Short Takes X

Short Takes—The Dedication 

Dear Annie will not let me be
     too withering or pompous.
I keep this journal to be free
     and make occasional rumpus,
to come at filaments of mind
that find the way I am inclined
should the lume within a word
ignite with what has just occurred
where I must reconcile the fact
with my own take on Nature’s tact,
that leaves me with no hiding place
as freest words enclose my face. 

11/11/04

Femur 

There are images that will cause one to cross the legs in a protective impulse. Today I met Bill P, who in ’77 suffered a bad car accident when a bastardisation frolic at Duntroon went wrong. He is not yet fifty and has undergone four hip replacements, the last of which remodelled his entire right femur. With irrepressible good cheer Bill described the operation, telling how, when the Indian doctor came to his bedside to report on the state of the old femur, he pinched his two fingers together and exclaimed, “Oh Mr P, the socket of your bone, you see, it is no more than a pappadum!” 

3/2/05

Agreeable Buck Ryan 

In an e-mail that was 80 per cent encomium of my prose, the lady at A&U has at last rejected The Seaglass Spiral. So now there is nothing to be done with this three years of work. Like those who have declined it profess, I trust my book is good writing, encloses a poetic truth about its topic, has sufficient narrative impetus in its saga-style form to engage a reader readily. In Lit Board applications and elsewhere I witness the writing of authors who call this publishing house (A&U) home and know my own art is surer, my prose more vibrant. But the outcome is the outcome. After thirty years and eighteen books, I can turn to no publisher as a home, nor can I feel sure I contribute to a general good by persisting in this vocation where my talent is esteemed while each new book is dealt with as though it were my first.

“But mate, you don’t need to worry about all that stuff because you’re an artist,” says the gravelly Australian voice down my phone-line, who may not have actually read me, nonetheless knows that to communicate good morale is both to contribute to the good, and to fly the flag for a self-assured National Type. When did I first meet this familiar? I pinpoint the occasion to my third month in Australia in July 1966.

Having spent six years at a British school where its First XV was trained to magnificent pitch by games-master and rugby Druid, Taffy Evans, I knew myself to be inept at the game. Now, Down-under (a peculiarly good word for the sensation of scrum-rugby as I recall it), I was a blind-side breakaway on a Canberra sportsfield, and went to tackle burly, agreeable Buck Ryan. For all that my effort ended as an ineffectual tangle around his ankles, I found myself being patted on the crown of my head.

“You’ll be in the First XV next week.”

“Mnah.”

“I mean it. I’m going to have a word with the coach.”

The blonde fellow trotted off, and on that grey afternoon I half-believed I had arrived in the “land-of-opportunity” while being aware how the kindliness and the dissembling of that pat on the head were not to be separated, one from the other. 

18/5/05

A title restored to rank 

Tonight I listened to colleague Marion launch my Selected Poems. In my attentiveness I was also aware that beside me, sleek as a currawong, stood S in his dark suit.

S holds the Chair of English at ANU and came originally as an undergraduate through the department five years after me and more brilliantly. In looks and temper this congenial fellow has the air of perpetual youth. Impossible to imagine that debonair face acquiring wrinkles or the shy voice having occasion to screech, as I have screeched in several Canberra schoolrooms whenever I have perceived my expertise in Eng Lit to arouse derisive amusement. One knows S, attentive, dapper, is also overworked as all modern professors are, harassed by audits and admin. Yet somehow he emerges from these trials like a swain stepping from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.

Behind this impression of youth, I know there to be a quiet fortitude and humility in his character. Some years ago, serving as the homebody during one of his diplomat wife’s postings, his consuming duty required he nurse their son through a critical bone affliction over a twelvemonth. At meals, in classroom, in transit, at play, S was responsible for ensuring the boy placed not the slightest weight on his hip joints over this interval.

“A fascinating experience, Alan,” he disclosed after describing the intimacies of his vigil.

Now we are book-launching among the shop’s bright shelves, and I note the youthful professor’s posture is tensed—yes, a currawong alerted to something amiss in its purview. This attentiveness is independent of Marion’s address. Then I spy on the nearby shelf, amid the regular patterning of other books, a browser has replaced a book upside down amid the hundreds of ranked texts.

The audience follow our speaker. So does S because he is a man of impeccable courtesy. But his stillness at the corner of my vision makes him appear spring-loaded. Then, with feral suddenness, he darts forward, deftly turns the offending title to be uniform with those on either side, steps back smartly to his place, sleek, polite, his attention to our speaker one hundred per cent. Currawong? Perhaps more S was an RSM correcting a tiny fault at the trooping of the colour in the instant before the order to march is given, for all that he was inalienably Chair of English and could not, in the natural fulfilment of his powers, have been otherwise. 

25/5/09

I met my Ancient Mariner 

I emerged from my dentist to be hailed by C, who quickly drew me into the vortex of his talk.

Had I written any more novels for him to read for fucksake. He’d read all those I’d done. He loved the one about Tasmania. (I have never written fiction about Tasmania.) I should know it took him a considerable time to read a book. This was in comparison to the bare five minutes it would take me, for fucksake, to go round the corner to the café where his latest paintings were on view … No! The Tassie thing had been Boys in the Island by the other bloke. I should check out his paintings now, like RIGHT now …

And so he harangued, approaching close, scrutinising me, then walking away, only to veer back towards me again.

C was notably more haggard since I had last seen him maybe a year ago. There were purses below his eyes, longish brown hair and grey beard. His dishevelment gave him a venerable look, and he took the Ancient Mariner’s licence in the intensity with which he fixed me, and the assumption that my time was his playground. I have known C four decades. He was a shy, gangly schoolboy at Moratorium meetings with an older brother who later died from heroin. Then there were decades I did not see him, then he was present again, hailing me at the local shops, needing my e-mail address, an inventory of my fiction titles. Next he was halfway through one of these, and suddenly it is today and he looms and recedes in my immediate vicinity saying it only takes five minutes to go round a bunch of paintings for fucksake, while a book requires … and I am assuring him, Sure, mate, I’m happy to look … But first he has much on which he must brief me before I am released to view the artwork. (Sam Coleridge, you subjected your Ancient Mariner to some shrewd editing if he was typical of the crazed.)

I escaped to the paintings and took a good look at them. Five minutes was, alas, adequate. But because, like that wedding guest, I now thought I understood the nature of a haunting, I memorised the numbers under those paintings that had pleased me a little with how they caught the barbarous rawness of beach vegetation, breaking sea and sky, whereupon I tried to make my escape. But the Ancient Mariner was already coming through the door and declaring in his tone of dangerous raillery that in comparison to the time taken to read a novel it hadn’t taken me long for fucksake to go round his paintings, and what could I have gotten from that?

And mercifully I was armed to say that numbers 3 and 7 had engaged me with the rawness of the treatment of … and because he could not recall what numbers belonged to what paintings, I was able to take him to his own works and explain my self away.

And lastly, there was my impression of his candour when again he barred my exit, advised me that Sometimes, like, he could get taken over by the logorrhoea for fucksake. As I escaped, he warned me to provide more novels. 

26/11/09

The fractured glass 

On my window sill I have kept a photograph that shows my mother in a summer dress with light cardigan thrown over. Her hands rest on the shoulders of five-year-old Gouldilocks, and both of us paddle knee-deep in the small surf of an Ulster beach, Tyrella or Cushundun circa 1954.

After her death thirty-seven years later someone went to the trouble of enlarging the original snapshot and placing a mount and frame around this reprint. Now some gust of wind has blown it to the floor and cracked the glass. Well, I will take my glasscutter and repair the glass because I value the picture and would like this representation of my mother to pass into the hands of my own sons who knew her, and with luck into the further possession of their children who will never meet her. But I cannot predict how value will flow, and this framed photo may be landfill within twenty years.

If I look into the photo at the cheerful woman with windblown hair, I can immediately recognise the good mother I had. And I catch myself according value to an existence that gave itself generously to whatever came up in a garrison and Canberra life, then died suddenly, receded from the mindfulness of all those who knew her. This was her natural course, as it will be mine. But the point is this. The mental process by which I accord value to her person is also natural to that evolutionary process that gives expressive power to everything in the Universe. Value, for all its immaterial substance, is intrinsic to the Darwinian taxonomy in any account that aims at a sufficient description of Reality.

Shall I stay with the material? I stood beside this woman’s corpse, and, like any materialist, I know what happens to corpses. Dust to dust? Pfui! It is nothing so paltry or final. In July 1991 my mother re-entered eternity, just as from eternity she emerged at her birth in August 1920. This is to say, she came from the immediate genetic and cultural material of her historical forebears, then back through remoter ancestors, trans-species, trans-substance to whatever that singular event was we refer to as the Big Bang—and howsoever we may penetrate a Beyond to that event.

Right now, as I sit at my screen, her nearby material presence is a crematorium’s ash-shingle that I keep in its plastic box on a wardrobe shelf until I decide how to dispose of it; my father’s shingle keeps it company. Wherever they both eventually go, their ash-shingle will in time transfigure to something else, then something else, and so on, natural and perpetual. I might hypothesise how a portion of Mum’s on-going presence will co-travel with random atoms from her ninth-century Hebridean-Viking ancestor, or some other micro-part of her react with chance-met atoms from her Sudeten-Jewish/New Zealand grandsons, in the billions of configurations her matter and all matter will submit to. And this would be natural, though perhaps not likely in the giga-abundance of events her on-going presence entered on that July day.

I say natural. Is it not also miraculous that these processes should lead both to and from a chance photo on a desk with its fractured glass, material connection to an immemorial past, and a presumable future? Is this the point at which the demonstrable in Darwin’s marvellous model of material process scratches at the pane of immaterial being? 

I gnaw at that frail word value. At sixty I can say I took my mother’s good mothering for granted during the years we coincided. My sense of her value is largely retrospective as I have had time, since her loss, to meditate and esteem her, such that I do not mistake where the good has been. This is both to know her person better, and know the meaning of value itself a little more surely. And this thinking is natural too, natural as a frog evolving its croak or a periwinkle coming to its astounding blue petals.

For the last fifteen years or so I have gradually accepted the shrewd, practical yet momentous Christian wisdom of how a person stands in the World. I comprehend what is expected from me in the Second Counsel, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”, because, even as I think meanly of many a neighbour, I know how I might behave otherwise in my mindfulness of the Other.

But when it comes to that foremost counsel, to love God with all of heart, mind and soul, I have difficulty. If it’s love, I can go from what I know of the loveable. My life has been fortunate in the different vibrancies of what “the dear” can mean to me. But how do I count Deity as dear to me when I cannot, despite fair consideration of the matter, decide between God’s existence or non-existence? I have proceeded far enough to know that Deity inhabits my wondering rather than my resolving mind, and that I have a fuller sense of being when the wondering mind is not excluded as a source of truth for what is real. An intelligence may originate and pervade Creation, or Creation may have created itself. In fairness to how I perceive truth, I cannot say the one is more likely than the other. I must imagine. But I must also trust. How does this connect with the fractured glass of my mother’s photo?

A friend of mine once observed that God is unimaginable, and this, I think is true. But Creation is both observable and imaginable, and if the Being of God is to be wondered at, then to meditate the scope of Being in the Creation is one way of informing that wonder. If I bring to mind, from the paragraphs above, the sheer scale of the substance released in my contemplation by the fracture of that glass protecting my mother’s photo, then I think I discern a reconciliation between what is huge and what is intimate in scale. Humans are a species, it is said, that yearns for a relationship with the infinite. I think that yearning is underpinned by something rather wondrous and inescapable. I value a thing. Its loss compels me to see how immediate is the relationship between the small and the grand, the momentary and the eternal, the intimate and the All.

In allowing this mental process to settle as it will, I have not reached a decision on Deity’s existence. But I have caught sight of a necessary aspect of mind beyond any mental reach I can attain. It is the ground where value happens—where intimacy and scale may be reconciled. 

28/7/10

Two thoughts on fons et origo 

“Where does Being come from?”

“Like everything else, from the Big Bang, or its predecessors.”

“Why so? Certainly the Big Bang accounts for the origin of matter and the simultaneous creation of space and time. It does not account for the onset of Being. Being is conditional upon there being matter to be.”

“I grant you, unless the opposite is true, that matter came into being on the condition that Being was available to be its condition.”

“I concede that. We have been placed at the brink of a perplexity, not a solution. Either way, active intelligence is a process of solving.”

“Unless solution is dissolution.”

“So why don’t you accept that?” 

Perhaps in common with most writers, I engage with a piece of work, and when it proceeds swimmingly I believe I am in control of the schedule. And when it falters I recognise it has a schedule that controls me.

That is to say, I must accept there is a piece of writing that might come into being; it can only do so through me, but it insists on its independence from me. 

14/10/10

Demented along his corridors 

Towards sunset our oldest cat wails his dementia around the house. He has lost his way among our rooms, and also in the habitual forest tracks of his brain. So he fills our mountainside home with his sour wailing, stiff-limbed, the veteran eyes expressing a kind of neutral indignation. Is it the back of the armchair he seeks, where he can curl, safe on a high pinkish cushion from whatever neural demon unravels the world in the brain of a feline? Or does he howl a more general dissatisfaction with what existence has served up to a Burmese-Tonkinese cross over eighteen years of the planet’s durance?

When he came to us with his jetblack sister, he was a grey, sleek animal and we called him “Riami” because Anne’s late father said this was the Maori word for “lion” and therefore might be a case where a word existed prior to the thing itself having been actually seen by the language users.

Lifelong, Riami has lacked charm. Complaint rather than initiative was always his first feral strategy. Sidelong indignation was always his first attitude. He bullied his sister, the wanton, enterprising Lilith who was bravest of pets with a feral genius for food opportunities. In our house we praise Lilith, who used her first summer to go from kittenhood to motherhood. These were hot nights and the suburb’s tomcats besieged us, but imprisoned, on-heat Lilith stalked our rooms, testing the strength of flyscreens with a soft tap of the paw. Locating opportunity, she retreated a distance, then ran like a pace bowler at the crease, burst through the loose screen, landed in the ivy, and within a minute was multiply pregnant. I think of the ferocious passions to be found in the Jacobean playwrights, Webster et al.

She delivered her glittering litter and we kept the one that Anne disentangled from its caul. In time Lilith lost teeth, but continued to pounce fearlessly on the intruder cats around our home, remaining slender and opportune for all her seventeen years. At last she grew moist-eyed, helpless, a furred skeleton panting to a stillness in the few seconds after a vet’s needle. How does the question of value sort itself out here?

And Riami the brother who lacked this flair but bullied his sister with intractable ill-nature, survives her, stalks the house wailing, must be picked up and talked to in even tones, and when this happens he grows calm. 

17/12/10

The genius of grass 

On our hillside I walked along the path beside the stormwater drain as far as the small iron bridge because I wished to climb to the line of pylons and the ground remains so saturated that the trench itself is impassable, the run-off in the ditch now black and noisome, ducks coloured as though part of the rife vegetation itself.

I crossed and ascended and within seconds my socks had been pierced by the several varieties of grass seed, my feet pin-pricked by dozens of seed-darts which I endured until, forty minutes later, I had regained my veranda, removed my socks and begun the minute task of removing from them these brilliantly designed plant missiles, remarking as I did so the extraordinary genius of grass.

Some of the seeds were flighted pellets, streamlined to penetrate fur or wool, serrated against being withdrawn. Some were tiny slugs attached to a filament of coppery hair. These I might carefully pull to extricate the seed, marvelling at the depth of penetration from the momentary brush of my feet through the grass. Then the filament, flexible when it attached itself but quickly become brittle, might break off from that insignificant but potent seed to wait in my sock for some future eventuality when, say, cast upon some landfill, it receives water and soil minerals to grow into Australian grass.

Or these seeds might be extracted successfully to fall through the crack in my decking and await there the bulldozing of my house when some future owner turns the present deck back into garden in 2030, allowing light and moisture to find and empower them.

Or the sock-owner is invited to read poetry on, say, the Lofoten Islands, packs this sock, where it falls behind a hotel bed, gets taken to Lofoten landfill and an Australian grass flourishes in sub-Arctic conditions thanks to climate change or some other macro-convenience.

Our Shetland sheepdog, who died aged thirteen earlier this year, had a fur coat to which seed attached itself with particular tenacity. Once we took her to the vet with grass seed embedded so deeply in her ear it could have killed her. Is patience the pre-eminent virtue of seed? The dog expires, rots away around that small implant. The rains come, a single grass and then the grasses assert themselves from that seed. Renewal by oddest chance, remote from hullabaloo. 

19/12/10

Staff of life 

Upon my window is a fling of stars and it is raining again. All day, on and off, it has rained, as it did yesterday, and most of the days of December, and throughout our spring, and generously in this year’s seasons before that. A week ago our newspaper fanfared how the Canberra dams were at their 101 per cent meniscus and the volume of spill over Googong overtook Niagara’s normal discard.

We locals have been urging this on. For many months, beside the city’s major roads there have been digital screens that advertise the dam levels, the actual daily water consumption, and the target consumption. A shrewd government move this, for every motorist has been able to watch the slow climb back from 18 per cent while being made mindful of water use. Cahn the home team, as it were. And now the orange numbers tell us our dams can take no more. H₂O, our staff-of-life, glitters in every ditch. The stormwater drain will not drain, meaning I cannot reach the further hillside dry-shod. Silvery threads of water find the ancient freeways on every slope and persist. Dry woodland trails have the sponginess of uncooked apple pie.

The oldest Australian emotion I acquired was the elation/gratitude aroused by rain after dry, rain as it perused foliage, rain as it raised clamour on an iron roof. Now the downpours will not stop. The days have turned Irish, their music percussive and woodwind with run-off.

In my garden I have three plastic water tanks. They were installed against the dry years, when dry years were persuasive in arguing significant expense for mere plastic objects. Now, day and night, the overspill of the largest, a forest-green lozenge tank closest to my room, clatters with the rainfall excess that must find its way to the Southern Ocean via Sullivan’s Creek, Molonglo, Murrumbidgee, Murray, performing as it flows the ten thousand miracles of renewal, in favour of frogs and against blue-green algae that flushing water brings with it. I lie awake and listen to the watery dactyls—di-di-dah, di-di-dah—and in the morning take the time to place buckets under that wastage because I cannot trust this interval of moist good fortune. Now my buckets wait to be needed in the first dry spell, and I own no more buckets to fill.

Do the emotions of unrelenting rainfall have their place in our national expression? It is natural that, when the rains come, the heart feels grateful. Have we found in our literature the means by which we might be occasionally ungrateful for this, the staff of life, yearning for something deeper, a congenial rhythm in the providence that sustains us? 

This article is the tenth in Alan Gould’s series of “Short Takes”, which began in the September 2004 issue. His novel The Seaglass Spiral is to be published this year by Finlay Lloyd.