MOST ORDINARY THINGS: IN THE UNWANTED FOOTSTEPS OF THE SELF
[draft]
1
He would he would he could he could
He would he could
Were he able he might
There's no saying
Things are after all entirely unpredictable
Even the most boring things
The unpredictable comes after the predictable; the boring comes before. The boring defies prediction through its very banality, its curious quality of alreadiness
See. It is already there
2
The upkeep is crippling them
They've just decided the water feature is a mistake, the wisteria an unnecessary luxury
Next week they'll have to sack the gardener
They lay more paving, they spread more gravel
All plants must go
They've forgotten already the fierce heats of summer
They're surrounded by acres of nothing
They've forgotten they exist
For a long time they thought they were successful. Now they’re not to certain. They've gone into hiding
The balconies are empty. They await speeches that will never be given
They've gone away for the weekend. Papers gather in the drive
We can only surmise that the alarm system is triggered ready for the inevitable assault
Maybe they will never return
Even if they return it won't mean much
3
There was one woman on the path. A middle-aged woman and rather plump. Not in any Rubenesque way, however. 'Have you seen my little dog?', she asks. With my eyes I wonder if I would see anything at all. I wonder whether I should tell her this or not. Instead I say to her that I think that if there had been a little dog I would have noticed it. There was no dog. I am certain of that.
There was one other person on the path, a fat man jogging. As he passed I heard the last gurgling of clogged arteries.
I was on the path, too. I missed my corner and as a consequence I walked too far. It was an easy matter to double back once I realised my mistake. You walked a kilometre further than you needed to, said my host. He was wrong. He forgot to double the distance by which I had overshot the mark.
4
Miscalculation is an interesting affair, especially when it is coupled with judgment. 'I will judge you but I shall miscalculate the extent of your error'
5
No one has written the history of miscalculation. But there is more miscalculation than not, there is more error than there is getting things correct
My saving grace I wished to say is that I am not making any special effort to get things right. It's not about getting things right or wrong; it is merely about saying something.
Yes, a sort of answering back. Doing something, saying something
6
It's gone. A mishap. Mischance. We blame no one, we wish to blame someone. The computer's frozen so that's that. A day's work gone down the gurgler, I say. Secretly I'm furious. It's been a struggle. The words don't come easy. After all, do I have any real idea what I'm seeking after? No. Things remain hidden until the bitter end
It's a curse. The disappeared text involves a necessity to repeat, to retrieve something. We cannot repeat. There are those of us who cannot bear to retrace our paths or thoughts or anything else. Because we have learnt that it is impossible. A death path. To retrace ourselves is to retrace ourselves forward into our own graves. We want to move on. It is that that allows us to escape
I do not wish to recreate the lost text
7
The birthday is today, or is it? He blames his son: 'It was he who wanted it on today.' The real birthday, the true birthday is in three day's time. He allows free reign to his mythic self, the Jesus self. After all it is not the first time that he has been caught in the coils of Easter. 'There's no resurrection', he says. These are his actual words. He means he's given the neighbours the wrong date. That means they won't be coming, not tonight. They expect to come Tuesday. Today is Saturday.
In fact, he makes semblance that he has no idea whether it's today or Tuesday. The seeds of doubt have been sown. He's in a conflict of wish states, as if this arrangement, the one he and his son have cooked up, the one we have all been drawn into, is not his idea, that it has never been his idea, that it has somehow been imposed on him. In carelessness, in forgetting, in giving the wrong date there is a refusal. It's as if he's mislaid the spoon, the cutlery of his own existence. The bewilderment is a ruse, an attempt to control
8
'So what are they doing, today …', I ask helpfully, in the hope of redeeming something
'Hanging about I suppose', he says
I might bring myself to say the obvious: 'Well, if they're just hanging about they could just as easily come'. I don't. Somehow the obvious is just not to be said
9
We can't repeat the text, we can't restore it. The fixed text, the fixed score shuts the door on the present in favour of a substitute present. It gives precedence to an overwhelming past that inserts itself in the place of the now. The present is always provisional, made up of provisos, residues, leftovers, the things that curse and haunt us, anticipations. The present is tentative. We lose the tentative nature of the present when we seek the solidity of the past. The literary canon, for example, it crashes at our feet like slabs of marble. It is this assignment to the past that establishes authority. The authoritarian is always the voice of the past. The present requires a different sort of authority: a form of permitting. The improvisational is free of the past. To the extent that it echoes or quotes the past it compromises its own self-authoring. The past can be cited as authority, the voice of authority, but it can also be ironised. Any irony creates a black - even a bleak - hole in the present. It gives the present a bad time but also a sort of shudder, on in which we may, with any luck, discover something, throw off the dusty blanket of ordinariness
10
I am not enamoured of tattoos, he says, after making a false first assertion that he found them amusing. Tattoos are not amusing. Bodies covered in roses, he says, butterflies, daggers, anchors, snakes. He does not cite the absences, he tells us nothing of faded camellias or hovering dragonflies or croaking frogs, he makes no mention of translucent jellyfish or the slithering octopus, all the things that might be but aren't.
All things come from tradition, he asserts - and decries the absence of adequate design. Tradition fades, we might have told him, and even now his intelligent, fastidious remarks seem prissy, neither here nor there. Think of the glories of the Marquesans, he tells us, we have nothing of that.
What, the Pacific wears itself on every sleave!
10
The history of this nation is the history of censorship. Censorship is the attempt to construe the history of the people through the absurd self-image of those who otherwise remain hidden
Censorship is always a history of absurdity
11
We abandon our friends on the shore. Once we might have thrown them streamers, now we forget the crepe, we forget the wreaths. Floral arrangements are what arrive on Monday mornings. Late in the afternoon, at the entrance to the underground, in the tiled corridors of the subway, you can buy flowers. On special. Saturday mornings are even more propitious; there's always a bargain. It is the bargain that gives a more or less accurate idea of the proper price. The fair price, that is, the one that should apply as a matter of fact
12
Why 63? What's the score? There must be an occasion of sorts. Something. A special anniversary.
14 April 1946. Surely there's something, surely.
The fact is I've got it wrong. It's 64. 64 and Sergeant Pepper, an appeal for care and love, whatever that is. The Beatles' mischievous lyrics. I wonder what they think of them now, the ones that survive that is
13
I hear the sound of scattered teeth and the sad departure of the dragon. It carries its tail listlessly over one arm, like an abandoned item of apparel
14
The gallery should contain a single work only. The art work should occupy the entire space. Art is not decoration, it is the provision of an alternate space, an alternate possibility, a different way of seeing things and doing things and being with oneself and the world. It isn't a space in the crowd. Art is a total space
They removed the Buddhas from Gallery 20 and substituted in their place a single huge piece of ice from Antarctica
15
Art is a single idea
16
We went to sea in somebody's boat. I don't know whose boat it was but somebody's boat. There was some money but the honey jar was missing. It had gone walkabout
In the kitchen there is endless complaining
17
The fact is we are all implicated in his madness. The moments of ritual provide sad islands of relief for all of us. Not islands exactly, more like patches or banks of mud emerged from the falling tide
18
It is hard to write on demand. In general, it should be avoided. Everyone agrees on this. The commission is a killer
19
A walk is a walk is a walk. Set a time frame as guide, say one hour. Walk away for half an hour then walk back. Do not repeat. Do not repeat, do not retrace, or avoid to the maximum extent possible
Braund Rd is spotless. It is a road of dust and cleanliness. No fallen wrappers, no debris of any kind. I find next to nothing I can put in my green plastic bag. The traffic is polite. Drivers stop to let you across intersections. They are solicitous. In little ways they show they are aware of your presence
The people on the footpath are small. They look slightly cretinous. They have pinched faces. It's a town of small, slightly cretinous, pinch-faced people
To the east of Prospect Rd there is more rubbish, more fallout, little of it interesting. A small regular piece of sawn three-ply, a square of metal. Along Prospect Rd itself there are bus tickets and a little message from the government saying IT'S JUST AS EASY TO WALK
People use taxis. Taxis park under pepper trees waiting for business. Yellow pollen or flowers or seeds fall from the pepper plants. Thick it lies on the ground and crunches underfoot. Taxis drive into concrete driveways and beep their horns discreetly. Taxis park in driveways with their radios blaring. Talk back.
The shops in Prospect Rd have become small businesses: photocopying, a solicitor's office, an architect's. Next to St Cuthbert's an undertaker's. Discreet with tinted green glass.
There are one or two parks. They are not used. There are elaborate signs telling you what you can and can't do with dogs. The dog must be on a leash under two metres in length.
Along a long walkway enclosed on both sides by metal panelling there are spasmodic attempts at graffiti. They have been carefully painted out in silver paint. This seems to work as a deterrent. The graffiti artists seem easily discouraged.
Maybe there are better sites
20
What shall we say of someone who has a gate made up of a giant welded dragonfly? Otherwise the general effect is of modesty, impersonality. There is one lovely yellow doorway. On either side there are concrete swans. They are, I suppose, meant to have plants growing in them. There are no plants.
I like them. I think of Lohengrin: Der Schwann, deer Schwann! They float on a concrete sea
Everywhere there are dead lawns and roses on their last legs.
21
'It's more and more difficult to write'. This is Donald Friend on my actual birthday: 31 December 1943. He doesn't say why
Here it's the same. It's more and more difficult to write. I cannot say why. It's no one's fault, not even my own.
22
This house is a repository of my past. Much of it, some of it. On the walls there are some of my paintings. One of them I like a lot and would like to have back. In the computer I find old correspondence I have written and other texts. They're archived. I could of course make a selection. From two or three years' back. Yet like all the rest it's already a foreign country, an elsewhere, another era that, were it not for these sudden 'real' encounters that spring forth at me almost every time I open a file, I would have forgotten entirely.
An instance:
There is no time like the present to be dead, it is a very good time
Caught in the cross-hairs of time you fell over
With a startled look on your face
(I know it well)
We all condemned you, you condemned yourself
You fell over, it was 4 o’clock in the afternoon
How do I know that? I don’t know it at all
19 9 06
A poem I wrote, and not very good. I made this comment when I sent it off to this one or that: 'My revolutionary new poem - about Joe Ngallametta. Revolutionary because it doesn't mention that he is a blackfella at all'
It is a stupid comment to make. Yet it can still be said. It may still need to be said. I wouldn't say it now. I am even slightly embarrassed, put out, to have to say it
I might of course have remained silent
It's not a good poem. It's not good but it's accurate. I am annoyed at him. We get annoyed when our friends die or get old
We make people, houses repositories of ourselves and then they run away, carelessly, even wilfully
We find that we have already left them ourselves. We're annoyed to be found out
23
Revision. To revise.
The best editing is always deletion, a sort of selecting and then pruning. And then giving a title:
A few words for a dead friend
Caught in the cross-hairs of time you fell over
That startled face, I know it very well
We all condemn you, you condemned yourself
You fell over, it was 4 o’clock in the afternoon
24
In reality I don't know when Joe died. 4 o'clock is as good a time as any
He died dancing, he died showing off
25
The fact is I can't resist the temptation to edit, not even the past
To be tolerant, big-spirited. That's what they say about approaching old 'drunken' work, the first 'inspired' thing
I've deleted. It's almost certain that I shall delete further, and maybe not kindly
That's what they advised: Approach your old work kindly, in a kindly spirit
26
Another poem. An earlier poem. A long poem in three parts:
Home Improvements
1
Today it’s all lovely in Muller Road and tomorrow it will be lovelier
The smell of fish heads differs, the catfish here are dressed in hot chilli
While up the road, at the son’s place
It’s the stench of plain white bread
It is the wife who will always prevail
There’s a particular smell comes from the combination of stale beer with old cigarettes
And the smell of bodies
Etched into the cheap armchairs from K-Mart
Money smells different
Yesterday the windows of the blue Falcon went missing, fore and aft
It must have been, as he would have said, giggling
And showing a missing front tooth
A real blue, a proper blue, a blue to end all blues
He had a saying he liked: ‘I’ll stop being Mr Nice Guy’
The coppers came and took his new colour tv away just to keep their hand in
Lounging on the little patio the way they like to lounge
Being discreetly conspicuous
In uniforms two sizes too small
The neighbours never look
Next time it might be their time
2
It’s as though there’s no one at home
The houses have two designs and they alternate up and down the street
Years ago the grader came and scraped the earth
Having discovered the secret of permanent infertility
Yes, it’s the couch, mate, and you don't need to mow it
No, not from one year to the next
Further down it’s as if the houses still nestle among the t-trees except the t-trees have gone;
Only the swamp remains
Where it’s higher the sun beats fierce
Today they decided it was home improvement time
So all the furniture moved one number down the block, either odd or even depending on what side you were on
Jeez, they said, we never though we’d get the footie Alfie signed, twirling it from hand to hand
I didn’t know Alfie could write, I said
But he sure knows how to lay a bet, they said
To be an Alf you need to lose your dough and love your Mum
Be a Tip Top bloke
And throw a mean pass
3
The curtains were made of a special nylon fully intended to catch all air and to stop it entering the kitchen
Or leaving that little alcove where we all ate
Today he gave me a broken-down car radio
Yesterday I thumped him so hard he went through the fibro in the kids’ room
They screamed but dobbed together to buy me a grey sloppy joe they all signed
'To Uncle Max …'
Dad was a cunt but he was still their hero
As glamorous as Hollywood any day
With his sunken chest, gleaming hair
And tracksuit pants with the white stripes down the side
I’m goin’ to the Mission tomorrow, wanta come
Which loosely translated means, I’ve got to skip town, can you drive me
He was the smartest blackfella in the whole northern suburbs
Cruising the streets in my silver BMW
While on the south side they opted for squat Mercedes
Conned out of different shady characters down south
Who thought they saw a quid in something ‘intercultural’
That might attract a grant
A travel bureau, a manufacturer of daggy hawaiian shirts
Up here it was the crime belt only and the smart remark
A quip on every lip
This arvo we went to the races, the dogs
It coulda been a bush meeting
The spindly trees more spindly than the dogs
And down at mouth, just like the blokes at the table that passed for the bar
The deal was done; there was a grudge match against the bloke from the next town
Mick was sure to win
And the boy from Burketown singing his sibilated past
Being pure invention
3 aug 2006
25
The 'hawaiian' has been added already - for indeed it was an hawaiian shirt left at my office door. A rough rough effort
And other changes in the vicinity of the Mercedes. Does anyone need to know? Probably not
26
More past:
The Springfield Gazette
Issue 728
Wednesday 15 October 2003: ‘Today China puts a man into space …’ (Wang Yi Wei)
When you have nothing to say you probably should say nothing. However, a sort of inner cheerfulness inspires me to write, an impulse to communicate
Why I don’t know. Maybe relief from something, the burden of bearing the parental guilt, the ....
They were in fact guilty as shit. Almost a generational thing
Never mind.
I was very impressed by Faulkner’s speech about Jim Cairns yesterday. It showed among other things that there is still intelligence in the ALP – intelligence and generosity. From the other side some mealy-mouthed somethings. For myself I always thought Cairns was something of a fool – maybe a ‘divine fool’, maybe the ‘divine simpleton’. Yet where there is agreement, even from business circles, was that he was ‘mannerly’ – and there must have been some method to his madness. After all, for him to have done as well as he did in the hard world of Victorian trade union politics you had to have something going for you. It seems he had some powerful allies – Button and Cameron, among others.
Bob Brown said some good things in his speech – and very rightly took on some senator from Queensland whose name I forget, a total arsehole. I’m always puzzled by my ‘averse’ reaction to Brown - who says a lot of the right things but at the same time says them in a way I find totally distasteful. Like trying to swallow Midnight Oil at midnight – or any other time of the day or night for that matter. It’s his self-requirement to be on top, to be superior. There is a sort of proper-think fascism at work. Maybe such types slowly, through the force of gravity or something else, slide inexorably in the direction of Tasmania. Whatever it is in Hobart that stops them sliding further southwards I don’t know. Maybe the prospect of marrying into the Danish royal family …
Anyway, I recommend Faulkner’s speech. It is high quality. What they said in the House of Reps I don’t know. But it may be worth getting Hansard …
I still believe that the Whitlam Revolution needs to be defended – though Fraser curiously did a good job of defending some of it. On another reading he colonised it in order to defend the interests of the Old Colonial Rule. In other words, death to the unruly …
Someone committed suicide at Kings Cross Station this morning. This seems to be becoming popular. Of course it was at rush hour and I was trying to get into the city. I didn’t know it was a suicide at the time – and nobody bothered answering my questions. So I thought it might be a terrorist ‘intervention’. We’ve had one or two of those too recently. They put on buses but these were too slow. So to make my appointment in the city I had to ‘run’ down to Woolloomooloo to catch a cab. It worked, this strategy. And I was more or less impressed at my level of residual fitness. It is moments like this however that remind me of how limiting my eyesight is …
Coming back from the city I caught one of the buses – of which there were oodles, once they’d had a chance to organise themselves. They’re getting good at this. ‘Just follow the orange vests’, they say, which lead you down a line of people with less and less English. But you jump on a bus that takes you straight to the Cross and for free. They never charge. It’s pretty much how things ought to be!
Michael Stavros, the Brisbane-based artist, has a show opening at Mori tonight. He has astonishing technique. I was attracted by his early work, its fastidiousness and obsessive commitment to something or other. Maybe it is to the idea of art that lurks somewhere, in photos, the performance of business, men in suits, the performance of dress. He has moved towards horses – of the Spanish Dancing School or whatever it’s called variety. Performance, dressage, the artificial, the contrived.
Shall I regret that I might have bought one of his early works when I might have been able to afford it? Possibly. There are apparently some interiors in the present show – an Emporio Armani in Milan, and such like. The same fastidiousness, the same astounding technique. What it tells us I’m not certain. There is none of the glamour or sumptuousness of Ingres’ bourgeois gowns, the wonderful textures of velvet and such like. There is none of the ‘exuberance’ of Renaissance draperies. Yet somehow it seems to be linked into that tradition. A mortician’s aesthetic. He’s the sort of person who probably would have got off on those lace ruffs people wore round their necks in the 16th century.
But why did people then have to present their heads on such elaborate paper doilies?
Death, suicide, museum displays, public transport, art, dress. What else?
ACAM (an art website) provided its first worthwhile contribution this morning:
… and if they make it back to Australia I would like a tickertape parade down george street, speeches by John Howard on their heroism and a flyover. then let them live out their natural lives somewhere near Cooma.
This from a Michael Desmond whom I don’t know. About the sheep of course. There is lots and lots of righteous indignation cris-crossing what people are happy to call cyberspace, whatever that is. This is the first contribution I’ve seen that gets at the absurdity of the whole sheep drama, and sees the parallels with other aspect of Australian life, including foreign policy and attitudes to the Middle East.
I’m not sure about the Cooma bit though. Apart from Immants Tillers (who lives there now apparently) and the pseudo-Tyrolean ‘restaurants’ – already in the original horrible reproductions of an idea that should never have been thought in the first place, let alone brought so casually southward. Let’s call this aesthetic of cuckoo clocks and miniature reproduction chalets and cowbells and dirndl and lederhosen Heidi-ism, and give a parting wave, a little abstruse bow in the direction of an Australian art history that may have thought it was going precisely in the opposite direction yet similarly fell into the trap of becoming the very idea of itself …
Commandment 178: ‘Thou shalt not quote thyself’
Anyway, poor sheep who are, poor things, always quoting themselves, baa baa baa. I don’t recommend Cooma - or Yass for that matter. I would have thought a nice warm apartment on the Gold Coast with lots of trendy hairdressers would have been the go. Clip and snip. A hair salon called BAA-BAAS is in any case inevitable, is it not?
LONG LIVE THE SHEEP OF STATE!
27
What tom-foolery is this? Where's the restraint? There are things I forget and regret. One of the ACAM photographers based in Canberra, for instance. Young boys on skateboards …
There are at the end of the day things that might be retrieved
Notes:
Section 1 is inspired by a walk I did in the late afternoon from the Botanical Gardens to my host's house in Fitzroy.
Section 10: 'The tattoos amuse me. One soldier had quite a gallery of daggers. Skulls, hearts and girls' names scrawled all over them. One particularly idiotic specimen has a great scroll on his arm, pierced by a long sword, and 'Death Before Dishonour'. Most of them run to roses, hearts and anchors, whether they've been to sea or not. Some just have 'Mother' or something.
… It seems odd that this craft that has flourished prosperously for so long has not produced better designs …[W]e have nothing to indicate that the European tattooers ever produced anything to equal the Marquesan work.
Unlike most ancient crafts it has survived centuries without any apparent development except the method of needling. I can only suppose that the skill of the workmen has not deteriorated; many of the designs are traditional —but none of them that I have seen, are good. I said that I was amused by the tattoos. I am not; I am bored with them.
31 December 1942
(Anne Gray ed 2001 The Diaries of Donald Friend Vol 1 Canberra: National Library of Australia: 161, 163)
Sections 19, 20: A walking itinerary: Halstead St - W Braund Rd - N Beatrice St - E Prospect Rd - S Cane St - E Doreen St - S Barker St -W Priscilla St - S Alpha Rd - E (nameless) laneway - S Union St - S New St S Kintore Av - E Old St - S Pulsford Rd - W Prospect Rd - S (St. Cuthbert's Anglican) Marian Pl - W Braund Rd - S Halstead St - E |
