I lay down on the fox pelt, its glass eye right next to mine as I rest my head on its head. I listen to the sound of the gas heater in front of me as I pull the orange and brown rug over my body. My mother knitted this rug. I close my eyes and gently press the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth and breath slowly, slowly, through my nose. It only takes moments before my ears close, just like the pressure change you get when you journey any significant rise or fall in altitude. Like a fog, but one that sensitises me, and nestled deep within the booming foam of that auditory sensation, my body begins to swell. I notice it most with my fingers, which feel like swollen sausages, but when I go deep, it covers my ears then my lips and my whole face, and as the bottom of the sky opens up inside me, my body descends into a thick heaviness, a fallen log, a hibernating bear, a buried treasure. I am awake, alert and very focused on the sounds inside my body, the bio-orchestration of blood and water and air and earth and metal. I am transfixed by the sound of my breathing. I feel as though I am listening to it from inside my body, from inside my lungs.

 

 

I stay like this for as long as I can.

 

 

I lay down on the fox pelt every night during winter that year, and every year after that.

 

 

I know that I was very young when it began, and that even now, I can press my tongue to the roof of my mouth and slowly slowly breathe through my nose, and I begin to submerge and to swell, and deep inside me is the rushing sound of my breath. Overwhelming, overriding, I am filled with this mighty wind and I remember a dream

 

in which I gave myself

 

these words...

 

 

 

The way out is through the breath.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

Sometimes the personality disappears, and that objectivity, which is an attribute of pantheistic poets, develops to such an abnormal pitch that the contemplation of external objects makes you forget your own existence, and you soon loose yourself in them. You gaze at a tree bent in a harmonious curve by the wind; in a few seconds what is only a natural enough comparison in the poet's mind becomes a reality for you. At first you lend the tree your passions, your desire or your melancholy; its groaning and swaying soon become yours, and soon you are the tree. In the same way, the bird hovering high in the azure sky at first represents the immortal wish to soar above human affairs; but almost instantly you become the bird. I imagine you seated, smoking. Your attention rests rather too long on the bluish smoke rising from the pipe. The idea of a slow, gradual, eternal evaporation obsesses your mind, and it is soon transferred to your own thoughts, your own sentient matter. By a strange equivocation, a kind of transposition or mental quid pro quo, you feel yourself dissolving into smoke, crouched like a heap of tobacco in the pipe, which has acquired the strange property of smoking you.

 

 

From The Poem of Hashish, by Charles Baudelaire

 

 

*

 

 

Penny White is dead. She died two days ago, finally delivering herself from the near decade of debilitating body pain she had lived within since her accident. A candle that burned bright. An athlete, an aesthete, an avid reader and music lover. When I first met her, I didn't notice the crutches, though we were walking together to a pub with a group of mutual friends and acquaintances. She was much bigger than her injury, though eventually it conquered her.

 

 

I once said to her that she was so strong that the only thing that could destroy her, was herself. You see, her injury was sustained during roller derby training. She pushed herself all the way.

 

 

Never defeated, even now in death, she is a warrior and woman of integrity. My memories of her, though clouded with time and the calamity of our short relationship, are precious. She could see the world with eyes unclouded. Now she has delivered herself beyond suffering. I am proud of her courage to face death, as only a true warrior can.

 

 

*

 

 

The weather is turning and in the Autumn darkness, trucks heavy laden with grapes thunder beside me on the highway as I drive to rehearsal. The harvest is in full flush, and midnight is seen by teams of women and men on machines that drone obstreperously with the massive power of their diesel engines. I live in a land where the summer abundance of wine is a flood. At sunset the dancers arrive and the music begins, our wine-cups are full of songs, bare feet upon the floorboards. We break bread and laugh and for an evening that is our lives, we step into a world that is neither real, nor unreal. Neither here nor there nor halfway up the stairs. Spirits in blue and spirits in green turn on tiptoe and I find myself holding my breath, trying to hold on to what I see

 

 

A Spirit in White. I see the flash of an owl above me as I drive home. At home I sit beside you on the bed. Spirit in Orange, you wear your bright robe and seem to me like a Eucalyptus flower. There is a discernable language in the silence of your movement. Words do not communicate everything there is to be said and the flick of a finger can tell me all I need to know about how you are feeling. A flutter of the eyelid, or a turn of your head and the angle you drape your hair, or perhaps your knee is turned away, just a little. Even your stillness is a song to me, raking my soul over the fires of heaven. Everything I see, I am looking at you. My breath is parallel to yours, my posture, my stillness and the silent language of my movement. Spirit in Orange, Spirit in Red, the earth falls away beneath my feet every time you turn your gaze from mine, all my certainty feels founded on uncertain assumptions.

 

 

I would forget my name if I could.

 

 

 

*

 

 

Preferring invisibility to confrontation, the Crooked Man attenuated his power, and everywhere he walked, he did so in the shadow of another spirit. He left no footprints of his own, cast no outline upon the earth and made no sound save his breathing which nonetheless pulsed always in rhythm with the wind.

 

 

From my novel, The Hangman Tree, which after seven years is nearing completion.

 

 

 

*

 

 

A letter to my drum students.

 

 

We always start unsure of our ability to learn, but we do not ever let that prevent us from learning. Consider these things today. You have a variety of confidences, and confidants as a group. You share a quiver of techniques developed over years of practice. You have a vocabulary from which to speak music. You have many musical experiences from which to draw inspiration : classes, performances and your own private moments playing while no-one is listening. Drumming on the steering wheel. Drumming on your knee, drumming on your lover's knee. You have your whole life from which to draw inspiration.

 

 

Any challenge that has been set, you have conquered.

 

 

There are many challenges yet to come.

 

 

Consider how you have changed, or grown, or grown humble, because of the drum. Take a moment to remember the things you have seen and done, because you picked up a drum one day and said yes. Take stock of all you have learned and be inspired by your efforts.

 

 

Any challenge you have been set, you have conquered.

 

 

There are many challenges yet to come.

 

 

You have opened yourselves to this wholeheartedly, and for your dedication you reap the rewards equal to your efforts. I too, will consider all that I have seen and done since you began to study this music with me. I will consider all that you have taught me, and all the ways that I have been made humble by you.

 

 

Every challenge you have set me, I have conquered.

 

 

There are many challenges yet to come.

 

 

We always start unsure of our ability to learn, but we do not ever let that prevent us from learning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

I lay down upon the Earth. It is mid-morning, the dew has not yet dried in the shade and I can feel my shirt soaking it up as I rest my head on the grass. I close my eyes and see my body as a canyon, with all the waters of the ocean draining endlessly into it. I take slow breaths, drawing all this energy back into me, all the energy I have wasted throughout the morning, given over to a mounting tension and as I find my breathing growing shallow. I worry about everything I do not know, all the unknown potential calamities yet to befall me, set in motion by my own ignorant fumblings, both in word and deed. So I lay down upon the earth and I breathe real slow and I feel the ocean tumbling into me and I try to remain focused on this sensation, telling myself that nothing else is happening right now.

 

 

I feel myself sinking into the warm soil, the darkness is a mother's caress, it is a swaddling cloth, it is a moment alone but not lonely. I feel my heart beat and I think about getting up, but instead I slow my breathing further and I see myself as a canyon, draining all the oceans into me, returning all the morning's wasted effort and when I do get up, I remind myself that there there is nothing else happening now.

 

 

It's been an interesting week. I left the door open this time, the door to the room of mirrors, and every night I have dreamed. I remember three. In the first my hair was long, a curly cascade of black locks covering my shoulder blades. I was in the streets outside the recording studio. In this dream I was happy.

 

 

The second dream, I had long dredlocks, quite similar to the dreds I used to have about twelve years ago. I was at a commune in Kuitpo Forest, a place I have had friends living in for many years. I this dream, I was not happy.

 

 

In the third dream, I found a super cute baby Brontosaurus (a dinosaur), only it had a peculiar long and flexible vestigial protrusion from its back, which I assumed was the ancestral remains of wings. I picked it up to show the kids, and though it bit me through my garden gloves, it didn't hurt too much, and I managed to show everyone and let the kids pat it before I released it back into the garden. I was in the garden at work in this dream. In this dream I was very happy. In this dream my hair was as it is now, neither long nor short.

 

 

*

 

 

I will tell you about the last twenty four hours.

 

 

          Count backwards from three.

 

 

Eighty school children squeeze into the music room, cross-legged they look up at us and I become a seer with the future lined up before me. Through the window of our art, the seeds of peace blow dandelion soft into the minds and hearts of the little ones. We tell a story, we revel in dance, we drum and we strum and we speak and the question comes every time...what is a Gypsy?

 

 

Though the question itself is fraught with the snares of history and misunderstanding, our answer speaks of the long story of human movement across the land and sea. We name the Romani, the Shuvali, the Indian, Persian, Irish, French, Slovak, Romanian, American and Australian. Our answer is in nine beat, it is in minor scale, it is call and response and howling at the sky and there is something incredible about seeing a room full of children dancing as if they are stirring a huge pot of soup, or wringing out their wet clothes, but greater than these was their fists in the air, wrists crossed above their head striking the seven-eight beat as the dancer in blue revealed the spirit of a culture far removed from their own. With a world atlas unfurled as a flag behind us, the old Czech storyteller points the way of nations driven from their homes by war and prejudice, their possessions few, their spirits resilient.

 

 

We Crossed the mountains

We Crossed the seas

we crossed the rivers and forests

Our Family were with us all the way

 

 

We came to the cities

we came to the towns

the people chased us away

our family were with us all the way

 

 

We came to the school

the children were friendly

we taught them our ways

our family were with us all the way.

 

 

We four, disparate of origin but tangled in the same string, clasp hands and make a steeple of knots and through the windows we can be seen eating and laughing and drinking and sharing our stories and inspiration and gratitude and every moment is practice for our part upon the stage. United by Music, Poetry, Dance, Storytelling and our mutual love for the limping stepping skipping dance of a life well lived, we gadjo give what we can to the fields of the future where the vardos will camp and we pray with our hands and feet that their songs and their dances will continue, as they continue through us.

 

 

Word by word

Dance by Dance

Note by Note

 

 

            Count backwards from two

 

 

I had never considered that multiculturalism in Australia would mean a renaissance of European culture as well, but up there on the stage, handing out citizenship certificates and hearing the vows of the applicants, is the Mayor of the district, resplendent in his long red robe and projecting a welcoming and magnanimous air. His official attire is not out of place. The audience are international, and with the earthen spectrum of human skin all around me, the once exotic Indian sari's, the riotous patterns of Ghanian fabric, and even the glittering costume I have worn to perform in, seem equally in harmony. I imagine I am in Timbuktu, or Carthage or some other fantastic metropolis from the past or even the future. It smells like food cooking and trampled grass and sunset dew as the band takes the stage. This is what peace feels like.

 

 

Strident, Romantic, a feeling that comes up through the feet and makes me want to laugh like a boy, the music is miraculous and smiling faces gather thick beyond the whirligig of spinning dancers. The violin sings lyrical in place of a singer, each song crafted carefully to evoke a certain motion: push me pull me, or turn on the spot beneath the full moon, or laugh and leap then sway down low and let the hips do the talking. It is music to cut a rug to, music to raise a glass to, music for harmony day in the great brown land down under. March twenty first, two thousand and eighteen.

 

 

It is three musicians from three nations, and two dancers from two more. This is what peace feels like, this is what it sounds like, this is happening right now, the flowers of our efforts spread seeds and are carried on the wind to whatever future will take them in and let them grow.

 

 

There is a choir with voices like a mighty lions, there is a choir like an eager apprentice, there are Ukranian Cossack dancers, a jazz piano and drum duet, there are speeches and certificates and the singing of the national anthem and photographers and sound techs and event managers with schedules soon marked with more changes than original plans. It is a congregation of culture and a ceremony of civil law. This is what peace looks like.

 

 

                 Count backwards from one

 

 

I visit my brother, the shaman, the psychonaut, the sorcerer.

 

 

The midnight clock stands still and I am the ocean floor, metamorphic rock, a primal soup, half squid half exploding star. I can feel my amnesia uncoiling, amoebic....there are a lot of things I have not allowed myself to remember about my life. Holes get cut and the absence that remains is a black hold, dead-weight, knuckle-break...what have I hidden away from myself, from you? I forgot how beautiful everything was, how I long ago lived a life that I loved and adored and thought was so precious that I took no time to appreciate it, or care for it, and so like everything, it was swallowed up by time and locked away by pain and every day that I could not speak of it, it got harder and harder to believe that any of it was ever true. My memories sank to the bottom of the ocean where I did my best to let them die and I got on with my life without them. I told myself over and over – you were wrong about everything – the fantasy of happiness and love that you left to rot on the vine was a fiction, an illegitimate claim to a throne you could never be worthy of – but, counting backwards from three two one, I find myself on the ocean floor deep in outer space and I am half squid half exploding star and somewhere nestled in the gooey liquefaction of pressurised sub-mantle rock, I find my own internal organs growing around the broken fragments of my discarded spine and I am being re-made by wiser hands than mine and my forced amnesia comes undone and I remember how beautiful we were, and how every day since then I have told myself that everything I thought was real about us was a lie. I have stabbed myself in the heart every day. I have carved the commandments of my damnation upon the rock of my flesh and I have done my best to get on with my life without my memories of you, made mute by the self referential evidence of my own denial. I offer no defence against my accusations, I make no plea.

 

But today, sipping coffee in the shade of suburban silence, I remember. I have come back up from the leviathan trench and I take my first breath with lungs that feel new and I am at my brother's house, recalling all the years from then to now, and how he has been there through every part of my buried pain, and that I can hold his hand and weep for reasons that do not need explaining, and say over and over to him, Thank you for being here with me now, Brother.

 

 

I made my past into a hell populated only by demons of my failure. I covered over the sky that once shone bright upon my youthful, loving, striving, kind and hopeful life and I bound with briars all my joys and desires, and I tied my arm behind my back and told myself that crippled was the new black and I turned miserable-ever-after in ever decreasing circles, asking why I could not steer myself out of Hades, though the sun shone bright upon my not-so-youthful, loving, striving, kind and hopeful life. The shadows of my hated past stretch long into the present, and all the chains and weights I put on my abandoned memories and let sink to the ocean floor, took me with them, and staring up at the receding light above I asked when will it ever be day again?

 

 

Will it ever be day again?

 

 

But today I am buoyed by the weightless joys of allowing myself to remember that perhaps not everything was a lie, and that we did know happiness and that I was, if only for a few short years, a good and loving man, and that we made a child together and that the sunlight that beams from his every smile is a reflection of the love we once shared. His light breaks through the sky I destroyed and a beam cuts shadows in the long grass, and I contemplate the possibility of forgiving myself for my mistakes.

 

 

It is day. Sometimes madness is a choice. Sometimes it is the lesser of two evils, and sometimes that is no kind of choice at all and today, in the suburban shaded silence of morning, with lungs that feel new I breathe in and I breathe out and I breathe in and I breathe out and I breathe in and I breathe out.

 

 

            Count backwards from zero.

Indivisible From Magic - March 2018


　
I have to leave the room of mirrors for a time. Too long spent in there is like to drive a man mad. The colours of the day start to fade a little, as the darkness grows a little brighter, until, well...you know.

The Hills around here are home to several of the Kithain, I guess they must have come across on the ships with the Scots who settled here. They seem to get on fine with the natives, perhaps there is something about the Dreaming that can allow for new dreams, unlike a lot of other...spiritual perspectives.

The Tall ones, dressed all in yellow, every shade of yellow imaginable, January tall grass yellow, Daisy on its second day yellow, clay from the creek yellow, more gold than yellow yellow, sand washed gray with rocks but it still looks yellow in the morning yellow, cat's eye yellow.

Do they carry spears? Or are they tall swords? The haze of sunset makes them indistinct, but the cobweb clouded kitchen window makes clear what should be unclear and...there they are, standing on the hill, walking acrosss the ridge casting shadows into the sun, as if they were brighter...as if they were brighter.

Then there are the creatures made of stone. In the old country I think people sometimes called them Knockers, but they seem different here. Perhaps they are just Goblins and I do not recognise my own kind as well as I should? But then who made the seeing stones? Certainly not the Goblins.
There are a lot of Goblins.

So many goblins. Stone Goblins, Sand Goblins, Goblins of the West Wind that blow in from the lake every evening. The Fox King, The Razor Clan, the Emperor of Thistles (who is actually lord over all prickly plants, so here that includes the Apple of Sodom.

Life in the Borderlands is weird, wyrd, wiered.


***


I sat in front of the little statue of the Buddha, squatting on the floor on my cushion, I just stared at him. I drank my beer and stared. His enigmatic smile bugged me sometimes, and this was one of those times; he was laughing at me.

"What are you laughing at, fatso?"

I’m laughing at you.

"What’s so funny?"

You think that there is a problem, when there is not a problem.

He sat silently, unmoving. His white stone face obscured occasionally by the incense smoke that drifted past. I twisted my long hair around my fingers, and picked up my book, ignoring him for a moment, but I knew that he was still sitting there, perfectly still; perfectly smug, content and certainly happy to be laughing at me all afternoon.

What is the problem? He asked me.

"There is no problem, you said so yourself." I was trying to be a smartass.

Then why are you worried about it? He was reading my thoughts again. I put my beer on the floor and narrowed my eyes, peering into his, hoping to draw the answers from him without having to go through this whole dialogue thing again, as we seemed to do every afternoon.

"What should I do then?"

Go outside, leave your beer behind. I stood up and walked outside to my front porch. My view stretched out across the park with its tall trees and dry grass. The sky was bright blue and the tree in my front yard moved only slightly from the south breeze that took the edge off the summer heat.

"You think that it is doubt that blocks you, and that your path to peace is based upon your ability to trust me, and to trust yourself." His voiced carried through walls and doors.

"Well, isn’t it all about that; the question of trust, of faith in the world?"

Tell me, do you think that the sun trusts the sky, or that the earth trusts the trees?

 I walked inside and finished my beer.

***


It's time I told you about Queen Manu, of the Lily Delta.


The Delta was a lush territory of peace and prosperity. A land where everyone had shelter and food and comfort. The weather was kind and the river supplied their every need. Their ruler, Queen Manu, was loved and respected and no war had troubled the waters of their land for generations.

But in the mountains things were very different. The Mountain King suffered as his people suffered under a drought that had lasted many years. His wells ran dry and the crops did not grow. As so often happens, his suffering drove him to madness and envy, as he looked down to the delta where life was abundant and where everyone had enough to eat, while his own people starved.

The Mountain King accused Queen Manu of stealing the rain, or declaring war upon his people without drawing a sword, and so he assembled his armies and marched upon his peaceful neigbour, burning and killing everything he found. Queen Manu sent messengers and diplomats, declaring her desire for peace and co-operation between their people. The Delta had more than enough to feed the Mountain people. If they came in peace she would house them all and see them safely through their time of struggle.

But the Mountain King did not hear her kindness. He believed that her offer was an attempt to steal the very people of his nation, after she had already stolen the rain. The Mountain King was sure that Queen Manu would only send her own armies into his emptied lands, and steal the precious gold and silver from his mines. 

On he marched with his armies, burning and killing.

Queen Manu sent a second messnger, declaring her complete surrender, if only he would spare the people of her peaceful nation from the swords and fires of his fury. But the Mountain King did not want peace, and even with the whole Delta offered to him, he demanded her utter destruction. He sent his messengers with the reply that his war would only conclude when Queen Manu's head was delivered to him on a silver plate.

So Queen Manu left her palace and walked down to the river, where she ordered her must trusted servant to cut off her head and deliver it to the Mountain King.


That is the story of Queen Manu of the Lily Delta


***


Now that you know about Queen Manu, you should know of Michael and the Dragon, and remember, all these things are connected.

Ancalagon, the greatest and most terrifying of all the dragons of the ancient world, lay siege to the ancient city of Tara. The parapets burned and the palace lay in ashes, thousands were dead, thousands more dying, the land was flooded with refugees fleeing the carnage, seeking safe places to hide in the night.

Hundreds of brave warriors, knights and archers had marched out to fight the dragon, but none had returned, and the people who remained in Tara, shivered in their homes, huddled together awaiting the fires of the dragon.

Michael, the youngest of four brothers, a boy of only ten years, had watched as his entire world was burned to nothing by Ancalagon, and his heart wept to see the people dying in the street. His father and uncles had all died trying to slay the beast, and now his brothers had not the courage to face it. In the morning, before his family woke up, Michael put on his tin armour, and took up his wooden sword and crawled out across the rubble to fight the dragon and drive it away.

The dragon caught the glimmer of metal in the faded blood red light filtering through the smoke of his devastation, and turned his wing to dive upon this new fool who had come to be his food. When Ancalagon saw that it was only a boy, curiosity entered his heart and he did not burn the child with his fiery breath as he had done all the others before consuming them.

Ancalagon landed before the boy, his gargantuan mass causing the ruins around him to crumble. The cracked remains of towers fell, and stone blocks crumbled to dust beneath the clawed feet of the beast. With a great flourish he spread wide his massive wings, flashing the boy with the magnificently coloured scales that lined his entire body. Their colours were like nothing else in the whole world, new colours that the boy had never seen glittered before him like the treasure hoards of kings and princes of legend.

The dragon lowered his head to look closely at the boy whose hand shook as he raised up his little wooden sword to strike, but the dragon did not harm Michael, instead he spoke.

"Answer me this, little boy, and if I like your answer I will let you live."

Once again the dragon spread his colourful wings and Michael saw the red light of dawn reflected upon the dazzling display of glittering scales. The ruined world of his home city shone like the inside of a cathedral when the sunlight strikes the stained glass windows.

"What is the most magnificent thing you have ever seen?" Ancalagon's arrogance knew no limit.

The boy looked around him at the burning city where nothing grew, where no living thing stirred, and he answered in as brave a voice as he could muster.

"The most magnificent thing I have ever seen are the flowers that will bloom here after you are gone."


And the dragon was so ashamed, that he flew away never to be seen again.


***


They built a prison in the desert, they put people in there who were foreigners, gave prison sentences with no foretold date of release. Whole families lived in these places, children were born and children died in these prisons. From all around people rallied, waving flags and giving speeches, throwing themselves on the barbed wire and running from the guards batons, years passed and still the prison stood.

The desert life took on a routine, a groove began to wear itself into the landscape, leaving a mark in the shape of their delirium. Years passed as people saw before their own eyes, identities dissolving into the hideous coil of white walls and standard issue food served on standard issue plates. Names were forgotten and numbers were given to replace them.

Letters arrive in the night. It is always night after five years in here. I see pictures and song lyrics, sometimes a celebration card, or perhaps a hopeful looking newspaper article with a photo of sixty people with placards standing in front of a tall building. My eyesight is failing me, as surely as my memory has fled me completely. I do not remember who I am, or rather, who I was; in that place that I came from that I cannot remember. I am a hollow being filled with the numbers on a clock face.
They built a prison in the desert, they put foreigners in there and banned the journalists, preferring the published images from their own department of public relations, their ‘leaked’ documents, their scandalous exposés. In the summers people clamoured against the walls with their flags and their speeches, their passion stirred on by some small victory, some tiny reprieve. Smashing their faith against a government whose only response to any inquiry or report was, denial.
After seven years it is always night. 
War flared in another land. The prison was forgotten, its people transported somewhere the people could not reach them so easily.
After nine years it is always night.


 ***


There are times (frantic) when the words overtake me. (frantic) When I cannot crest the wave, but am submerged beneath, and though for hours each day I am writing, composing, arranging words, (swimming) listening to the rhythm of my father's slow walking-cane three-step-dance (a soft sand shuffle) and writing melodies beside it, (a sweet serenade into the twilight of age) I cannot fulfil my need. There are always words waiting for me, calling me onto the dancefloor. (a slow shoreline waltz) And when I am in that tide, I can float and trust that my body and mind are worthy of the task of writing.
Step by (frantic) step by (breathing) step by dancing step.
***

　

I only turned my back for a minute. I thought I locked the door behind me.

But when I woke up this morning, there it was with its hooks in my mouth, climbing out of my stomach with its poison sacks empty. I didn't even bother to kill it. The damn thing practically winked at me as it crawled away. My vision is blurry, I feel my joints giving way, my flexibility and confidence of movement are shaky. Paranoid. The corners of my thoughts conceal threatening ideas, fears, frail fractures and fallacies.

I mistrust my own motivations, I look everywhere for evidence of my betrayal. My perfidious selfish heart with its single minded selfish goals.

It seems that room of mirrors is not done with me.

***

I have to tell you about Coriolanus. Well, really the story is about his Mother, Volumnia, his wife Vergilia and another woman, Valeria.

You see, this story is from one of Rome's many civil wars, when one of her Generals, a certain Gaius Marcius Coriolanus, once banished, had returned to Rome leading a great army of her enemy, the Volscians, and he beseiged the city. The people suffered and all about was the great fear that Rome was to be burned for the sake of personal grudges between men of great power. During this time, many groups of women gathered at the temples to pray, but one of these women, Valeria, prayed at the shrine of Jupiter, and there had an inspiration which she immediately acted upon. Calling together all the women around her, together they marched to the home of Volumnia, mother of Gaius, who was there with Gaius' wife, Vergilia, and their children.

Valeria begged Volumnia to go with them out to face the enemy army, for all the women to go as one to Gaius and to beg him for mercy, that together they might end the war. Valeria said to Volumnia: "We come to you as women to women, not because we have been ordered by the Senate, but because our God has listened to our prayers and given us the inspiration that we should turn to you for help."

Volumnia replied, "I do not know if he will have any regard for us, since he has none for his country, which he once loved better than his mother, his wife and his children. But in any case, take us, make what use of us you can and lead us to him. If we can do nothing else, we can die offering up our prayers for our country."

And so they left the city, a piteous sight in their rags and their hunger, such that even the enemy army greeted them with respectful silence. It so happened that Gaius was seated on a tribunal, with all his officers around him. When he first caught sight of the procession of women he was filled with amazement, but when he saw that it was his mother, wife and children at the head of the gathering, he struggled to maintain his remorseless and inflexible resolve, and was overcomme by his feelings. He greeted his mother first, clasping her for a long time in his arms, but when he grasped his wife and children he could hold back neither his tears nor affection, but allowed himself to be swept away by a flood of emotion.

Volumnia spoke to her son thus:

"Gaius, we come to you as the unhappiest women alive, for we must come to see you having turned your arms against your native city, and we within it. When we pray for your salvation, we are doomed, for to do so is to wish for our city's destruction, but when we pray for our city's salvation, we pray for your doom. You ask us to sacrifice either our city, or you. I shall not wait for the war to decide the issue. If I cannot prevail upon to you to prefer friendship and harmoniy, to enmity and strife, then let there be no doubt - you shall never attack Rome unless you trample first upon the dead body of the mother who bore you."

While his mother was speaking, Gaius Marcius Coriolanus remained silent, and after she had finished he stood in silence for a long time. HIs mother asked him, "Why have you nothing to say, my son? Is it right to sacrifice everything to anger and resentment, but wrong to give way to your mother when she pleads with you in such a cause as this? But if I cannot persuade you, I must use my last resource."

As she spoke, she and his wife and children threw themselves at his feet. At this, Gaius cried out, "Mother, mother, what have you done?" Then he raised her up and tenderly pressed her hand. "You have won your victory. You have saved Rome, but destroyed your son. This is my defeat, though none but you could have defeated me."

He then spoke in private to his family for a few moments more, then sent them back to Rome as they wished. The next morning he marched the Volscian army out of Roman territory.


- I must tell you the origin of this story. I have been reading the works of writiers from the ancient world. The current book I am on is by, Plutarch, a Roman autobiographer from around 200BCE, the Ian Scott-Kilvert translation from a book called "The Makers of Rome" A great portion of the text above I have copied word for word from the original - this is not my writing, but I think that you can see how much these ancient writers have been influencing me. I include it here as a comparison to the story of Queen Manu, which is an original story that came to me about twenty years ago, and which I have been telling around campfires and the like since then.

The more I read, the more I find stories of the ways in which women deal with war, and how their cleverness and compassion seem a bright light in the darkness of calamity. This is not to say that all women are bright, beautiful and lovely...I have found just as many stories of women whose savage exploits in war and in peace have caused a shiver of fright to run up my spine. I'm just saying...we're all in this together, in sickness and in health.

***



Review of Boy Overboard
From the Novel by Morris Geitzman
Adapted for stage by Patricia Cornelius
Directed by Delia Olam
Produced by Ink Pot Arts
Performed on March 10th, 2018 in the Living Arts Centre, at the Mount Barker Waldorf School.

　

As I leave home to go to the theatre with my son, I glance in my rearview mirror at the dust swirling behind me, and the flickering light/shadow/light/shadow of the gumtrees along my driveway. Considering the play I am going to, I consider my place in the world, and the peaceful life I lead, and have always led. I am a product of first world thinking, economocs, politics and geography. My struggles are against anxiety, work/life balance, car servicing, shopping centre carparks, and hot weather. I drive a nice car, wear nice clothes and have a lovely job, a beautiful partner and healthy children.

The story of Boy Overboard has me crying from the opening scene, as four young girls are smuggled in the boot of a taxi in the night, to attend an illegal school run by a small group of parents. As the story of life in Afghanistan develops, covering landmines, public executions, and government hit-squads coming to arrest those involved in the school, I am not the only one crying. In the dark, warm and crowded silence between scenes, I hear the unmistakable horror of a woman weeping, and some part of me knows that it is a mother. A refugee mother. For as we entered the theatre I saw the familiar sight of unfamiliar faces, many nations already seated before I took my place in the shadows amongst them.

The sound of her crying, whoever she is, goes quiet for a time, as the story seamlessly shows us the humour found amidst the hardship, granting us all the chance to see the bravery and kindness and cleverness of the teenage characters' in their quest, tragic and heartbreaking though it is. We all laugh at the jokes told by the one legged boy, hopping about on crutches as he stands as goalie in the childrens' games of street soccer. We chuckle at the awkward violent outbursts of the young girl, throwing rocks at passing trucks, while her brother warns her that she must hide from the soldiers. Theirs is a story of the common struggle for so many who live in Afghanistan, and those who try to flee. Struggle against the barbarism of governmental oppression, against hunger, death, piracy, and the final tragedy, the one that brings home our very own part in the story, their imprisonment by our own government, in an offshore camp as they are denied the very thing hey have fought so hard to believe in. Australia. The woman is crying again, and I hold my son, eight years old, as he sits on my lap in a quiet trance, exhausted but intentely focussed. Last night he was with his mother at WOMAD. She showed me this morning a photo of him making angel shapes in billowing drifts of bird feathers amidst the revelry, colour and music of our most treasured cultural festival. Last week he attanded swimming lessons through his beautiful school, where I help out once a fortnight in the gardening class. Tonight upon the stage, we watch children dressed in pirate rags with scarves covering their faces, using crutches and walking sticks as props for maching guns and my whole body shivers with terror at the sight.

In the theatre antechamber, once the drama upon the stage is over, the audience linger over coffee, cake and sweet rolls, and again I find myself swimming in a familiar sea of unfamiliar faces. I am one of many nationalities, all of whom have come together in peace to experience what is so much more than a story about politics, or war or even refugees. It is a human story. It is a story of our time, an international story of great importance presented with incredible acting and passion by a youth group who rehearse in my home town and perform in a local school theatre. The significance of this incredible combination of elements is not lost on me.

I know that I haven't yet said anything about the actors, or the sets, or the speech given before the play began. I haven't even mentioned the main characters' hopes and dreams of one day playing soccer in the world cup, a ridiculous fantasy that at times seems the only thing that keeps them all from sinking into despair. What I will tell you about this play is that it has shaken me out of myself and let me take better stock of what is important in my life. The sets made of rags and suitcases and wooden crates have shown me that great beauty, great art can be made with the simplest of materials. It has shown me that there are people in my community dedicated to staging amazing theatre, and to telling the truth. It gives me hope to see such an intelligent and compassionate treatment of a very difficult and complex subject, and to be mesmerised by the profound acting talent that commanded the stage tonight.

As I drove home from the theatre through the winding tree lines roads out of town, my son and I both saw an owl, its white feathers illuminated in the headlights as it swooped low, between the canopy of the trees, and the top of my car. Now that we are home, my son sits in bed reading before sleep, while I sit in the lounge room beside my partner and write to you.

My youngest daughter has been learning the national anthem as a part of her choir practice for the Festival of Music, and I am reminded now of one line in that song.


For those who've come across the sea, we've boundless plains to share

What happened to us? To our country that now illegally imprisons these most vulerable of people, the victims of war, who flee from our common enemies? Where did our pride and generosity go? Have we become victims of our own government's cynicism and allowed fear of immigrants to now dominate our foreign policy and to override our humanity?

Yet, hidden in enclaves in every part of this nation, people defy the arrogant and cruel attitudes of the status quo, and set their hearts and minds and bodies to to the task of fighting the injustice of refugee imprisonment. Tonight, in that theatre filled nearly to capacity, I saw the face of our resistance. Our beautiful, articulate, and hopeful resistance. I saw the space we have made in our hearts for those who've come across the sea, and as the sun set on another day in paradise, I was moved by the power of art, and took home with me the inspiring reminder (in the words of the main character Jamal) to 'never give up, even when things are looking hopeless.'

　
　

February - My Thirty Eighth Birthday bonus post.

　

I keep asking
to whose benefit?

for whom do I work? Day in the field, and night at the drawing board
scheming plans and plotting perfection

plotting my downfall

striving for peace, I fight for air
in the smoke of my catcha-fire
I smoke and catch fire
and all the right words come out
and I play all the right notes
and I neva missa beat
and when I am alone
its just me and you - the one without a reflection
the one whose shadow stretches long from my feet to the sunlit horizon
and these questions of benefit, of utility and gain

...well, they all go away.

Though the cost exceeds the profit
though the demands exceed my capacity
though day after day, hour upon hour I am taken from my family
and made to kneel upon the altar of music

I cannot reverse my fortune and reject the gift I am given
You who have no reflection in the room of mirrors
you whose voice is silent
whose face is hidden
whose shadow stretches long towards the sun
I am bound to the destiny of your desire
I let my hands be guided by your hands
my voice by your voice
for in my silence
and stillness
you move me and all is well with the world
even if only
for today.

　

***

Some thoughts on time...(tick, tock, tick, tock...)

　

Tempo (Tempos, Tempi): Funeral March, Slow March, Street Walk, Quick Step, Double Time, Rushing, Largo, Meno Mosso, Andante, Adagio, Allegro, Alegretto, Presto, the unfixed Rubato...

Tempo CAN be described as a number of beats per minute, but this mathematical approach lacks feeling for me. I prefer to use my imagination, and set tempos in relation to the natural rhythms of my body. Starting with my heartbeat, I try to trace a line between it's pace, and the pace of my footsteps as I walk. This is my central tempo, and faster or slower are measured in relationship to the speed of this cross rhythm.

Tempo: I have been drumming for seventeen years (so far...). I began with a pair of Indian Nagori drums, then I bought a Djembe, then another Djembe, and another Djembe, and then I got my first Darbuka, and a set of Doun Douns. It was around this time I was given my first harmonica. It's a bit of a blur now, but somewhere along the way I started playing Koncovka, Harmonium, Cajon and I also began to sing. Next came the Dulcimer, then the Setar, and Ukulele. Most recently I found a Xylophone and Glockenspiel in my basement that belong to my landlord, and after a bit of a clean up, I have been them playing frequently.

Tempo: How quickly did I pick up music? What tempo desribes the slow and steady gains of a life devoted to the study of music in it's broadest sense? And then I ask you, what impact must dance have made upon my musical learning? I have never studied dance, but for nearly a decade I have found my musical home among a dance community. I have studied their dance, and it has had a powerful influence on my music, it is an important facet of my study. The tempo of the dancer's footsteps now mingles with the rhythms of my hands.

How long should it have taken me to learn what I have learned? If pressed, could I even describe the network of knowledge and experience that I belong to? I have been teaching for about ten years now, and I haven't reached a place where I feel like I am covering the same material twice. Every day I find a new way to play Baladi, and a new way to teach it. Music is a different kind of knowledge, and the interconnected and cross disciplinary nature of its study makes defined goalposts of achievement very hard to pinpoint.

Now we get to the bones of the subject.

How long have you been playing music? Or Dancing? How long do you expect to continue to do so? Are you nearer the beginning of your song or the end? The ocean of knowledge has no floor, and the distances from continental shore to shore are so vast that even a lifetime spent sailing would not reveal the world to you. I have been playing music for seventeen years, I am currently thirty eight years old. I expect to continue playing music until my death. My grandfather recently died at ninety nine years old, so that's my benchmark. He was a clean living gentleman, never drank or smoked, and spent a great portion of his life aftter the war growing roses and playing golf. I am not such a healthy one as he, so lets knock fifteen years off his life and say that I might live to be eighty four.

So that leaves me...forty six more years of study.

A PhD is meant to take three to five years of study and writing.

Do you understand what I am getting at ?

What is the tempo of my life? At what rate does learning happen? It is easy to get caught up in disheartening thoughts of one's own shortcomings, but musical knowledge is not like any other kind of knowledge or skill. There is a blues singer named Muddy Waters (aka. McKinley Morganfield), who, born in 1913, began playing music at age 17 and recorded his first album at age 33. I have listened to songs he wrote on his very first album, songs about drinking and fighting and chasing after women, that he re-recorded in his later years. As a senior citizen, his mojo was working plenty good, and his later versions do not compare disfavourably with the originals. His skill did not diminish with age, it matured, it adapted, it grew as he grew. I am inspired by his music, and by the development of his style as a musician. He did not let age reduce him, rather he let time develop his style, as a photo might gradually become more visible in developing fluid. As he aged, his true nature only became more visible, and his music more beautiful.

What is the difference between young and old? Between ignorant and experienced? Are those two ideas really the polar opposite of each other? As my musical skill continues to develop, it is not an ascending graph of increasing complexity or technicality (although it includes such), it is also a deepening of subtlety, a softening of my youthful desire-bound passions, and a development of the relaxed, confident ease of playing that only comes from the self-centred assurety and trust in the beauty and wonder of my own creations. The years mature my skill, and the more beautiful I allow myself to become inside, the more magnificent and captivating my music becomes.

Tempo: Does one grow more beautiful with the passing of years, or do you only grow older? How does a mountain age? Or a river? Are we not made of the same atoms as the earth and even the stars? What is the tempo of the pulsing expansion of the universe? At what speed are the planets expected to develop? Is Mars behind schedule in the devlopment of living organisms? Are you lagging behind your own expected development as a musician? What harm do your expectations inflict upon you, when the outcomes do not match up to the illusion of your aspirations?

Does playing for hours every day really make you a better musician, or does it just make you better at playing your instrument? There is a difference, and it is one that should be considered very deeply. Are you moved by the songs and dances of your heart? Does this tide of feeling also move others to feel more deeply, as you feel more deeply for having moved them?

Where am I going with all this?

There is no rush. You cannot force your years to pass more quickly than the Earth's rotation demands. A day will always take a day to pass, and with musical skill so perfectly and harmoniously bound to one's own emotional development, it too cannot be rushed. You cannot halve the time it takes to bake a loaf of bread by doubling the tempertature of the oven.

So play today, play tomorrow and the day after, and if your progress seems slow, consider the speed of tectonic movement. Consider the speed of the planet you stand upon in its passage through space? Consider the speed with which an insect lives its life, or an elephant, or the Sun... Consider the rubato of your life, consider how the morning is gone in the blink of an eye, but the night goes on forever, how childhood seems eternal, while the hungry mouth of eternity swallows all living things. Consider how old age must too give way to an even greater age and how the beginning is so like the end...

Rushing, Double Time, Quick Step, Street Walk, Slow March, Funeral March. The frantic near panic waltz of birth, the limping gypsy crooked circle dance of youth and adulthood...rubato...my hands move quick but my heart beats slow. Rubato, my thoughts are like lightning while the speed at which I read the book kept at my bedside is a crawling caterpillar, languid and unafraid. Rubato...the controlled flexibility of tempo by which notes are deprived of their length by slight quickening, or given more by slight slowing...

How like love, like tenderness, like the waves of passion we rise and fall upon, floating as leaves upon the wind, as driftwood upon the ocean, as notes upon the string and the beating of our hearts.

D-Doum, D-Doum, D-Doum...

(As an addendum, I thought I might add a little piece of writing from one of my favourite Podast authors, Joseph Fink. This is from the serial fiction 'Alice Isn't Dead'. At the end of each episode, the author tells a 'Why did the chicken cross the road' joke, but the answers are not what you expect. The following is from Chapter seven, season one.)

Alice Isn't Dead can be found at Aliceisntdead.com

　
"Why did the chicken cross the road? Because time moves so slowly, doesn’t it? Only sometimes it moves so fast. Some days the morning is done by nine, some afternoons linger long after sunset. "What time is it?" you’ll ask. "What time is it?" you’ll ask over and over for years, a repetition of thousands throughout your life. What time is it? What time is it? Time moves so slowly, doesn’t it? Only sometimes it moves so fast. But it was only just morning! But I only just had lunch! Is it evening already? When will the morning come again? When will the morning come again? It’s been so dark. So dark, for so long. When will the morning come again? Time moves so slowly, doesn’t it? Only sometimes it moves so fast. And that is why the chicken crossed the road."




***

A limping, stepping, skipping game,
a blindfold race through centuries
through cities bright and cities dark
through lives our own and loves home grown

a skipping, stepping, limping game,
a blindfold race through time
and in my hand a glass of wine
and I salute the crooked ways
the messy, broken, wayward days
of youth and age and even sleep always

just a limping, skipping, stepping dance
a blindfold chase
through cities bright and cities dark
and when the dawn-birds sing and hark
the coming day
the unknown way
the skipping, stepping, blindfold limping,
crying, singing, fighting, winning and all the ways
we keep on trying,
to play the two against the one
to dance the moon against the sun
but we will find out one by one
by three by six by nine,
the skipping, stepping, tripping, falling
and the ever present,
rising up again
that is the song of all our pain

and laughter.

***

Oh how heartbreak seems the constant companion
of love
that we who love are cursed
and blessed
by the pain of such
delicacies
as to abandon our minds at the first sight of love
and sink willingly into the heartbreak
that is being Known by the Other.

How we break, are broken, and are remade
all by the same force that seems to cause
the heavens to turn and the rains to fall.

We are the earth that rain falls upon
We are the space through which the heavens soar

Oh heartbreak!
Oh love's most bounteous gift
Take Heed! 

For this heartbreak is unlike any other you will know,
or have known.

Stand ready as the night inside you
is pulled apart by the fingers of the sun who will
not be denied its pleasure in you.

***

Review of 'The Wordsmith's Cats', an Ink Pot Theatre production.


The laughter of children is the most valuable resource in the world. So valuable it cannot be spent, cannot be stored or saved, cannot be traded for anything other than the future.

The future.

How present the future is in the present. All our stories written now, as we tell them now, as they become the past, they write the possibilities of the future into the children of our children. The Myths of our past have become the myths of the present, and the fables of the future have their origins in our time.

Our Time.

Did you know that this is our time? The promised, prophesied era in which all our actions mean something? All our lives have the promise of change, the future is unwritten for us, destiny undetermined. We live in a time and place where the laughter of children is commonplace, where the games, songs and culture of the very young thrive, well fed by a diversity of literature, film, music, theatre, dance and technology.

To participate in these things is to participate in culture, and thereby to stand hand in hand with our past and future.

All this I say, because I do not quite yet know how to begin speaking about The Wordsmith's Cats. How do I?, how can I?, how dare I?, an adult, even speak on the topic, without trampling the flower laden earth of their wonder and imagination with my ignorance and amnesia of the reality of a child's ability to believe in fantasy.

I will tell you what I saw.

　

Our first performance, in the sunlit gym at Trinity Gardens School. As we run through some scenes before the show, school children at lunch watched us through the wall of glass doors, their handprints smeared oily and earthy across the transparent barrier separating us, their faces pressed against the glass, their noses pressed against the glass. First one child, then two, then I look up again and the entire entrance is crowded with their wrapt attentive faces, some sitting, some standing, pushing against each other to get a better view of the leaping and caterwauling vultures rehearsing their scene on the mountaintop stage set.

In the huge steel cavern of the gym, the reverberations of sound are disorienting, sounds are swallowed in unusual ways, and sent echoing in others, sometimes laughter bouncing from an unexpected direction. Everything seems loud, my drums, the mandolin, the school bell. The clonk and scrape of wooden props placed upon the stage are booming, while the sometimes frail, sometime shy, sometime brave and noble voices of the children strive to rise above the tumble and rumble and mumble of the audience, seated enmass before them on the floor.

Two hundred children seated crosslegged on the floor, worshipful, gazing with utter belief at the cast of costumed children playing games upon the stage, play pretend, play for keeps, play for real, for pleasure, for life, for fun and laughing, leaping crazy joy, dressed as hyenas wooping and rolling in the mud, dancing and clapping in unison, a tribal line dance with slapping clapping hands and stomping feet.

Then the next day, we play again in the Living Arts Centre at the Mt Barker Waldorf School. The theatre is as different from the gym as the ocean is from the land. Every sound is precice, a word on one side of the stage is heard as if spoken into my ear on the far side. The music is crisp and clear and the softest brush of my cymbals is a gentle breeze breathed into the listening awareness of every audience member. The choir of childrens voices rise in an imperfect, perfect harmony, proud, confident, in love with the songs they sing. Beside me, Joanne Sarre, director, writer, and manager of the whole company, and her lifetime friend, Paul Cleaver, musician and composer, lead the chorus, their voices strong and proud and full of the love that a lifetime of music fills a person with.

Before the play starts, the whole cast and crew stand hand in hand in a circle, our faces, our bodies, it seems that our very souls are illuminated by the stage lights, and to my right there are two girls whose faces are painted feline, in their full, furry costumes and I look at them and even I, from my crooked, stony, lofty vantage of age three times their own, I forget my reason and rational adult thinking and I believe in them, as a child believes in the fantasy of their own imaginations. I look around me at all the faces in the circle, at the evil sorcerer and the blue faced Wordsmith, the questing heroine in her floral skirt, the boy made mute by malevolent magic, the vultures and hyenas and black clad stage manager, and there at the centre of all our attention stands the ever blossoming flower, the ever youthful and springtime faith priestess of our collective endeavour...Joanne. She who believes in us, she who gave us all our roles, she who called us to our calling, to our place in the circle. She does not stand upon a pyramid, master of a company of servants, she, like the Tao, leads us from within.

This is our final performance, and as the theatre fills and the lights dim and a hush settles dusk-like upon the room, I can feel the trickling well of sadness begin to fill up inside me. This is the last time I shall witness this. These children who believed in themselves enough to make magic real, and to make adults and children alike believe as they do, that in the play-pretend of theatre we are taken from the humdrum mundanity of the 'real' world (whatever that means), and for a time, seated in the glowing darkness of the theatre, we dwell in the realm of spirits.

Everything that is real, was first imagined.

We once dwelt in caves, and in the flickering shadows of our campfires we imagined the magic of humanity into reality, and painted our power upon the rough stone walls of our ancestral homes.

The theatre is that cave. We are those ancestors, listening to that first story of stories being told, and in the shadow shapes of our hands, we puppeted our imaginations into a future in which our children laugh and play in a sunlit paradise. Where they learn of the mighty achievements of our forebears in schools we built for their benefit, so that their children might also learn, and build upon the achievements of our imaginations, and our courage to see those dreams made real.

But as beautiful a poem as I might write to tell you of this magnificent play, as wondrous a description as I might craft from words, it is a monochrome and flat stencil sprayed upon the page when compared with the reality of the things that I have seen. The full chromatic spectrum of light that becomes visible when we admit the absolute necessity of beauty as a virtue, is a glimmering rainbow shining forever amidst the grim gloom of human history.

So I say to you this. Go into the world seeking this beauty, making this beauty, believing that it is real, achievable and necessary. Cultivate this beauty with your words and your actions. Make your love real and remeber that the laughter of children is the most valuable resource in the world. So valuable it cannot be spent, cannot be stored or saved, cannot be traded for anything other than the future.

Your future, their future, our future.

　

　

January - February 2018

　

I wonder if I am real.

I stand in the room of mirrors and I ask the monk in grey.


Am I real?
He says yes, but I wonder about him sometimes. He lives in my imagination after all, so perhaps his opinion is not to be credited with truth, but the Buddha once told me not to downplay the importance of the imagination. It is after all the origin of all real things.

I am a creature of my own imagination. I imagine myself to be a musician, a father, a husband, a friend, a gardener, a writer....all these seem real enough, but I have fooled myself in the past, so I am uneasy with assigning reality to any of my own ideas about who, or what I am.

The way people look at me often makes me very uncomfortable. They are looking at something that is real, but I can never tell exactly what they are seeing. I wonder, what am I to them? If I can convince myself of things untrue, then can I also convince other of these same fantasies? If so, then do my friends see anything real when they look at me, or have they the power to pierce the veil of my illusions and see something of me that even I am unaware of?

My secrets have secrets, as they say.

I wonder, does the monk in grey also have a room of mirrors, and does he go there to see a monk in white ? What do my dreams dream of ? Or am I simply mad, imagining agency and intelligence to etheric phantoms of my mind?

Just how powerful is the imagination? It seems a matter of life and death sometimes. Other times I dig my shovel into the warm soil of the garden, planting bulbs for the coming spring and the imagination seems as powerless as a gentle breeze. It seems irrelevant to a reality that does not care for monks in grey or needle toothed demons. The dirt beneath my fingernails and the rough texture of my labourer's hands might be the only thing in all the world I can truly believe is real.

A performer's life weaves fantasy into reality, but the blurred lines between the two are porous, and flexible. Perhaps, the barrier separating fantasy from reality is in itself, unreal. Maybe my hands, dirty from the day, are the gate through which my imagination enters reality, and their quiet dance upon the keyboard grants me this power to share my wonder, and my wanderings, with you.

　

***

The dancer is more real than the room she dances in
the colours of her spinning skirt bleed ink-like across the air
painting the room

her movements become the conversation of our silence
as we who watch, see the reflections of our own thoughts and feelings
mirrored in her expressions,

in the twisting and turning of her hips and hands and
the skin of her tattooed belly
and the fully clothed nakedness of her uninhibited movement
embarassing us in our own inhibited stillness

we cannot look away, we cannot help but look away

her beauty is too real to admit
more real than the room she dances in
the colours of her spinning skirt splash ink-like across the air
the dancer shames us with her shamelessness.

Like a child whose laughter is too bright
our old hearts break at the sound of such liberty
and we remeber a time when we,
maybe,
were that free.

***

I saw a Raven on the side of the road, down near the old stone bridge on the edge of town. I saw a Raven with a Rat in it's beak.

I saw Three White Herons overhead.

The lake at sunset.

At home I saw sunlight gleaming off a knife edge, painting white the wooden chopping board, and right beside it, the shadow painting black the same.

I heard the story of creation, as told to me by my eight year old son. Spirits who made the sky, the crust of the earth and the core. Spirits who made life, and another who made death, so that everyone would get a chance to rest.

My wineglass, filled and filled again, I overflow.

What is the difference between magic and reality?

Is that even the right question?

I saw the soldier with his head hung low, and the lady with her heart hid behind keys. I saw the Raven with a Rat in its beak. I saw Three White Herons, the lake at sunset. I heard the story of creation, and I tell myself, All these things are connected.

　

*

In the faces of children I see the story of the future. Their ideas, attitudes and experiences will inform their actions, which will echo through time as they too become history, and the future can be divined in the eyes of their next generation.

I saw one of my drum students today, a boy one third my age. He looked up at me and every white whisker in my beard, every sunwarmed line upon my face suddenly became visible to me through his eyes.

Yesterday I was not old, but today I am, and it is new and exciting to discover this. The problems of my youth are no longer my problems, the goals, desires and methods of my youth are passed, and today, in a renaissance of self, I laughed. How wonderful it is to be something new!

At last! At last I am not young. Marvelous! I can let go those troubles of my past that troubled me still, and look forward to new troubles, new challenges. Hell, a new way to sing the blues. Every door seems open again, as if somehow I am no longer the product of my past, but of my future. My future decisions will make me. My past decisions have done everything they can to make me what I am, but now it is my future that I will rely upon to inform me. I can already feel it pulling me, my future decisions being made, and their consequences rippling back.

I am typing in the kitchen, golden sunset light stencilling fern shadows on the walls, and all around me the sound of a breathing world, ready to be received.

***

　

In the late evening I sit down to play Setar and immediately a melody comes out, unheard of, played by someone with hands far more confident than mine. I am startled but I do not scare them away, I sit and let them guide my hands. There is someone inside me that doesn't share my insecurites, doubts, or fears. He plays so beautifully, so instinctively that I find myself listening to his song, but it is I who am being played.

Later, I look around in the room of mirrors, but I cannot find him there.

　

***

　

A sunset lake reflection,
a Sacred Ibis, a Black Winged Ibis, a Grey Heron, and an Egret upon the shore
A flock of Wood Ducks upon the water

The ache begins in the afternoon, an arthritic swelling of the senses,
a feeling of tension, inflexible
and by the morning
heartbreak has covered me.

A dead fox on the roadside
stretched out in the summer heat
its carnivorous beauty broken against the steel of human genius

Two Fairy Wrens playing in the shade as I sit beneath a tree
my stomach a sailors knot
the unruffled skies an affront to the storm in my tea cup

Oh how I want to feel good,
to be unburdened by the barbed wire and electric tape of the past
but it seems that growing up, and growing old and
growing out of these old clothes
takes more than good will
more than poetry
more than intentions and inventions and the genius of steel

For the carnivorous hunger of the the past does not lay broken by the roadside
does not fall discarded by the wayside
does not let go when we let go
but returns to us everyday
in every thought, borrowed or bought
commanding us to stay the same
to stay the course
to see it through
to hold on to fear though afloat with love we soar through an unruffled sky that seems an affront to the fireworks of our passion
　
A Plum Tree grown curled and cuddling against the monolith of a Red Gum

A conversation with an old friend, and cups of coffee between us mend
the swelling of the senses
the inflexible morning
and the heartbreak covering me

I pick my son up from school
with a harmonica in my pocket
and a book in my hand.

　

***

The floorboards greak and squin,
barefoot chilldrins dance and sing upon the
soarboards of the stage,
and even in the even light of a rehearsal,
the ordinary world is

lost

on

us

as a butterfly enters downstage right,
emerging irridescent from behind black curtains,
and floating upon an invisible breath so delicate
it feels like being underwater

so I hold my breath and watch.

I see it bubble hopping above the children
I see them, see the butterfly
and then, as if sunshine could be poured from a cup,
the room thus emblazoned
joy and wonder
　

the butterfly

flew over me

　

***

　

The boy drummer,
momentarilly distracted by the cricket crawling across the floor towards him
slips with sudden ease into the rhythm
which has
up until now been inconsistent
and
sometimes

fal

ter

ing

but which for a distracted moment
becomes itself completely
and forms a bond so utterly
to the harmonium song beside it
that the two are one and the song uplifted
and the father glances to his right
at the hands of his boy drummer
and the father smiles and plays and sings a little stronger
and when he stops and asks if they may play a little longer
we sigh, we swoon though seated
and then we cry out
for more.

***

Thank you
for considering my skill
a resource
of value
even if
it is only of value
to you.

***

Dec 2017- Jan 2018

　

If you want to know why dance is important, just imagine a world without it.

Music

Art

Fashion

Literature

In their absence, black holes open up into which all other forms of beauty would eventually fall.

Even poetry.

　

*

　

Christmas eve, my youngest children play, chasing each other around two easy chairs, pretending to be The Goddess Tafiti and the Demi-God Takkar, the Hero of all People, throwing fire balls at each other and shapeshifting into birds and fish. Takkar is trying always to return the heart he stole from the goddess, who rages in madness and grief and who sometimes cannot listen to the voice of reason. My son plays as Taffiti, my daughter as Takkar, and gender identity is never brought up. They learned this story from a Disney movie, which I have watched with them many times, it is a cultural paradox I am comfortable with. Their laughter, loud and clear and free drowns out the TV, drowns out even conversation as we sit in silent awe and I think to myself, I am grateful, for I know there are places in the world where the laughter of children cannot be heard.

Is there anything more valuable than that sound?

Is there?
　
All my troubles fade away.

In this bliss.



***

two wild men, both at bus stops on the same road. The first, a large man, round, with long, well woven dredlocks down past his shoulders. The second, standing, leaning on a crooked cane, with long uncombed hair and a long uncombed beard, and a look upon his face of the kind of contentment only seen on those who have abandoned conventional goals and live by a standard not known or measured by societal standards. And I, with my long uncombed hair and my rough unshaven chin, now sit in the tavern typing about it and trying to find a story to tell you.

The Spartans believed long hair was a sign of a free man. Some native American tribes believe that long hair acts as a psychic antennae.

So here is the story I will tell you, and it is not about wild men, but of ordinary men in extroadianry circumstances....

This event took place sometime during nineteen forty four, on the Eastern Front of the Second World War, as the Russians were pushing the German forces back. This particular battlefield had devolved into trench warfare, as each side reinforced their positions. It so happens that there was a Russian soldier on that battlefield who had an excellent singing voice, and every night he would entertain his friends, boosting morale and spreading good cheer throughout the trenches. His companions so treasured his voice that they were always protecting him from danger, and during lulls in the gunfire, would bring him cups of warm tea to ensure that his throat was also well protected from the cold.

But despite their efforts, the singing Russian soldier contracted a cold, and for some nights was unable to sing. It was on one of these silent nights that the Russian radio operators received an unusual message from the German lines. It was a question about the singing soldier. Was he well, and would he sing for everyone again soon?

The next night, German soldiers crept through the treacherous no-man's land to the Russian lines, and threw down to their enemies a brand new harmonica, so that the singing Russian would have music to accompany him when he sang again.

I don't know what happened to the singing Russian soldier, and I don't want to imagine what happened to the retreating Germans, but their story, this legend of musical history has survived to be passed on. From the heart of the most hideous human conflict ever fought, this tale of humanity, and the power of music has survived.

(As a side note: When I told this story to Lord Stompy, he informed me that during those wartime years, and for a long time after Germany was the only country manufacturing harmonicas of any real quality. The American and English brands being far inferior.)

***

Midnight long gone, by lamplight I sit in bed listening to old classical records from Iran. How strange that new friendships can change old habits, how they open doors in your mind and let you see yourself differently. I am grateful.

I will always be grateful for new friends. For how they challenge old preconceptions. How they aren't willing to put up with bad habits others may have grown used to, and how they look at you like you are an unfinished story. To them, you are new, and your story is unknown, and so in the act of getting to know someone, you get to hear them telling their story for the first time, and as you tell yours, and you get to listen to your story being heard for the first time by someone new.

　

***

Drumming isn't relevant to your life. It won't solve your problems, it will in fact create more problems than you can possibly know. Drumming isn't relevant to your job, to your partner, to your friends, to the taxman or the doctor, it will never mean to them what it means to you, even though it has no concrete relevance in your life either. You cannot use drumming to wash the dishes, or make school lunches, or any other thing. A drum is not useful for anything other than drumming, and so it has no relevance to any other activity in life. So if you think drumming will make you happy, it will not, (for happiness is something innate in you, not something that can be derived from an outside source). What drumming will do to you, is make you a drummer.

What is a drummer?

Drumming may not be relevant to your life, but your life is absolutely relevant to drumming. Your life is the absolute, irreplaceable element without which, drumming can never be. The drum is silent without you. Your life is the only relevance the drum will ever know, for without you, it is only a hollow log. The drum is made purposeful by the purpose we bring to it as drummers. The question central to every drummer's heart is this:

How many I relate to the drum?

How may I relate? How may I become relevant to the drum? How can I reveal with my open heart, the voices clamouring for expression in me, through my drum? How can I, through discipline and passion (a combination not easily made), meet the demanding standards of the drum? The drum who can hear my every mistake and read my every disrupting thought, my every indulgence of doubt, for make no mistake, doubt is a luxury, born of the opulence of our age. The drum demands confidence, but will never reward a braggart. The drum demands decisive, clear thinking, but is disgusted by the rigidity of a purely mathematical approach. The drum wants you to understand yourself, the drum wants you to feel comfortable, the drum will lure you out past the edge of your comfort, past thinking, past your confidence, past your own ability and then......then the drum will play you, and all your decisiveness and confidence will be cast off as shackles by the liberty of instinct. If you let it, the drum will play you rhythms you have never heard, never imagined. The drum, when you give your voice to it, will speak your name and take control of your body with a sorcery simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating and in that letting go of control, the un-teachable secrets of drumming are to be learned.

Still, the question lingers, how may I relate to the drum?

I ask, how do I allow my relationship to the drum to transform me? To challenge me? To what extent do I allow the timeless and powerful magic of music to drive my thinking, feeling and behaviour? As I stare off into the middle distance, my fingers tapping upon my knees as others talk to me and around me, while in my mind I swim in the swirling eddies of rhythm, I become the answer to my own question. I become a drummer. Drumming becomes my language, my everyday vernacular is grafted upon the experiences and idioms of rhythm. My conversational patterns are my soloing patterns, the tempo of my walk is the natural tempo of my music.

This writing, is a drum solo.

We are made of patterns, rhythms and music and song and dance and pictures and words and all the other insubstantial elements that we bring into the world through our art. Though our flesh seems real, it is animated by the imagination, made human by the special and unique way that we each relate to the world through our senses, both inward and outward.

So when you see me looking at you in a certain way, when I am looking at your beauty and not your face or arms or any part that you can see, understand that I am looking at the most real part of you. The part that makes art and dances and sings and is in every way unique. When you see me absently staring into the air, my head tilted at just the wrong angle, I am listening to music that cannot yet be heard. When you dance in the silence of your kitchen, when you sketch an invisible landscape upon the air with your finger, muttering that this goes there and that goes up and when you sing without your voice becuse you are too shy to sing out loud...

I take a few slow, deep breaths.

The point is this.

Life is ephemeral. We are insects who break free of our cocoon and lift kaliedoscope wings to the fresh air, to live for only one day. So when I look at you in a certain way, or my head is tilted, or my fingers dancing, know that I am a drummer, know that I am listening to the rhythm of your feet upon the floor, the count of your syllables in conversation and the rising falling pressure of your breath as you speak. I am trying with every fibre of my being to absorb as much information from the world as possible, for the drum demands my devotion to such learning.

So if sometimes I do not remember what you said, it is because I was listening to the symphony of tones and rhythms a single world spoken from you lips can become when I open my mind properly to observe it.

So when I am writing and I start with one idea but end up somewhere else, it's just like drumming you see, and during a solo you can go way out on a limb and the question becomes: how do I resolve this question?

What is a drummer?

You are the drummer.

I am the drummer.

The absolute, irreplaceable element without which, drumming can never be.

The drum is silent without you.



*
At the street fair.

I see a girl in a straw boater hat sitting with friends at a streetside cafe, the exterior walls of which are boarded up to resemble a Jamaican pirate shack.

I see an Aborigial boy, in loin cloth and tribal body paint weaving through the thick urban crowd, stepping as he disappears into the throng, behind a woman wearing a black dress with South American patterns on the hem.

I see two distinguished older gentlemen, a little round at the belly, but broad at the shoulder and chest making a sort of barrel shape, a tree trunk, but with an animal flexibility and strong confident poise. One wears a Trilby, pale in colour and in much better condition than my own, (a little hat envy there), the other is bald, sandpaper stubble around the back and sides, and the same upon his chin. They are tall, moving like elephants among a herd of zebra, gazelle and oryx. Like kings, able to survey the crowd, while others must only dwell within it.

I see an old woman in a loose slung, plain brown hijab, sitting almost asleep in a wheel-chair, around her what must have been her large family, adults and children and those in between. I see the dancers in black take the stage, their silver jewellery glowing with the borrowed colour of carnival lights. I see the old woman wake up, immediately, her eyes are clear and focussed, intently focussed, on the movements of the dancers. I see her pupils dart up and down, following hip and hand, leaping and falling with the peak and trough of skirts spun orbital in the hands of playful wind spirits, the old woman herself begins to float. I glance up at the young woman holding the wheelchair, her hijab is more closely folded to her face than her elder, but her colours are vibrant and exciting, a statment matching her makeup and clothing. She too watches the dancers, the whole family watches, but I am watching the old woman.

Limpid pools of light, her eyes are the eyes of a young woman. Keenly she studies the dancers, keenly and with knowledge and deep stirring memory.

I imagine she is remembering the old coutry.

Can you remember the old country? I cannot. My German ancestors fled here from the old coutry six generations ago, or so family legend tells it. If I have a memory of that place, it must be very faint by now.

I am watching the old woman, as she is watching the dancers in black, and all around the crowd are watching us. We, the troupe of dancers and drummers who wear the culture of a foreign land as if it were our own, making of ourselves devotees, students of the world and of peace.

I see the faces of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Malasian, Indonesian, Italian, Greek, Iraqi, Iranian, Afghani, Egyptian, African (I'm not great at identifying African nationalities)Polish, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, German, Scandanavian and French and I think I see an actual Viking. He is a head taller than the rest of the crowd, has long straight gray hair, a long gray beard and tatoos visible on his neck, so I'm going to say he is a Viking. I think I'm getting my point across though, when I list the nationalities I can with reasonable certainty, claim to see in the crowd tonight.

I think that something very special is happening, in this time, in this place.

And I think that you are all a part of that.