Short Takes XX

22/11/09 Full presence

Today, Anne’s friend Jan came into the gallery where my love works on weekends. As they chatted, Jan asked, “Do you happen to recall that song, ‘I know where I’m going / I know who’s going with me …’? It’s from a film.” Then, in that acoustical gallery, Jan began to sing it.

O yes, Anne replied quickly, nervous about gallery protocols, she knew the song, whereupon Jan recounted the following story.

“I was in Melbourne, near the Victorian gallery. There was a man playing a flute. He was about my age and had a head of vigorous grey curls. The music was pleasant, so I gave him some coins.

“‘Any requests?’ he asked me.

“‘Well, yes,’ I said, and asked if he might know the ‘I know where I’m going’ song because it was so long ago I feared I might have imagined it.

“Indeed, this flautist did know the song, and proceeded to play it, beautifully. When he finished, we fell into conversation, some of it just badinage. Then he said, ‘That will be $50 for the request,’ which took me aback a bit.

“‘O, I only have $5,’ I said, and gave him that. But you see, I was so relieved. The song actually existed in fact and not just in my imagination. Meanwhile the flautist told me he had once belonged to an orchestra.

“As we chatted, the day had become hot and he asked me if he might remove his jacket. ‘Yes,’ I said, so he did, and in the process he dislodged the mass of grey curls so that, wigless, his head disclosed a few meagre hairs, even less dignified than if it had been clean shaven.

“It was awful. He was so apologetic. And in my confusion as to what might be the decent response, I just stood there stony-faced, as though I had witnessed nothing. How should I have behaved, do you think? How, such that he might know I wanted to take him at his full presence, and not … wigless?”

20/6/12 Molly on the shore

“Gouldilocks, may you have joy of it.”

“I’m sure I will. Explain to me Joy?”

“It is when you are conscious of being in the dance but unconscious of being in the place where the dance occurs.”

“Gotcha.”

21/6/12 We go

We go to pictures to find particularity. We go to music to find continuum. But this serves only to make us long for both contexts in a simultaneous sensation. Do we try poetry to provide this? Yes. And the hybrid context succeeds, but only to that point where the verbal image becomes crude beside the delicacy and élan with which a painter has caught the content of an instant, only to that point where the flow of words cannot match the inchoate reach of non-verbal sound.

16/7/12 Oh dear

Too often the photos of my childhood disclose Gouldilocks as The Show-Off. Why must the curly brat perform so? And how define show-off in this case? Shall we call it that impulse at any moment to be conspicuous as the vivid thing of my self-imagining?

O dear, what egotistical jumble this draws from the rag basket! For instance, is my long enterprise in making verbal things for show founded on no more than this show-off predisposition? How can it not be? The very act of writing a piece implies a boast—Look at me! I am present above others because I rise with my goods to tell you about it.

The consoling thought is that this places me in company with the show-off billions, all those who peck poems from keyboards, punt inflated leather between posts, finger the stops on a flute or the frets on a guitar, simper before the camera as they take something scrumptious from an oven.

Yet for all us involuntary braggarts, to do other­wise is to lie down with the creatures where we could squeak or roar, our presences immediate enough and competitive, having effect, but having no aspiration as to effect.

21/10/12 What might I suppose?

What might I suppose? Reality, as I observe and experience it, does not tolerate unfinished business; its very condition is to make towards. Can I conclude then, from all that has been, is, and will be the case, there is a Whole looking to be whole, that the very nature of process, while tensioned with further process, at the same time looks towards the conclusion-of-process?

Or is the conclusion-of-process unthinkable by the very nature of what process is—a beyondering?

As a conscious being, my deepest tension is that which seeks to reconcile awareness of a beginning, middle and end in my life—in all lives—with awareness of the continuities I know overlap me, and absorb my material and non-material residue for other uses. Nonetheless, if a viewpoint exists that can see my lifetime as a distinct entity, surely this allows me to suppose a viewpoint that might exist to encompass All-Reality? I use the verb suppose and not conclude.

Reductionist thinking is an effective, if severe instrument and to insist on the materiality of all being is a fair, if dour claim. So the materialist reductionist assures me I will, at death, be extinct, my minimal residue absorbed into the grand recyclings of dust in meaningless perpetuity.

Yet the fact I can be given a glimpse of how pro­cesses appear to impel themselves towards wholeness in my comprehending, at the same time I must be acutely aware of how, as I review what I hoped had been comprehension, I see how incomplete these are but therefore, how potent they could be with a sense of where wholeness might be realised. In the yonder.

Nothing drawn from materiality and the reductionist thinking it prefers, can argue for the resilience of individual being beyond death. But if the idea that Reality, an All that one day, from a viewpoint not to be pre-empted, but which can be fairly supposed, is composed in fair measure of the real sum, as opposed to the mere material sum, of that which has been, then further being can be fairly supposed for the irresolved non-material substance of an existence if we are right in thinking the end-story of Reality will have a conclusiveness to which our intellects find response, having been gifted with the power to recognise it in addition to that power that can recognise its absence.

The worst mistake the atheists make is to believe that anyone who wonders at the possibility of spirit and the resilience of being, must be a child. We are not. We are beyonderists.

25/5/13 Why picaros, to be helpless, must get born

In a picaresque novel, recounting the birth of the hero or heroine in the opening pages is essential to the emotional settings of a work that will be concerned with “on-the-road” narrative. Why so?

A birth brings human presence at its most vulnerable and least formed into a “looming” world where strangeness and full-force of character are already in play. And this condition of vulnerability is equally true of the hero or heroine at the outset of journey. How wonderful, therefore, in its account of birth, are the opening pages of Smollett’s Roderick Random where the hero’s mother dreams she gives birth to a tennis ball that someone promptly hurls over the horizon only to have it hurled right back to her feet again, where it becomes a tree! Brilliant!

So birth of the hero establishes the first motif of the life-journey—vulnerability before the loom of the world. This is quite different from what is offered in, say, Jane Austen where we meet a heroine at the brink of maturity whose further growth will arise from a small, but critical, range of moral recognitions, and an intellect developing its power to make fine discriminations. Elizabeth Bennet finds this power already incipient in her nature, whereas Pip in Great Expectations or Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited must acquire them ruefully. But in either case the births of Elizabeth, Pip and Charles are superfluous to the essential story.

In the case of the picaresque, by entering the reader’s imagination at their births, the picaro, be it Christ, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, or Humphrey Clinker, each have witness to their living from when their presence did not yet possess a self through to their self-possession. Their journeys attract assorted and outlandish adventures, but that inaugurating birth determines the stability of our interest in journey’s end.

30/4/14 The freebies

I write for the sake of making my books as vibrant, true and fair as my talent allows, which is to say, firstly for the calibre of the thing itself, pfui to commerciality. How very altruistic of me. Nonetheless, I do not neglect also to try and eke livelihood from my efforts.

Yet from everywhere come the worthy requests for freebies to impose on this livelihood. “Please give us a poem, a review, a presentation. We can’t pay you, but you do get a free copy of the anthology, the journal, the prospectus with your photo in it.” And here (horrors) is such a cheerful, well-meant offer, to jam another three centimetres of already jammed shelf space with middling literary art in this epoch of millions ego-sick with the need to be witnessed. Thus do beggars put on charm to steal from fellow beggars.

12/6/15 The knockabout world

Like anyone, I can rehearse showdowns, churn scenarios, of spite, of retaliation, of The Worst. My sister tells me humans are far more adept with the negatives of life than its positives and I would need to concede this in my own case.

And yet out on the bridle path this afternoon with my trotting fox-otter, the sky blue and windless, this Canberra winter day poised on the Platonic ideal, I hear the courtesies of cyclists as they approach from behind. “Passing to your right, mate.” “Cheers mate.” “Avagood’n.” And some congenial lycra goes by at speed. Moments later I pass the slender lady who can walk these stony tracks without stumbling while deeply absorbed in her book.

“Good afternoon,” she rises from her text.

“Isn’t it,” I reply.

For along the stormwater easement with its poles and wires, our hillside presently has a blush of green from the regular rains. And the pinch in my left chest cavity reminds me that I’m healing now, two days on from my affray.

Let there be no evasions: affray happens; I know this from six years at an English boarding school. It is a knockabout world. And yet the knockabout event can still astound, for its belligerence, yes, but more for the speed with which actions, deliberate but undeliberated, take people from themselves.

On my usual stroll Wednesday night last, I had walked out along my bridle path, the fox-otter disinclined on this occasion, which was a pity, for in the event the little dog might have been protective with some snarly harassments. I did have my stick with me because I no longer trust what my GP has called my “ratshit” hips. This stick is a handsome job I made myself with hexagon brass knob and copper ferrule, a good length and a satisfying balance in its swing. Summer and winter dark, I enjoy this behind-the-houses exercise, the profiles of possums or frogmouths on the wires, occasional squeal of a rabbit being taken somewhere uphill, the black-jag profile of trees and the canopy of Orion and The Cross above them, for all the stony track has made me sprawl on occasion. But this night, unusually, I decided to complete my circuit via the street, so came down through the gardens.

As I crossed the street I glimpsed a cyclist’s light. It was not imminent, though in fairness it was oncoming at a steady pace. A trice saw me skip to the pavement where I made a light remark. “Jeez, you came on quick,” or some such. The cyclist had not needed to brake, swerve or slow his medium pace, and when his own riposte came back to me, while I could not make out the words, I took them to be in the same blithe spirit as my own. Are we not Arcadians together?

Then glancing back, I noted the gent had stopped, turned, pedalled past me again, whereupon he turned to make a second approach. This time I could hear his belligerence.

“You f***in’ step out in my way, and you don’ even apologise.”

There was more crackle as his bicycle fluttered alongside me. In its unexpectedness, belligerent verballing resists being recalled verbatim.

“Nothing to apologise for, sport, surely.”

I have a quick ear for the browbeating manner, and dislike the submissive posture so, as the crackle persisted, I addressed Mister Belligerence thus. “Why don’t you stop and tell me why you are so angry?”

In a moment he had parked his bicycle on its side-stand, and confronted me with his small advantage of height and burliness. He was close, unheeding of the human critical distance, meaning I never quite got a sense of his face. Early fifties, Caucasian, slab cheeks, chin and forehead? I listened to more crackle, then Mr B gave me a fierce shove.

Ah, onset of the violence. I recalled across fifty years to boarding school. If it continued, I would use my stick on his knee, as I had seen police use their truncheons on The Bill to disarm aggression.

“You askin’ me to punch your f***in’ lights out, or what?”

This I can retrieve for the verbatim, though not my response which I hope was stout. When the second shove came I whacked him as hard as I could on the left side of his leg. Sprain the MCL (medial cruciate ligament) and see what discouragement follows, I had learned from my own knocks and that deft truncheon-work in The Bill.

Alas, my whack both incensed him and broke my precious stick, but failed to disable. He launched himself at me. We tumbled, cackling like two roosters. I was under, and could have wished myself more martially self-possessed. I expected a hammering but it never came. Instead, when he had delivered himself of much verballing, he rose, got on his bike, trailing accusations as he departed.

“You’re drunk, mate.”

“That is untrue.”

I searched for my spectacles in the leaf litter, believing them dislodged in the fray, fending his further crackle.

“Let me just find my glasses and I’ll answer that …”

His last catcall was weirdly helpful. “They’re on your f***in’ head, mate,” which indeed they were.

I hobbled home, called police, told my tale to two congenial officers who arrived about 11 p.m. One asked questions and took notes while the other pinned me with a levelling, though not unfriendly stare throughout. Next day the doc told me I had cracked or dislocated ribs in the affray which accounted for why I found it painful to cough or laugh. Mr B, for all his threats, was a shover not a puncher, so I conclude my injury arose from the thump of his weight on me in our tumble.

And so I churn retaliations. Mr B brought on the affray, and I presume he had some private rage for which my crossing the road before his bicycle provided convenient release. I have no conscience about putting him on a copwatch because his rage is evidently volatile, and I do wish my swipe at his knee had been more accurate, that he might have experienced helplessness as I had to under his weight and abuse. But nor do I retreat from my own share in the incitement. I could have soothed rather than stood my ground. I could have misjudged my moment for that whack.

Ribs are left to heal themselves, and so they do. I can now laugh pain-free, though feel sorely a cough or sneeze. In my workshop, I have planed down some jarrah for a replacement stick and fitted its hexagon brass knob. It has nice balance, good length.