Short Takes VII

Late October 1973

The Horse Camps of Central Asia

The hilly street where my cousin dwells is recent and unpaved. She lives in Ankara with her husband Denis and her newborn son in order to foster a small Christian community in this part of West Asia not especially hospitable to her faith. Beyond the medium-rise blocks of flats I can see westward where the Anatolian dusk is tinctured mauve and pearl, while the earthen street has a lunar pallor. Historically this is the hour of the marauder when the human eye must adjust to night vision, and it is true that, as soon as the cab stops at my cousin’s apartment, I find myself mobbed by a dozen street kids who, in their abundant high spirits, tussle with me across the back seat for possession of my rucksack.

“You would not have seen your belongings again,” Tina tilts me her jocular eye, after I have gained the sanctuary of her home. With intermittent supplies of tap water, the harassment and occasional arrest of members of their Christian group for lending books to each other, she and her family do it tough here.

A day or two later I need the same presence of mind that saved my rucksack. Denis and I stroll the ramparts of Ankara’s old fort, and here are more kids to mob us, nine-year-olds with crew-cuts and grubby cheeks who fix on us with that same marvellous good cheer.

Give us your lira, they demand, and gamely take hold of my arm and Denis’s arm to use as a whirligig, as though we were a casual piece of playground apparatus. How can they be so immediate in the intimacy they assume with us? Plainly we are both prize opportunities for loot and convenient uncles to whom they can show off and express their warmth of spirit. Certainly we are also sport, as they attempt to yank our hands from our pockets that they might sink their own fingers upon our small change, our penknives, key rings, and carry away what plunder they can.

“Are you keeping Ramadan?” one demands an answer from Denis, who is studious, gentlemanly, and very tall.

“No, I am a Christian,” he replies.

“Gavur! Gavur!” they exclaim triumphantly, and brandish their own penknives across our faces, declaring holy war on us.

“Gavur,” Denis informs me, “means that they are calling us infidels.”

The accusation is fierce and yet their aggression is wonderful good nature. So my response to their impudence, in part alarm for the safety of my belongings, is also partly to admire their superb élan. They are children, and they demand I live at the edge of myself.

Herein is the exquisite tension of this Anatolian place. Below us sprawls the Turkish capital with its rational public architecture, broad, straight thoroughfares, hulking offices, grand monuments. At the Ataturk Memorial I have seen the guards goose-step with a comical rigidity, ridiculous in their close-fitting white helmets that look like plastic toys.

Indeed, nothing I have set eyes on in the capital expresses the quick of these nine-year-olds, their manners so intact from a pure cavalry culture. They expect the lightning of response in others because their own conduct is fashioned from lightning. One knows the quickness of Cockney repartee, the flash gestures of Parisian style. But neither manner discloses its provenance as plainly as the behaviour of these kids dashing about these ramparts shows its provenance from a Central Asian horse camp. Why is the Turkish capital not a place of tents and corralled horses?

Across the horizon, hills, like my own Monaro hills in their profile, gleam with sparse, brassy pasture. I have been shown how this Ankara/Ankuwash/Ankyra/Angora is a site more ancient than its Turkish occupation. In the splendid Museum of Anatolian Civilisations I have seen the Hittite reliefs of winged lions, bird-headed humans and the statuette of a stag-god, bronze incised with silver, poised as though on a nailhead of rock. And as we stroll, I note the patchwork of the masonry, reddish Ottoman stone, opportunely extended in places with recycled Crusader and Roman brickwork, untidy when contrasted with the neat yellow brickwork of Ataturk’s mausoleum, Ankara’s centrepiece building. Kemal’s struggle to found a modern, secular Turkey was a ruthless one, I remember reading. Denis points out the thirty-nine minarets that have appeared around the mausoleum since his death in 1938. They are pale in the brown haze like the shoots of some resilient regrowth vegetation, but they seem not quite native here either.

The women wear shawls and colourful baggy trousers gathered at the ankle, and when they walk they have a rolling gait, as though for a ship’s deck. At the markets I have seen carrots that are two feet long. “Show no interest in anything you do not intend to buy,” Tina advised me when we visited the place yesterday.

Beyond the government buildings, museum, railway station, and the ranked apartments, Denis points out the “gecekondu”, Ankara’s shanty towns. “If you can erect a tolerable dwelling on a vacant block overnight you can gain a title to the land,” he explains.

And beyond these, the brassy, moonish hills, once forested, where successive waves of ancient peoples hunted the winged lion and the stag god.

Martial law ended three weeks before I arrived here, but soldiers are everywhere in Ankara. Traffic gives way to the long military convoys that pass down the streets. Troops guard public buildings. The police have revolvers, and the policeman in his box on the traffic island shrills with his whistle, gesticulates with his hands. It is energetic woodwind, energetic choreography, but it has no observable effect on the behaviour of the traffic.

When it comes time to leave, at the bus station I watch through the coach window as a man is saying goodbye to his young son. Neither of them smiles. Another man stands nearby, an uncle perhaps. Occasionally the father takes the boy’s chin in his hand and says something terse, fierce, yet plainly affectionate; there is such an intensity of presence in that face with its dark eyebrows and moustache. Now the bus is about to leave. The boy is crying and clasps his father, the father leans and kisses his son with short, savage kisses on his cheeks and forehead. In the desperation of its emotions this scene might be a lover taking leave of a beloved. The father breaks loose and climbs onto the bus at the very last minute. The other man takes the son by the hand, and the boy waves to our bus until it is out of sight.

On the Istanbul road we pass occasional houses where freshly slaughtered meat hangs from a line between trees. Then, without warning, we halt; there is dust, some low scrub, the distant pale hills, and no other feature except the beggar sitting cross-legged at the verge of the tarmac. Our driver and his attendant take a cap around the seats and, when they are done, they pour a shower of silver into the top pocket of the beggar, who is busy with his hands gesturing blessings for our journey.

The waters of the Bosphorus are swift. On the ferry two men are arguing. Then the argument seems to peter out, except that one has muttered something and in an instant the other has lashed out with a fist. A moment later the offended party has a broken bottle in his hand, and the striker is rummaging in his briefcase, presumably for a knife or firearm. Onlookers separate them and the two retire shouting curses at the other. The affray has lasted perhaps ten seconds.

This morning I stepped from the front door of my hostel in Cumhuriyet Caddesi and saw where several vehicles were parked. The first car I laid eyes on had New South Wales numberplates, and the second one had Victorian. I met their owners later, and they had not travelled across Asia together. “So you’re a Jim Cairns man,” one commented guardedly over our breakfast, responding to some remark I had made.

Well, yes, but somehow to be mindful of that political allegiance in this city, where fellows led dusty brown bears around by a chain shackled to the creature’s nostril, prodding them to stand on two legs beside a tourist for the photo opportunity, was an odd distraction indeed.

Both the Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque offer a dark and a quiet that is respite from the vibrancy of the life in the streets. Lofty, magnificent, Aya Sofia nonetheless looks abandoned and dusty. The Blue Mosque, by contrast, is spread with gorgeous carpets and has small lights set around the blue, overarching ceiling. At the entrance is a beggar whose body is cut off at the pelvis. He sits in a canvas bag and is by no means an old man.

In the Topkapi Palace, behind glass, are the jewel-encrusted scimitars or ermine robes of one fierce Sultan or another. One robe has the assassin’s punctures clearly visible. I stand entranced by a jewelled dagger with a small gold clock suspended by a gold chain from it, as though a huge crescent moon, gorgeous and lethal, loomed above a tiny precious earth. Nearby is a forearm modelled in brass where a section has been removed to show the fusty remains of human hand bones. There is also a human skull, and both exhibits are labelled as being remnants of John the Baptist.

What is the status of women in Turkey? The airline booking office is run by a blonde woman in a brown trouser suit. It is immediately clear this person could never, in good conscience, walk one pace behind her husband. She raps out her orders and the sleek male employees scurry to rummage in filing cabinets and offer her papers. They are nervous and I don’t blame them. When the phone rings, she snatches it from the hand of the fellow who has answered it, delivers something brisk and wholly effective to the other end. She books me on a flight to Athens. Where I have now arrived, to find what? The human countenance typically less … less at the front of itself.

29/1/04

His Self, His Rest

In re-reading his Sonnets and Dream Songs, I find I much prefer John Berryman to John Ashbery and his imitators because the poems are prepared to risk all the disorder and randomness of the post-mod, while at the same time never losing focus on the idea that a personality, a character, can be integrated from the details of disintegration. The effect, for me therefore, is quite primitive, to establish a presence at the core of Berryman’s work that is, above all, likeable, and thus of value.

While I am not impervious to the appeal of Ashbery’s poems, they inevitably engage me fragmentarily, here an image for mutability in the way waves behave against a rock, here an image of night, the equaliser, the agency that cancels distinctions.

Berryman describes, indeed, stokes, the chaotic pressures upon his self. But the self remains always in view and therefore is of us. This is both a moral and an aesthetic position. I favour it because it possesses more nerve (that up-front of courage) and more resilience (the back-up of courage) than the post-mod attitude that will abandon distinct personality in favour of a random tidal swim of events and impressions as the best facsimile one can make for the fabric of our reality. By contrast, Berryman is impressive and likeable because he is never complacent on this issue, whereas, whenever I chance upon a new Ashbery poem, I end by disbelieving it because I cannot credit that the author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror isn’t, au fond, dismally complacent about the slipperiness of meaning.

Whatever appalling disquiet passed through Berryman’s mind on the occasion of his plunge from the Minneapolis bridge in January 1972, I cannot imagine it being at such a remove from our own day-to-day, that we could not share its particular anguish. Were Ashbery ever placed in a similar extremity, for all the elusive, kaleidoscopic eloquence and texture in his poems, I cannot begin to imagine from his poems the distinct person brought to that fall.

30/9/04

The Pathos in Ambush

This evening I finished a draft of a poem about the umbrella story from the Arnhem battle, read it aloud, and found myself, as they say, overcome with emotion.

Am I, at fifty-five and with little previous record, becoming a cry-baby? Perhaps this is true, although it is not my own words that draw the tears, but the magnificent, wacky, shrewdness of Major Tatham-Warter’s nonchalance to invite the padre to shelter under his umbrella from the storm of Nazi firepower. Not that I can separate this sang froid from the larger gallantry of 1st Airborne Div at that Rhine bridge, sixty years old a fortnight ago. And not that I can fathom why my passions attach so fiercely to a conflict that was resolved four years before Gouldilocks made his appearance on the planet.

Prior to my scene, I had drunk some whisky, it should be noted, the potion that makes old gentlemen fond.

5/11/04

Venerable Canberra

At a function tonight Jane M described the heating in those Braddon houses of the 1950s. “They were Rayburns,” she explained. “Had a tendency, you see, to spill logs whenever their mica doors were opened. Risked setting fire to the wooden floors.

“More common,” continued Jane, “chimneys would catch fire from accretion of soot. This happened to mum who ran next door, frantic, wailing, My house is on fire! My house is on fire! What shall I do, what shall I do?”

The neighbour, explained Jane, was phlegmatic. “Laura,” she said, “for goodness sake, dear. Put on a hat and go for a walk,” the received wisdom being that chimney fires burnt themselves out in their good time.

21/11/04

Envy, Let’s Face It

From glib tongue and sarcastic tongue I have heard how no one would ever think to serve on the Literature Board unless it furthered career, raised profile, or provided an opportunity to wield cultural power. Piffle. This service is national service, more often bleak than agreeable.

For instance, I go through these applications for the overseas studios, Paris, Rome, Ireland, America, and I am made downcast. I make my judgments, record my private vote, the votes are collected, tallied, and someone wins a career boost. The process could not be fairer, yet every success of these, my contemporaries, dejects me, and every dejection reflects ill on my character.

Whatever the opportunities, the tours, the overseas editions, the offers to sit down with US editor or English literary agent and program the bigtime, I watch the careers of my colleagues as they are described and enumerated in these applications with, let me face it squarely, a reaction of simple envy.

Of course I observe some who are operators, indefatigable in their self-hype. Equally I see innocents who, by simply “taking up writing”, have been effortlessly warmed by fortune’s smile. Profoundly I have learned how career success has but the chanciest relationship with talent. And how have I been equipped to learn this? I have trusted my own superbia. Colleagues! I see your work and I know my own, and I am a marvellous blue whale among sardines …

Which if I boil this cetacean emotion to a decent reduction, I must admit, yes, envy, let’s face it.

11/5/05

It Occurs To Me …

That there has never been a more dismal time for the health of poetry, one reason for this residing in the observation that so many who resent reading poetry wish to write it.

This widespread impulse in people to add to the repertoire of poetry without engaging with its resource is somehow entangled with the idea of egalitarian education. If a thing that arouses in me such small regard really does have a stake in what-it-is-to be-witnessed, surely I can have a slice of that too.

So the repertoire swells and the resource languishes, the workshops proliferate and the art shrinks as a distinct destination for human wonder. Poetry, that old accompaniment to the long journey of human imagining, is rescued from the gutter by folk who wish to have their utterance witnessed but cannot quite fathom why, and therefore must transform poems into accessories for the ego’s very pernickety convenience.

25/7/08

I Sought

I sought out my fortune until it became more interesting to watch it.

14/4/09

Sotto Voce

Seeking to complete a handsome book set, today I went to a large bookshop and enquired about The New Everyman Edition of Shakespeare. My request prompted the young woman at her screen to do a search and I watched how agile, how confident were her fingers on her keyboard. Ah, but then she stopped, and stared into the screen as though some mystery dwelt in its tropical blue sea. Her fingers poised, she seemed frozen like a minnow in the path of an orca and I wondered if I could help. Then I saw her lean across to her colleague and ask with a sotto voce squeak, “How do you spell Shakespeare?”

18/6/09

Kangaroo

Among the trees behind our Mount Ainslie house these creatures are common, though never usual. And it is alarming how often, when I stroll amid the calligraphy of pewter, grey or khaki scrub, I will almost rub noses with a buck or a doe before realising it is there. So what then is camouflage? One per cent colouring, ninety-nine per cent immobility.

11/7/09

I Stood with Macbeth and Banquo

What must I make of dream? With the exception of boyhood gang-strife, I have come through life having escaped the Drang of war experience. Before I slept last night, I was reading of the horrors that Australian and New Zealand nurses encountered during Gallipoli and on the Western Front. I can read such accounts, be moved, yet know I am safe, that my life has been fortunate in its time and place to follow the pursuits of peace and not to have my nerves, and that more encompassing quality, my courage, tested by the extremity of battle.

And here is my dream. Somehow it is Scotland and there is dense mist. Battle is taking place. I am a foot-soldier among other foot-soldiers. Out of the mist ride mounted archers who let fly with deadly shafts. People beside me are pierced, some through neck, some through stomach. To stand next to such piercings, the sensation of my dream tells me, is to feel the other’s misfortune as a kind of sympathetic shudder, and a radical uncertainty of my own safety. Some of these apparitional archers are on my own side, some are not, and it is impossible to predict whether a friendly or a hostile agent will next materialise from the mist.

And this milky whiteness makes it impossible to know what the broader issues of the battle are. I know I am imperilled. The sensation in my body is that of someone wholly conscious of the imminence of horrible injury or death. More critically, the dream permits me no consciousness whatever that my self might inhabit an alternative place in life. For the durance of this dreaming, my reality is this mortally dangerous, foggy hillside of battle.

Of course, as I wake and recall, I can start to calculate the provenance of the dreamstuff. The Scottish mistiness recalls a scene from Polanski’s film of Macbeth where the victorious Scots patrol the battlefield dispatching their wounded enemies. The book on nurses had described the battle of Fromelles and the zip-zip of bullets that corresponded to the zip-zip of arrows and crossbow bolts in my dream. In this way I could bed the dream down in its antecedents.

But in the dream itself I was wholly present, conscious of having no alternative to that particular and perilous presence of scarcely recognisable, deadly assassins riding from the white fog.

So, I ask, given this enclosing consciousness, did my self in the dream have a moral presence? Experiencing the high adrenalin, unaware the peril was nothing but dream, staying with the fellows who waited in the wet grass of that hillside, was I showing courage, resilience, and the same inner alarm and insecurity as I can construe for the soldiery and nurses in the book I had put down before sleeping? If at the instant of dreaming one is totally unable to distinguish between an illusory state and a real state, is there a case for awarding the highest commendations for courage as often to the dreamer as one does to a waking hero? It is a subversive notion, this one. If I had moral being in that enfolding dream circumstance, did I behave like Simpson or Jacka? If that part of a human being that walks heedless through deadly danger can do so because some mental switch has flicked consciousness into the dream-state, was the valour of Simpson and Jacka distinguishable from my own?

I cannot see how it is otherwise. And yet I know the difference between a real sniper’s bullet and a warm bed. I know I live in circumstances that are deeply secure from the things that my dreaming might be continuously rehearsing me for.

30/8/09

Watching the Axework

Yesterday afternoon while chopping firewood, I put an axe into my big toe, causing two fractures to the metatarsal and about ten minutes of volcanic language in north-east Ainslie. A lifetime of chopping firewood, and Gouldilocks thought he had a good eye for the job.

That evening, yarning with Jack W, a mate from ANU days. Jack recalled his youth in Goodooga, western New South Wales, when he had been sent to the woodpile to cut some firewood. Observed by several old timers, he set to work and very soon overheard that they had bestowed on him the nickname Lightning.

“How come Lightning?” young Jack paused in his chopping.

“They say it never hits the same place twice,” one of the old fellows tilted him a look.

Alan Gould’s seventh novel, The Lakewoman, was published by Australian Scholarly in August. This article is the seventh in his series of “Short Takes”, which began in the September 2004 issue.