On Writing.

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Writing, in and of itself, is nothing.
Writing, in and of itself, is everything.
Writing, in and of itself, is enough.
Writing, in and of itself, can never be enough.

Writing, in and of itself, is the one truly human act of creation.

An unlettered child can sing and make music. An untutored child can draw or paint a picture. But to write requires mastery, the drawing together of language, logic and rhetoric in the flow of thoughts and ideas, streams of consciousness, poetic metre and prosaic rhythm. To write requires a consciousness beyond the self, beyond the itch and scratch of animal need, beyond the demotic prosody of circumstance; beyond the fixations of a fevered mind, the obsessive ordering of black and white, the chicken scratchings on white vellum that betray a mind too narrow and too cluttered.

Yet writing, in and of itself, is destruction, a crucifixion, the nailing of bloodied words to the white and plastic page. The deaths of endless possibilities lie cold and grim 'neath the gravid wealth of words. At twelve minutes past four in the morning I lie sleepless and uncomfortable. I press old hands against tired eyes. Words and ideas form in flashes of green and blue, exploding like raindrops on a slate roof, their vital water running into dark gutters, sluiced into oblivion. Unless I rise and write they'll slip away, stripping meaning from my mind in shreds and shards, pouring the endless flow of babble and cant into the darkness.

Yet to rummage in the cluttered drawers of self-regard and bathos does not constitute writing. For something further demands itself. A net of meaning that strains our glittering thoughts from the air, a lacework web of hooks that catches the mind of another, and another. Writing is more than typing or calligraphy. It links pure spirits, one to another. Successful writing calls spirits together.

And in that meeting something more is spawned. Living things are formed and shape themselves, drawing light and breath and existence from the ether. From the play of words, from style and substance, chirp and charm, from word and meme and memory. And we must create ourselves with the net, with the lacework tale, the story of our self and our words, or else disappear, fade like fog in wisps and whispers, vanish like love in tears and tantrums.

For if writing is the one truly human act of creation, then all writing springs from love. From the cleaving of separate selves from the All and One, from the cleaving together of kindred spirits. Sentences spring to bridge the gap elastic, stretching out to one another, drawing us in each to the other. Love calls forth and we must answer. The urge to be, to unite, to be known is unanswerable, more demanding and more stern than any mistress. A love of self that is truly selfless, the love for another that is our truest self, our most honest need and gravest weakness.

Our words we weave to bridge the unbridgeable. Bright phrases bubble in the dark, spreading light in flashing smiles. Turns of phrase return and turn again. Rare words like lepidoptera open sunlit wings, winking with false eyes. The juggle of wit and the gaudy display of learning conspire in secret falsehoods, inviting and ever misconstrued. We tell our lies in one another's heads. And on we write or like the circling shark die of lost momentum and petered-out thoughts, of loves lost and little princes found. The sandalled footprint of childish wisdom disappears into the desert of silence. The eye that reads blinks once and we are gone. Our words fade from the virgin page, restoring virtue in perfect punctuation.

To write is to exist.

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Beauty & The Beak

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He’s a clumsy bugger. Vigorous, but awkward, tossing meat and cheese everywhere when he rummages for the right piece to eat. Ungainly is a good word for him. I’m not precisely sure what gainly looks like, but he certainly ain’t it. But he’s alive. Very much so and against all the odds.

When I got back to Brisbane after Easter in Canberra he was there, and the growth over his eye seemed to have broken away, or been scraped off. The scales having fallen he could see both sides, but the lump on his beak limited his forward vision, so he couldn’t give me that meaningful look that Crookfoot does when she fixes me square on. A look Catherine would have described as ‘old-fashioned’. Then a week or two later the horrible growths on his feet were gone, and he’d slimmed down and was more mobile, if not more graceful. Then, this week, the lump on his beak has dried out and gone, leaving just a scarred patch.

The Beak is Back!

He’s now a ferociously driven young bird, full of testosterone and noise, doing very nicely thank you. Which is very touching, and a miracle unexpected.

Oh, and I’m engaged by the way.

To be married.

Which is quite a surprise.

It’s a very Harry met Sally tale. We’ve known each other twenty-two years, and met when we were both married. Since then we’ve both been divorced, remarried and divorced again. Or in my case, widowed. And we’ve been closer in the last year or two again, but not expecting much more. Until about three months ago. When we were together ‘unchaperoned’ as my fiancée put it. Which apparently was the magic word. Because it was clear that that was what it took for the scales to fall from our eyes. Although, no doubt, Ellen was more aware of things than I. I am a man, after all.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and love and lust rekindled.

So this last weekend, after weeks of phone calls and tentative exploring of possible futures, including, perhaps, the likelihood of living ‘contiguously’ being discussed, we met again. And I proposed. And she accepted. Which is where the Beauty part comes in. Because she is very beautiful, and very wonderful, and I am madly in love with her. Green eyes and soft skin, dark hair and quite the figure.

And she smells wonderful.

And tastes even better.

And the whole world is changing very fast around us. My daughter, Ellen, will be 21 in three months, and will be setting up a home of her own. She announced to me that she has no desire to leave Brisbane, and won’t come to Canberra to live with us. Which, while obviously heartbreaking for a loving father such as myself, does mean that Ellen S, my intended, betrothed, soon-to-be-wife, and significant other and I will be able to live like newlyweds. So I’ll be moving to Canberra before the end of the year, to live happily ever after, and write and write and write.

By the way, did I mention I’m in love?

By the other way, in case you’re wondering, my daughter Ellen was in part named after Ellen S, my affianced. But this won’t cause as much confusion as you might think. Because I usually call Ellen (daughter of mine) Nell. Which, coincidentally is Ellen (my affianced’s) grown-up daughter’s name. But my daughter Nell spells it as Ellen backwards, that is, as Nelle. And Nell (my soon-to-be-daughter by marriage) is currently answering to Nellie. Which I haven’t called my (daughter) Nell in weeks.

So, couldn’t be simpler.

Except for my father, whose mother’s name was Ellen.

But he’s deaf in one ear.

Did I mention the ‘I’m in love’ thing?

~

Merlin's father.

Catherine's father.

The first time I ever laid eyes on the bastard was in a painting that was done not long after his funeral. I attended a meeting of the Labor Left faction one night in the winter of ’86. It was held in a long, concrete-walled conference room on the ground floor of the Allied’s union headquarters building in Red Hill. At one end of the room the entire wall was taken up with a mural showing all the wonders that unity of labour and trade-unionism could achieve, with particular emphasis on the Queensland that Bill Parris and the Allied had helped to build. It was, no doubt, one of those ‘art-in-working-life’ projects paid for by the Hawke Labor Government in the full flush of the high-spending years.

The mural was done in that peculiar ‘South-American revolutionary-naïve’ style that always makes me feel that the pre-schoolers have taken the nursery by storm with plastic bayonets and sickles, fresh from toil in the finger-painting fields and the plasticine mines. In the centre was a single figure, larger by far than all the rest, a tall, solidly built man with horn-rimmed glasses, iron grey hair and a dark, pointed beard, his hands raised in a gesture that was part liberation-theology Christ-like, part melodramatic music-hall magician. I had no idea who it was. I didn’t meet Catherine for another four years or so.

But the image stayed with me. It was so intensely religious, so genuinely iconic, yet at the same time without a real centre. He wasn’t a figure that held things together, or poured forth bounty from a cornucopia. He was the strange pseudo-Christ at the epicentre of a whirling chaos, and not the good kind that has beauty and underlying order and majesty. This was scattered and scatter-gunned. This was an explosion, destruction masquerading as creation. The figure in the centre sucked in power from all that appeared to come from him, undermining the meaning that was presumably intended.

It’s only in writing this that I’ve come to realise that the mural inspired a satirical character for a series of short stories I wrote later, during the time in the mid ‘90’s I worked for the Queensland Government, after Colleen had bent my head out of shape, and before Catherine and I moved in together.

The character was Shane Guevara, the artistic son of leftist South-American refugees who’d moved to Brisbane, and in particular to Logan City, a satellite town without an orbit, a cultural wasteland and economic sink-hole famous only for teenage pregnancy, petty crime and half-assed hot rods. Shane was a spray-painter with a strong ideological streak and a gift for the airbrush. A series of his best custom paint-jobs which larded the barebones plot were actually a series of extravagantly crafted in-jokes for those who had to suffer as a socially aware teenage boy during the 1970s in the land of Oz. They included the following:

"1976 Holden Monara, ‘Fall of Saigon’, 350 Chev, red and black, chrome sidepipes."

“Defeat of the Kuomintang” Mazda Bongo van, pale blue acrylic, 12 coats.

"William Morris Minor, 1100 cc, Paddy Hopkirk roll cage. Doilies everywhere."

1966 Ford Cortina, `Andreas Bader's Suicide', Holley 45, with extractors.

“Jane Fonda visits Hanoi as Barbarella”, 1972 Chrysler Valiant wagon, 245 hemi, bench seats, beige with matching trim.

Shane’s love interest was one Emily Wilding, a.k.a Em. A thin, passionate left-wing activist and vegetarian. Untidy dark hair, in a gamin 'Audrey Hepburn' cut that's grown out into a shoulder length straggle. Early 20's with green eyes, Em was a caricature of my own taste in women.

Em “rides a Vespa of indeterminate horsepower, and has an irrational fear of TAB outlets and bran mash. Is prone (sic) to throwing herself in front of things, police vans, local government. flunkies, lasagne.” All of which was an obscurantist clue as to the origins of her name. Emily Wilding Davison was the suffragette who famously threw herself in front of King George V’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, and died of her wounds four days later.

Part of Shane’s genesis came from my own time in some really terrible garage bands as a teenager. A good mate and rhythm guitarist was Andy Ball, a red-haired spray painter who had a mural of the Meatloaf ‘Bat out of Hell’ album cover painted on a dodgy Ford Escort panel van in which the gearstick would come out of the gearbox while you were driving. He later bought and painted a black Ford Falcon identical to the Mel Gibson ‘Mad Max’ car.

The creative process is a strange thing. I sometimes wonder if the mural is still there. In the past I’ve fantasised about visiting and defacing it, with paint stripper or just some heavy black enamel. I try not to think about it too much. Better to bury the bastard in words than to get busted for civil disobedience.

Beijing Rules

For those who want to know where they stand in Beijing:

You don't stand, you kneel.




Smile, wave, murder millions.

Book Review: Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t read Fight Club.

It’s crap.
Rhythmic crap.
Nihilistic rhythmic crap.

But it has a punchy rhythm and short sentences. Short sentences tied together with longer apparently lyrical descriptions. Descriptions tied together by repeating the last word of each as the beginning of the next.

Some times two.
Sometimes two words to tie together, with brand names.

Iconic brand names like Impala, Armalite and whale stuff, that stuff they use to make perfume that costs so much. And pissing in the soup. But not Ellis. Not Havelock or even Brett Easton. And he’s never heard of Bob Ellis who maunders in that beautiful sad way about things lost and melancholia and being drunk.

Bob Ellis gets all his injuries from falling over drunk, while Palahniuk gets his from violence given and received, that isn’t a subtext for homosexual father-fixated longing at all. ‘Cos that would be gay. And not helplessly, hopelessly human and needing love but being too afraid to give, and not having anything worth anything to give ‘cos we’re too lazy to do the work.

Homosexual. Not homo-erotic.
Not auto-erotic. That’s wanking.
Wanking is a town in China.
Wake-up at the airport.

Wanking on a sadistic fantasy.
Fantasy that’s not sadism ‘cos I have a get-out. I get hurt too.

The door doesn’t lock. The lock’s broken.
Broken with a cordless penis, but I called it dick. Dad laughed at me.
Mum might catch me. In a town. In China.

Do the work. Make something of ourselves.
Did I mention the brand names. Corniche.
Vichyssoise. I beat myself up because I’m in inner turmoil.

More than you can know.
More than anything you can know. About me. And bullets.
Bullets are great, Marla.

Rain. Easton Ellis wrote a nasty book. But it wasn’t lazy.
Who’ll play Edward Norton in the movie? Me, and Brad.

The first rule about spell-making is that you don’t talk about lazy writing.

Nihilism. God.
Did I mention the Nihilism.
There are no questions in this book.

Because we have all the answers. Sure we do. Hit something. Hit me. I’m tough, dangerous. I have an inner Tyler that doesn’t fix the roof. The roof leaks. Everything swells. Nails stick out and snag and rust. Decay is cool. You should see the mould in my room. It’s fungus, fun fungus. It has a dangerous alter-ego with a fantasy.

A fantasy that I’m doing this
Fantasy that I’m doing anything.
And doesn’t take too long to read.

No Shirt. No shoes.
No shirt, no shoes, no service.
The service in here is terrible.

Lye. It burns.
I like lye burns. Burns like lies.
Sodomy. Fellatio. Cunilingus. Bondage.

It’s called ambergris. That whale stuff that gets blood all over you in the toilet. Piss in the toilet. Bum. Blood. Blood, teeth and aching. Pain that’s fake. Pain that’s just descriptions of bodily functions and made-up damage. Damage that’s just repetition, repetition that’s just painful. Painful and boring. Boring with a drill.

Freeze their locks off.
And boring.
Change the reels, Tyler.
Don’t eat the soup.

The third rule of fight club is you don’t talk about how bad the book is.

The Hunchbeak - (II)

Some days I feel very old, but not today. I’ve just seen something I’ve never seen before. A wild bird, Gymnorhina tibicens, the Australian Magpie, the only true Magpies in the world, not a pied crow, is asleep on the steps. The tibicens comes from the Latin word for piper or flute-player. If you’ve ever heard an Australian Magpie you’ll get the reference.

It’s the Beak, and he’s sleeping on the second-top step to the house, beak tucked under his wing, blind-eye to the world. In daylight, at three in the afternoon. He’s been there for hours. He was there when I opened the door this morning at eleven, hopped to the top step, asking for food, for meat in particular. I filled the cheese bowl, but he ignored it. I found the minced beef in the fridge and fed him, four or five good-sized pieces until he was full, until he couldn’t fit any more in.

And then he did something I’ve never seen before. He wiped his bill on the steps, and stayed. Picked a step, one from the top and got comfortable. Then settled in. He’s in pain, I know. Today it’s hard on him, and he’s tired, very tired. I made coffee and started my day, came out to watch the noon news bulletin, and he was there. I fed him again an hour or so later, and then again later still. What he doesn’t eat the ants clean up. But I’ve never seen a bird sleeping like that, and particularly not on the ground.

He feels safe here. Knows I’m thinking about him, that there’s no danger from this quarter, that I have his back. The occasional noise from the builders down the road wakes him, but I talk to him softly, tell him it’s safe, that he’s safe here. I drop my mind into my chest and open my heart, open the heart chakra, and reach out to contain him, to give him warmth and protection. And he relaxes, tucks his head under his wing again, and sleeps. It seems I’m finally getting the hang of it, the Green Ray that is. Attracting what you want and need by staying open to being called on, being part of the world. My beloved would be pleased. It’s taken years.

We live with the front door open, always have. When Cath and I met we both had the habit, a working class thing, English. We’ve always had birds, possums, the odd stray cat and on one occasion a huge black cockerel that had escaped from a neighbours yard, coming into the house. In part it’s about living with an open heart, although that sounds incredibly pompous. But it’s hard to explain any better than that.

A bird in the house can mean an impending death, but not here, they’re just part of the extended family, and since Cath died they’re more important than ever. I don’t have pets, and I stopped acquiring familiars years ago. Too many of them died as a result of my untidy process. Which is what familiars are for, it’s true, as insurance against magic rebounding on you. But it’s hardly fair to them. You befriend them, invite them in, make them part of your personal world, give them a name. When they respond, get close to you, become familiar, they become a familiar. Then, when your magic goes wrong and you overreach yourself they take the hit when it rebounds on you. And they die, if they’re lucky. So I don’t do that any more. I have friends with wings instead, which is much better all round. And the door stays open.

We don’t live in fear of wandering malice, of random robbery and criminal malcontents. We don’t attract them, and I always maintain an awareness of the immediate neighbourhood, keep a weather eye on the mood, the season, the prevailing wind. And I still follow her old maxim: Nothing to be scared of if you’re the scariest thing out there.

We did it together.
I’m doing it for both of us now.

He’s down in the garden now, after four hours just standing, hanging out, sleeping in fits and starts. The three o’clock crocodile of Catholic schoolgirls is streaming down from Lourdes Hill School, which brings a lot of high-pitched chatter and clumping of school shoes that he can’t ignore. But he hasn’t gone far. Just down the stairs. Which means I can collect the mail without disturbing him.

I know he’s struggling. I’ve thought of ringing a vet, getting advice, but I know I can’t end it for him. I’m not the type, and I’ll always favour hope over death as a solution, or even just a stop-gap. So I’ll stay awake, keep an eye on him, do some laundry and drink some coffee. It’s what there is to do.

The Hunchbeak of Beatrice Street.

~
It’s killing him, the poor little bugger. He’s only five months old, but I can’t see him making it through the winter. One month, maybe two at best. But he doesn’t complain. Birds don’t. They put up with what they can’t change and suffer in silence.

He’s the oldest of the two chicks from this years brood. The fourteenth of fifteen that Crookfoot has produced since we moved in here eight years ago. And he’s male. That you can tell from the attitude, the volume, the cheerfully loutish behaviour around the cheese dish on the front steps. Crookfoot lost her last two in a rush late last year. The younger one, a slender female with a delightful disposition and endlessly chatty was chased out of the territory, as is the usual practice.

That left Mother and J.R, her one-eyed, seven year-old son, in residence. There have been more than a dozen others over the years, raised from squawking fluffy bundles until they’re able to look after themselves, then evicted, sent out to try their luck, and risk their lives in the big wild world.

J.R wasn’t thrown out. Not for him the savage pecking and ruthless methods of magpie eviction. His monocular disposition made him too vulnerable, and he stayed, an overgrown baby at first but growing over the years into a loyal support and handsome son, always ready to help feed each year’s new brood, long after Crookfoot had given up on the endless round of stuffing squawking beaks with beef, cheese and whatever else turns up. He was a big lad at the end, strong, broad-shouldered, a solid and respectable citizen, with a powerful neck due to his endless need to scan for danger with his one good eye.

He was hit by a car in the last week of April ‘07. Blind-sided one last time in Goulbourn Street by one of the endless supply of utes and vans that swarm around the endless supply of ghastly townhouses being built there. He didn’t get much of a send-off. I saved him from the ants, but wrapped him in newspaper and put his body, a good weight too, in a council rubbish bin. I didn’t have anything better in me. I’d used up all my ability to do funerals and grieving when Catherine died in November 2006, and by the end of April, two weeks after her birthday, I was just too heart-sore, too cried-out to cope with another parting. Even for a magpie I’d known all his life, had fed since he was a skinny squawker at the bottom of the pecking order.

I marked his passing by breaking the bowl he’d fed from all these years. Slid it off the top step with my foot and watched it crack into three pieces. I shed a few tears. A week or two later I went down to Goulbourn Street at three in the morning and spray-painted a memorial to him in the middle of the road; his name, the date, twelve feet high. It’s almost gone now, a year later. I’ll go down some night soon and redo it for him. I don’t sleep at all any more during the dark hours so I’ll have plenty of opportunity.

He was replaced a week or two later by a blow-in. A yearling male magpie chased out from a clan somewhere else. This is too rich a territory to go to waste, and too big to be defended by Crookfoot alone. It took a month or so for her to establish that she was top bird. The males are aggressive, and slow enough learners that it takes a while, and several quick, vicious pecks in the side-ribs to get the message. He’s called Boofhead, Boofy-Boy, or just Boof for short. They get the names that seem to fit, and he was a very boofy boy to start with, all wild eyes, and noise, and beak, and attitude.

Since then he’s put on some weight, learned his place, acquired adult plumage and, since this years brood was born, taken up where J.R left off as primary child-care, beak-stuffer and all-around aero-dynamic role-model. A year is a long time for a young magpie, and he’s much smarter, more capable, more able to keep up his end of a conversation now.

Crookfoot loses interest in the endless feeding they require fairly quickly. Once they can fly she spends as much time alone as possible, delegating the on-going care and feeding to whoever’s number-one bird after her. Given that she builds the nest, mates, lays the eggs, sits on them in all weathers and feeds them once they hatch in November she’s usually had a gut-full by February. She has a look that’s incredibly eloquent at this time of year when they all turn up for food around five o’clock.

She’ll watch Boofhead running back and forth, endlessly feeding one noisy beak after another, and look at me with the eye of a mother who’s done this too many years to count, and would just as soon have a quiet chat, a cup of tea, and close the door to the nursery. There’s a genuine, parent-to-parent connection. I feel it especially when I rush off to pick up Nell from work when she’s had a lousy day, and can I drop everything and pick her up right now? After all, what could I possibly be doing that’s of any consequence?

Nothing, nothing at all.
What indeed?

This years pair were fairly typical. A loud, solidly-built, bombastic, aggressively shouting male, and a slender, quieter, more intelligent and thoughtful female. The female is doing fine. There’s plenty of food, plenty of minced beef and grated cheese available from me, and the recent rain has pushed plenty of edible species up out of the wet ground. She’s injured a foot, and is limping, but it doesn’t look permanent so she’ll be fine, I think. But the boy is in trouble.

I noticed it first about six weeks ago, mid January. He had a misshapen upper beak. It was fine on one side but had a bulbous swelling on the other. It didn’t bother him so I didn’t pay much attention to it. Nell and I even joked about him being the Hunchbeak of Beatrice Street. But now it’s getting worse by the day. The swollen beak started to get larger about three weeks ago. Then I noticed a similar dark clumping of growth on his left foot. It didn’t slow him down any, and it doesn’t appear to cause him pain, just made it look lumpy and inelegant.

Now the growth on the beak has spread with some similar growths around one eye. In the last two days it’s obscured his eye and he’s now blind on one side. I’ve spotted more growths on his left leg around the ankle joint, up near the body, not big, but growing. And he’s getting a little thick in the neck, so something may be happening under the feathers. He’s still got thick fluffy down around his head and shoulders. I don’t think that he’ll live long enough to grow new plumage.

I have no idea what it is. If it spreads to his other eye he’ll be finished. A blind bird doesn’t last very long. Either way I don’t think he’s got much time left. It’s growing faster than he is, poor little sod. Poor noisy, aggressive, hungry, determined, full-of-life, little sod.

I hope it’s clean, at the end. Quick, merciful.

We had a baby butcher-bird a few years back who had an obstruction in his throat that killed him. He couldn’t swallow. We gave him food ground extra fine, but in the end he couldn’t swallow anything, though he kept trying.

One night he came in and perched on an arm-chair an hour before dark. He couldn’t eat, but we sat and talked to him, Nell and I, and he stayed quite late, well after dusk. He drew comfort from our company, felt loved, cared for. He knew we were with him, knew that our lives overlapped, that he meant a full life’s-worth of being, and dying, and memory. His name was Ralph.

A little human warmth goes a long way, on very small wings sometimes. The next morning the neighbour found him, under a bush next to the fence. She handed him to me and we gave a him a burial in the backyard under the fig-tree.

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