Short Takes V

7/5/77

Stamboul Prelude

Our Belgrade train left the cavernous Sarajevo station at midnight. In the shove and bustle of the ensuing hours, K and I shared a compartment variously with a conscript, a student, a man with a bandaged foot, another with the fierce eyebrows and defiant cap of someone from an Eisenstein film, a mother with a baby. We were too deeply in the night hours for any of these to show interest in conversation and conditions were so cramped one did not stretch a leg or lean aslant one’s seat. The single light globe was too weak to read by, too obtrusive to sleep by, but despite this discomfort I say the two Oz poets were lucky in their travel arrangements.

In the corridor people stood with their belongings, or edged past in an incessant, nervous traffic. Here, along with others trying to sleep in the narrow confine, I could see a young woman sitting on her suitcase. She had one leg propped against the carriage wall, her knee raised thereby, on which she balanced her elbow, her head then able to rest on her open hand. It was a rickety edifice but she trusted it as a place on which to lay her head in sleep. Each time someone shuffled past she was compelled to dismantle this whole superstructure of body and suitcase, then reconstruct it in the hope of snatching a few seconds of further repose. What animal trust she had in these temporary improvisations with which she created her bedroom!

The small hours are the longest hours. Outside the carriage window, Yugoslavia was a liquid blackness but for the occasional neons sliding by the glass like rods of ice. There were long delays. Did we pass through a town called Vinkovic or was this a name contrived by dream? Sleep can happen even though the sleeper does not believe it has happened. Hundreds of years seemed to elapse, and then, abruptly outside the window, there was a ragged sky and the orderly grey tenements of Belgrade. I saw it was raining heavily and whatever could be green among the dull buildings, a street tree, a patch of park, was excessively so. The woman and her suitcase had vanished from the corridor, people clustered around the exits.

We left this train to look for accommodation in the Yugoslav capital or, failing that, a visa for Bulgaria. The hostels were full, the Bulgarian embassy was closed. Within three hours the two Oz poets were back at the station, boarding a train, a very literary train, Agatha Christie’s Orient Express, Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, the floors of its compartments and corridors littered with bottles, food scraps and papers.

26/6/88

Going Nuclear

With Anne and the boys, I have now been three days at the British Hotel in Valletta and yesterday morning we were woken at six a.m. by the profound commotion of a waterfront astir. What was going on?

The hotel affords a panoramic view across Grand Harbour towards the forts of Senglea and Saint Angelo, those Hospitaller bastions of the Great Siege of 1565. Through the centre of this scene flow the harbour waters, dark sapphire in opulent contrast to the town, with its forts, cupolas, and the newer apartments that rise in tiers to the horizon and which, in the bran, almost sulphur colour of their stone, seem more coralline than erected. The roofs are hairy with television antennae.

But yesterday, in the streets, along the waterfront great numbers of people were congregating, as though for some grand play-off between soccer teams. During the night-hours a huge American freighter had been appropriated by persons unknown and towed to a mooring across the narrow mouth of the harbour, effectively blocking entrance to all traffic. The high pink of its under-hull suggested it was dangerously under-ballasted. Below our window, men in singlets walked their poodles along the esplanade, gossiped with the loiterers at the stone wall for a few moments, then wandered off to return later. There was an expectation of showdown as the crowds grew. Below the embankments the high-prowed, gaily painted djhagoza (fishing boats) bobbed at their moorings.

I took a stroll through the hotel’s public rooms in order to learn what the excitement was about. It seemed two ships of the Royal Navy were expected on a good will visit to Grand Harbour, with a prince royal being one of the helicopter pilots on the aircraft carrier. But a diplomatic impasse had arisen because the RN would not disclose whether its ships carried nuclear weapons, a discourtesy communicated to the citizens of Valletta that had caused a majority (it seemed) of the adult population to rise from their beds betimes in order to resist the RN entry. I had been made aware of the warmth of Maltese patriotism, having flown to this city with a plane-load of returnees from Australia and heard the robust cheer erupting down the fuselage at the instant the undercarriage touched Maltese soil.

By nine a.m. the open spaces around Senglea and Fort Saint Angelo were densely thronged and the singing of the masses came across the water to our balcony in great swells of sound, like the chants at a cup final, the acoustic properties of Grand Harbour resembling those of a gigantic stadium.

Then, upon the glittering place of combat arrived the Valletta wharfies, formidably well equipped in their huge white tugboat, as lofty in its deck structures as any man o’ war. It was armed with several power-hoses for the putting out of shipboard fires and it churned the blue waters to white froth with its twin engines. Initially its task was to tow four rusty barges out into the fairway and anchor them there, provocatively, as further impediment to any incoming British aircraft carrier. A further ferry-like vessel was towed out and anchored likewise.

Ah, but now one of the Maltese Navy’s two small patrol boats had appeared in order to contest this mischief on the fairway, and commenced to chase a very elusive skiff that was darting about in what seemed to be a supervisory role. This was the wharfie command vehicle, I surmised. A second patrol boat hovered at a distance. Promptly the juggernaut tug bore down on the naval featherweight in order to rescue the skiff, turning its jet hoses upon the small warship. The ensuing sea-fight was wholly unequal. As the white blast from the tug scoured the decks of the patrol boat, from all around the amphitheatre of Grand Harbour came a thunderous roar of approval. The warship first tried to dodge, then tried to endure the point-blank hose-down, but to no avail, and had to retreat, her decks gleaming and her crew, I assume, sodden. The second patrol boat remained prudently in its surveillance role.

Did it occur to the watching Maltese that their entire navy had been vanquished by one of their own tugboats? The crowd seemed to be wholly on the side of the insurrection. Meanwhile, at the British Hotel, we kept glancing towards the harbour mouth to see if Her Majesty’s ships Ark Royal and Edinburgh had materialised on the horizon. They had not, so we retired to the breakfast room and by the time we emerged the Valletta crowd had largely dispersed and the showdown with the RN was evidently averted. How this was known is a mystery.

We spent the day inland, at M’dina, called the Silent City, where the Roman mosaics are exquisite; a bowl depicted in tesserae with the tonal naturalism of an optic science formalised a millennium later.

In the evening I mounted to the roof of the British Hotel where I met an elderly Australian man who spoke with a plummy English accent. He wore a yellow cravat and paced the patio restively, swirling the brandy in his glass, not especially happy about the events of the morning.

Then he looked at me steadily and declared with conviction, “Thank God we live in a country with a decent Navy,” and I was to assume there was an old-fashioned value being affirmed here.

Looking for a Maltese beach today, we bussed to Mellieha in the north of the island and secured a square metre or so of sand amid the crush of British and German holidaymakers. And there, somehow aggrandised on the sea’s horizon, in two-dimensional cut-out because of the sun, I saw the two RN vessels, Ark Royal and Edinburgh. Nuclear-armed? Certainly their silhouettes bristled with scanners, aerials, cannon, derricks, the drooping rotorblades of a big chopper. Yet the impression they gave as they rode to anchor a mile or two offshore, was not menacing, but one of entities altogether more remote, huge, contained by some mystery of their own, and uncannily out of scale with the horizon itself and what a person walking a poodle beside a sea-wall might expect to come over it.

24/4/08

A Small Hours Observation

Whatever other qualities may be attached to the presence of the Invisible One I address in prayer, that of being a most equable conversationalist is foremost. This responsive presence reminds, amplifies, takes exception to what I have to say. It can startle but it is never untimely. It is searching but always discreet. It will lay a ground of understanding or it will take a ground of understanding away. It is addressed as God, yet it can argue Prof Dawkins’s case more cheerfully and less stridently than the Prof himself. It exists where wonder has its place in the mind and it shies from the place of belief. It is entrenched in character and yet leads character on to an imagining of possibility, an acceptance of scale.

But all that is just you!

Yes and no.

20/5/08

Dream and Fabric

Does a dream do what it must, or what it can? Are the apparently haphazard images and sequences in dream-narrative an inevitable freight of the electrical and chemical impulses of the dreaming brain, or are they picked up opportunely, incoherently? In other words, do we dream in character, or is dreaming a subversion of the very idea of character?

I have to start by affirming my view that, as dreamers, we certainly each have our own cupboards of imagery and recollection. I am not my brother’s dreamer. And yet I consistently dream outside my expectations.

Two nights ago I dreamed that my father had the office of being my hangman. He was not happy with the job, and I seem to have been wrongly convicted of something. I was dully rebellious as to the verdict, not particularly bothered about my fate; the hanging was going to proceed anyway. It was a yellowy time of day, and in a setting of yellowish masonry. The source of the dream was probably a television political thriller I had watched in the evening where a falsely convicted British man was to die by lethal injection in a US prison.

In terms of meaning, I cannot fathom why my dreaming mind contrived this narrative and aroused the potent reactions it did. Dream seems so opposite to the mental processes of waking life, including wakeful reverie. But I am certain that dreaming and wakefulness form one seamless fabric in terms of my (of anyone’s) being—our well-being and our whole-being. The role of the dreaming mind in the context of human and animal evolution, I have suspected for some time, is largely rehearsal. The dream devises narrative, seizes upon imagery, but the usefulness of these things in an evolutionary context is to put the dreamer through the emotional responses that might arise in the emergencies of wakeful life such that we have had a run-through to better prepare us for survival. In this, assuming all the higher mammals are dreamers, the cat, the pangolin and Gouldilocks are all alike.

But I think now that dream in humans has come to overlap this role. The opportune imagery and narrative of dream present themselves, not only as rehearsal, but in the same way as an item of poetry or music. That is to say, dream, like all imagining, simply, but searchingly, illumines the reaches of mind because mind itself, for reasons I can intimate but not entirely fathom, insists on having its perimeters reached in any given individual existence. That is to say, dream investigates time and place in order to determine where being is possible.

By character my father was no hangman. Whenever he took his young sons fishing, he invariably wanted us to return the fish we netted to the stream. He once scolded my own son for bashing a tree with a stick. “It wants to live, Jack, it wants to live!” he repeated, his eyebrows down like a stormfront. Yet his presence as an official hangman in my dream was compelling and entirely credible. So my life contains the experience of having a hangman father, as does, I must conclude, the sum of Reality.

21/7/08

Alms

On Friday night I gave the last of my three commendations as judge of Mildura’s Philip Hodgins Memorial Prize. We ate a banquet of dolmades, soup, and goat, prepared by one of the nation’s great chefs. When at the rostrum I could not see the words of my speech, this same watchful chef was there at hand to supply some emergency lighting with the comment—“You see how we cooks provide the answers for you poets.” In addition I had some very gracious things said about my judging by P and, yet again in Mildura, enjoyed the feeling of my presence having actual presence among these well-disposed townsfolk.

I left this place of opulence earlier than most to walk the short distance to the hotel, my jacket slung on my shoulder. There were a group of fellows drinking beer at an outside table and, as I passed them, they began an exchange between themselves, which, it gradually dawned, referred to petit moi.

“Hey, Old Greyhair! You, hey, Bellchambers! You!”

I had overshot them by twenty metres when I decided to stop and ask, “Do you fellows have something to say to me?”

I knew the hazards. For all the annual literary and musical festivities, Mildura also has the rough edge of many country towns. Have I not lain awake at The Grand, listening in the small hours to the cars revving along Langtree Avenue, heard glee and quarrel as folk spill from The Brewery. But I had drunk my bellyful during the evening and so had bravado enough to face trouble if that was what the exchange between these drinkers portended. What I was not prepared for was the conversation that actually ensued.

For one drinker had risen from his table and stood, swaying somewhat on the pavement. I approached him. “What is it, mate?” I enquired.

I saw he had taken his wallet from his pocket. “We thought you looked a bit down on your luck, mate,” he began. “Let me give you a few dollars,” and I could see the notes peeping from the leather folds of his wallet.

“Listen mate, it’s fine. I’m a visitor from Canberra,” I assured him.

“Nah, mate,” he couldn’t accept this proposition. “We was discussin’ you, and you look like one of them homeless fellahs. Here, take …” and his unsteady fingers twitched among the notes enfolded in the wallet.

“Really mate, it’s fine. I’m a guest of the writers’ festival here. As a matter of fact, I’m being paid $500 to be in Mildura. It’s good of you but …”

“Nah, nah, nah listen …”

And again I heard how he and his mates had sized me up as being destitute, so destitute I must be; it was not to be argued with.

Well, it was true that my direction on Deakin Avenue was towards the river where the hobos camp, and it was true I walk with a small limp because my right hip no longer likes the rest of my person very much, and it is true that my hair is suddenly silver. But I persisted in trying to convince the dear fellow that Mildura was already contributing handsomely towards my well-being, and again he was unconvinced. He swayed, the wallet hovered, the yellow and orange banknotes winked at me.

So in the end I told him I had better get on, and, swayingly, courteously, he allowed this. “Jus’ remember that when you was in Mildura you ran into John”—and this is how I heard the surname—“Sponger.”

I assured him I would, and wished him a good night of it.

11/9/08

The Northern Plains Death Adder

Yesterday B came to erect our carport. He is a lithe, friendly man whose tall stature appears to unfold itself upward towards the baseball cap he wears at a tilt. And like all the fellows who have been contracted for our present building enterprise, B possesses a potent reserve of experience and expertise that is busting to become narrative whenever a willing human ear is in prospect. In just a few minutes I was acquainted with quite broad tracts of his life that included the manglings and deaths he has dealt with in his volunteer work for St John’s Ambulance, the high distinctions his wife has attained in her study of medicine, and, with some detail, his experience as a herpetologist who keeps a comprehensive collection of Australian snakes on his Tarago property.

“I’ve reared them since they were babies,” he refers fondly to his taipans and eastern browns. And when I had been generously briefed, he commenced to clang away at galvanised metal in order to bring our carport into being.

He returned to the job today, grinning, holding out his right hand and declaring, “I reckon yesterday was a hex day.” I could observe two neat puncture marks at the fleshy juncture of thumb and hand. “Northern plains death adder,” he informed me before I had a chance to ask. “I was changing the water in its cage when k’pow!”

It is true I have more perspective on snakes now than formerly. This dates from the moment in 1986 beside the Queanbeyan River when, with my two-year-old on my shoulders, I had a smallish black snake rear on me, puffing its head like a cobra. In that instant of flurry, the panic of the nightmare resolved itself to a mere event in the world and in good Freudian fashion my small phobia became disarmed. Nonetheless the image of something deadly with its fangs sunk into my person, injecting me with something lethal from its mouth interior, still makes me want to fold myself away into a corner. I had not seen a snakebite in the flesh before, so it was the blitheness of B’s response to his dangerous wound that I relished.

“One of the deadliest … wife not home, so I bind the wound, get into the car, drive to Goulburn Hospital. ‘Do you know what snake it was?’ they ask. ‘Northern plains death adder,’ I tell them. ‘Oh, we have no anti-venene here for that,’ they say. ‘No worries,’ I say, ‘Just treat it like a normal death adder but add 0.3 ml.’ ‘Right,’ they say, and did.”

“Lucky you knew that,” I observed.

“Matter of course,” B grinned quickly, perhaps sheepishly. “Fellows like me keep a chart on the wall.”

And why might that grin have been sheepish, I wonder. B admitted that, had he been meticulous about procedure when changing the snake’s water, he would not have been bitten. Ah, but now there was this item of new substance to add to a spiel, a spiel cheerful, self-deprecating at times, self-affirming always, and with that shining, punctilious punchline, “Just add 0.3 ml”.

12/11/08

The Virtual Door to the Real Room

I wonder about the existence or absence of God because it is a subject eligible for wonder rather than clarification. But in the small hours, during prayer, where I assume God’s existence and address myself to it, I am aware how my sense of self and my sense of being a mere single existence in The Creation become clarified. Equally, I become aware of how it is impossible to persuade anyone of this experience. The self must venture willingly down this corridor. One opens a provisional door in order to be inside a real room.

18/12/08

The Reject Prize

Tonight I accepted “The Halstead Press Reject Prize”, awarded for a manuscript that has failed to find a bed in a publisher’s dormitory, and yet which, in the eyes of the judges, remains a worthy kind of hobo. They bestowed it on my “Life Drawing”, the creative memoir that has attracted at least a dozen rejections, all praising the writing while questioning the market for this work.

I believe it to be my subtlest work and its rejection has been a protracted heartbreak since I finished it in 2005. So, should I envy my local colleagues as I attend one book launch after another, read the guff that passes for art, watch small talent swan in the large public acceptance that allows them to have affirmed they are indeed real authors, and they are our authors, and therefore lovable, sought out, fussed over? Of course this is the life of court, but envy is envy, watchful, unsympathetic serpent under the palace garden leaves.

And yet could this writing vocation afford a full experience of itself if envy were not intrinsic to it? It scorches the self-esteem to watch oneself being treated as inconsiderable, or to see how arbitrary is the fortune by which some are accorded presence and some are denied it. But that scorch does scour away the dross that attaches to the core of the vocation, namely the allegiance one has to the making of the thing itself. It clarifies the essential reason for an effort, a reject prize maybe, but to be quietly hugged as one lies awake in the dark, listening to the stir and shuffle around the dormitories.

Alan Gould’s seventh novel, The Lakewoman, is due from Australian Scholarly Press shortly. His collection The Past Completes Me: Selected Poems 1973–2003 won the Grace Leven Award for 2006. This article is the fifth in his series of “Short Takes”, which began in the September 2004 issue.