the Greater London Council until it was abolished by Maggie Thatcher in 1986. Here in Australia we had Old Stoneface, Malcolm Fraser, as our PM and there was, just like there is now, a minerals boom going on. I couldn't believe how profligate people were with their money, pulling oodles of cash out of their pockets to pay for their ride and scattering notes across the floor of the cab, often without bothering to pick them up again. Boom or no boom, you don't find fifty dollar notes on the back seat any more like you did then. It was Fraser, often caricatured as one of those Easter Island heads, who said in his faintly bored patrician accent that Life wasn't meant to be easy, enraging just about everybody. No-one seemed to know that he was quoting Bernard Shaw, nor that he'd deliberately left off the second part of the remark: ... but take courage: it can be delightful!

What was I doing? What did I want? Hope for? Expect? It's hard to remember, I was so young then, not even thirty, and without much clarity of thought or purpose. I know I wanted to go to the Film School and I did apply under a program they ran where writers experienced in other forms could learn how to put screenplays together, but I wasn't really experienced in other forms and my application was declined. I can still recall, with blushing shame, a sentence from the personal statement you had to make in which I said that I was a dreamer, something I make allowance for, but no apology. If there was one sentence that condemned my application to failure, that was it.

And yet ... it was true then and probably still is now; I just wish I hadn't been so pompous about it. My idea was to learn how to write films, for a living, and then with the ease and comfort and unlimited time so purchased, write books. It's peculiar, looking back, to realise that I have written both books and films, but that the ease, comfort and unlimited time in which to do so have largely escaped me. They say you should be careful what you wish for because your wishes may come true and mine mostly have: it was the books and films that mattered to me, not the comfort and the ease, which I naively thought would somehow just come as part of the package. I never thought I would end up as one of the working poor, but that's what I am right now.

But I don't want to sound maudlin either, because I'm not: you have to play the hand you’re dealt. What really has changed between then and now is my clarity of purpose. Then, I was full of piss and wind about wanting to be a writer but in fact spent almost no time doing it: I shudder when I look back at the years I wasted, mooning around, because I really didn't know what I wanted to say or how to say it; whereas now, I'm relatively clear about what I want to do but more likely to lack the means and opportunity to do it. Driving a cab for a living has consequences for writing, one of which is that it's difficult, perhaps impossible, to embark on any long work ... not impossible per se, but impossible for me. I need to see a stretch of unfilled time ahead of me if I am to write a book, at least six months, and you don't get that as a working stiff. That's probably why the book that's coming out, or has already come out, Waimarino County, is made up of shorter pieces, because that's what I can do when I'm driving, write shorter pieces that require shorter stretches of concentration, a week perhaps if it's an essay, an hour or so if it's a post, like this, to a blog.

Meanwhile, this morning, when I woke at about six o'clock to the sound of rain falling and frogs creaking in the neighbour's pond out the back, I thought of that Bob Marley song again, partly because I heard a wonderful live set of him and the Wailers (at the Roxy in LA in 1976) on the radio the other night and partly because I knew I would be writing this today. So I came in here and called up the lyrics without remembering the beautiful middle section of the song which, when I read the words in the grey half light and heard the music begin to play in my head, sent (paradoxical) tears rolling down my checks ... and bring them again now to my eyes :

Oh, my sycamore tree, saw the freedom tree
Saw you settle the score
Oh, children, weep no more
Weep no more
Children, weep no more …

Dystopia : X Dreams

2007-05-04T15:42:00.000+10:00

You are adrift in a foreign country, of which you do not know even the name. You look it up in an encyclopedia; it is called Dystopia. You cannot read anything else in the book, which is written in a strange alphabet, like Cyrillic. Nor can you understand the signs on the shops or what people in the street are saying. Everything familiar has dropped away. You are as if abandoned in your own mind. Nevertheless, this place is also a simulacrum of a city you lived in in your youth, and you are able to use relicts of the map in your head to find your way to your sister's house. She is in the kitchen, with her woman lover. You want to break down and cry, and for her to hold you in her arms as once she did many years ago in another house in the city which this place resembles and is not. My life is very complicated, she says, by way of explanation. You leave without saying goodbye and go up past the shops at Three Lamps to catch the bus. No bus comes, so you start walking along the footpath towards K Road. You have no destination, you just want to keeping on moving. You lose yourself down this endless street, which extends further into the distance the longer you walk it.

You are in the kitchen of a cafe called the Verona. Out the back in the yard your partner in crime, a misshapen midget like yourself, is being executed with machetes. You don't know what you have done, nor who these people are, only that they are chopping him up, and you are next. You take a burning coal from the brazier to light your way and run out the front door of the cafe. The night is grey and shapeless. You cross K Road and go down a diagonal street opposite. Once you are out of sight of the Verona, you pause and look at the light in your hand. It gives forth a reddish glow but no heat and now you see it is not a coal at all but a tiny skull, intensely malevolent. In the instant you know that it is futile to run any further: whatever you do, you will be dismembered in your turn. You stand there paralysed with fear as dark assailants drift down the murky street towards you.

III

You are unsheathing a woman from her peacock blue dress, peeling it slowly over her opulent white breasts, which spill out into your vagrant hands. She is older than you, beautiful, not so much shy as unused to love-making. Past the rise of her belly, you see a greyish-white stripe running vertically down the centre of the black mass of her pubic hair, like a blaze on the forehead of a horse. As you plough her crease with your finger, seeking and finding wetness, she gasps and says: My husband hasn't found that spot in years! You begin to worry that you will ejaculate prematurely ... the spasmodic thudding of a copious flow of semen from the vas deferens and on down the urethra into the sticky gap between belly and sheets wakes you. A pearly light is gathered at the windows, and the birds are beginning. You have a curious feeling that this woman is real and is staying, or living, in one of the nearby houses. You feel that she too is lying awake in a mood of post-coital sadness, somewhere nearby. Perhaps she is the next door neighbour who smiled wanly at you as she wheeled out the recycling bin full of bottles emptied by a houseful of drunken men at the end of last weekend. What if such phantasms are real projections? And such experiences true encounters? If she were your succubus, would you then have been her incubus? A pity you cannot ask your neighbour for her dreams.

You go to one of your childhood homes to pick up the key to the mail box. It is built over and behind a Chemist shop on Main Street. Your mother is there in the kitchen, doing something, but you don't speak to her. You take the key and leave by the back door. Then you are on a train, going inland. As it approaches the place where you were born, you see old wooden houses gone silver with age. Over the rise and down the hill we come, there are many of us, converging, walking into the town. It is the return of the scattered. We mass, we come together, greeting each other. At a bend in the road is a massive, blasted tree, of enormous girth but almost without foliage. We are overcome with emotion at the sight of this tree. We are weeping. We have come home.

You are climbing in some red mountains, where the rock is folded like the grey sandstone outcrops on the hills above this valley. Coming to the top, you gaze across a limitless stretch of water where two seas meet. It is the place of leaping off of spirits. While you are looking out, the bowl of the ocean suddenly reverses, becoming one with the bowl of the sky, and standing before an immense void you are overcome with vertigo and fall fearfully into nothingness. You come to walking along a black shore where some fishermen and peasant farmers are lounging among boulders. They are French. You fill a wooden bowl with a steaming black liquid from their bubbling pot, and sprinkle black cheese upon it. With bravado, in the sight of those derisive peasants, you taste it. It's good. Then you hear a voice, saying the adventure is over and you must return. The mountains have gone a crusty, crystalline white, like snow. You cross over them without any difficulty at all and take the road inland; it is one down which you have travelled before in dreams. As it climbs past great fans of gravel onto a scrubby plain, you see ahead a coach and horses; there is a white hand, the same white as the mountains, emblazoned on the coachman's back. The man riding shotgun is keeping off wolves. As you struggle to catch up with the horses, you realise there are two wolves, both wounded, in a thicket of thorn bushes at the side of the road. They are a big shaggy yellow male and a smaller black female. Again the fear, so intense you have to wake yourself up to escape it. And, waking, you remember the red mountains, the black shore, the white hand and the yellow wolf, as if recalling a landscape from one of the further provinces of Dystopia.

A feast of poets, hostessed by a Matriarch—your mother!—to which one poet is refused entry. He is outside in the rain, denied the table where manna is devoured until someone who knows him arrives and brings him in. Wet, shivering, cold, he is a hungry ghost. His friends don't show. He can't explain, so he can't come in. Finally you (yes, you have been there all along) say you know him and that he is a dead man, he died of AIDS, but is a poet nevertheless. You go out, take his hand, lead him in and sit him down at the table. He is given bread and potatoes and soup, but he does not eat. He sits at the table in collar and tie, like a proper poet. Everyone is watching him. Soon, his friends will arrive. Then, perhaps, he will eat.

VII

You are looking at paintings your sister made four years before she died—the dates are written clearly upon the backs of the canvases, together with notes, jottings, fragments of sketches. They are superb paintings on long narrow scrolls, richly patterned, quite unlike any you have seen in real life. You know she made and hid these works so that they would be discovered after her death; behind the great sense of loss you feel is another, more complex emotion: you have always thought that her untimely death was at least partly due to her inability to find a way of expressing herself, yet here are works that are complex, mature, fully achieved, which she could not possibly have made without knowing what she was doing. On the back of the last canvas is a doodle in which you seem to read your own name. Sensing a message, you lean closer, only to find the lines mutating into a scribble pattern, a dense tangle of black, a mare's nest.

VIII

A woman is lying next to you in bed, a pale boy curled up on her other side, gushing sperm. You are ranting. How dare she have another in your bed? How dare she!? She listens in her quiet, calm way. She listens and says nothing. She will not do what you want. She will not abandon the pale boy at her other side.

You have come to interview a young woman. She is lying in a bed, wearing nothing but a man's shirt. You stretch out beside her, trying to conceal your erection below the edge of the bed cover. She giggles. Is that what you came for? she says. You smile and say nothing. She takes off her shirt: her breasts are small, pendulous, with protuberant nipples. She lies back, and you bend your head to lick between her legs. Everything is clean, pink and curled shut; she has no pubic hair. Her clitoris lies there like the little tongue on a cashew nut. She squirms when she realises what you are going to do, but she does not tell you not to. A panicky feeling, as of imminent, unwanted orgasm, rises, and you wake up. You have not come. You try to go back to sleep, but you cannot. You feel cheated, and you are, but only by yourself.

A mediaeval artist with a Polynesian tattoo is whispering in your ear. He is trying to seduce you. He says that although he has ended up in a waka—that is, in a wheelchair—he still wants you. He says that you are beautiful, more beautiful than your mother or your sister. His friend, the expressionist painter, is ripping wallpaper off the wall in a derelict house, exposing Disney comics pasted underneath, the brightly coloured, banal images fading, peeling. The tattooed man is still talking. It isn't just that he wants to fuck you; he wants to slit your throat while he's doing it. His voice mutters on like the sea. His tongue flickers in your ear. You stay where you are. You let him.

Luogo di Pietra

2007-03-29T20:44:00.000+10:00

I
Sogno

In the portico of the palazzo I pick up a stone the size of small egg. It is made of red chalcedony and there is a face carved into it, a fish perhaps, or a bird. A fish, it has lips. We walk out onto the shore, we are waiting for the tide, we will go swimming. Here the people bring their food wrapped in dense white silks spun by spiders and afterwards leave them on the sand for hermit crabs to find and crawl into. The grey-brown sea sluices in among the black rocks. I see flashes of green and purple as crabs drag their silks deeper into crevices or bury themselves in the sand. Tides are brief and violent on this coast, no sooner am I down among the bathers in the bottom pool than the water begins to recede; but instead of heading back we stamp our feet, we move our bodies, we dance. I see my sisters coming from the north, picking their way towards us among the gleaming outcrops. This must be an island, now we are on the other side, another coast, here are intricate, upstanding, tubular seashells in Etruscan colours, yellows and reds and browns, they are shaped like a kind of pasta, they are everywhere. I see in the crosswise falling light that there are many precious stones here, feldspar, chrysoprase, beryl and more, some are antique, they have been worked long ago and then abandoned to lie unthought upon this shore. A crook of amber with silver intaglio. A pile of lapis lazuli, mined in Bactria, that reveals an ineffable blue when water pours over it. Polished boulders of peridot, that green olivine. I pick up some shellfish and take them to the restaurant to ask if they are edible? Of course, the man says, and when you are tired of them, you can go further south and you will find other kinds of food, just as good, but different. A small boy with a stick and a hoop is playing across the tesserae of the courtyard. Later, as we are leaving, paying a small tariff for the privilege of having been here, I show my hostess the egg-like stone I have carried all through this dream. I want to return it to her but she smiles, ever gracious and says no, keep it, we have so much, goodbye ... I wake with my hand curled around a stone and begin immediately to work upon it, carving the vulvine lips just as I remember them, the crooked eyes, the slight ridge at the back that might be a woman’s forehead or might simply be a mark left there yet despite aeons of rolling in the sea.

II
Memoria

This is a transcription of a dream, made just after I woke, although not from the dream—that happened sometime in the night, when I did what you seem to have to do with dreams, committed it to memory. And yet ... this isn't really the dream either, or not all of it: for instance there was a prologue I've omitted, as we farewelled our hosts before leaving the palazzo. The images came, I think, from the palace in the film version of The Comfort of Strangers, which means it was in Venice, where I have never been.

And who is we? When 'we' were sitting on the beach watching the people eat their lunch out of spider-silk stockings, I was with my eldest sister; when I went down for a swim, I was alone but there joined a group of people who I did not know but with whom I felt companionable, the way you sometimes do on a dance floor in a nightclub. Afterwards, it was our younger sisters that we saw, coming from the north. They were very well dressed. And the beach looked like the coast south from Wellington. Then all my sisters disappeared from the dream but the ‘we’ remained.

The sea shells on the other beach—it was the west coast of Italy, north from Rome, where I have never been either—looked very much like one of the vessels Philip Clairmont was fond of painting. A vase, perhaps. Or a jug. Their colours were his colours, but I wrote Etruscan because of where the dream was set and also because I like the word. And then there is a little book of Tarquinia frescoes I have that was somehow mixed up with the Clairmont-esque images of sea shells. Which themselves resembled ornate, open-topped cinerariums.

As for the lapis lazuli, that wasn't actually in the dream, it came from a documentary about the Sumerians I watched the night before, in which a pile of greyish stone, looking a bit like schist, lay against a wall while a man sluiced water over it and that startling deep blue colour appeared as if by magic. The gleam of olivine that I've called peridot ... that was there, though indistinct and perhaps the stones were not as large as boulders.

Further, when I went to the restaurant, I went to the toilet first, with the shellfish, which I put in the hand basin; and it was while I was there that the little boy appeared. He peed and poohed on a water feature at the other end of the small room. It was later, after I came out, that I saw him with hoop and stick. The hoop was tiny and perhaps square, with paint flaking off it. The man I talked to, the restaurateur, was his father or grandfather. There were memories of a restaurante I went to at the Portuguese Settlement in Malacca, where I watched an old man delight in the play of his grandson.

The woman who spoke at the end, the one to whom I tried to give back the stone, was there for the whole of the dream: in the palazzo in the beginning as much as at the gate at the end. She was the hostess of the dream, its mistress, perhaps, or cicerone. The indispensable other component of the ‘we’. You could even say it was her dream not mine, she was entertaining me in it. I didn't describe her because I have no visual memory of her, she was a presence not an image. A presence and a voice.

Besides all that, the fact is that as soon as you commit a dream to memory, it changes from what it was into a version; and when you write down what you have memorised, it changes again and you have another version. Even so, the original dream survives in, and persists apart from, its versions. Perhaps the reason for writing down a dream is so that its persistence as itself may be recalled from the imperfect versions of it, both the one in memory and the one in writing.

III
Senso

Just before I went to sleep that night I had a moment of intense longing for Pearl Beach, where the street names are given after precious or semi-precious stones: cornelian, emerald, garnet, onyx, tourmaline. It was a Sunday night, I’d drunk a few glasses of red wine, I’d watched the program about Sumer in which water was poured over the pile of lapis and, when I lay down, heard the muted, jumbled, multifarious cacophony of the City and, for the first time since I left more than two years ago, wished it was the sound of the sea at Pearlie I was hearing. The feeling was the one you have when you want to go back home.

Pearl Beach, a friend used to say, is like an ear. Wherever in the village you are, up the back near the Biological Research Station, in the bush, among the houses or down by the shore, you will hear the sound of the sea. It is as if the promontories at either end of the strand, and the high hills behind, amplify sound the way our own interior hums are amplified when we put a shell to an ear. Even on quiet nights, there’ll be the intermittent sudden loud crack and boom as a seventh wave breaks and then sighs up the sand. When it is stormy, the sea will make its incessant, depthless roar.

So that was one complex: lapis lazuli, Pearl Beach, the sea. Were there others? A sequence in the Sumer documentary showed a cylindrical seal being rolled across wet clay to make an impression. The wedge-shaped marks—cuneiform—looked sharp and beautiful and mysterious. It’s thought that these hollow seals, which are found all over Iraq as well as and up and down the Indus Valley, were markers of identity. Signatures, perhaps. But the identities seem to have been commercial rather than individual or existential. You wore a seal around your neck and, when a deal was done, took it off and rolled it in the clay, which would later become a baked record of the transaction.

The marks cut into the seal are of course a negative that will roll out as a positive. The ability to conceptualise this negative / positive relation of signs—when did that arise? Does it have a relationship to the invention of mirrors, which happened several thousand years previous to Sumer? Were these early merchants alive to the ambiguity of carrying a negative of the self around their necks? These were some of the unanswerable questions I was mulling over as I drifted into sleep; their ultimate expression might be: who are we really?

There was another mystery alive in my mind, that came up in conversation with a friend the day before. He remarked, in passing, that the colours we see when we look at an object come from those parts of the spectrum of visible light that the object does not absorb. This means, where colour is concerned, that we see what isn’t there. Somehow this speculation fused in my mind with the notion of those old merchants carrying a negative of the self, or rather of their commercial identity, around their necks. As if we are all visible to others as what we are not; and yet, what we are not is also, and incontrovertibly, who we are.

These preoccupations—with seals, with identity, with the negatives and positives of stamp and image, colour and complement—manifested only obliquely in the dream. The vessel-like shells, or shell-like vessels, echoed the cylinder seals the way the sea echoes, though I could not say what kind of markings they had upon them. The woman who conducted the dream was a figure from antiquity, with that questionable identity people from the pagan past have for us: how did they see? feel? be in the world? My own presence there was as a guest, by inscrutable invitation, in a place where I can otherwise go only as an intruder.

IV
Teoria

It’s fashionable these days for science professionals to assert that dreams are nothing but the static of the mind. We sleep to recover mental and physical energy, for the body and the mind (they are not distinct) to carry out repairs. Some kind of sorting process is implied, like what happens when you defrag your computer: bits, or bytes, that belong together are joined, others that are irrelevant or unconnected get heaped up elsewhere. Or deleted. This seems reasonable enough, but doesn’t account for two vital components of dreams: their narrative construction and the powerful emotional resonance these constructions, or the images they are made out of, have for us.

Yet everybody knows how difficult it is to communicate the force and strangeness of a dream. As soon as you try to say what made it significant, that significance drains away like the last gasp of a wave into the sand. That narrative splendour, those images of wondrous power, become a banal jumble of fragments, the displaced and scattered stones of a mosaic. You find yourself trailing away into silence in the face of the other’s well-meaning incomprehension. This failure to communicate does not, however, empty dreams of resonance: that remains, a secret joy or wonder, a private source of sorrow, consternation or regret.

Does this mean the countries we explore in dreams, the people, both known and unknown, that we meet there, are part of our own minds? Yes, probably; and yet … another salient quality of dreams is that they point to a (un)reality beyond the self. To explain this by saying that we go, not into other worlds, but into the uncreated chaos of our minds, while a perhaps rational answer, somehow lacks conviction; while any other explanation does violence to sense in this rationally irrational age we live in. The conundrum appears unresolvable.

My dream was made out of various elements: nostalgia for the sea; the Philip Clairmont paintings I know so well and had just been looking at (as photographs) again; my life-long fascination with the lost worlds of antiquity; a feeling for stones that is almost as old; bits and pieces of waking memory; and some physical, indeed visceral facts that I needn’t go into here. Yet a summary of these precursors doesn’t encompass the dream. There are still incommensurables. Here are three of them.

I’ve been to this place of stones before: many years ago, not long after I came to Sydney, I dreamt of an otherwise bare stone house that had a vase of yellow flowers on the sill of one of its glassless windows. I left it and walked out along a rocky coast, where stood statues of white marble. They had black staring eyes and dark layered hair; they were busts of antique dignitaries; and I knew them to be Cretan, then, earlier, Sumerian. I was walking into the past; I began coming across blocks of the same white marble that were as yet uncarved. The dream ended on a stretch of coast that had behind it a lagoon, from the reeds of which marsh birds called: the world before men and women came upon it.

The most resonant of the images in this more recent dream was the intaglio-ed crook of amber lying half-buried in the sand. I looked at it with awe and trepidation; though I wanted to, I did not pick it up. Subsequently I learned that the crook and the mitre of Christian bishops derive ultimately from the staff carried, and the hat worn, by Etruscan haruspices. I knew this in the dream but did not learn it, waking, until after the dream had been and gone. It was an Etruscan haruspex who warned Caesar to beware the Ides of March; Etruria is buried in the Rome that tried to efface her.

The third aspect is inchoate, unformed: my cicerone. Though I retain no visual image of her, I can think of two women she resembles, or who resemble her. Both I met in the last year or so, and with each there was a frisson of recognition, as if we had known each other long before; circumstances dictated, on both occasions, that we had only one brief meeting, one conversation. But the woman in the dream, while alike to both, was neither of these. To describe her, I fall back on generalities, making her seem other than she was. I cannot really say who she is because I have not met her—yet. For, misguided as it sounds, I believe one day I will.

On Stones

2007-03-11T16:48:00.000+11:00

… within the collective of a meaning as stony as stones

Alan Brunton

When I first moved to Sydney I lived in Thomas Street, Chippendale, as it was then called, in a part of town that was once the lost suburb of Golden Grove and is now known as Darlington. It’s a small warren of narrow streets in an angle between busy Cleveland and Abercrombie Streets. A friend mentioned to me one day that you would sometimes find there unusual stones, seemingly brought from elsewhere and placed, for some inscrutable reason, on a corner, next to a doorway, beside a curb ... soon after he told me this, I found one of these stones in nearby Vine Street, not far from a big old sandstock curbstone that had the baleful letters K I L L inscribed in it, perhaps by some disaffected quarrying convict. I picked this stone up and kept it near me for many years, losing sight of it, unaccountably, when I left Pearl Beach to move back into the City a couple of years ago. It's probably still up there somewhere.

It was small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of my hand, irregularly shaped, very hard, and pitted all over. The upper surface was dark and rounded but underneath it was slightly concave and of a much paler colour, as if it had sat for a long time half in, half out of water. Someone I once showed it to told me there are stones like that lying around about the blowhole at Kiama, on the South Coast of New South Wales, so maybe that's where it came from. Who brought it? Thomas Street is very close to The Block, where an urban Aboriginal community hangs on despite the many efforts from local and state government instrumentalities to re-locate its people elsewhere. I used to wonder if these mysterious stones were an occult intervention in the psychogeography of the City but perhaps that's too romantic a notion.

And yet ... the other day, after I picked my sons up from Strathfield station, we were wandering back down Parnell Street to the car when I spotted another unusual stone, lying in the grass outside some double corrugated iron doors upon which the words GO ALL BLACKS have been painted. This, like the Kiama stone, is very hard and pitted all over, but it's quite a bit larger and the mazy surface below the pits is a rust orange colour. It's much more regular in shape; indeed, it looks as if it has been worked to make a flattened ovoid, though exactly how you'd work a stone this hard is beyond me. It's just the way there's a slight ridge around the circumference when you set it down flat. This stone also fits in my hand, but to hold on to it I have to keep my fingers and thumb curled around. It feels good to heft and would make an excellent grindstone; if it is any kind of artefact, that's probably what it's for.

The impulse to pick up and carry away these stones is very strong but it's not unquestionable. If they were placed, shouldn't they be left? Or are they placed so that they can be found and used again? I'm unlikely to grind with this stone but I will keep it and value it as long as it stays with me—and perhaps that's all a stone asks. As Czesław Miłosz says, stones always are because that is the way they like it. Yet who has not heard, at some estranged or estranging moment, the stones cry out to us?

Recently I read The Life of Muhammad by Ibn Ishaq, who was born in Medina about 85 years after the hijra of AD 622 and died in Baghdad 66 years later. His inaugural biography survives only in a version edited by Ibn Hisham, who himself died about 60 years after Ibn Ishaq. The English translation is by Hungarian Edward Rehatsek, made in Bombay and completed just before his own death in 1891. This voluminous work was, in its turn, edited by Michael Edwardes to make a slender, elegant book of about 150 pages, first published in 1964. Somewhat to my surprise, I enjoyed it immensely. I loved its mix of family and tribal history, folktale, hokum and divine revelation. Among the much I did not know about the subject is that the pre-Muslim Arabs of Mecca and Medina worshipped gods who were enshrined in stones. Nor did I know that the Ka’bah, which includes in itself the Black Stone that is thought to be a meteorite, predates Islam. You could perhaps say that the worship of stones has survived the advent of the Koran.

These disparate facts made me remember an encounter I was lucky enough to have, years ago now, with two remarkable stones from Africa. I knew, through a woman friend, a fellow called Ken de la Coeur. Ken was a Qantas steward who spent his time off in West Africa, buying all sorts of things that he would then bring back to Australia for resale. Anything from vast canopied wooden beds to tiny coloured beads made out of Venetian glass that had been melted down and then recast. Many of his things were rare and, since he had a good eye, all of them were beautiful. My friend met him because she used to go into the shop he had on King Street, Newtown to trawl through that vast array. Ken didn't actually sell much, that wasn't really the point. Instead, he amassed a unique collection of West African art, mostly sourced from select dealers whom he'd got to know, and visited on his regular trips.

Ken loved the people of West Africa as much as the things they made, and it was probably from one of the men he met there that he contracted HIV/AIDS. In time, he became too ill to keep the shop open, but he continued to run the business, such as it was, from his home in Redfern. After his last trip to West Africa, he held a soirée to which guests, mostly personal friends, were invited to come and view, maybe purchase, his latest acquisitions. We were among the first to arrive at that event, and the last to leave. Very late in the evening, when there were just a few people left, Ken brought out and unwrapped two stones that came, he said, from among the Dogon people of Mali. It is difficult describe the powerful aura possessed by these two stones. They were about the size of small cantaloupes, ovid, pinkish-red, one larger and darker than the other. I held on to them for a long time, avid for possession. Ken was asking a thousand dollars for the pair, too much for me at the time. In the end I did give them back and he re-wrapped them in their cloth and put them away.

Ken was from Melbourne. His family, although they loved him, had never accepted that he was gay; yet, when it came to the will, he left everything to them. What’s worse, he had never catalogued his collection. It was all in his head. You only had to point to something for Ken to tell you its origin, provenance, significance and all sorts of other detail about it. This knowledge went with him to his grave. As for the collection, the family gathered it up and shipped it to a warehouse in Melbourne. Later it was broken up and sold. Most of it would have been represented only by the tiny cardboard tags, with Ken's fine calligraphy on them, that he would attach to his things. They would include a brief description, where it came from, and a price—no more.

The stones, when I saw them, were not accompanied by any writing at all. They were probably, despite their size, of the kind worn in massive iron necklaces by Hogon or wise men; if so, they represented bones and were indeed a source of power. I often wonder what happened to them, whether they were sold, or if they were thrown out or abandoned—after all, what use to anyone is an anonymous rock? Or perhaps not, perhaps the energy that emanated from them meant that they have been acquired by someone who knows something of what they are. It is impossible to say.

I only had two things of Ken's: one of the afore-mentioned Venetian glass beads that he gave me, which I handed on recently to a dear friend on her fiftieth birthday; and a small bronze box, with three pairs of birds on the lid, facing each other, their beaks fused, that the friend through whom I met Ken gave me. And yet there is a third: an indelible memory of the Dogon stones.

III

In a 1993 interview, American writer Cormac McCarthy, speaking of his play The Stonemason, remarks: Stacking up stone is the oldest trade there is. Not even prostitution can come close to its antiquity. It's older than anything, older than fire. He is surely right to say that our relationship with stones is as ancient as we are. When we bend down and pick up a stone, we reprise one of the oldest acts of our kind. Holding it in the hand, turning it over, hefting it, imagining a possible use or place for it, our two hundred thousand—or perhaps five million—year old history collapses to a moment in time: this moment, this prospective scan of the next moment, the next act with which we re-confirm our deep, immemorial kinship with the earth.

But stones, while they are indisputably of the earth can, as the Black Stone of the Ka’bah reminds us, also come from the sky. And after all we live, as Hendrix said, on the third rock from the sun. Perhaps our fascination with stones, which even small children share, arises not simply out of the practical uses we may make of them, but from the sense we have that, handling them, we are handling the very material of creation. The Dogon stones were imagined as bones, which are both ancestral and prophetic—where we come from, what we will be; but the Dogon also elaborate a complex ontogeny that derives their ancestors from the stars, specifically, the Sirian system. The ancestor spirits, the Nommo, came down from there in flashes and booms then dived into water where they amphibiously persist. Or, after fatal squabbles between twins, and the dismemberment and dispersal of body parts, they inhabit stone shrines built over their scattered bones.

We can turn this the way a stone can be turned in the hand: isn’t it also the case that we believe that residues of our selves, our spirits or souls, inhere in stones? That the relationship we cultivate with particular stones is a two-way thing? And that as a result some stones are precious? I’m not only talking about jewels here, but also of something more common: those that become our familiars. Among the many stones I’ve found over the years is one I keep on my desk: a rough round red one that I picked up beside the road near Erua, in the shadow of Hauhungatahi—aka (locally) Browntop—on Highway 4. It’s volcanic and I like to think may have been hurled out of the crater of Ruapehu during one of its many eruptions. Whenever I pause to read back what I’ve written, my hand reaches out for this pyroclastic stone; I pick it up and heft it, feeling its weight; my sweat has formed a dark patina upon its upper side. It somehow connects me back to the very place in the land where I come from. And thus, although it remains just a stone, it’s also something else: a transmitter; and what it transmits is intelligence of the earth.

on the dark side

2007-02-25T20:15:00.000+11:00

from astronomy today

2007-02-10T16:53:00.000+11:00

Wanderers

Mercury
's old surface is heavily cratered like many moons. It is larger than most but smaller than Jupiter's Ganymede and Saturn's Titan; and much denser and more massive than any moon because it is made mostly of iron. Earth is the only planet more dense. Mercury rotates three times every two orbits around the Sun. Its orbit is elliptical, you might see the Sun rise, stop in the sky, go back toward the rising horizon, stop again, and then set over the other horizon.

Venus
is similar to Earth in size and mass but has a different climate. Thick clouds composed of sulfuric acid droplets and closeness to the Sun make it the hottest planet. No life of any sort has ever been found. Many things about Venus remain unknown, including the cause of mysterious bursts of radio waves. Venus' highest mountain is Maxwell Montes. Other notable features include numerous mountains, coronas, impact craters, tessera, ridges, and lava flows.

Earth
is the third planet from the Sun. Sphere-shaped and composed mostly of rock, over 70 percent of the planet's surface is water. A relatively thin atmosphere composed of nitrogen and oxygen. Earth has a single large Moon that is about a quarter of its diameter and, from the planet's surface, is seen to have almost exactly the same angular size as the Sun. With its abundance of liquid water, Earth supports a large variety of life forms, including potentially intelligent species such as dolphins and humans.

Mars
rotates, making most of its surface visible. Dark and light sand and gravel create a blotted appearance for the red planet. Winds cause sand-tinted features on the Martian surface to shift over time. The north polar cap is made of water ice and dry ice, there are fan marks from old water flows, and huge volcanoes leftover from ancient times. Visible on Mars are large dust storms in light orange. A particularly large storm is pouring out of Hellas Basin, erupting into a huge planet wide cyclone that continues even today.

Jupiter
is the largest planet in the Solar System. Due to its rapid rotation the planet possesses a bulge around the equator, giving it an oblate appearance. The outer atmosphere is segregated into several bands at different latitudes, resulting in turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries. One is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that has been going on since the seventeenth century. Surrounding the planet is a faint ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. There are also at least 63 moons, including the four large ones discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610.

Saturn
is the only planet of the Solar System that is less dense than water. Like Jupiter it has a rocky core at the center, a liquid metallic hydrogen layer above that, and a molecular hydrogen layer above that. Traces of various ices are also present. Saturn has a very hot interior and radiates more energy into space than it receives from the Sun. The rings of Saturn average one kilometre in thickness and are composed of silica rock, iron oxide, and ice particles. In the northern hemisphere the planet appears blue, but deep in the clouds the natural gold returns. It is not known why these clouds are gold.

Uranus
is faint and featureless when viewed in visible light. But enhanced images reveal the moons, rings, and clouds of this distant gas planet. Blue represents the deepest layers while the highest cloud features have a reddish tinge. Racing around the planet, high, bright clouds are seen to move substantially. Ring systems are common to the solar system's four giant planets. The main Uranian ring seems to vary in width and is brightest near the top. There are small Uranian moons beyond the ring system: Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda and Puck.

Neptune
's atmosphere has long light coloured cirrus like clouds floating high in it. Shadows of these clouds can be seen on lower cloud decks. Most of Neptune's atmosphere is made of hydrogen and helium, which is invisible. Neptune's blue colour comes from smaller amounts of atmospheric methane, which absorbs red light. Neptune has the fastest winds in the Solar System, with gusts reaching 2000 kilometres per hour. It is thought that diamonds may be created in the dense hot conditions that exist under the clouds-tops of Neptune.

Pluto
's horizon spans the foreground, gazing sunward across that distant and not yet explored world. Charon is a darkened, ghostly apparition with a luminous crescent against a starry background. Beyond Charon, the diminished Sun is immersed in a flattened cloud of zodiacal dust. Pluto's ruddy colours are based on existing astronomical observations while high atmospheric cirrus and dark plumes from surface vents resemble Neptune's large moon Triton. Craters suggest bombardment by Kuiper Belt objects.

sources include: NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day & Wikipedia

ludwig & the death masque of shagspear

2006-12-31T20:17:00.000+11:00

Marie Antoinette walks under trees, across brown dry curled up autumn leaves, towards the Palace of Versailles. We don't know what year it is, only that it was before 1793. It's not her fault, any more than her Hapsburg nose; but when we go close on the leaves we find they are actually dry curled up bodies of men & women incinerated in some historical catastrophe or other. We don't know what year it was, only that it is after 1793. Exactly 54 years later an indigent painter, having given up his job at the court of the archduke in order to nurse his sick half brother, Karl, buys in a second hand shop in Mainz a picture of a poet on his death bed, wearing laurels, with a tall thin candle burning by the bedstead. The small painting, oil on linen, is in a kind of fold-up wallet & bears the caption: Shakespeare. And a date, 1637. The painter, distraught at the languishing of his brother, from typhoid, becomes obsessed with the painting; he believes it is after an earlier work with the same subject, or perhaps even from a death mask. When he learns that there was, in the same collection that the painting came from, a plaster head, he begins a search for it in the antique & second hand shops of Mainz. Two years later, in the shop of man named Wilz, he finds it, buried under rags and other surplus stuff, & very dirty. He believes this to be the death mask of Shakespeare, as well as the inspiration for the painting. There is a date on the back, 1616. He thinks it will make his fortune. He takes the cast to England, where another half brother, Ernst, has been appointed the intimate companion & secretary to Prince Albert. The death mask of Shakespeare is celebrated in London, it is even exhibited at the British Museum; but since no-one can work out how it came to be in Germany in the first place, it is not authenticated & no-one, not even the Museum, will pay the 5000 pounds he wants for it. The painter, also a naturalist, attends a scientific conference in Edinburgh & travels in the Highlands. Later, his friend & patron, the zoologist Kaup, lends him the money to go to the Antipodes. He sails via Rio de Janeiro to Van Diemens Land, where he is valued for his skills at conversation & his expertise in the arts & sciences. After the gold rush he goes to Victoria, prospecting on the Bendigo fields & finding there enough gold to repay Kaup. Later he joins high society in Melbourne, & later still is appointed official artist on an Expedition of Discovery into the Interior, during which, persecuted by the Irish policeman who leads the party, he dies, aged fifty-two; though not before executing some luminous watercolours that still seem to tell of a world hithertofore unapprehended. In December the same year (1861) Prince Albert also dies & the indigent painter's half brother Ernst, lacking employment, returns to Germany, as does Shakespeare's death mask. It will be another hundred and fifty years before anyone dares authenticate it & even then there will be skeptics; by which time it will be known that the small oil painting shows, not Shakespeare, but Ben Jonson on his death bed. Meanwhile, Marie Antoinette moves slowly towards the palace, her delicate shoes crunching over the corpses of leaves, unconcerned, indeed oblivious, as to whether she is walking into or out of history.

Space Station over Cook Strait

2006-12-26T10:10:00.000+11:00

The (Un)Imaginable Future

2006-12-16T16:30:00.000+11:00

for SKR

1. Baboon, we have travelled far ...

Look closely at a human embryo within a womb & you will find a cloud of retroviruses swarming the placenta, the remnants of an ancient infection. Without viruses, we might still be laying eggs. For protection, a single layer of an embryo's cells merges into a continuous barrier, a syncytium. Where embryologists spotted spheroid retroviruses budding from cells in a baboon placenta, 30 years ago. A viral gene was making a protein, syncytin, that caused human placental cells to fuse. An artificial molecule, a morpholino, prevented embryos from making the cell fusing proteins. Most inherited viruses are muffled versions of the original infectious forms. The missing viruses vanished when the inherited forms prevented reproduction within the host. HIV may finally be conquered by ancient biological means. It could even lead to a new human species. These few nonprogressors could go on to form the new species. We have the capacity to prevent it being an evolutionary event for the first time.

2. Refugia

Europe is off the hook. The North Atlantic Ocean system ferrying warm water northwards from the tropics is not about to shut down. The warm interglacial period that began when the Ice Age started to wane 17,000 years ago is nearly at an end. Plant & animal species can survive trying times by retreating to safe havens or refugia—places as small as a sheltered valley or a mountain top. Phylogeographers work from both ends—past & present—to determine what species might do in the future. Refugia were the source of colonisation by plants & animals after the Ice Age. The world’s deserts, from Africa & Asia to Australia, have been virtually ignored. In the wet tropics, the climatic & biological requirements of many different species have been determined, & where they held out in the past. The secret is to combine paleo data with genetic information about living species.

3. The Return of the Trees

Forests are increasing across the world after centuries of being destroyed. The increase is most rapid in Spain & the Ukraine, the decrease quickest in Nigeria & the Philippines. The great gains are in China & the United States. Brazil & Indonesia are losing the most. This great reversal could stop the styling of Skinhead Earth & by 2050, expand global forests by 10% or 300 million hectares, the area of India. Where forest coverage is stable. Forests expanded in Europe after the Black Death & diminished again in the Age of Exploration. French forestry records dating back to the Middle Ages show an arboreal renaissance unaffected by population increases. Wealth is an indicator in reversing deforestation. All countries with a GDP per capita higher than Chile’s ($US4600.00) have increased their forest cover since 1990. Replanting in China offsets Brazil’s annual loss of 3.1 million hectares. Indonesia felled a vast area of forest but harvested less timber than the US, which gained growing stock. The main danger to forests is fast-growing, poor populations who burn wood to cook, sell timber for cash & fell trees to plant crops. Harvesting biomass for fuel forestalls the restoration of land to nature.

4. Archaeology of the Brain

Above ground testing of nuclear bombs between 1955 & 1963 led to a big increase of radioactive carbon-14 in the atmosphere around the globe. Levels have since tapered off as the carbon-14 was absorbed by the oceans, plants & animals. A person born in 1963 has twice as much carbon-14 in their system as someone born in 1999. This carbon-14 bomb spike provides a unique opportunity to date human tissue. Carbon-14 levels in the DNA of cells reflect atmospheric levels at the time the cells were born. Levels in the neurons from all areas of the cerebral cortex are as high as the atmospheric levels at the time of each individual’s birth. Neurons of the cerebral cortex are thus the ones you were born with. We don’t make new neurons in this decision making region of the brain. Having a permanent population of cells that store information about language, maths & logic over a lifetime may be better than growing new naïve cells that have not been exposed to years of experience, as is the case with fish & frogs. Human muscle cells are fifteen years old, bone, ten years, liver, two, red blood cells, 120 days, outer skin layer, two weeks, gut lining cells, five days; unlike your hippocampus, which regenerates, your front brain is the same age as you are.

Baboon ... adapted from: The Australian, 1.11.06;

Refugia adapted from: The Australian, 8.11.06;

The Return of the Trees adapted from: The Australian, 22.11.06;

Archaeology of the Brain adapted from: The Sydney Morning Herald, 14.12.06.

every cloud ...

2006-12-11T10:42:00.000+11:00

Just heard from AUP that they will publish a collection of shorter pieces of mine, under the title Waimarino County, in May next year. This is the image I'd like to see on the cover:

It's maybe not clear, but that's a photo taken from one stage coach of another, further on down the Tohunga Road on the south-western slopes of Ruapehu, the mountain you can see above the bushline ahead. I grew up not far away from here, to the left of the picture as you look at it, in the 1950s ... but this image is from the early 1900s, about a century ago from now.

2006-12-07T12:02:00.000+11:00

Exeunt

After
the fire, the long ice. Antic clashing among the shadowy rocks. At the beginning, before what would be. After the ice, water. Abracadabras of flannel flowers, doves erupting from the sleeve of god. Apples of Sodom. Arrival of the always that went everywhere. Après le déluge … a forgetting, a wandering wondering where are the true states of mind. Among the myriad that we pass through, or that pass through us, each minute, hour, day, which are real? Areal?
All

Before
forgetting is remembering. Before remembering, mind. Before mind … god? Bruised beyond redemption, broken in pity, biblical. Besotted, fearful, today you remember everything. Bountiful memory! Bright lie! Begin at the beginning and go all the way to the end that has not yet come. Bolder than bold, blacker than black, botched or not, the whole kit and caboodle stretches out before and behind you. Both the track and the tears; both landscape and inscape.
Blessed

Could
it be so? Child of god, where do you wonder? Can you say or is it a conundrum without issue? Cordillera in the consciousness, cliffs of fall, concussive recitative … let us wander the shores of unknown seas. Cross into the beyond of yesterday, that future lost forever in the past. Criminal, coeval, conspiratorial, caught. Carelessly scattering the vowels and consonants that hithertofore we have clung to, or exchanged. Clouds of unknowing call us.
Come

Damnation
is the fate of those who abandon god. Does the same apply to we who have been abandoned by god? Do you know the answer to this riddle, strange traveller? Dolce et decorum est pro patria mori. Don’t forget: the last refuge of a scoundrel. Days and nights in the wilderness. Daguerreotypes of ghosts never before seen, never seen again. Down is the name of a country we cannot live in or leave. Delights of paradise whispered in the ears of the damned.
Demon

Eidola
mass at the doors of perception. Endlessly suggestive of that which might have been, might yet be. Eidetic, erogenous, never less than weird. Except that … who can say what form a phantom or a spectre might take when seen from the other side of forever? Eye of god, inhuman, pitiless, empty of sentiment, stark as the last sunlight on Girdlestone peak … execrable. Exiting that gaze into the malign uncertainties of our own, they persuade us of the existence of angels.
Eon

First
there was nothing. Finally, nothing again. From then to now to when, what? Fandangos of god’s superlative elegance, or the finangling of demons? Fricassees of atomic moles, genetic soup, hollow cell membranes frozen inside meteors dropping into Canadian lakes. Fur flies in the north. Fivestones. Fissile material. From the far reaches, a murmur of voices, cosmic weeping at the margins of the black forest, the black ocean, the black sky. For what did we come? For why?
Fall

God
’s blood runs in your veins. God’s wounds are your wounds. God’s gonads too. Gnomon of the inarticulate sun, guide of the lost, globule of the death star. Given that these are your words, is this then your world? Going towards followed by coming away from. Ground of meaning turned over to an archaeology of exchange in which the other is always substituted for the one. Gloss of an expunged text, grisaille of infinity, cadaver of the perfected body.
Gone

Hell
is the absence of god. Here and now, you suffer all possible torments. Hush-a-bye baby on the tree top. Hoarstones trouble your sleep, the nightmare shrieks down the alleys of your mind. Hope there is in both hopeful and hopeless. Happiness cannot be pursued, not any longer. However it comes, that is how it will go. Higher than light, into the hypnagogia, that sphere beyond spheres, your haploid self ascends. Head in hand, hand to heart, heart in mouth, mouthing.
Horror

Ion
accused of unspeakable acts in the forum, sent into exile. Ithyphallic god of nomads at the edge of the Imperium. Isinglass, mica, finings, glue. In this wine we drown, by this ivy we are strangled, on this isthmus we shall forever stray. Irrefragable, the doom written in the irade: I do not wish ever to hear his name again. In that moment, a chorus of sighs rose from all around, the voices of stones saying over and over again the one impossible word, incunabula of his loss.
Incest

Jah
lives. Jesters unique as kings, one for each. Joking aside, there is no other way of understanding the loneliness of regency. Journeying, sharing the jeroboam, the fool and the monarch shudder to an alcoholic halt under jacinth skies. Jimson weed sends you blind. Jiving with Jesus sends you … just a closer walk with thee … through this world mysterious and vague … Juxtapose half of six billion with their other halves, what do you get? … juvenescence of the year/Came Christ the tiger.
Joy

Kilter
was something he was always out of, in the same way that he was never kempt. Kissed the Blarney Stone, lying on his back and stretching out over the void to place his lips where god could not reach them. Knew that he would never be lost for words again. Keening. Killing him softly with their song. Kurdaitcha man came one night, stole a kidney, since then, the other has been working overtime. K.O. is O.K. backwards. Kilometres to go before we sleep.
Key

Love
late walking in the aisles of rain. Light of evening, Lissadell. Lissom, lubricious, licit … lost. Limbo of libido, Limpopo of lust exiled to the dead heart, limit of thought, god’s lying end. Landloper’s song fades past Tungsten Gate where Xanthe waits no more at the caravanserai. Loveless, lovelorn, lovesick, yet still you love. Lustra pass. Luteous years, tawny with longing. Later, after the rain and the tears and the night’s white sighs, you learn again how to listen.
Loam

Meandrine
paths, through coral, through mind, winding. My god, my god, why hast though forsaken me? Meaning does not inhere. Memory wastes. Materiality fades in the face of the monstrance. Moon, moraine, monosyncline, monsoon. Make of this what you can, for it is certain that you will (l)anguish without protection once god has died. Moreover, he dies again each time he is denied. Mons veneris, unclimbable. Mourning. Miracle is not to have been born at all.
Mystery

Nuncios
reflect upon diplomatic slights, remembered for centuries. Nuncupate wills bequeath only resentment. No-one knows how to end the blood feud between god and the gods. Nor even God himself … not love that I’m running from, just the heartache I know will come. Nepenthes priced beyond your range, nates of loss, neuralgia of the wizened hand. Never again, never before, never more, never never. Nymph in thy orisons … Now anticipates next, next recalls last.
Nectar

Opium
of the masses, law of the discarded middle, oxygen of love, orisons, torsions … O.K. means orl korrect (joc.). On the far side of the ocean, a chemical sea, washing the ferrous sand with its salts. Oleaginous life, clinging to the margins. O western wind, when wilt thou blow? Omphalos. Omit no time. Oligocene to now, epoch of the primates. Opus terminus of the god of all this … order. Or chaos, whichever you prefer. Orb and oblate of the orient. Enceinte.
Old

Primate
of all England, a monkey in robes, wearing a mitre. Primordial delusion, priapic vanity, primum mobile. Perhaps it is time to leave the gods to their own devices, perhaps god’s away on business. Pulsars at the furthest edge of the universe engage his attention. Persuasion will do no good, prayer is useless, promises will not be kept. Puer aeternis in a gavotte with a senescent priest. Pinions engage the clockwork of creation. Plangent, placid, all but played out.
Pluto

Quean
of the imaginary, quatorzain of love, quaternary delusion. Quite why we are here nobody really knows. Quantity or quality remains an incommensurable choice. Quavery voice of the aeons proclaims the eternal recurrence of all things. Questions without answers, answers without questions. Quandary: quarks quark, queers queer, quid or quiddity, who knows? Qur’an is god’s last book? Quiet of evening, stillness of water, faint braille of stars on black quilt of sky.
Quill

Recent
retreats of ice recall earlier epochs, a watery world. Radio love broadcasts on all frequencies, without ratiocination. Railways run to the end of the earth, a train leaves the last platform and climbs into the sky. Round the rugged rocks the ragged rascals … three, three the rivals. Rapturing in a ratskeller. Raucous birds calling from the future, the one god will not see. Reptiles wore feathers in the Jurassic, a rubefaction of time. Rehearsal for undermining, catastrophic reprise.
Rain

Snake
in the garden, saying: Ye shall not surely die. Seismic shift, shatter of bones, eyes opening on the unseen. Saying: Seek and ye shall find. Serein, falling from a cloudless sky, at evening. Saraband or serenade, swansdown of sublunary light, skin sere like old leather. Shofar sounds on the baked plains of Jericho, walls do not fall. Sheer drop, shot silk, satin and lace. Seductive world, how not to eat of god’s apple? Sea pink, sea kale, sea angel, sea horse. Silver and gold.
Song

Triage
of gods, who shall we examine first? Take which fiction to task? Tragacanth for the holy spirit will come, by tumbrel, from the west. Twice told tales of fathers and sons. Tryst or triste? Tomb of reality, trapeze without net, machine without a ghost: this Universe. Tuberous spring, tubercular summer, tumult of autumn, winter of total war. Tessera to enter the Coliseum, where tranced men and beasts contend. Tertian fever. Trumpery of a tired theology.
Time

Umbelliferous
dark. Understanding nothing but, yes, standing under the stars. Unreal City, the capital of Ultima Thule. Unmarked trams spark through the murk, rendezvousing with the Underground at Central. Until you have been unsexed you will not know god’s uttermost ecstasy. Utopia the last stop on the suburban line. Uvular speech. Usurious, uxorious, useless man. Undine spoke last of all, what she said made no sense to anyone not already a water nymph.
Urn

Venusian
inspection of Earth discloses conditions inimical to life as they know it. Verglas clogs in their lungs. Viruses insinuate themselves into their DNA, visiting the future by proxy. Vaster than empires and more slow. Voluptuous time, veridical miracle. Vomer broken by a blow to the face. Vulgarity of blood on god’s lips. Vatic speech interrupted in the forum by an irruption of Goths, Huns, Vandals. Vulcanized rubber on wheels of carts trundling towards eternity.
Vulva

Windows
glazed with yellow light on god’s last afternoon in the world. Worth every minute, it was. Wandered into the Wendy house, looking for laughter. Wasn’t there. When, when and whenever death closes our eyelids … We cannot say why, nor can we stop asking. Wolfram mined in dark valleys, welded to make the adamantine gates, out in the autonomous zone. Whirled beyond the stars, wreathed in sorrow, wrecked. Wraiths at his wittering lips, awaiting the end.
Wind

Xanthe
heartless, unfaithful, beautiful, where did you go? Xoanon of some mysterious god, fallen from heaven, worshipped by barbarians, why? X marks the spot where I wept for you, the yellow acids of the earth staining my skin. Xenophobes gather under the portico, announcing my exile. X rays of my heart show a blackened core, drier than dust. Xeroxs of you proliferate everywhere I go, copies of copies of copies, each generation a little more blurred than the last.
Xylem

Yare
yare, good Iras; quick. Ytterbium or yttrium? You cannot say where in the lanthanides this silvery or greyish metal occurs. Years later, we come again to the yarborough where no number over nine is admitted. Yardbirds rehearse their back and forth, endlessly. Youth is wasted on the young; yet how could it be otherwise? Yawing of a yacht from its course; yaws, passed venereally, colouring the skin red. Yes, anticipate the godly light. Y chromosome, yearning for an X.
Yield

Zac
tanner, a sixpence for her shoe ... Zener cards prove that intuition exists, zig-zagging through consciousness like an unused road. Zenith of possibility, zen of nullity, immured in the zenana. Zodiacal light in the east, tall triangle, after sunset. Zircon nights we danced heedlessly away, in another time, before we lost each other unaccountably and forever. Zygote of the single flight, zeroth of love, gamin inexistent and desired as god, unzip my chest and so remove my heart.
Zero

Elurea

2006-12-01T11:52:00.000+11:00

Sometimes in dreams you meet people who seem to all intents and purposes, real. And I'm not talking about succubi, not this time. It was up in Paddington, I was working a shift, but had for some reason taken a break. At the bar of a hotel in Oxford Street, ordering a (soft) drink. She came up beside me, smiled and suggested I ask her out sometime. To a movie or a dance. So I did.

She was slender and small, though not tiny. Later that same evening we were walking together in another part of Oxford Street, holding hands. Her hands were different from each other, the left was littler and a bit wizened, the right fuller and smoother. A close friend of mine was with us, I knew she was looking at us holding hands and wondering what it meant.

Later still, back at the cab, which was in fact my own car, parked under dark trees near the Paddington Town Hall, I said, yes, I'll take you back to Elurea. This meant somehow fitting her pushbike into the boot of the car, but we managed it. And off we went. The final image of the dream was a map reference, Elurea, far to the south of the City, north facing, on the shores of the Georges or the Hacking River. I woke with a strong sense of the sweetness of person of this nameless woman. Wanting to see her again. Absurd as that sounds.

So I went to my Sydway for a look in the south ... the suburb that corresponds to the map in the dream is Illawong, somewhere I've never been, a place I was only vaguely aware of, on the south bank of the Georges River. Yesterday, it's true, I was looking at Sydney's outer suburbs, but I was looking in the north: at Glossodia, Ebenezer, Sackville, Maroota and Fiddlertown.

Then, I googled the dream name, trying various spellings: both Illuria and Eluria are places with established, if fictive, existences, so I settled on the spelling above, even though, in the dream, I thought it was probably Illuria we were going to.

How now will I find my way back to Elurea? And, when I do, will she be waiting there for me? By the wharves, perhaps, at the end of Letter Box Lane?

gone to god

2006-11-30T18:51:00.000+11:00

After yesterday's post (was it?) I almost remembered what this site was meant to be about. At the beginning. Almost but not quite. And, I don't really want to. As if some things were better left dead. Admonitions that we need entertain no longer. Again ... this sense of instability, a wandering wondering what is the real state of mind? Among the myriad that we pass through, or that pass through us, in a minute, an hour, a day, which one is the real? A real? All.

dreaming's end / ending's dream

2006-11-29T13:21:00.000+11:00

Sometimes life just seems to stop. Or, it is elsewhere. In the Andromeda galaxy perhaps. The absence of god, in whom you do not believe, seems more profound than ever. Divinity further away than the furtherest quasar. These periods of non-life come without warning and last for eternity or for a day, whichever is longer. Several days, a week, a fortnight go by and nothing happens. It isn't that the sun does not rise, the moon wax or wane, traffic circulate like blood platelets in the City's hardening arteries. It's not that eating and sleeping, working and not working, walking, reading, talking, remembering and forgetting cease to engage or distract you. But, through and by and because of and besides all that, life has stopped. Then one day it starts again, and it is only now you can say: Life had stopped.

2006-11-13T09:54:00.000+11:00

Nothing has changed here. The privilege of stones?
They always are, for that is the way they like it.

Czesław Miłosz: from The Rising of the Sun, VII, Bells in Winter

Si j'ai du goût, ce n'est guères
Que pour la terre et les pierres.

This "taste for stone" is a theme in modern literature that emerges in the early days of Romantic writing and flows like a submerged river through practically all serious works in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It stems from the classical feeling that stone was a dead substance and therefore belonged to a separate realm of being. Hades, for instance, was stone, as was the dead moon. The firm Greek sense that stone does not grow distinguished it radically from things that do. And yet it was of mineral substance that everything was made: an organism was an interpenetration of matter and spirit.

Put the understanding another way: science and poetry from the Renaissance forward have been trying to discover what is alive and what isn't. In science the discovery spanned three centuries, from Gassendi to Niels Bohr, and the answer is that everything is alive.

Poetry has a similar search, and its answer is not yet formulated, as it cannot understand nature except as a mirror of the spirit ...

Guy Davenport: from Olson, in The Geography of the Imagination, Forty Essays

more about stones

2006-11-10T22:04:00.000+11:00

When I first came to Sydney in 1981, I lived in Thomas Street, Chippendale, as it was then called, though properly it was Darlington and sometimes known as Redfern. Near one of the lost suburbs, Golden Grove, which now survives only as a street name. Anyway. A friend mentioned to me one day how you would sometimes find unusual stones around there, stones that looked as if they had been brought from elsewhere and placed, for some inscrutable reason, on a corner, next to a doorway, on a curb ... not long after he pointed this out to me, I found one of these stones in nearby Vine Street, not far from a big old sandstock curb that had the baleful letters K I L L inscribed in it, as if by some disaffected quarrying convict. I picked up this stone and kept it near me for many years, losing sight of it, unaccountably, when I left Pearl Beach to move back into the City a couple of years ago. It's probably still up there somewhere.

It was small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of my hand, irregularly shaped, very hard, and pitted all over. The upper surface was dark and rounded but, underneath, it was slightly concave and of a much paler colour, as if it had sat for a long time half in, half out of water. Someone I showed it to once told me that there are stones like that lying around about the blowhole at Kiama, on the South Coast. Maybe that's where it came from. Who brought it? Thomas Street is very close to The Block, where an urban Aboriginal community hangs on despite the many efforts from local and State government instrumentalities to re-locate them elsewhere. I used to wonder if these mysterious stones were an occult intervention in the psychogeography of the City but perhaps that's too romantic a notion.

And yet ... the other day, Friday, after I picked my sons up from Strathfield station, we were wandering back down Parnell Street to the car when I spotted another unusual stone, lying in the grass outside some double doors to somebody's garage or back yard. This, like the Kiama stone, is very hard and pitted all over, but it's quite a bit larger and the surface below the pits is a rust orange colour. It's much more regular in shape, indeed, it looks as if it has been worked to make a flattened ovoid, though exactly how you'd work a stone this hard is beyond me. It's just the way there's a slight ridge around the circumference when you lie it flat. This stone also fits comfortably in my hand, but only with my fingers and thumb curled around it. Feels good to heft. Would make an excellent grindstone and, if it is any kind of artefact, that's probably what it's for.

The impulse to pick up and carry away these stones is very strong but it's not unquestionable. If they are placed, shouldn't they be left there? Or, is it the case that they are placed in order that they be found and used again? I'm unlikely to grind with this stone but I will keep it and value it as long as it stays with me - and perhaps that's all a stone asks. Czeslaw Milosz says somewhere that stone is stone because it only wants to be stone. And yet ... who has not heard, at some estranged or estranging moment, the stones cry out to us?

The Dogon Stones

2006-11-05T13:55:00.000+11:00

Last year I filled out a coupon from a newspaper and subsequently received a free copy of the 11th edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World ... in the same act committing myself to buying four other books from the relevant source. Knew this was a mistake but wanted the Atlas ... love the Atlas. Took months of distraction to decide which among those available I would choose for my four purchases; meanwhile the junk mail quotient in my letter box increased exponentially. Because the original source misspelled my name, I can always tell when they've handed it on to someone else. All sorts of dubious people. Anyway, settled finally on a book for each for my sons - The Siege and Fall of Troy, Robert Graves' re-telling of The Iliad; The Wind in the Willows; - plus Brewer's Dictionary of Rogues, Villains, & Eccentrics (a disappointment); and The Life of Muhammad.

Have just started to read this last, by Ibn Ishaq, who was born in Medina about 85 years after the hijra of AD622 and died in Baghdad 66 years later. His inaugural biography survives only in a version edited by Ibn Hisham, who himself died about 60 years after Ibn Ishaq. The translation is by Hungarian Edward Rehatsek, made in Bombay and completed just before his own death in 1891. This voluminous work was, in its turn, edited by Michael Edwardes to make a slender, elegantly produced and written book of about 150 pages, first published in 1964. Somewhat to my surprise, I am enjoying it immensely. I love its mix of family and tribal history, folktale, hokum and divine revelation. Among the much I did not know about the subject is that the pre-Muslim Arabs of Mecca and Medina worshipped gods who were enshrined in stones. Nor did I know that the Kaba, which includes in itself a Black Stone that is thought to be a meteorite, predates Islam. You could perhaps say that the worship of stones has survived the advent of the Koran.

These disparate facts made me think of an encounter I was lucky enough to have, years ago now, with two remarkable stones from Africa. I knew, through my girlfriend at the time, a fellow called Ken de la Coeur. Ken was a Qantas steward who spent his time off in West Africa, buying all sorts of things that he would then bring back to Australia for resale. Anything from vast wooden canopied beds to tiny coloured beads made out of Venetian glass that had been melted down and then recast. Many of his things were rare and, since he had a good eye, all of them were beautiful. My girlfriend met him because she used to go into the shop he had on King Street, Newtown to trawl through that vast array. Ken didn't actually sell much, that wasn't really the point. Instead, he amassed a unique collection of West African art, mostly sourced from select dealers whom he'd got to know, and visited on his regular trips.

Ken loved the people of West Africa as much as their art, and it was probably from one of the men he met there that he contracted HIV. In time, he became too ill to keep the shop open, but he continued to run the business, such as it was, from his home in Redfern. After his last trip to West Africa, he held a soirée to which guests, mostly personal friends, were invited to come and view, perhaps purchase, his latest acquisitions. We were among the first to arrive at that event, and the last to leave. Very late in the evening, when there were just a few people still there, he brought out and unwrapped two stones that came, he said, from among the Dogon people of Mali. It is difficult for me describe the aura possessed by these two stones, one of which was male, one female. They were about the size of a small cantaloupe, ovid, reddish, one larger and darker than the other. I held them for a long time and did not want ever to let them go. Ken was asking a thousand dollars for the pair, far too much for me to consider buying them. In the end I did give them back and he re-wrapped them in their cloth and put them away.

Ken was from Melbourne. His family, whom I met at the wake, although they loved him, had never accepted that he was gay; and yet, when it came to his will, it turned out he left everything to them. Perhaps a worse tragedy was, he'd never catalogued his collection. His knowledge was extraordinary but most of what he knew wasn't written down. It was all in his head. You only had to point to something for Ken to tell you in detail its origin, provenance, significance and all sorts of other information about it. This knowledge went with him to his grave. As for the collection, the family gathered it up and shipped it to a warehouse in Melbourne. Later, I understand, it was broken up and sold. Most of it would have been represented only by the tiny cardboard tags, with Ken's fine calligraphy on them, that he would attach to his things. They would include a brief description, the location it came from, and a price - no more.

The stones, when I saw them, were not accompanied by any written description at all. They were probably, despite their size, of the kind worn in massive iron necklaces by Hogon or wise men; if so, they represented bones and were a source of power. I often wonder what happened to them, whether they were sold, or if they were thrown out or abandoned - after all, what use to anyone is an anonymous rock? Or perhaps not, perhaps the power that emanated from them meant that they have been acquired by someone who knows something of what they are. It is impossible to tell. I only had two things of Ken's: a small example of one of the afore-mentioned Venetian glass beads that he gave me, handed on recently to a dear friend for her fiftieth birthday. The other is a small bronze box, with three pairs of birds on the lid, facing each other, their beaks fused, that my girlfriend gave me. I do not know where the little card that came with it is now, though I may still have it. And yet there is a third: an indelible memory of the Dogon Stones.

Tongaporutu

2006-11-05T11:02:00.000+11:00

Diptych

2006-11-04T13:05:00.000+11:00

One

Bruno’s Indian said something wise as I was leaving but, like so much of the wisdom that has come my way, I have forgotten it. He was a tall, slender young man, the foreman of the gang of Gujarati illegals who picked Bruno’s apples and pumpkins, but even his natural authority could not make them work on festival days, nor on the days when, for reasons that were obscure, they became spooked. I saw him in the rearview mirror, dressed in white, standing with my sister and her husband as I drove away from the sheds on the rich river flats down by the Tuki Tuki and then on out of the valley.

The back seat of the rental car was full of crisp red apples and my sister had given me some of the strong dope they grew in a favoured spot in the orchard. I was going to Wellington for an art opening, via south Hawkes Bay and the Wairarapa, intending to stop in a town of my youth to visit my father’s grave. I was happy to be free and untrammelled on the road, but throughout the morning and the early afternoon, a troubling image kept surfacing and floating before my mind’s eye: the bones of my father’s skull coming through the flesh down there in the earth where we'd buried him a couple of years before.

After I left Masterton I smoked a joint rolled previously which, while it did not banish the visage of the skull beneath the skin, did overlay it with intensely nostalgic images from my boyhood; so that when I crossed the bridge over the Waiohine, just north of Greytown, and saw kids swimming as I used to do in the swift green waters between the piles, I turned off the road and drove down the short track to the stony river beach where they had left their piles of clothes and their towels draped over gorse or broom bushes. But it was no longer possible for me to join them, so soon enough I reversed and turned about and bumped back up to the highway and on.

The graveyard is south of the town, with curiously shaped concrete wings over the gate that do not meet to make the arch they suggest. I had never explored it properly before, and was surprised to find it segregated: a small Jewish section and then the Catholics there on the right as you went up the drive, with a row of truncated macrocarpas on the left, behind which my father lay. Over the cattlestop and into the main part of the cemetery. I stopped the car near a small wooden shed built next to the boundary fence, climbed out, stretched. I was feeling strange already, otherwordly, perhaps trepidated, if that’s a word.

It was a still, partly cloudy afternoon, alternately bright and shadowed, and quiet except for the carolling of magpies from the tall pine trees up the back and the seemingly grief-stricken, intermittent cries of sheep from the surrounding paddocks. I walked over to the Sexton’s shed and peered through the dusty, spider-webbed window. Its floor was uneven, a turmoil of earth, as if someone had tried to excavate within. A broken shovel lay sideways in the dirt and there did not appear to be any back wall to it. That chaos of scumbled filth went forever. It was like a vision, not so much of hell, but of some brute vacuum beyond both heaven and hell. I felt myself being pulled into that vortex and it was an effort to drag myself away. The illusion so strong I went around the back to check if there was in fact a wall there …

A low hedge grew over the fence on that side of the graveyard and from in amongst its tangled greenery, its twiggy darkness, I could hear the rustling of some small animal or bird. There was another shed further along, I walked towards it as if impelled by the foreboding atmos around me. It was more miniature barn than shed, with double wooden doors, one of which was half open, the other secured with a bolt. The open side held more tools, a mower, fuel cans and so forth. I shot the bolt on the other door, it creaked open. Inside was a pile of yellow straw and laid on the straw, unaccountably, was the mummified body of a whippet or a small greyhound. The roar building in my ears became louder, I swayed, dizzy, faint. The body of the dog filled me with horror, the rustling in the hedgerow likewise. I closed the door and stumbled away.

Up the back of the graveyard, under the huge, raggedy pines, is a rectangular field in which are a couple of dozen massive, elaborate, nineteenth century graves all set on a diagonal with respect to the parameters of the enclosure. As I walked into that field, the sun went behind a cloud, the magpies flew up, with loud cries, out of the pines and away. The roaring in my ears crescendoed and I seemed to hear, above or below or amongst it, the grumbling voices of the dead town fathers and mothers buried here, a stern and heartless rehearsal of the Anglican pieties that ruled the town. The graves were disposed, I thought, on a ley line that stretched, past the brown hills to the northeast, over the manifold ocean, all the way back to some dim, occulted village in England.

No! I said, or shouted, though not out loud. No, no, no! I would not submit to their dread authority, I was not subject to their haunting, they could not own my soul the way they thought they owned the soul of the town. Their dead hand could fall where it would, but not on my sleeve, nor my shoulder, not on your life. I walked among the old graves, reading the names, muttering my refusals, and heard the ancient voices diminish to a murmur of discontent then die away into the dark and bright light of the afternoon.

Whatever it was, or had been, was over. I left that baleful field and made my way back through the military section to where my father lay. When we buried him I brought two stones for his grave, one from each of the two rivers that run through the town where I was born. The round one, like a skull, that I found at the bend in the Mangawhero where we used to go swimming, was set in concrete at the head of the grave, but the wide flat footstone I pulled out of the Mangateitei on the slopes of the mountain was missing. I stood where it should have been and spoke a few words out loud to him; then was quiet. The decay of his body no longer worried me. I even felt a kind of peace descend, neither profound nor momentous, but ordinary, mortal. In that silence, that peace, I heard the ticking of his watch on my wrist.

Two

The morning after the opening, I hit the road again, driving back to Auckland via Taranaki. I had someone to see, a rich art collector, in New Plymouth. I stayed the night in a motel at Waitara, then continued on up Highway 3, which runs along that wild coast as far as Mokau. I smoked another joint of my sister’s strong dope as I left town which, again, might explain the experience I was about to have. On the other hand, things like this have happened to me, unpredictably, when I’ve been unstoned, or stone cold sober.

I was barrelling down a wide empty sweep of highway towards a river bridge when I felt a sudden urge to stop. I drove over the bridge and turned off to the right, onto an obscure country dirt road. No, this wasn’t it. I turned the car around, went back, re-crossed the bridge and took another road that ran along the side of the river towards the sea. There was a carpark and picnic area about a kilometre along. I left the car there, intending to walk out along the tidal riverbed to the sea.

It was mid morning. A fine day. The tide was out. I took off my shoes, left them where I could easily find them again and set off across mudflats towards a high ridge of black iron sand, glinting with mica. It squeaked as my feet sank into it, leaving behind sighing holes that soon filled up with sand trickles. Past this ridge I could see a curiously truncated headland made of yellowish-brown sandstone, capped with tough grass. Fragmentary islands of the same rock out in the sea. I thought if I could get around this promontory I might find an ocean beach beyond.

The walk was longer than I expected, and as I neared the head of the headland I saw that it was riven through by a cave that might or might not go all the way to the other side. The dark aperture of the cave mouth seemed forbidding or forbidden so I plodded on, round the point and out onto a wide beach that stretched away south for kilometres. There before me, at the back of the high tide line, stood a strange, weather-beaten structure, shiny and white as bones. It resembled one of those stages that were made to lay out the bodies of the dead until all the flesh had gone from the bones, which would then be cleaned and gathered together and hidden away in some cave.

It even looked, from a distance, as if there might be bones upon it, but as I moved closer I saw it was not so: just a platform made out of driftwood, about a metre tall and two metres broad. Lashed together with baling twine that was already pale and fraying. What on earth was it for? Who had made it? Why? It was as foreboding as it was mysterious. I sat down next to it and wondered; then, since the day was warm and there was no-one around, took off all my clothes and went down into the surf.

A perfect set, seven waves, rolled in as I walked out, and I caught the last of them and shot shoreward in a hiss and bubble and surge of white water. Beautiful. Out again I went, and in on another perfect wave. And again, and again. I was as if drunk with exaltation and it wasn’t until, shivering with cold, I finally, regretfully, left the water and went back up to where my clothes were that I realised the tide was coming in—fast. The sea was already lapping at the base of the stubby yellow-brown headland where, moments ago, as it seemed, I’d walked across crunchy dry black sand.

In a panic now, I threw on my clothes and started back. It was too late to return as I had come, the only way was via the cave which did in fact go right through the headland. The premonitory fear I’d felt before was still with me but the urge to reach the other side before the tidal river became impassable was stronger. Sea water was sliding into the cave mouth as I entered, starting to run. So it was that the markings on the cave walls, the ancestral figures with triangular heads and slanted eyes, the chevrons and the double spirals, and, upright along the walls, the many stylised feet, three and four and six and seven-toed, the toes made of holes drilled in the rock, passed in the blur. And yet I seemed to hear a hiss of voices as I ran, a jostling, archaic, sibilant chorus which might just have been the waves of the sea, advancing.

It was hard to move at speed across that long black reach of glittering sand, and exhausting too, and by the time I was over it, the tidal river was knee deep; when I’d waded back to where my shoes were, under a flax bush on a clod of earthy bank, my trousers were wet to the thighs and my heart was going like billy-o. But that was alright; I was safe.

It wasn’t until I got to Auckland and looked at the catalogue of the art opening I’d attended in Wellington, that I realised where I’d been: Tongaporutu, Tony Fomison writes in a 1980 essay reprinted towards the back of What shall we tell them?, is the largest rock art site in Taranaki. Here wayfarers, or war parties, paused on the main Waikato to Taranaki track. Here, perhaps, the ceremony called uruuruwhenua was performed. Fomison quotes James Cowan: If you wish to avoid heavy rain or other obstruction or inconvenience on your day’s journey, you must pay due respect to Tokahaere (a ‘walking rock’ in the King Country) by pulling a handful of fern or manuka and laying it at his foot, reciting as you do an ancient prayer to the spirit of the rock …

I did not of course have the time for such a ceremony, even if I'd known what it was. All I had was a glimpse of an antique mystery, a once sacred place that is now a curiosity and will soon disappear under the inexorable rise of the ocean, as so many other sites that existed along that coast already have done. Yet I drove away over the bridge and up the wide sweet highway on the other side with a clean feeling, as if the sea, though not perhaps the cave, had scoured my skin of the accretion of those half-formed, half-unadmitted residues of the flotsam we pick up as we live through our days. As if I had been, momentarily, serendipitously, reborn.

Lost Things

2006-11-02T21:50:00.000+11:00

Started this blog a few months ago because I'd written something that didn't seem to belong anywhere else, so I pulled up this site and put it here. One other similar piece followed ... then nothing. When I thought to re-start the site, I didn't understand what these two posts meant, so deleted them. A fresh start, perhaps. Now, of course, I want to have another look at them but they're gone forever - hadn't configured the options so that my posts were emailed to me. They have joined the File of Lost Things.

I imagine everyone who writes has such a File, more or less extensive. Mine is quite large, mainly for technical reasons. My first computer was an Amstrad and, although I obsessively backed everything up to disk, those disks were a different size to the standard floppy and can only be read on the now obsolete Amstrad. Some years ago I tracked down someone who said he could, for a fee, translate them to Word. I sent him money and the disks but, despite a series of phone calls, he never reciprocated. The last time I rang his number it had been disconnected. There's not much I regret from that cache, the only thing I'd like to look at again is a screenplay I wrote, very quickly, around my travels in coup-afflicted Fiji in 1988.

After the Amstrad died, I bought a small Apple Mac laptop. It was stolen in a house break-in at Pearl Beach in 1998, just after I had finished, printed and sent to my publisher the book I wrote about artist Philip Clairmont. If the theft had happened two weeks earlier I would have lost the book - so, although it was a bitch, I felt the timing was in one way fortunate. From that machine I mourn the loss of some personal communications from people who have since died, and two short prose pieces that I was quite proud of but for some reason never printed out. They represented the beginning of an involvement with a form I have come love, though I don't know what it is called.

Anyway, I've been thinking about those two short pieces lately and have now decided to attempt to reconstitute them. They will not be as they were, but at least they will be. I'll try and rewrite them over the weekend and, if I like the results, will post them here. As for the lost two first White City posts ... I'll let them go to god, who was, I seem to remember, their subject.

whited sepulchres

2006-10-30T23:49:00.000+11:00

Recall returning once to Sydney from the South Coast & seeing the towers of the City ahead, rising nacreous out of the grey-green of the schlerophyll forest - like bones afloat on a shimmering haze of gasoline residue. A whited sepulchre ... it's from the Gospel of Matthew, 23:27:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

Probably the most famous literary usage of this motif is in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, referring perhaps to Brussels: In a very few hours I arrived at a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre. Yet any City, white or otherwise, might be characterised thus.

Remember, much earlier, my first sight of New York, from somewhere out on the wide polluted lands of the Jersey shore, & being astonished because, in my naivety, I had not thought those towers would all, or almost all, be flat-roofed. Had imagined spires, pinnacles, palaces, not an agglomeration of rectangles jostling skywards.

Another time, summer, down on the harbourside at Elizabeth Bay, after a day of bushfires, the setting sun appeared below the heavy grey clouds over the City & turned everything an unearthly white, some post-apocalyptic light whose radiance seemed skeletal.

And yet ... are we to paint our tombstones black?

white cities

2006-10-29T13:11:00.000+11:00

The first White City was in Chicago, 1893, The World's Columbian Exposition; this was also the first time that an Exhibition included a separate amusement area, which somehow came to take the name given, from the colour of the buildings, to the Exhibition as a whole.

The next was in London, built in 1908 at Wood Lane near Shepherd's Bush, for an Anglo-French Exhibition. The stadium for the 1908 Olympic Games was included in the complex. Again, the name seems to have been adopted from the colour of the buildings, and it isn't clear if it was also a memory of the Chicago version. Some contemporary postcards of the London avatar:

Sydney's White City, of which there are a couple of photographs here, was just for fun, an entertainment precinct, a Luna Park. As was often the case, when it was closed, bits and pieces of it were dismantled and re-used in Amusement Parks elsewhere.

There's a Pogue's song of the same name on their 1989 Album Peace & Love; also a book by Pete Townsend of The Who. Haven't read Pete's book, or heard the song, yet, but the lyrics, which appear to refer to a dog track, go like this:

WHITE CITY

Here a tower shining bright
Once stood gleaming in the night
Where now there's just the rubble
In the hole here the paddies and the frogs
Came to gamble on the dogs
Came to gamble on the dogs not long ago

Oh the torn up ticket stubs
From a hundred thousand mugs
Now washed away with dead dreams in the rain
And the car-parks going up
And they're pulling down the pubs
And its just another bloody rainy day

Oh sweet city of my dreams
Of speed and skill and schemes
Like Atlantis you just disappeared from view
And the hare upon the wire
Has been burnt upon your pyre
Like the black dog that once raced
Out from trap two

It may well be that the White City Stadium, pulled down in 1988 to make way for BBC offices, was once used as a track for racing dogs; or there might have been a White City in Dublin, as there is in, of all places, Soweto.

eating the wind

2006-10-25T22:17:00.000+10:00

The wind riffles through the pages of the future, out on the balcony. Finds nothing much there & passes on down the street towards the railway station. It's too late to catch a train, they've all gone west. Or east, as may be. Across the tracks & on down Sloane towards - what? The river. Listening to Tinariwen, the Radio Tisdas Sessions. We (will) all live in the desert (someday) (soon). The Simoon. Last night was a good night driving because the Devout were off work, feasting. The Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. No Arabs on the road, no Pakistanis, no Banglas or Turks. Money to be made, anywhere & everywhere. As usual, I was too tired, I came home early. Bought mats, feather pillows, today. The Umma is increasing, alone among World Religions, numbers of those who follow Islam will increase in the next few years, reaching towards two billion. An ethical sense of community that we have abandoned, I always think, handing back my keys, getting the receipt for my gas, such politesse among those young Muslim men who attend seemingly all of the all night gas stations. Mixed with an obscure pity for that I am, lost, eating the wind. It's what they say in Indonesia when asked, what are you doing? Going nowhere, doing nothing, eating the wind. Looking for the Umma, perhaps. Or not. Just looking ... ghosts tall as the wind / up the undertakers street / to the crossroads / where the gauleiter calls ein zwei drei ...

2006-10-22T12:49:00.000+10:00

zig zag devil

2006-10-15T17:25:00.000+10:00

IM Sally Rodwell 1950 - 2006

+/- 100 years ago

2006-10-14T17:18:00.000+10:00