Brothers Save Seven People Caught By Rip .... (and other exciting blog updates) ....

As usual, it's been a while. I learned that I can't yet put a link to my film Air up, since first we have to see if we get into festivals, then it has to go onto the QOOB website (the Italian co-producers).

Meanwhile: me and my brothers. Three decades ago. Double-click to read. Then click again to zoom.

Sangre de Cristo

That's the mountain above me as I write. But first things first. I shot a short film in Texas. Called "Air." When it's ready, I'll link it to a site from here. Should be March or April. My first film as writer-director. Something came together and suddenly there were seventeen of us on an old Greyhound bus heading a thousand miles through the night, with a white-rapper driver whose name was "Cornfed", to west Texas. It all worked out, even though I made a lot of stupid first-time mistakes - later paying the price in frustration in the edit room. A few images from the shoot. Me in the Charlie Brown pullover. And on another day, much colder, in the light-coloured beanie talking to Andrew Garfield, our extraordinary lead actor, who very deservedly won a BAFTA for "Boy A".







So now I am in New Mexico. My friends Dennis and Sylvia have a house here, 8000 feet up in the snow (snow right now, that is) above a small town called Arroyo Seco, and they tend to stay here in summer, so I've come up from LA on a self-imposed writer's retreat. Trying to navigate the fine line between creative solitude and stir-crazy isolation. A very fine line, some days. It is beautiful here. A few pictures. Plus the car I bought last week in Albuquerque for $1500 - a 1973 Buick Le Sabre Centurion, which I love, and which cruises like a big old ship, while still managing to look a little pimped out.

Sometimes (it is rare) there is poetry in the Craigslist auto & truck ads. I saw this:

Engine does not smoke or knock.
Tranny does not slip or shudder.
Rear end does not howl or whine.

(It was written in prose, but there's poetry in it.)

I am up here to edit/wrestle with/reorganize my new book of poetry ("Interferon Psalms"), which my publishers are waiting for back in Australia. The manuscript is essentially finished, but there are structural decisions etc to make. I figured a maximum-non-distraction environment would be good. Here also to begin the new novel: a blank page situation for the first time in quite a while - nothing but a dense two-page outline, the story in its essence, and a sense of the novel's overall texture.

I'm nestled under the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains, or mountain, I'm not sure which. There's a zen temple right next door, which I haven't visited yet. The former abbott of the temple (former because he died in a swimming accident in Switzerland in 2002, apparently) named it "Daisho-Zan" or "Great Holy Mountain" twenty years ago. (I guess there's a name before the Spanish name too.)

On the wall beside my bed, there's a lithograph, or possibly an etching, by someone whose name I can't make out (perhaps it's "Wilsey '99"??), a crazy blue image of a star with an eye in it, and a wild sea and night sky, and beneath it this quote, attributed to Michael Hannon, from "Fables":

We are crossing the lake of violent time
singing a little a little void song for courage....

(And I wonder if the "a little a little" is a Wilsey mistake in the transcribing, or a correct transcription of the Hannon original. I like both possibilities.)

5. The Writing on the Wall

Writing, in the previous blog, about those memories of significant graffiti reminded me of one other: this, high on a wall in Copenhagen in, I think, 2005.

I like the grand scale: it's quite high up, and clearly it's been done with a roller brush. Hard to tell exactly where it was done from, too. Above, beside, or below. All would present difficulties. Such a grand stage for such a trivial announcement. Then again, that's what the majority of billboards are: declamatory, monumental and irrelevant. At least this is a little subversive, and wears its loopy heart on its sleeve.

4. Aldo & Angel

In December and January I put finishing touches to my novel God of Speed. During this time I liked the fact that Los Angeles at last got crisp, especially at night. I had been there eight months and thought it was all just endless Truman Show, climate-controlled. But LA winter reminded me a little of winter in Sydney, the blue-sky days, the tang in the air, a pale and dreamy sun, and the drop at night. Then in February I went to the 4th Festival Internacional de Poesia de Granada, in Nicaragua, a beautiful experience I might get around to writing about. On March 1 I left LA, mostly to promote the novel's release in Australia, and do the Auckland and Sydney Writers' Festivals. I'll return to LA on July 1, so it feels I've been living out of a suitcase for four months. Lots of adventures, tempered by a destabilising sense of transience. Probably I wouldn't swap it though. My French publishers will publish God of Speed but no sale yet to an American or British publisher. I turned up in Paris a couple of weeks ago, off the plane and straight to my publishers' apartment, and checked my email to see one from Festival & Co, the small but excellent literary festival run out of the Shakespeare & Co bookshop. Antonia Fraser had had to pull out, due to her husband Harold Pinter's sudden hospitalization, and could I possibly do a replacement panel that day at 4pm? (It was 9am when I read the email; I had just flown for 24 hours.) Defenses clearly down from early-onset jetlag, I said Yes, why not? and dutifully trotted myself out, seven strange hours later. It was one of those memorably hallucinated jetlagged events, in that now, two weeks later, I remember only fragments, as if from a particularly fractured dream. I met the English philosopher AC Grayling in the green room, and liked him very much. He did a session the next day on Descartes. He was an elegant speaker without notes, and it was absolutely fascinating, but he was clearly one of those people who could speak on any topic and deeply hold one's interest and attention, jetlagged and all. Bill Maidment, a lecturer at Sydney University, was like that. I was one of many who understood, by second year, that the smart thing to do, regarding Maidment, was to take whatever course(s) he was offering, no matter how odd the subject matter. It increased one's chances of getting good marks in the exams, because the learning had been rather effortless, but more than that, it increased one's pleasure at being young, alive, and a vessel capable of taking on more knowledge. Or rather: more wonder.

The following week, the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie, which takes place every summer in the Marché de Poésie (where else but France?) in the Place St Sulpice, contacted me to say that the Australian poet Phillip Hammial had taken ill (I hope he is better), and could I take his place in the Saturday reading? Well yes, why not? So I definitely felt like the replacement guy in Paris, and tried to work out what that might mean. Nothing, really, I suppose. But I liked the coincidence.

Now I am in New York for a few days. Balmy late June nights. Strolling along on the lower west side tonight, I saw a small, discrete graffiti: I FEEL SEX. Barely noticeable, on a door in a recessed doorway I passed. "I feel sex." Yes, indeed. As one does. I liked how, with the addition of a simple "Y", it would have been banal, unworthy of reporting; but that the missing "Y" suddenly meant a proliferation of meanings, some of them interesting. I felt instinctively -- perhaps it was something to do with the handwriting -- that there was some pathological blend of yearning and pain in the person who actually wrote it, but that the statement itself, away from the context of its composition, was grandly humourous, erotic in its bluntness, and mischievous in a balmy June way.

This brought to mind the three memorable (that word again) instances of graffiti that have somehow stayed with me through my life.

The first from childhood. I visited someone recently on the leafy north shore of Sydney, near where I had grown up, and I suddenly remembered a graffiti that had deeply intrigued me between about the ages of about eight and eleven, decades ago. I think it was on a railway bridge somewhere near Gordon Station. It said simply:

ANGEL YOU HAVE DIED IN VAIN

What I'd give, still now, as I would have, then, to know, even vaguely, what it might have been about.A Google search is no help at all.

The second: for many years, through the early nineties, along the stormwall at the southern end of Bondi Beach, was, in enormous white hand-painted (not spray-painted) lettering, the word "ALDO". This in itself was non-eventful. The stroke of genius was the day I saw it had been added to, in an equally large, but now spray-painted hand, and in a noticeably different script. It now read:

ALDOUS HUXLEY WOULD HAVE LOVED BONDI

I was excited by this, and I saw it every day for years. I somehow thought it was a Doors of Perception reference, because there's that wildness in the air at Bondi, where the ocean meets the land, and the sky is charged with a kind of salt-sparkling electricity. That graffiti was there for a good long time, but eventually the council did a graffiti cleanup of the stormwall. They should have hewed that phrase in granite.

The third one, I saw in Dublin around 1998, on a clean white wall. The first huge line, with its initial capitals seeming to set forth its declamatory intent:

KATHLEEN -- Dog-biter blondie hoor

and then the second line, a little meeker, preceded by that beautiful innocuous ellipsis:

.... and I don't like her any moor....

If there's anger here -- and I imagine there may well have been, in the beginning in any case -- it's offset, it's defused somehow, by the almost linguistic lilt of its humour. And who could not love that hoor/moor rhyme?

Then on the plane from Paris to New York, I wrote three poems. I love those bursts on planes. Such a nice bubble, in which poems arrive that seemingly don't carry with them the usual DNA, or rather, the usual trusses and supporting beams. Not sure this is a habit I would want to get into regularly, but for no particular reason, here is one of them.


MYTHIC SACRIFICES IN THE FRIENDLY SUMMER


Another airport, another bull to be slaughtered.

I had changed greatly in a personal decade

but little in eleven thousand years.

When I saw bulls I saw red and felt a kinship

with necessity. I felt very relaxed knowing

the world was overflowing with procedure, even in

its younger phase. One gave one thing to get

in turn another. Seeing red was like seeing

the future, the sliding of the blade, and I felt

much closer to God. Sunny times, old Memory.



Mithra didn't know shit from clay.

I liked my own communion in the desert:

felt I was onto something, and that if I just

concentrated hard enough, I could invent a tradition

of stillness. The hummingbird makes the hum.

But every time I travelled I would see, many and fierce,

bulls no one else could see, unnerving in their defiant

love of fate. One cornered me in the Men's Room.

Again that moment: you must change your life.

I buried him later high in a tree.

~~~~~~~

A final point. I find myself these days so utterly entranced by Borges, and I loved reading, in Alberto Manguel's short memoir With Borges, the anecdote about Borges, that austere, well mannered, perfectly dressed old gentleman, blind or nearly blind by now, saying, gently, to an unruly child, "If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear."

3. "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." (Philo of Alexandria)

I drove for weeks, it seemed, and the rain never let up. British Columbia, Oregon, Northern California, driving rain, the soothing swish of windscreen wipers. Rental cars are good, insofar as they are new. Which is to say they are waterproof, and don't steam up. Driving through the downpour, through spruce or pine or redwood, the sense is of being in a bubble of oxygen on a benign but exotic planet, or of drifting through vast underwater forests.

During the trip I was wading, sometimes rapt, sometimes merely determined, through Berryman's Collected Poems 1937-1971, which is pretty much everything except for the sublime Dream Songs. A difficult pleasure, like Weil. He fought great battles, but left great gifts. When I read too fast, they pass me by; it is easy to do, for the density and difficulty invite skimming. The impenetrability can be daunting. It is like a rippled stream: but you have to traverse the rippled section to be there when the water suddenly opens out, when deep transparency becomes available.

"Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done ..."
(from "Eleven Addresses to the Lord")

"You must perhaps both pray for & abandon
your peculiar strength of patience,
daring daily more or all."
(from "To a Woman")

The desire to achieve patience, the desire to abandon it. Haunting contradictions, given the way his battles came to an end. Though there is something enticing in that notion of a daily escalation - from "more" to "all" - of daring. As if it can be developed by practice. I suppose it can.

That reminds me, obliquely, of something I read in Harper's Magazine recently: "Einstein's gravity is not so much a force as a circumstance: the very material of the cosmos has crumpled steeply around you until, almost conspiratorially, all of your possible paths have been narrowed to one." (John Mooallem, "A Curious Attraction - On the Quest for Antigravity")

But I was speaking of rain. I had begun to think that it never rains in Southern California, where I have been lately, on and off. That, as far as weather goes, this place might as well be "The Truman Show". So it has been good to wake up to a steady downpour today.


The hills outside where I have been living were ravaged by fire in April. It's been a kind of moonscape - pretty, but in an apocalyptic way - since I moved here. Then a month or so ago (before I went north, to the rain) there was a period where Griffith Park was closed to the public, and all day, every day, helicopters came in low and dropped a kind of green mulch over the barren ground. It looked like a strange art installation developing, Christo at work perhaps. The photo shows a fresh strip; within days of the drops the greens would become less lurid. It's "organic", or so they say. In Southern California one would expect so. It's a mulch that both reseeds the soil (with what?) and binds it, to prevent mudslides in the upcoming rainy season. I read this in the local paper and was pleased to learn there is, indeed, a rainy season.

Of which perhaps today is the first day?

I would have liked to have seen a mudslide, though.

In the meantime, in terms of visceral entertainment in the local neighbourhood, I will content myself with the frenzied yelping and bloodcurdling screeching of the packs of coyotes that come in from the hills to the edge of the suburb some evenings. (It is always in the first hour or two after dusk.) They are dispatching suburban cats, I've been told. Something's getting hurt, that's for sure, and the hairs raise on the back of the neck, a primal response.

One day I watched from my desk a coyote, immobile in the shade of a spindly tree in a gulch, not three hundred metres away, the occasional languid flicker of its ears the only hint it was not a statue. And yet if I turn my head 90 degrees, there are eleven million people spread out there. At night sometimes it is the distant baritone honking of the freight trains running through Glendale, and not the coyote attack, that reaches you.

When I got back from the rain trip it was Thanksgiving, my first ever first-hand experience of the ritual. It's been fertile ground in films about dysfunctional families coming together to collectively sprinkle salt in wounds, but I was fortunate to be invited to a mellow lovefest, complete with Louisiana cooking. Berryman seems to have a quote for every event:

"For that free Grace bringing us past great risks
& thro' great griefs surviving to this feast
sober and still, with the children unborn and born,
among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt
and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude."
(from "Minnesota Thanksgiving")

It got me to thinking how if one can live with relatively high levels of gratitude, then one is relatively lucky. Through whatever thick and thin. Through the worst disaster. For the simple surprising fact of having been here at all, and the knowledge that one day that will not be the case, that all things, without exception, will pass. But there is another level. When, through conscious contemplation, one becomes aware that one is experiencing a high level of gratitude: the gratitude increases yet again. A positively reinforcing loop. This is an accessible state. But it must be developed by practice too. Because complacency can act as a grand counterweight; what's more, there's a lot of white noise out there.

Perpetual alertness, mindfulness: life lives in you, it moves in you, it speaks itself.

If I could do this more often (blog, I mean, not be perpetually alert), it might not ramble so much. Though maybe that goes for the alertness too.

Final Berryman:

"... a fair wind and the honey lights of home
being all I beg this wind-torn foreign evening ..."
(from "Overseas Prayer")

2. "There exists a 'deifugal' force. Otherwise all would be God." (Simone Weil)

I saw this image about a year ago, driving somewhere out beyond Mudgee and Orange in central western New South Wales, looking for locations for a short film I plan to make called "Air". I can't remember any more exactly where this place was; it was on a day of random driving through back-roads, and while I noted down locations of relevance to the film, this was just a "stop-the-car, did-I-just-see-that?" moment. And how lovely, and odd, it is. I'd love to know more about it, but figure I may never.

It's all pretty flat out there, but this was an area where I was winding up and down hills. This image was a long way from anywhere, on a rock face, close to the road, on a bend. What is it doing here? It's the kind of image you'd find stencilled around the inner city - close to an art school, perhaps, an obsessive little motif scattered in back alleys. But not all alone, a hundred kilometres outside of Mudgee. And what is the flying man doing exactly? Or thinking, on his lonely central western vigil? And are those wings? And is he wearing a suit? The shoes make me think so. And is that a signature? A "D"? And a kiss?

Right now I'm in Paris, and that road trip seems a long time ago. I've been reading "Gravity and Grace" by Simone Weil; this appears to have been just the right July, just the right hemisphere (Freudian pun), just the right Paris in which to read something really challenging - I have to concentrate, hard - that opens out, now and again, into these flashes of recognition. But it comes to you quite calmly. Reading Weil, it's like you are picnicking with astonishment. I mean, you spread the blanket, you open the picnic basket, and look - astonishing bread, astonishing knives that glint as you cut.

"To strip ourselves," she says, "of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world."

Later: "We have to go down to the root of our desires in order to tear the energy from its object. That is where the desires are true in so far as they are energy. It is the object which is unreal. But there is an unspeakable wrench in the soul at the separation of a desire from its object."

This morning I had breakfast with my friend Maria and her fiancé J-F the fireman, at his apartment above the fire station at St Sulpice. Then Maria and I rode bicycles across Paris to her apartment in the 18th, and then down to her dress shop, elegantly minimalist, in the 3rd. which she had to open around midday.

Eleven years ago I had ridden pillion on the back of Laurent E's moped, as we careened through this city that was everything he knew and loved. This was a bright time for him. But he never quite made it through, and died last year, far too young, and troubled. The last I saw him, eighteen months ago, he had run out of the café, crying with shame at where his life had gotten to. Perhaps my unexpected arrival had brought back for him memories of what once was. This week I will visit his grave, at the cemetery out near the Porte de Pantin. The first time, perhaps, I've understood the concrete necessity to say goodbye.

And yet today, whirling through Paris, trailing Maria the navigator, just as eleven years ago, watching the city unfold over Laurent's shoulder, what I experienced was a kind of flow. Which is nice, because for various reasons, these are stop-start times, and flow is not a given.

Weil: "In general we must not wish for the disappearance of any of our troubles, but grace to transform them."

1. Thou art that

Hardly daily. Barely weekly. Possibly not monthly. But could be handy.

My friend Lee called from New York the other day. She was at the zoo - I forgot to ask why - and couldn't find the exit; the call was interrupted at one point by her asking a staff member for directions.

A couple of minutes later she said to me: "I keep circling the baboon reserve and saying where the hell are the peacocks."

Later again: "I passed the lions they were roaring like crazy."

I wrote the lines down because they tickled me pink. They will most likely make it into my next book, "The Interferon Psalms". I don't often write that way but how could I resist this? Is that what's called "found poetry"? Not any more.

Lee said if she could just find the peacocks she could find the subway entrance. She had worked at the zoo briefly once but had been in Madagascar more recently and perhaps memory played tricks.

Then I heard a commotion on the line. "That's a lovely sound," I said.

"That's a bunch of peacocks squawking," she said. (I had thought it was a group of schoolchildren running past her, screeching with joy. It was an odd experience, transferring the visual image when she said "peacocks".)

In the interests of brevity, I will finish with something from Eduardo Galeano, "Walking Words":

"The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta."