A visitor outside our bedroom window.
Rainbow lorikeet in dwarf flowering gum
Lorikeets have brush-tipped tongues...
...for lapping up nectar and pollen.
Usually only one lorikeet feeds on this tree...
...taking turns with another noisy guest, a Little Wattlebird.
Heliopolis and Earth
Heliopolis and Earth 10
Two from a series of images from my science fictional universe of organic architecture, surreality and the seamless integration of science and ‘religion’.
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Investigators at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reported yesterday that they have tracked down the ‘Higgledy-piggledy Bosun’, the entity generally held responsible for creating all the mass in the seven seas and possibly the universe.
Asked where he’d been all this time, the elusive bosun replied, “I was asleep below deck, cap’n.” The bosun admitted to creating the universe’s mass, but claimed he’d “had a bit too much rum that day.”
Museum Victoria has announced in its e-news that its next super-exhibition will be The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia, with ‘over 170 artefacts from the world famous Middle East collection of The British Museum’. Yes! The civilization that brought you writing and literature, agriculture (arguably) and ziggurats, trickster gods and demons of disease, the city-state and urban life. Coming to Melbourne! Praise be to Enki.
I haven’t been posting much here lately as I’ve been concentrating on fiction. My main project at the moment is a (longish) post-apocalyptic short story called ***, which may keep growing. For me (and for the topic!) it’s not very bleak.
I haven’t written a lot for the work blog lately either, what with fiction, study and the Glen Eira Storytelling Festival. However I do have a new post about The Adventures of Tintin.
It was great to have the opportunity to be a judge for the My Brother Jack Literary Awards. Congratulations to all the winning writers, who you can check out here. I was the judge for the Hardie Grant Egmont Junior Secondary Short Story Award (phew!). The ceremony was held on Sunday the 23rd of October and involved public speaking!! Still, I survived and it was all worth it to see the excited faces of the young writers receiving their prizes. It was not so easy, however, to narrow the list down to just three – a necessarily subjective process.
Also this week, Holmesglen Short Story 1 under the capable leadership of Kristin Henry released our annual collection, There’s more to life than Cauliflower Cheese. We each have a story in the book, with mine being ‘Sisters’, a retelling of the Mesopotamian myth of Ishtar’s descent into the Underworld. Well done to all the writers and the hard-working team who put it together!
ElektroErekto Constructor-Spasms along the black frontier. Technically the cage of the wilderness is composed of grey static, peaks formed from two dimensional geometries, a sprinkling of the hard laughter of the stars. Indeed the stars will play for you above the mountains, when they think no one is watching. Creep quietly through your forest, Earth creature. Take your seat at the show. This music of crystal tears fractures in space lines spun between points; measures of light, white green blue red, flow down along the threads; stars sup from spoons. Thus the messages are sent, thus the matter of the cosmos is shared. And in the fury of the void they sing to drown out the roar of space, rage of their primal mother, echoing down from the Big Bang. Every point in the brimful void roars with that original ecstasy, but still the void’s children sing to each other, keeping the vast night at bay. Abyssal buzzcock avaunt! And below, the mountains draw their grids, assembling grey planes of stardust in honour of the song. Perched in a tree, Earth creature watches the mountains’ construction, listens to the stars’ song…
Somewhere there is a black river flowing under stars. This is a bone country, grey and bone and never sees the sun…
I want to write of a sunlit country. The river still runs black in memory. But the yellow ball of the sun is shining in the depths. Pom-pom trees with rainbow tufts appear and disappear along the banks as we voyage. There are birds here so small, so great in song. One will leap from a tree, open its beak and let forth a shriek. Sonic shockwave that curdles the air, mangles the grass stems to rat-nest mazes and passes over the water churning black waves. Luckily their range is small, and on the boat we hear a gentle trill. Meanwhile the bird collapses exhausted into its nest, it must recover its strength for the night.
Arctic foxes are here on vacation, rainbow zinc painted on their noses. They flip us the bird and turn up their stereos. We pretend not to notice them as the sun sinks into the shrieking jungle of night’s unconscious ahead. While beyond the horizon, darkwing glaciers fan their wings, plotting the jungle’s demise in a new ice age. Vast, infinite, they spread their crystalline wings, spars of ice creak, pinions groan, rain of glittering feathers shattering on the plain. Even here the black river flows on, refusing to be frozen refusing to be caged, immune to sun and ice and carrying its own oblivious temperature, climate of zones beyond the sky. Deep below the surface the roar of chaos, scream of the vacuum. Its canyon cut deep into the tundra, white bears stand at attention on its banks as the horror flows by. Perhaps there is its destination, the sun sinking vast and yellow at the end of the world, melting into the ice, throwing up steam of rose, lavender, aquamarine, boiling the clouds in their tank. Or shall it flow on forever around the globe? Or leave us and voyage into the night, to rejoin the void from which it sprung?
I have been reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with its critique of Christianity as among other things a product of body (self-)hatred and a resultant death-drive. This connected with the Vienna exhibition that I went to at the NGV last weekend, where the placards which the curator’s minions had screwed to the wall mentioned Freud and his war between Eros and Thanatos (or was that a love affair?)*
Anyway all this reminded me of an obscure book I found in a second-hand bookshop called The Timing Light**. The author falls somewhere between Brautigan and Pynchon stylistically and chronologically. What was his name? I’ll have to locate the book and get back on that one; I’ve had a bit of trouble finding it online. But the title was hard to forget.
Anyway anyway, the protagonist as often happens in these novels is an intellectual type unable to grasp the pleasures offered by the passing parade of human insanity. In short, an over-analyser. He sees much of human society as primitive and irrational. It is as if he is gazing through the bars, at the monkeys or the lunatics enjoying themselves. They don’t seem to understand themselves what they are doing. They’re just loving, fighting, scratching, snorting, strutting, cowering. Etc.
This narrator/protagonist works in a public pool, where he sees all kinds of ordinary people, including the intellectually disabled who come in for aqua therapy sessions. He notices that the ‘disabled’/ low IQ men (more so than the women) are often happy and mischievous, and thinks about how miserable more intelligent people often are. (Or perhaps men, who are more prone to mind-body splitting?) The beast nature doesn’t worry, doesn’t torment itself, it acts. However many people are torn between the beast and the angel.
All this reminded me of something I’ve read, ‘The more civilisation, the more neurosis.’ It sounds like Freud though I haven’t been able to locate the exact quote, however I found something similar:
‘Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.’
-The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud.
I haven’t read much Freud (no longer works. or does it?) but this is very close to the view of our philosophical pool guard. That is, that religion operates as a psychological de-centering technique. By believing in something (unprovable so un-disprovable) outside the self you don’t have to worry so much. It enables the projection of neurotic self-scrutiny onto an external thingy that must be big enough to handle it!
The narrator, incapable of silencing his doubts sufficiently to embrace a religion (whether the punitive stick-wielding kind for keeping the primitive in line or the more advanced man’s religion of joy and willing participation), embarks on a series of debauches involving sex, drugs and experiment with different behaviours and identities, including dancing badly in the mud and shouting at athletes. Yet despite the existentialists’ promises to the contrary he always wakes up as himself. None of these activities permanently break through the cage of the individual mind.
As one would expect from such a novel there is no real resolution and the narrator goes back to work at the pool. In fact the last sentence doesn’t even end, so, like the giant mole in Kafka’s ‘Burrow’ the reader imagines the pool guard going around and around his mental tunnels for all eternity, or until he suffers a panic attack, falls into the pool and drowns.
*The Babylonians were onto something when they gave Love and War to the same deity, the goddess Ishtar.
**The title may refer to the automotive timing light’s role in ‘balancing’ ignition timing, just as the narrator seeks to balance his intellectual coldness with periodic debauches. Thus these episodes illuminate positions along his internal harmonic balancer.
Then again it may be a piece of intellectual wankery.
First there is a gate, under the mountain. Square lintel, and in the centre…a black ball…no, a circle. Just absence…I walk forward and it swells…the circle grows faster than the door frame, as if it’s moving towards me, as I move towards it. I step through the door. The broken teeth of the mountains fill the horizon…the black pool swells, growing before me, eating at the centre of things. I can’t see the mountain peaks, they disappear into darkness. There is a forest, a fringing forest, delicate, draping arms of spruce…Rhododendrons shelter under crags where the ounce stalks its hunger across fields of scree. On the near shore of the pool shallow water lies, the colour of tea; sunlight strikes through its contracting depths…black flaws hunt among the ripples, lie still when I stare at them, saying “We have never moved.” The sky too, the colour of tea, sun rays chiselled into mud. The midnight pool contracts, expands, its ancient breathing unsettles me, rhythm I cannot catch, always breathing, breathing light, exhaling darkness. I journey on, not knowing where it will lead – this journey into my eye, reflected in the mirror.
