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.
Monday, 26 February 2018
Sunday, 11 February 2018
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.
***
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.
***
Thursday, 18 January 2018
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.
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.
Saturday, 6 January 2018
Indivisble from Magic
November - December 2017
*
in the room of mirrors.
i encounter the first demon, the blackness, despair.
he tells me : everything is its opposite, all energy moves contrary to its intention, nothing can be known, nothing can be assumed, nothing can be done, you are dead, floating meat in a meaningless and effortless universe.
you've been in control all day haven't you? i ask
well, not all day, he replies
his voice, hateful, whining like an overworked engine, a frantic, destructive stress, a mess, a strangled dog, full of fear and contempt. a voice so loud it blocks out all other considerations.
i take a warrior stance and i spear him through the teeth and i drive him back into the mirror, but at midnight i wake with him on my chest, bloody mouthed and howling. i sit up, gasping for breath as his slippery fingers creep vinelike around me.
i rise from bed and put salt on my tongue, walking in the dim green glow of a midnight hallway. breathing deep, breathing slow, unclenching the fear that clutches, who, limping on crutches, terrifies me with nightmares of my own decay.
why is everything unfamilar? everything always strange? i ask the demon.
you make it that way, you prefer it to the alternative, replies a soft, calm voice. it is not the demon, but the monk robed in gray and black, sitting cross legged on the floor.
i return to bed, breathing deep, i take up the spear again and drive despair into his mirror, but it is my own reflection in the glass.
i turn to the monk in gray and black, crosslegged on the floor, and i say to him :
you've always given me good advice, what should i do about the first demon, the blackness, despair, that hateful lunatic who sees nothing good in the world and believes that all evergy moves contrary to my will, and that whatever I try to do, the opposite will always happen, and the more I try, the more I will fail. what do i do? to engage him is to become enraged at the absolute breadth of his glib sarcasm and flat assertion that all else is pathetic fantasy. tying to ignore him only allows his poison to subversively infect the way i see the world, and define the way i live and breathe, without my knowledge or consent.
what do i do?
i cannot prove him wrong
what do i do?
the man in gray and black, crosslegged on the floor says to me :
understand him.
*
I want to tell you a story, I want to spin you a fiction taken from amidst the facts of my life, but I cannot bring myself to lie to you. So, though it sounds fantastical, though perhaps my imagery strikes you as imaginitive, I tell you this. All this is true. Make of my words what you will, but know that I write them with sincerity and purpose.
I haven't been able to stop thinking about the woman with the keys, the invisible woman in the market. I ask myself, what does she dream of? Searching in the night for the lock to which her key will fit, searching for the thing she threw away, or perhaps the thing she locked away, but which now she cannot find. Though it sounds a cliche, I ask myself, who has the key to her heart, or to her mind? Is she known by anyone? Or is she truly invisible?
*
Wooden floorboards, low ceiling, fluorescent lights, coloured fabric on the walls, three of us are talking.
Life feels so unreal, so free of consequence. The fiction of history tells me that events are sequential, connected, that action provokes reaction and from these steps dynasties are built and torn down. History tells the story of consequence, yet I do not feel this in my day to day existence. I do not feel the inexorable accretion of my actions gradually building my destiny. I do not see the interlocking experiences that manifest as my beliefs, and which in turn, manifest as my actions, which in turn, grant me consequences. Life feels unreal, like there are no connections, no sequences, just random events piling up like hailstones in the street.
There are moments though, when I see the world as it is. When I see the world through every other persons eyes and suddenly it all makes sense, and I can see the sand piling up around us, the grains of our words and thoughts and deeds stretching as a desert in every direction, and atop the dunes and across the great red expanse entire, stand kith, and kin. Our shadows reach long to entangle with each other, and in the simultaneous sunset of an age, and the dawn of a new epoch of discovery, we stand upon the vast evidence, upon the sedimentary landscape our lives have given testimony to, we stand upon the sand.
While Ozymandias' stone head lays buried far below.
I blink and there I am again, in the room with the wooden floor and the low ceiling where I am, talking with you, suddenly aware of the consequence and density of my actions, which have over these years culminated in one word from you tonight which meant more to me than I could ever have expected.
That the word should even have meaning any more is astounding, since our lives seem shaded forever in gradations of terror, and every day a new reason to fear each other gains traction in the cultural gestalt. Once sacred bonds of this and that now seem like relics from a bygone age (Greg Taylor). Swept along in the tide of human affairs, in gasping moments we pull ourselves to the surface and glance around, hoping for perspective. Perspicacious we seek a landmark amidst the tumbling waves, believing that we will know land when we see it, hoping that we will know land when we see it.
We do not see land, but we do see each other, all of us, caught in the same storm.
Perhaps now, in this time we live in, Trust is the rarest of all the virtues. The most precarious, precious bridge we can build over the troubled waters of our tumultuous generation.
*
When all around you keep their heads, while you loose yours, its possible that you are mad. The incessant babble of my thoughts and the incessant chittering of my fears perpetually throws me on my back foot, I retreat from myself, uncertain of my own motivations, all confidence in my own point of view is gone. I assume that any confidence is arrogance, hubris in the face of an impossibly complex world. I reject confidence, I worship doubt. I approach with my softest voice, yet somehow always end up on the end of my own sword. I have no measurement by which to interperet behaiour, no consistent story by which to understand moods. All the old ways are broken in the vast useless pit of history, there are no prophets, none can say what tomorrow will bring. Yet we hope against all evidence that tomorrow will be like today.
Please let tomorrow be anything, but what it was today.
*
This old man
he played one
he played knick knack on his drum
A schoolyard in the afternoon...
There is sunshine on everyone's faces, mothers, fathers, children, grandmothers, grandfathers, babies and even the birds are sunlit today and I blink and remember nineteen seventeen and the mud coloured world of starvation and war, the hollow eyed stares of mothers whose sons are all dead, the inexpressible pride and shame of old men who sent their sons to war. A generation lost to madness and today, here I stand in the sunshine with everything restored, the Somme re-forested, and even our sadness is now a glorious joy that knows nothing of deprivation and loss and war...
This old man
he played two
he played knick knack on his shoe
A restaraunt at sunset...Marrakech
The orange glow of Moroccan lamps inside, shadows are split by sunset beams and somehow this crowded room feels secret, private, hidden from the street and shaded from the vulgar day. The restaraunt is almost full as we enter bedecked for celebration, champagne on our breath and the excitement of eventide and good company in our voices. As our banquet begins, so too does The Dancer in black and gold, and in the narrow alleys between tables and chairs, she moves as if she had all the room in the world, dancing as freely as a girl on a beach, turning hand in hand with two men who know some steps, dancing back to back with a leopard queen in a gold turban, and the women from our table rise and dance with her too and the phantasy feels like real life...
This old man
he played three
he played knick knack on his knee
A world restored to the pursuits of peace and the enjoyment of the fruits of peace and the wearing of silk slippers and the sipping of fine wine and the enjoying of the easiest joys in the world to understand: children who are healthy, young, beautiful, free and who will live to enjoy the fruits of our peace, children who will live on to have children of their own, and who will struggle and suffer, but who will remember this time in golden rays of nostalgia and know the taste of fresh air, and the sweat and sand on their skin and the dreamy smile of an eight year old girl as she waves goodbye to my son after school has finished for the day and together we sing a nursery rhyme as we walk to the car.
This old man
he played four
he played knick knack on his door
Yet it is real life, a real life with dancing and drumming and I look up into their faces and I kneel in service to them, my hands upon the drum trying speak the secrets their feet know, or their ankles, or their hips or swaying hair, or languid smiles, my hands giving voice to the silent communion of movement as together they complete the story that the open door of the restaraunt implicitly invites...
This old man
he played five
he plaved knick knack on his hive
I blink and I see that old world, charcoal shaded beneath the skin of the present, the mud coloured suffering of nineteen seventeen, I see those mothers without sons and fathers without sons and a broken hearted generation who lived on and on and who in their turn and in their time, created those who created us. We who play with our children in the sunshine and who enjoy the historically unparalleled abundance of education and nutrition available to them and who live in hope that their future will be even brighter than our present, we who dine in restaraunts and dance between the tables...
This old man
he played six
he played knick knack on his sticks
An open door. The restaraunt is a public house, the host in his white coat becomes our friend, smiling and talking and making sure we are always at ease and want for nothing. He is there, beaming at the spectacle played out in his dining room, with his guests all there to share in the wonderful, subversive beauty of people holding hands, strangers dancing, and old friends dancing, and I, a drummer, am graced with the opportunity to follow and witness this contract of public trust. The restaraunt is a ritual, it is rebellion against tyranny, it is an open door, a room where strangers may meet and and where any topic may be shared as the food is shared and where we the common folk may be served and made to feel important. Where, bouyed up by the sweet and satisfying intoxication of our senses, we resort to poetry where once only common speech felt natural, we resort to song where once poetry had seemed enough. Every moment in a restaraunt is an opportunity to be grand, to feel welcomed and strong and content amidst the glowing faces of friends and the overpowering love of food that unites all humans in all times.
this old man
he played seven
he played knick knack up to heaven
The guns of Aras are silent, the ghosts of Paschendale keep their distance. Even long after the day has passed into the palm of night, the haunting blank faces of the long forgotten cannot break the glow of Moroccan lamps, the dead cannot whisper louder than our conversation. The burden of the past cannot drag with undertow certainty back, the tide of time which lays one day upon the next forever until today.
Today.
Though the walls of our buildings are made with the clay of our ancestors, though their suffering is forgotten, rendered meaningless by passing ages, though nineteen seventeen and four hundred BCE have more in common with each other than anyone might know, today is a new day, and new leaves have grown upon the apple tree of our discord, and new fruits, and our knowledge is not born as a sin, but as a savior. Our knowledge, and the sharing thereof, might yet save us from the ignorant consequences of the past.
So I say to you
Feast
Share in your greateness that we might be made greater still
Today.
For the future is unwritten
with a knick knack paddy whack
give a dog a bone
this old man came rolling home
*
I go blind for two days, voluntarilly you understand, and through that dark telescope I see a great world open up and I imagine my home, the hallways and rooms and furniture, sketched out in my mind's eye, first gray, then colour washed wave like wave like waves across my inner view. In that bright darkness, lit not by the worldly sun, but by my own inner sun, I walk in peace and listen to the creak of my footsteps and the sonar of my breath and voice and the sway and brush of my fingertips along the walls and chairs and floor. In the darnkness I hear the quiver of wings, and the misty sound of falling dust.
I hear the dragging of feet and the trailing of chains and the clashing of picks upon stones, and low, deep beneath the earth upon which bare feet do step and stamp, I hear someone singin' the blues. The one bar blues, the call and no-response blues, the locked door at a dead end blues, the take a look at your black life, never goin' home no more blues. The Grandma's name is forgotten blues, the home town gone forever blues, the Grandfather fed to the dogs blues. The train don't come this way no more blue, the hailstone broke your widow blues, the howling dog forever blues, The one note, one line, one way down, no way out blues.
Do not mistake my reverie for despair, for what I hear is not the song of death, but rather it is the music rising up from the bottom of the cave. It is the song of the condemned, the great happiness that can not ever be suppressed, even in slavery, forced migration and the erasure of history. Coming up from below I hear the song of the human race, the reason, I think, that we will always survive despite our best and most ignorant efforts to destroy ourselves. The song at the end of the universe, calling back to us.
Blindfolded, my imagination becomes a dark, warm, fertile soil, and from it, growing through the skin of my conscious mind, the flowers of Persephone bloom in colours unseen by the opened eye, and the songs I hear are songs never heard by the lob'ed ear. Songs only heard in the cave, where the voices of our ancestors still echo and all we think forgotten, is known. I see great and impossible architecture, amidst the ruins of civilisations long gone, new civilisations stand and fall and new civilisations stand and fall upon them. Like wheat in the field, grown and harvested and sewn again. The sun golden upon the seeds and upon the pollen clouds, and upon the earth, and upon those who sow the grain and those who harvest.
Remember, inside you, even when your eyes are open, there is a world, watching you, listening, learning, growing.
November - December 2017
*
in the room of mirrors.
i encounter the first demon, the blackness, despair.
he tells me : everything is its opposite, all energy moves contrary to its intention, nothing can be known, nothing can be assumed, nothing can be done, you are dead, floating meat in a meaningless and effortless universe.
you've been in control all day haven't you? i ask
well, not all day, he replies
his voice, hateful, whining like an overworked engine, a frantic, destructive stress, a mess, a strangled dog, full of fear and contempt. a voice so loud it blocks out all other considerations.
i take a warrior stance and i spear him through the teeth and i drive him back into the mirror, but at midnight i wake with him on my chest, bloody mouthed and howling. i sit up, gasping for breath as his slippery fingers creep vinelike around me.
i rise from bed and put salt on my tongue, walking in the dim green glow of a midnight hallway. breathing deep, breathing slow, unclenching the fear that clutches, who, limping on crutches, terrifies me with nightmares of my own decay.
why is everything unfamilar? everything always strange? i ask the demon.
you make it that way, you prefer it to the alternative, replies a soft, calm voice. it is not the demon, but the monk robed in gray and black, sitting cross legged on the floor.
i return to bed, breathing deep, i take up the spear again and drive despair into his mirror, but it is my own reflection in the glass.
i turn to the monk in gray and black, crosslegged on the floor, and i say to him :
you've always given me good advice, what should i do about the first demon, the blackness, despair, that hateful lunatic who sees nothing good in the world and believes that all evergy moves contrary to my will, and that whatever I try to do, the opposite will always happen, and the more I try, the more I will fail. what do i do? to engage him is to become enraged at the absolute breadth of his glib sarcasm and flat assertion that all else is pathetic fantasy. tying to ignore him only allows his poison to subversively infect the way i see the world, and define the way i live and breathe, without my knowledge or consent.
what do i do?
i cannot prove him wrong
what do i do?
the man in gray and black, crosslegged on the floor says to me :
understand him.
*
I want to tell you a story, I want to spin you a fiction taken from amidst the facts of my life, but I cannot bring myself to lie to you. So, though it sounds fantastical, though perhaps my imagery strikes you as imaginitive, I tell you this. All this is true. Make of my words what you will, but know that I write them with sincerity and purpose.
I haven't been able to stop thinking about the woman with the keys, the invisible woman in the market. I ask myself, what does she dream of? Searching in the night for the lock to which her key will fit, searching for the thing she threw away, or perhaps the thing she locked away, but which now she cannot find. Though it sounds a cliche, I ask myself, who has the key to her heart, or to her mind? Is she known by anyone? Or is she truly invisible?
*
Wooden floorboards, low ceiling, fluorescent lights, coloured fabric on the walls, three of us are talking.
Life feels so unreal, so free of consequence. The fiction of history tells me that events are sequential, connected, that action provokes reaction and from these steps dynasties are built and torn down. History tells the story of consequence, yet I do not feel this in my day to day existence. I do not feel the inexorable accretion of my actions gradually building my destiny. I do not see the interlocking experiences that manifest as my beliefs, and which in turn, manifest as my actions, which in turn, grant me consequences. Life feels unreal, like there are no connections, no sequences, just random events piling up like hailstones in the street.
There are moments though, when I see the world as it is. When I see the world through every other persons eyes and suddenly it all makes sense, and I can see the sand piling up around us, the grains of our words and thoughts and deeds stretching as a desert in every direction, and atop the dunes and across the great red expanse entire, stand kith, and kin. Our shadows reach long to entangle with each other, and in the simultaneous sunset of an age, and the dawn of a new epoch of discovery, we stand upon the vast evidence, upon the sedimentary landscape our lives have given testimony to, we stand upon the sand.
While Ozymandias' stone head lays buried far below.
I blink and there I am again, in the room with the wooden floor and the low ceiling where I am, talking with you, suddenly aware of the consequence and density of my actions, which have over these years culminated in one word from you tonight which meant more to me than I could ever have expected.
Trust.
Perhaps now, in this time we live in, it is the rarest of all the virtues.
The most precious of bridges
built over the troubled waters of our
tumultuous
generation.
That the word should even have meaning any more is astounding, since our lives seem shaded forever in gradations of terror, and every day a new reason to fear each other gains traction in the cultural gestalt. Once sacred bonds of this and that now seem like relics from a bygone age (Greg Taylor). Swept along in the tide of human affairs, in gasping moments we pull ourselves to the surface and glance around, hoping for perspective. Perspicacious we seek a landmark amidst the tumbling waves, believing that we will know land when we see it, hoping that we will know land when we see it.
We do not see land, but we do see each other, all of us, caught in the same storm.
Perhaps now, in this time we live in, Trust is the rarest of all the virtues. The most precarious, precious bridge we can build over the troubled waters of our tumultuous generation.
*
When all around you keep their heads, while you loose yours, its possible that you are mad. The incessant babble of my thoughts and the incessant chittering of my fears perpetually throws me on my back foot, I retreat from myself, uncertain of my own motivations, all confidence in my own point of view is gone. I assume that any confidence is arrogance, hubris in the face of an impossibly complex world. I reject confidence, I worship doubt. I approach with my softest voice, yet somehow always end up on the end of my own sword. I have no measurement by which to interperet behaiour, no consistent story by which to understand moods. All the old ways are broken in the vast useless pit of history, there are no prophets, none can say what tomorrow will bring. Yet we hope against all evidence that tomorrow will be like today.
Please let tomorrow be anything, but what it was today.
*
This old man
he played one
he played knick knack on his drum
A schoolyard in the afternoon...
There is sunshine on everyone's faces, mothers, fathers, children, grandmothers, grandfathers, babies and even the birds are sunlit today and I blink and remember nineteen seventeen and the mud coloured world of starvation and war, the hollow eyed stares of mothers whose sons are all dead, the inexpressible pride and shame of old men who sent their sons to war. A generation lost to madness and today, here I stand in the sunshine with everything restored, the Somme re-forested, and even our sadness is now a glorious joy that knows nothing of deprivation and loss and war...
This old man
he played two
he played knick knack on his shoe
A restaraunt at sunset...Marrakech
The orange glow of Moroccan lamps inside, shadows are split by sunset beams and somehow this crowded room feels secret, private, hidden from the street and shaded from the vulgar day. The restaraunt is almost full as we enter bedecked for celebration, champagne on our breath and the excitement of eventide and good company in our voices. As our banquet begins, so too does The Dancer in black and gold, and in the narrow alleys between tables and chairs, she moves as if she had all the room in the world, dancing as freely as a girl on a beach, turning hand in hand with two men who know some steps, dancing back to back with a leopard queen in a gold turban, and the women from our table rise and dance with her too and the phantasy feels like real life...
This old man
he played three
he played knick knack on his knee
A world restored to the pursuits of peace and the enjoyment of the fruits of peace and the wearing of silk slippers and the sipping of fine wine and the enjoying of the easiest joys in the world to understand: children who are healthy, young, beautiful, free and who will live to enjoy the fruits of our peace, children who will live on to have children of their own, and who will struggle and suffer, but who will remember this time in golden rays of nostalgia and know the taste of fresh air, and the sweat and sand on their skin and the dreamy smile of an eight year old girl as she waves goodbye to my son after school has finished for the day and together we sing a nursery rhyme as we walk to the car.
This old man
he played four
he played knick knack on his door
Yet it is real life, a real life with dancing and drumming and I look up into their faces and I kneel in service to them, my hands upon the drum trying speak the secrets their feet know, or their ankles, or their hips or swaying hair, or languid smiles, my hands giving voice to the silent communion of movement as together they complete the story that the open door of the restaraunt implicitly invites...
This old man
he played five
he plaved knick knack on his hive
I blink and I see that old world, charcoal shaded beneath the skin of the present, the mud coloured suffering of nineteen seventeen, I see those mothers without sons and fathers without sons and a broken hearted generation who lived on and on and who in their turn and in their time, created those who created us. We who play with our children in the sunshine and who enjoy the historically unparalleled abundance of education and nutrition available to them and who live in hope that their future will be even brighter than our present, we who dine in restaraunts and dance between the tables...
This old man
he played six
he played knick knack on his sticks
An open door. The restaraunt is a public house, the host in his white coat becomes our friend, smiling and talking and making sure we are always at ease and want for nothing. He is there, beaming at the spectacle played out in his dining room, with his guests all there to share in the wonderful, subversive beauty of people holding hands, strangers dancing, and old friends dancing, and I, a drummer, am graced with the opportunity to follow and witness this contract of public trust. The restaraunt is a ritual, it is rebellion against tyranny, it is an open door, a room where strangers may meet and and where any topic may be shared as the food is shared and where we the common folk may be served and made to feel important. Where, bouyed up by the sweet and satisfying intoxication of our senses, we resort to poetry where once only common speech felt natural, we resort to song where once poetry had seemed enough. Every moment in a restaraunt is an opportunity to be grand, to feel welcomed and strong and content amidst the glowing faces of friends and the overpowering love of food that unites all humans in all times.
this old man
he played seven
he played knick knack up to heaven
The guns of Aras are silent, the ghosts of Paschendale keep their distance. Even long after the day has passed into the palm of night, the haunting blank faces of the long forgotten cannot break the glow of Moroccan lamps, the dead cannot whisper louder than our conversation. The burden of the past cannot drag with undertow certainty back, the tide of time which lays one day upon the next forever until today.
Today.
Though the walls of our buildings are made with the clay of our ancestors, though their suffering is forgotten, rendered meaningless by passing ages, though nineteen seventeen and four hundred BCE have more in common with each other than anyone might know, today is a new day, and new leaves have grown upon the apple tree of our discord, and new fruits, and our knowledge is not born as a sin, but as a savior. Our knowledge, and the sharing thereof, might yet save us from the ignorant consequences of the past.
So I say to you
Feast
Share in your greateness that we might be made greater still
Today.
For the future is unwritten
with a knick knack paddy whack
give a dog a bone
this old man came rolling home
*
I go blind for two days, voluntarilly you understand, and through that dark telescope I see a great world open up and I imagine my home, the hallways and rooms and furniture, sketched out in my mind's eye, first gray, then colour washed wave like wave like waves across my inner view. In that bright darkness, lit not by the worldly sun, but by my own inner sun, I walk in peace and listen to the creak of my footsteps and the sonar of my breath and voice and the sway and brush of my fingertips along the walls and chairs and floor. In the darnkness I hear the quiver of wings, and the misty sound of falling dust.
I hear the dragging of feet and the trailing of chains and the clashing of picks upon stones, and low, deep beneath the earth upon which bare feet do step and stamp, I hear someone singin' the blues. The one bar blues, the call and no-response blues, the locked door at a dead end blues, the take a look at your black life, never goin' home no more blues. The Grandma's name is forgotten blues, the home town gone forever blues, the Grandfather fed to the dogs blues. The train don't come this way no more blue, the hailstone broke your widow blues, the howling dog forever blues, The one note, one line, one way down, no way out blues.
Do not mistake my reverie for despair, for what I hear is not the song of death, but rather it is the music rising up from the bottom of the cave. It is the song of the condemned, the great happiness that can not ever be suppressed, even in slavery, forced migration and the erasure of history. Coming up from below I hear the song of the human race, the reason, I think, that we will always survive despite our best and most ignorant efforts to destroy ourselves. The song at the end of the universe, calling back to us.
Blindfolded, my imagination becomes a dark, warm, fertile soil, and from it, growing through the skin of my conscious mind, the flowers of Persephone bloom in colours unseen by the opened eye, and the songs I hear are songs never heard by the lob'ed ear. Songs only heard in the cave, where the voices of our ancestors still echo and all we think forgotten, is known. I see great and impossible architecture, amidst the ruins of civilisations long gone, new civilisations stand and fall and new civilisations stand and fall upon them. Like wheat in the field, grown and harvested and sewn again. The sun golden upon the seeds and upon the pollen clouds, and upon the earth, and upon those who sow the grain and those who harvest.
Remember, inside you, even when your eyes are open, there is a world, watching you, listening, learning, growing.
Sunday, 26 November 2017
A dead Raven is in my hands, it is heavier than I had imagined. Neck bent in a gentle posture of sleep, wings tucked down, sleek and perfect and warm from the sun and with the faint fetor of decomposition quick upon the air. I saw it die, knocked aside mid-flight by the car ahead of me. The Raven hesitated as it rose from the road, and was lost. Tumbling though the air, wings askew and flapping with a final effort to escape its fate, there was no life left in the flesh when it fell into the dry grass.
I drive past at first, but I return later that day to collect the body, it is heavier than I had expected, but perfect, sunwarm and sour. I carry it home in my car.
I spend the afternoon reading about native American techniques for preserving whole birds, as well as techniques for clean dismemberment and feather plucking. I am both disturbed and intrigued, my stomach turns over, but my eyes read on.
Long after the sun has set I put on my gloves and set to work. I pick up the bird and say to it You are not your body. I know immediately that I am not my body, that the flesh I inhabit is only a part of what I am, and that when I die, my body will break down and return to the earth, just like the Raven in my hands.
I look at death for a moment.
I take the wings, the tail feathers, the feet and the head, the rest I return to the wild.
An experience both macabre and natural, gruesome and ordinary. I have not handled a dead animal in such a way since I was fourteen, when I caught a rabbit in a trap, then skinned and cooked it with butter and pepper over a campfire out bush. I cured the skin with salt, keeping it as a little memento for years.
So I guess the story about the dead Raven takes us here.
My father was a hunter. As a boy at home I would fall asleep beside the fire, laying on a fox pelt complete with glass eyes, the whole thing carefully mounted on thick felt. In my father's study, mounted on the walls were wild boar tusks, trophies for marksman competitions, memorabilia from his years in the army. Above my own bed, a pair of mighty goat horns were mounted on a wooden shield, I would stare up at them every night as I went to sleep. I went shooting with my father, my cousin and my uncle in the school holidays, year after year, filling tin cans with buckshot and cracking rocks with .22 bullets, staying up late sitting around the campfire, walking up and down the scrubby hills around Palmer, collecting old Yakka stalks to use as walking sticks.
Now I am a man, plucking feathers from a wild bird, taking it's useful parts and returning the rest to the earth.
*
I was given a shortbow when I was about eight or nine years old. I was taught the rules of its use, as I had been taught the rules of firearms, a code of behaviour that was not, under any circumstances to be contradicted, and which I never did. For years I fired at my backyard haybale target, learning how to breathe, steady my limbs, focus, draw and release the arrow in a fluid motion. I was never a master, but I knew how to handle the weapon and how to shoot straight over both short and long distances.
When I was about twenty and living in the suburbs, I gave the bow away to another young boy who lived in the country, and so the wonder of archery was passed along.
Today an old friend came around, bringing with him a new compact, collapsable shortbow and set of carbon fibre arrows. I set up a target for us, and when he handed me the bow it were as if I had forgotten nothing, shot after shot finding its target, seven out of eight arrows hitting each time.
Nock the arrow, (breathe out), draw the bow as you (breathe in) lift the bow and take aim (and slowly release the breath) as you fire.
It has been about twenty years since I have handled a bow, but my hands moved with absolute certainty and when I was most centred in my self, my arrows struck the centre of the target. If my breath was too quick, or my thoughts too clouded, I would hit off centre, always the result of my ego intervening in the process and wresting control from my body.
Archery is a meditation like no other.
*
The sensational permeability of love, the infinite gradation of its seasons of sunlight. To paint a picture of love is to paint a sky from dawn to dusk and through the halls of night to dawn again, and to paint it forever more for no dawn is alike to another, and no night lasts forever. So it is with you and I, my dearest, my Love. Forever painting and being painted, forever waking to the dawn and sliding soft and warm into the the bright day, to live hand in hand.
*
How humbling it is to be in the presence of such humble greatness. To share in your presence the joyful gaze of the crowd, and witness the testimony of your beauty. All day my hands have been in the earth, my back to the sun, digging holes, planting shrubs, trees, flowers, swathed in the silence of nature.
We are transformed by the night, garbed in the colours and fabrics of foreign lands, our daily labours invisible, our tribulations a forgotten fable as the purpose of all our striving finds purchase amidst the noise and haste of the clattering city. In the night you dance and I play and we eat and tell stories, and mesmerised by the fluid precision of your movements, I find it humbling to be beside such humble greatness, and to share in the gift of your art.
(for Kylea and Regan)
*
The season changes, and I with it.
why not? am i immune to the laws of nature?
is my sentience somehow more powerful than the push and pull of the moon?
I am an animal, a rock, a river, a tree, subject to the sun and rain and
a subject of the sun, and the rain
Those ghostly faces who stared out at me from the receeding shadows of winter are nowhere to be seen, instead I glimpse tall dream people, smelling flowers, shimmering as heat waves in the air, they float past me in the rainbow hue of glimmering water and everywhere the trumpeters proclaim the reign of the Summer Court.
Cloud banks heap against themselves building sky-quake mountain ranges that collapse and rise and collapse again, and rise again in their windblown procession.
I catch a flashing shadow, a scimitar curve black against the green earth, and above me a hawk floats triumphal, weightless and defiant of gravity, floating hollow boned upon the self-same winds that break the great blue sky with cloud banks heaping one upon the other, mountainous and trembling in the sky.
*
Low sunset laid upon the stones, I step in trick-step on the broad flat paths, side-step and slip past stains upon the pave, fresh from this eve's early imbibations. The city is drunk already upon the heat, pressing like skin upon skin, we feel our own bodies passing through air and sensual, silk bedsheets of breezes spread pleasure as they pass over sweat gathering on backs, bellies, necks, ears, noses and all parts exposed or concealed. The air is wet with sound, the sway of a violin street performer surrounded by children who whisper and gape at the sweet wonder of her song, the carillon choir of town hall striking the hour, the burdensome roar of traffic straining against itself.
And out of the day, come the drummers.
With drums slung across backs or carried under arms, they sway their way through crowds and conversations. Where they take up seats and play, the booming voices of their drums are louder than the traffic, louder than thunder, amplified and reverberated, and collected in the ears and hands and eyes of passers-by who stop, or turn and twist their necks to see and to hear. It lights fires in the minds of the children who come to look closely and to play, and their mothers who stand by with the faces of mothers everywhere who see their young ones discovering music.
Out of the day come the drummers
(A link to the poem by Steve Silberman, Out of the Day come the drummers)
http://ezone.org/ez/e3/articles/diga/drum.html
*
With my toes in the sand and my heart racing, I find myself upon your shore again. Like last time, I am as much changed as the time before that, and I can see all my past selves who came here and who made pacts with you, just as I am here now again, making a pact with you. My breath near frantic, I step into the water and let the ocean wash my feet and my hands and I wash away the dust of these past years. My fingers running wet through the curl and black tangle of my hair, I wash away the debris of trauma, the burden of clinging fear, the knots of my own anxiety. I wash these parts of myself and glance only for a moment at your immense beauty, knowing that I will return tomorrow to complete what I started here today. Tomorrow I will swim in your fullness, and you will know that I have come back to you.
Mother Earth
Mother Ocean
Mother Moon
Mother Sky
*
Now deep in the night, I sit with my woman and my son and we listen to the gentle surf. We listen, we sit in silence, listening, and when a wave bursts upon the shore with particular colour and music, we comment, talking for a moment, lifted from the silence of books and carried gently back into silence by the susurrus of the surf receding and advancing in the far off darkness of the night.
No clock ticks in this place.
Legend tells of a sorcerer who smashed a clock at midnight on New Years eve here. It is a legend I witnessed and can attest to. It was magic, myth, a mysterious and perfect midnight that I now find myself facing again, as I listen to the waves in the far off darkness of the night and remember the pact I made with the ocean, on the night that a sorcerer smashed a clock against the wall at midnight...
Tonight I make a new pact, a promise. A secret.
*
I see him.
Razor clean scalp, meticulous, white skin, clean. A strong face, sturdy jaw, pale eyes. The three top buttons of his white pinstripe shirt are undone revealing a portion of a circular symbol laden tattoo in the centre of his hairless chest. He is strong, very strong, and I think at first that he is a sailor, or a soldier. His huge pecs and arms bulge in an obvious display beneath his tight shirt. But there is something off about the whole picture, something that looks like a disguise, like these are not his regular clothes. I don't think he has regular clothes.
His face and eyes are fixed in a stern purposeful gaze, searching through the crowd for a specific place, or person. It is not a kind face.
He's not alone. Walking behind him are three young girls, all in glittering gold mini-dresses, all with blonde hair and high heeled shoes. The middle of the three wears a 21st Birthday sash, and in some way resembles the man with the tattoo, like he chose the dress, like he chose the clothes for all three. Like they are all in costume.
I get a creepy feeling when I first look at him, but I brush it off, telling myself that I'm just feeling edgy in an unfamiliar crowd, paranoid in a noisy nightclub, seeing menace where there is none. But then I turn as he walks past me, and I see his hand. His right hand, held behind his back just below the belt, about where his hand would be if he were standing at ease on a parade ground. This hand makes a gripping motion, and as if in slow motion, I see him make this same, steady, intent filled gesture a second time. I close my eyes for a moment and see, blurred slightly through a sub-visible translucent glamour, his shadow on the floor. Painted on the darkness of it, scrawled in white chalk, I see overlapping, interconnecting, arcane symbols, and in his clenching fingers I see a gold chain, and on that chain I see three girls in glittering gold dresses.
That is all I see of him. He is folded into the crowd, and with his girls, is gone.
I do not see him again this night, and am glad of it.
*
I have never heard a woman cry in a theatre before, and the sweet guitar melody that was being played while she did was like water trickling through the stones of a dry creekbed, and the swaying of the wind and the voices of trees were brushed softly from the cymbals and all the room fell quiet around us. In the dim blue light between scenes, towering shadowed stage props cloud the dimly glowing sky of the vaulted ceiling and all the darkened wings backstage are filled with the silent costumed forms of children, holding their breath.
The actor upon the stage breaks character, stands and strides up the steps to the director, throwing her arms around her and speaking softly in her ear. It is the expression of love and compassion felt by everyone in the room, but it was the young girl in striped pyjamas who said for us what needed to be said.
An angry one may kindle strife
a cruel one may wreck a life
a timely one may lessen stress
and a loving one may heal and bless
What am I?
From the play, The Worsmith's Cat, by Joanne Sarre & Paul Cleaver
Thursday, 19 October 2017
October 2017
As light preceeds the dawn, the honey scent of crocus flowers preceeds her onto the stage, the silence of her footsteps disguise the gravity of her purpose. Starlight seems a heavy weight upon the floating petals of her dress, which drift and sigh with every note the musician lifts fingertip and palm from the gleaming gray steel elispse upon his cross-legged lap. An instrument named a Halo.
In the shadow of a blue light dulled by rough black curtains, I crouch offstage, crowded in beside the stage manager and the twinkling forms of the next dance troupe, as we all, in total silence, watch Regan dance, and Tony play.
Dance and Play.
I remember the sand pit. Of my childhood memories, playing in the sand pit is very strong for me, hours upon days upon weeks upon terms, semesters, years...and now a life well lived with my hands in the dirt. I remember dancing in the sand, twisting my feet around and making patterns like snakes. Or flowers. I imagined I could dig to China. Dance and Play. The instincts of children.
Up there, with the lights in her eyes and that look upon her face like all of life is as beautiful as this moment, and without a word being spoken, we all agree that it could be, life could be everything in this moment, and that right now, all of life is as beautiful as a woman dancing upon a stage, her red dress like a flower in spring.
*
Who are these ghosts? Why do they linger in weed choked alleys, on street corners, in shops and alone on the higway as I drive home, driving towards midnight, moonlit, the booming thrum of music ringing on in my mind, my ears congested with sound. Who are these masked desperados? These pale faced devils in plain clothes who stare blank as walls and who cannot be moved with word or force?
Where are the angels? the heroes?
Where is the whistling man? The mistress of keys? Here where the shadows have shadows and even deeper filth festers and fidgets in the unseen gutters of the spirit world. The city is not a safe place. And yet...and yet...neither is it unsafe, nor is it unknowable, for while these masked creatures who wear the shapes of men do linger, they do not malign, and my passing seems for all the world to be unnoticed, unremarkable. The ghosts too, though animate and conversant, have a society and interests of their own, and pay me no heed as I walk amidst their comapny.
With runes marked out upon the soles of my shoes, the dust does not move with my passing, shadows cling frozen upon the slate gray earth, unruffled. The masked forces of nature stand observant, pillars of stillness, mountain motionless surrounded by the rushing of time, entropy and order washing as waves upon their shore. While I, oh I, watch them. I stare into the emptiness of their eyes, their masks up close I see writing upon them, the fine calligraphy of whatever magic is granted to they who wear, or are worn by, the masks.
All my ignorance, and all my knowledge. That is what I see written in the masks. I see the infinitesimally tiny speck of light that is my existence, against the broad view of all existence. I look away. I must look away.
I break the spell.
Who are these ghosts? Why do I linger with them in weed choked alleys, on street corners, in shops and alone on the higway as I drive home with them, driving towards midnight, moonlit, the booming thrum of music ringing on in my mind, my ears congested with sound.
Where are the angels? the heroes?
*
The sun is high, the day bright and wondrous.
A distant, lone saxophone player blows his solitary music echoing beautifully, loud and perfect as I walk beneath vaulted pavillion arches. I look up from my boots, and standing right there before me, a mysterious woman stops in the shade to light a cigarette, blowing smoke up into the air with a cinematic wistful sigh. Tall boots. Mirrored shades. Red lipstick.
There are moments so stunningly arranged by fate as to leave one breathless, all the histories of man and beast had to preceed before this could occur. A scene-like theatricality, straight out of an old time detective movie, complete with musical score.
But...here is the lesson easy to miss.
This moment was not special, not unique.
All moments are these moments, waiting for us to look up from our boots and see.
All of time, all of creation has waited since the birth of the first star, for us to look up and see.
See what? you ask.
Whatever is there.
*
In a field in the borderlands.
I lay down in the tall grass
I forget about time
for a few minutes
the clouds
the wind
everything
just as it is
*
At a Market.
The dancers in black, the dancers in white, in orange and gold, the drummers who are led by them, and the rolling waves of sound that follow upon their convergence. From the four corners of the city, trailing the perfume of their intent through crowds thick with the press of a marketplace, theirs is a confluence of culture and joy. In the sunny courtyard, a bespectacled gentleman in hat and shirtsleeves makes coffee while his two children take orders from the press of thirsty spring tickled supplicants. Dancers in black, dancers in white, in orange and red and blue and gold, and the drummers who follow the snowbell tinkle of their steps upon the floor.
*
There
in the tall grass...
a rock in the sun.
Upon it
a
black
winged
Ibis.
One step
two, three...
then it flies on through the woods
with more certainty than I have known
in
my
whole
life
*
Walking with the family across hills and rocks and through the tall grass we come first to the Goblin lookout. From this rocky vantage we look down to the realm of the Fox King in the dark green reeds along the banks of the northern lake. Far beyond it upstream, at the intersection of two valleys stands the Tree of the Ancients. Skirting the tall reeds and tramping upstream along the boggy edge of the creek, we cross and pass a thistle patch, following the curve of the earth to the mighty tree just beyond the hill. A tree beneath which we lie and stare up into branches that looked down upon a hundred hundred generations of Aboriginal faces, walking in search of intitiation, for this land was magical even before I imagined it to be so. Before I populated it with Goblins and Skags and the swift wild tribesmen of the Razor Clan.
Leaving the Tree we cross the plateau to the Waterstone, where we leave a tiny glass bottle as an offering and cross over into Razor Clan territory, along the Running Flag Race leading all the way to the Cupstone, and to the path leading down into Skag Gully. Passing by, we continue along the highlands until we can see The Twins, last of their kind in the valley. Tall and beautiful, swaying in the high wind, carrying messages between the Whispering Trees in the east, and those in the West.
But what's this? A third? Their child has survived the first year in the wild and now shows its green fingers above the grass. Where there were two, now there are three. Where there are three...?
Nearby we pause at the Viewing Stone. Once a portal to another world, it is now closed, locked for reasons lost to history. On the hill we see, crouched and almost hidden, a wild woman and her daughter, our kinfolk, resting in the sunwarmed concealment of golden grassblades.
The shadows lean long across the lowland fields as we turn for home. Crossing openly through the fallow pasture, fearing neither predators nor bandits, making straight for the southern lake and wetting our lips with the mineral water. Noisy as the sunset birds above us, we talk and laugh and stumble and play our way back along the road that leads to our homestead, tucked neatly beside the woodland creek crossing that leads back to the Goblin lookout. Nearly a full boundary trek from start to finish and a story told along the way of the land and the inhabitants of our imagination.
Or maybe none of that happened. Maybe I just walked around the paddock today with the wife and kids. Saw some weeds by the creek that need spraying and the fence is down on the edge of the track leading to the top paddock, next to the big rabbit warren. Dam levels are high and creek is flowing slowly.
Or maybe there really are Goblins in the tall grass, spying down upon the Fox King, and playing frisbee on the hilltop.
Maybe.
*
I follow in the footsteps of cows.
The rhythm of their
easy
steady gait
becoming my own as I step quietly in the
rut of their routine.
The easy path,
the middle way across the hill
offering the least resistance,
offering the simplest solution
to a problem far, far older
than humans.
*
The beautiful lie
of poetry
sometimes seems
more important
than truth.
*
Standing on the crumbling platform at the train station in a coutry town, the crowd gather waiting for the train and I could be standing on this platform in any year in the past one hundred as the children cheer and the adults cheer and everyone rushes to the edge, peering uptrack as the collossal noise of the whistle blasts all the world into silence beneath its mountainous wave. Hissing smoke and steam, the mighty and beautiful iron beast rolls smoothly to a halt before us, passengers within the antique wooden carriages looking out at us as we look in at them and they drink wine from tall glasses and converse in their travelling stillness, nearing their journey's end. One more town and their sunset disembarkation shall be a spilling out of people somehow out of step with time. All of modernity has yet to match the exquisite aesthetic of the steam train with its noise, heat and grime, its shuddering carriages every part the lumbering pendulous weights they are, pushing and pulling against the engine. The ornamented exterior in wrought iron and timber, always mixing function with beauty, matched seamlessly with the grease coated linkages and complex array of moving machine parts. It is real. None of its workings are concealed. The furnace heats the boiler which creates steam pressure, this pressure drives the machine. Yet, with the very soul of its function on display, it retains both modesty and pride beneath the sheer artistry of its design.
I did not understand trains before my son was born, but through his eyes I have learned to see them as a child see's them, as huge, noisy, bright and beautiful machines, like a rare striped bear roaring in the rocky barren wilderness of the rail yard.
*
Rain in the night and I dream of you, pale skinned in the moonlight, naked and unashamed, a wild animal. I awake to the sound of cockatoos and you are still asleep beside me in the dawn pink, the air outside awash with a veil of fog. The world beyond our window is both exposed and private, for there is no fence like a mountain, and no freedom either. In the day when we don our boots and walk upslope to the standing stones, we stand hand in hand with the sky, our hair the sudden plaything of wind sprites and we laugh and smile and even beneath the bright sun, your smile is brighter.
Rain in the night and I dream of dreaming, waking from one form into another and finding myself in the body of a forty year old Englishman with pale skin and red hair, and I knew the story of his life as if I had lived it and I felt his loneliness and resentment, his despondence and fear, but I knew his love as well, and when at the end of along and tiresome day, he slept, I woke again in another body, another life...
How far into the dreaming had I come? How many dreamers had I skipped like a stone on water across? Each time I slept, I woke again in another life, and like a body floating to the surface, from the deep dream of that Englishman, I rose up through the dreams of others to myself, and woke at last in my own bed, my own body.
Rain in the night and I dream my dream and in the morning I awake to the sound of cockatoos and you are there beside me, naked and unashamed, a wild animal in the dawn pink.
*
I want to tell you now about the barefoot priest, and the soldier.
Three years ago...
First, the priest, barefoot on the hot bitumen, I saw him cross the street alone. Bald, dressed in a black suit, with the white collar of the clergy tight around his throat. A small crucifix hung on a chain, swaying against his chest as he took deliberate, slow strides, out of rhythm with the pace of the world. A man out of step with time. He made the world around him seem blurry.
He was tanned, he had spent a lot of time in the sun, and did not show discomfort from the considerable heat of a January morning in the city, but despite this healthy glamour, there was something off about him, a hollowness to his gaze, perhaps I saw a shadow mark beneath his eye or upon his cheek. This man was privy to dimensions not known to the common man, cognizant of conversations unheard by the common ear.
On the same day that I saw the barefoot priest, I saw the soldier. He was young, in his twenties, but the burdens dragging him graveward carved lines into his face on their way down from his beautiful, blue eyes. Like eroded rock, he sat slumped against himself, elbows on his knees and head tilted up, his uniform matcing the dull green of his duffel bag which lay on the ground at his feet. He sat alone in the useless perspex shade of a bus shelter, sweat staining his shirt and glistening on the rough stubble of his shaven head, his westward shadow cutting a frightening shape into the surface of the earth.
I saw the soldier again later that day.
On the other side of the city, hunched over like eroded rock, slumped against himself in the useless shade of another bus shelter. The sun now burning his other cheek as he turned but did not see me with those beautiful, blue eyes, his shadow cutting east, a canyon in which to fall.
That night, on the radio I heard the news of suicides all over the Queensland wheat farming lands, children as young as eleven succumbing to the despair of a drought that seemed to have no end.
The next night, Adelaide flooded. The garden festival grounds were half submerged in the morning when drainage teams showed up with pumps and shovels and sandbags by the truck load.
All these things are connected. I said to myself. All these things are connected.
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