May 30th, 2009
Eurydice
Be ahead of all parting, as if it were
behind you, like the winter you just weathered.
Because among the winters there is one so endless winter,
that, overwintering it, your heart recovers altogether.
Be always dead in Eurydice - rise up singing,
rise up praising, once again concerned with purer matters.
Be here, among the dwindling, in the realm of leaning,
be a ringing glass, that in sounding swiftly shatters.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Orpheus Sonnets, II,13
Image - Bill Henson
For Ken and Elizabeth
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May 20th, 2009
My mother had a thing for Isadora Duncan. I’m not convinced it was the white chiton, free movement and aroma of rebelliousness, because she was also interested in Margot Fonteyn and Maya Plisetskaya, both disciplined classical dancers. It could have been the 1968 film Isadora starring Vanessa Redgrave. I watched this film on television with my mother some years later and I was very taken with the white chiton, sensual movement, plentiful lovers and bohemian lifestyle of Isadora. Now that’s for me, I remember thinking at the time.
Even poor Isadora’s death when her long scarf became caught in the wheels of her lover’s sports car thus strangling her did not deter me. And combine that with the publicity shot of Vanessa Redgrave as Isadora, all abandon and sexuality in the name of Art. Well, they had me. I knew where I wanted to go.
I’m sure my mother was not aware of my thoughts at the time, or maybe she was, because she hauled me off to see the great Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, performing with the Australian Ballet.
Maya Plisetskaya
I sat in my seat and waited. Curtain goes up, performance unfolds. So where was the abandonment of self to the spirit? The sensual drapery? The fantastic other worldliness of Isadora? It was not in Plisetskaya’s disciplined and athletic movements. I fidgeted and squirmed, unable to engage with what I was seeing on stage until the woman behind me gave me a sharp rap on the shoulder with her rolled up program. You could do that sort of thing to other people’s children in those days. I sunk down in my seat brooding and resentful at the Russian so-called artist on stage. It was all her fault. Or my mother’s. Or maybe a conspiracy of the two.
I suspect my mother’s interest in Isadora was fostered by her own mother’s (Gwendolyn) wholehearted embrace of Theosophy as an adult. My mother disapproved of Gwendolyn’s embrace of ‘weird religions.’
Do all children long for conservative parents?
Gwendolyn and her sister Rene, (my great aunt), were the daughters of a fire and brimstone Methodist preacher from Newcastle on Tyne. Rene became interested in Rudolf Steiner and opened a Steiner kindergarten for disabled children, and Gwendolyn, after establishing the library at Sydney Teachers College and raising my mother, left for Greece and subsequently India where she became a follower of Krishnamurti and the Theosophists. She would visit us regularly, flying in from some ashram, burn incense, wear sari’s, fight with my mother and off she’d go again.
My mother read about Krishnamurti and Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists in an attempt, probably, to work out who the hell her mother really was. I didn’t know what a Theosophist was. Sounded boring to me, vaguely churchy or related to study, and I was busy working on my goal of becoming a Native American at the time.
Richard Tarnes, in his book Cosmos and Psyche says, ’Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands.’ So it appears my grandmother and I were actually pursuing the same path - I, with my attraction to the freedom, spiritual and communal values of tribal society, (and the cool, beaded clothes). And Gwendolyn with her attraction to the freedom and spiritual world that Theosophy offered, (and the luscious, coloured saris).
Isadora worked for a time in post revolutionary Russia. It proved to be too spartan for her and she removed to Paris in the 1920’s, a place and time where every good Bohemian should be, in their hearts if not in actuality. It was an era of cultural shift in which the ideas inherent in Theosophy found a place to flourish. Tarnes says ‘ the work of Mondrian and Kandinsky was deeply influenced by their encounter with Theosophy. Art itself during this alignment was infused with a new sense of spiritual significance, whether in painting, in literature (Rilke, Joyce, Proust) or dance, Isadora Duncan, who said, ‘art which is not religious is not art, is mere merchandise.’
Isadora could not have meant religion in the formal doctrinal sense, but more in what we would call today (using a word so misused it scarcely means anything anymore), ‘spiritual’. Art must be infused with the spirit of the search for meaning, for truths, and for knowledge. I can go along with that.
me
My grandmother would have been in her twenties in this era, and these cultural shifts had a huge influence on her. I am drawn to the culture of my parent’s times, novels by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and paintings by Charles Blackman, Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale. Maybe because these paintings and books were the wallpaper of my childhood, (along with Disneyland, Malvern Star bikes and that hideous dish, Shepherds Pie), I feel an attachment or familiarity with them, just as my mother would have known who Isadora and Krishnamurti were.
So we are, I like to theorise, in some ways connected to the cultural eras of our parents. Their fascinations and interests form sediment in our minds, becoming a part of us. What my children will take with them through life of my cultural obsessions and fancies I scarcely dare to speculate on. Perhaps I’ll be dead before they express these preferences in some way. But when one of them refuses to eat basil because it is not in season, or feels compelled to go into all the museums in which ever city they are in, and refers to their favourite books as their best friends, they might think of me and think, who really was my mother?
me
In one of her last letters to me before she died, Gwendolyn wrote, ‘One of the hardest things in life is to be a non conformist.’ And she certainly knew a thing or two about that. She died in her mid eighties, a lone vegetarian in a Rosicrucian nursing home in London. Her worldly goods consisted of a bundle of art prints and a shelf of classical music recordings, and newspaper clippings of interest to her.
Her words have stayed with me. At the time they bored into my brain as I had just made a life decision she no doubt disapproved of. I don’t question the life experience and advice of a woman who lived as long as she, but I would have liked to ask her this, ‘Isn’t it harder to live as a conformist if you need to be free?’ When I look at her life, I know she would never have settled for anything less than freedom.
Gwendolyn
Isadora Duncan
upti3zrumm
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May 17th, 2009
‘Fear not, till Birnam wood
Do come to Dunsinane’
Macbeth, Scene V
Things happen in forests. For me, anyway, but only when I walk in them.
On my first two-night walk in a forest, carrying backpack and tent, I wore a brand new pair of walking boots. I neglected to break these boots in before setting out with a group of friends. By the end of day two my socks were stuck to my feet with dried blood. Given the option of being escorted back to the cars I took a deep breath, felt the blood squelch around my boots, and said ‘I’ll keep going.’ Each step was agony, but I finished that damn walk. Early the next morning, after tying rags and socks and more rags around my feet I went to work.
I worked in a local vineyard taking vine cuttings from dawn until dusk in rubber boots. We’d work our way down the rows and back up the other side, surrounded on all sides by green hills of vineyards. It was very hard physical work, and we were paid by the bundle, however the pleasures of being outside and watching the rhythms of the day around me compensated for the exhaustion. But add the bloodied feet and it was an epic of endurance.
I continued these overnight hikes for some years. But at other times I walked alone. My favourite solitary walk was taken through a large and sprawling pine forest near where I was living at the time. I’d enter the silent tunnels between the trees and climb the steep hill right to the top where the forest opened out, have an orange, (never an apple or banana), stick the peel in my pocket and keep going across the paddock to an area of native bushland. I had my favourite logs to sit on, my favourite views and hidden places. I walked this route almost every day for a year, and felt incomplete at the end of the day if I didn’t do it. The thoughts and ideas that occurred during this particular walk still echo in my life today, and the forest resonated in many of my artworks over the years.
Pine forests have quietness to them. Not native to Australia, very little grows under the trees and so there is no crunch or crack as there is in the dry native bushland. The quietness of the forest was often enhanced by heavy mist, and occasionally broken by the heavy thudding of a mob of kangaroos fleeing the intruder. On looking up I’d see the large, black bush ravens watching me with their impassive stare. Rabbits sometimes hurtled past and the forest floor, padded with pine needles, swallowed up every sound.
I could never enter the forest without thinking about Bertolucci’s film The Conformist and the attempted assassination in the pine forest, or Polanski’s film of Macbeth and his brilliant imagery of Birnam Wood moving across the hillside in the early morning light. Even now, if I see a pine forest in a film I sit up straight and bristle with excitement.
Walking can bring into consciousness truths that one had, until that point, known, but refused to acknowledge. It is the experience of Macbeth’s guard seeing Birnam Wood move toward the castle. He saw it, but he turns away because he knows such a thing could never happen. He turns back and the wood has moved again. It is the act of turning away, of not accepting what is staring one in the face, that I associate with pine forests. But the act of walking through the forest somehow reverses this.
A year or so after my affair with the forest I made an installation for an exhibition with three other sculptors. It consisted of hundreds of drawings of pine trees with their roots out of the ground and entwined, made with graphite chunks on transparent paper. These drawings were placed in a large circle, one on top of the other so the viewer saw through each drawing to the one below and the one below that. At various points in the circle carved stones held the papers down and as the occasional breeze wafted through the gallery the papers would gently lift and fall.
Unable to let go of the forest, some years later I made a large print, “Creature in the Forest” (which won a national print award). The creature, a hybrid dog/person dressed in a wolf skin, stands on hands and knees surrounded by the pines and weeping ravens. I no longer practice as an artist, but these two works remain very close to me.
In my current incarnation as writer I find walking essential. I take a small digital recorder and practice my characters dialogue as I walk. It can get very animated at times. But I don’t do it on public streets. I grab the dog and go into the bushland behind the house. She enacts her seek-and-destroy all feral foxes fantasy while I enact imaginary conversations. I have at times come across other walkers who look askance at me. I smile and keep walking. It has become so important to the process of creating that I dislike listening to my Ipod, or even walking with anyone other than the dog.
The walking returns me to the inner world where all of it is born, lives and fades.
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May 16th, 2009
Egon Scheile
Romantic Comedy.
Those words go together like flowers and chocolate, breakfast and Tiffany’s, vodka and razor blades, pillows and tears. But where is the comedy in romance? Is it like happiness, only discovered when looking into ones’ past or is it anticipated in the future? How many people would look back on their romances and remember the comedic nature rather than the pain of such episodes?
It’s only long afterwards, (and in some cases, never), that one can see the humour in it all. Occasionally one can see folly and wasted emotion while in the grip of it, but never humour. To have a laugh often requires people to share your situation, to be in the trenches with you. But mostly you are in that foxhole alone because the one doing the sniper firing is usually your loved one. This could be funny, depending on the nature of the bullets. But usually it’s not.
The writer of romantic comedy attempts to make the most painful scenes of loss, confusion and disappointment appear funny. Writing about the reality of romantic turmoil is one for the literary guys out the back with their overflowing ashtrays and quest for truth.
The truth that love does not triumph, people lose what they had, or wanted or needed. The truth that in the real world, love is quite often not enough, or it dies quietly while no one is looking or dwindles into deadening habit. How can we make that funny?
‘He went up into the bedroom and saw her dress hanging up at the foot of the bed. Then, leaning against the secretaire, he remained there till it was dark, lost in sorrowful meditation. After all, she had loved him.’ *
Where is the humour in this passage? It’s almost too painful to read.
And this,
‘Yes,’ he said dreamily, ‘an extraordinary woman. It’s not her cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I’m awfully sorry for her.’ **
Or this,
‘Lily lay on the unmade bed staring at nothing, empty of feeling. Robbie was selfish, Robbie put himself first, he’d betrayed her with other women, but never this. He’d always tried to clean up his own messes, tried to keep it from her, wept with remorse when she wept.’ ***
One of these quotes is from a romantic comedy. But there is nothing funny about any of them.
According to Wikipedia, ‘Clerical critics (in the middle ages) often deemed romances to be harmful worldly distractions from more substantive or moral works.’ Well, they would say that wouldn’t they? In the modern world we crave distraction, diversion, amusement,anything that provides an easy escape from the days concerns. Think of the insubstantial nature of free-to-air television, and think of the rows of best selling books in bookshops. All of them worldly distractions from the daily plod.
Few, these days, read for self-improvement or seek out books to provide moral instruction. We can get that from The Simpsons. And while Australia may have very high book sales per capita we are not talking about Thomas Aquinas or Noam Chomsky. Reg Hunt’s Fishing Guide perhaps or The Complete Dummies Guide to Doing Your BAS. Or romantic comedy, women’s fiction, cookbooks and the occasional thriller.
Google the word ‘romance’ and a range of items come up, ranging from ‘Sexy Ukrainian Girls’, to Hollywood stars’ tips for keeping romance alive, (eat together at expensive restaurants), to the truly sad advertisement for ‘pre-written love letters.’ On delving further into this article I found tips on writing ‘adoring’ love letters. The author of this article cautions the novice letter writer with this sage advice…
’Much safer to write a passionate love letter if you are engaged or married.’
This, one could assume, means it is safer to write such things if you are married but leaves open the question of whom you send the letter to. Is the author perhaps suggesting that passion needs the obstacle of your loved one’s prior commitment to another?
The concept of romance has changed over the centuries. The idea of falling in love, as we know it in the twenty first century, would be considered outlandish for most of the people who have lived on this planet. The medieval notion of courtly love is the true ancestor of today’s notions of romance, (a quick trot through Victorian times endowed it with cloying sentimentality). Courtly love is described as being ‘a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent.’ (1). This is not the sort of love one finds in today’s romantic comedies where the couple are shagging like minks on the first page. Courtly love was to love from afar, to have desire but never have it fulfilled.
To promise faithfulness in adversity was the epitome of romantic sentiment and needed not an expensive restaurant in LA but only a handkerchief, a sigh, a glance and then one got on with the business of marrying for position, fortune and family.
The modern person expects romantic attachment as a prelude to marriage. Erroneous thinking really, as marriage is, the French courtiers knew, about status, fortune and family. Romantic involvement is not the best indicator of a future successful marriage. However, this is our culture and this is how we do it. And there is much money to be made out of such cultural constructs. The desire is created; romance is yearned for, the pain follows and is concluded in a frenzy of retail therapy. And thus there is little profit in commitment. The writer of romantic comedy is well and truly implicated in this cycle, creating expectations and desire. But it is not the desire of courtly love. We would not tolerate perpetual desire with no consummation and all energies diverted to higher pursuits. The remnant institutions of medieval times -– convents and monasteries are almost spent, instant gratification and self-entitlement have taken over and we are all ‘entitled’ to romance. Just as, according to an advertisement I saw in a department store - ‘All Australians are entitled to look good.’
The romantic comedy writer also has a kinder imperative, kinder than kindling unfulfilled yearnings. The writer and the reader run away together, hand in hand escaping the real, the pain and the disappointment. Together they experience what some are too scared of to try, or to hurt to try again, or have never experienced at all. The writer makes it safe and puts a pretty cover on it, manages the reader’s emotions for them, highlight’s the absurdity of it all, and allows the reader to drift away into sleep undisturbed by pain or fevered imaginings.
It’s show business, colluding with the entertainment conglomerates, weaving a shimmering cloth to throw over the inevitable pain and failure of the romantic episode. In the end, however, the writer brings into being a place where they can be alone with their characters, a place where they can construct a better reality than this one, a place they are content to be in, whether a reader comes with them or not.
*Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
** Anne Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
***The Book of Love, Phillipa Fioretti
(it is with extreme humility that I list a quote from my own book next to such giants)
1.Francis X. Newman, ed. (1968). The Meaning of Courtly Love, vii.
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May 15th, 2009
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow Analysis
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:
There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can’t stop him. The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile
and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk
and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets
which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:
There’s a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him. The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly - yet the dignity of his weeping holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow. Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
or force stood around him. There is no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
sand sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons. Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit -and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
as many as follow her also receive it and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea -
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping. Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.
Les Murray
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Eurydice
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