Penna Mona Penna

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The three girls were sick, that left us boys to go to see Theatre of the World at MONA by ourselves. Nothing too bad, just colds and general sleepy day dreamy lethargy.

I had no reason to set the GPS. I did it, more than anything, out of habit, and a childish love of all things geek. When I glanced at the clock for the first time it was 12:34. Adding to ten this is my favourite time of the day. A cheery wizard omen. The theatre of clearing and forgetting. The second part of The Beatles White Album looms exactly to fit into the ride from Penna to MONA. From Birthday to Good Night.

And the divine divide is almost as beautiful as the study and the seat of the Muse is in some ways more beautiful, less beautiful, more disturbed by human hand, lest disrobed. Clear and disturbing obscure as uncensored night time visions. Coal Valley. Duck Hole Rivulet. Grasstree Hill Road. Sad jet faced microbe slow eating constant chewing fat black daughters of Hathor. On the side of the road they strand watching dozy dreamy wise the cars slowly fade into the past. The valley rich in sheep . Dull brown native hens greedy scratch at new sown fields green. And the valley rich in grape vines opens out from the crest of the ridge bright yellow and belligerent green new and fertile sweet and rich in abounding mechanic fields of industrial onion and lettuce and potato and the shiny green glade of fresh shown newly rained rapidly will to power to the sun loving grasping striving unto the sun and the former and shaper of life one earth and we are but interlopers and the wind through the trees and Henry Reynolds tells us the cries of dead rattle the trees. Without integrity...not a nation , but a community of thieves to listen to Xavier Herbert.

Mountains rise dreamy sheer a curtain wall of fear of multistoried green multihued mystery winding gear grinding curves of wide sweeping turns from the bend of the cutting. Deep dark gullies of eternal winter cold and damp and moss and the hilltops open to the warmth and the hilltops are drier. Round and round slow and lazy like time to observe and reveal all things hawks gliding to the swerve of the rising warm air and helical. And she missiles down from out of the sun talons extended and flashing bright and shinysharp and uncaring to kill the rabbit. For the weak must die. She has her own fingerlings to consider.

The factions and parties and elements are slipping apart and some called for civil union but equality like the call of accretion must be universal and absolute, or it shall not be at all. There can be no second rate no back of the bus no separate but equal and some brag of more or better morals the antiother.

Down down downity. Down shifting the hill glistening of the engine car ear aware of the sounds of human hand and mind made solidreal. The latest and the greatest. Down to Risdon Cove flat spongy sword beach of genocide invasion landing place. Flat past the sea historic ghost storey whipping post Richmond captive fictional Ikey Fagin named Artful Oliver oil twist and my baby girl not five years old was too scared to visit the gaol winding roads whaling rows windy ways sky sea sandy land matrix free hand mountain line steam smoke nickel smelter steam snow mountain cloud gathering oaken river wide and windy white capped waves  medieval tortured winter mandatory grapes cut down to silent size put in their prayerplace Mt Wellington gloomy table top overseeing Father cape town stern block head wooden top Pertrloo hero fire and smoke and soft spreading bullets tearing. And as we climb down the hill helter skelter the thin smelter yellowing mould wound in the corner of the we got trouble river city. The glue turns dry and brittle and the wall paper comes away from the wall and extends slow slowly. It lives. A nightmare of history. Unable to awake.

All for one and one for all for we are the mighty talon mighty  extending sweeping eagle eyed from silent down the sky unseen unheard hawks. And it all went off down urine one sixty pint of glumness rock on and bright orange vomit sort of an evening now a night of the book and a book of the night. Of dreams and absurd history culture 20 000 years and more and we are now fine again awake. The heartening of dreams and forgetting of horseshoe crab nightmares and turtles and stuffed open mouthed talon flashing fury of idioms messaging owls and glassy eyed Whiteley stare starting out opium calendar bay blue laden whirly surrealist shapes and pig cashable Normandy battle brash smooth stones loved. Hunks of hacked hair felt and simulated. Conversing with a stranger passion and the bluest cobalt blue excitement.

The Beatles White Album, the watusi second half from Birthday to Good Night almost the twist exact equity the time my house to old and new. Walking running playing dafter and son giggling imaging extending the iron work cement truck and here is where the rockets go. They make the truck go fast. Waiting Ticketing. High ceiling entrance. Down dark circle cycle stairs descending Dantesque subversive divine adult Disneyland comedy the walls hewn from bedrock the sewage tunnel hallway. Dystrophic future exoplanet factory setting. Addams family Gomez Cara Mia Crimea love house of rooms and arsenic and old lace old timey duchess and cabinets milk and ice cream mixed merchant seaman ti jean would scrapyard understand garage sale helter skelter football pell mell bob tail and tag rag and bone man Steptoe Sanford salvage and sons big fat timey wimey wibbly wobbly of next to next of side by side contrast and compare kaleidoscope that got away from me...

Radical harkening back to old stool timey museums set commode of the muses receding the circles of hell deep and deep dark dank past Tantalus...dug the ell-square pitkin. Poured we libations unto each the dead. Ply upon ply. Speaking to the shades shaking afore the shadows of what once was shades of long gone languages and spirits and gods and spirits and nymphs and each one alive and with a soul the river the tree the rock the prey the corn plundered gold rush the rubber terror or the sheep's back land grab given away not legal and the sealers mad the whalers and sooners and guano diggers and the carpet bagging money grubbers seizers of power and diverters of language. And now no more, so much no more. Never again. No more stories nor dreams. At the heart of this terror of smallpox gonorrhoea the bible bile and the boozy beggar bottle cheater of the ruse flag of the crafty one. No one despondent of Calypso pour libations and for the great king of the world of the world of protective mother and wavy cephalopod love unto fiery death no more and the pope sits in the frozen circle plug of icy cold hell as the mutinous angel Lucifer squats and farts for all time. No more. Gone for all time. Theatre of forgetting and bringing back to life with blood and wine to dialogue and which hand held this and painted this and concerned this. What maker?

Old skool nauseam and sacred silent place of dreamy wavy gravy chaired learners with pinned horseshoe crabs from boyhood home and crucified butterflies and great busted open shingle crystalline random slabs of geology and taxonomy on mortified branches well practiced taxidermy twittering birds of shimmering garish colour. The ordered shiny bugs the squatting ghouls and luck bringing fetish. Next to the this very afternoon up to date.  The cataloguing of the rapidly changing diving world the voice stifled the songs no longer sung. The craft left to gather dust of disuse. Lonely in drying drawers of humidity contoured basements. The counting and cataloguing of bumps and blemishes and gall shaped wounds to separate the ocean from the insane. The moving forward.

Dark and sharp labyrinth. Dedalus crafty artificer. The beast born of god ordained insane bestial coupling. Dedalus built wide shining apparatus Pasiphae Hathor white armed fine ankled cow eyed Hera. Kandinsky abreast side by side by Sondheim. Limestone CO2 hieroglyphics magic writing who carved and penned and concealed sanctified symbols and independent totem colour. Here Picasso and his mistress Dora Maar are the unwobling pivot. The masques of differing volume and intent and the modern up to date.  Rootless? Nihil tradition bebound to Beefheart repeat or to Stardust shock or simply to bore Joe six pack. Glad dark not glade gas candle optic illusion. Illusory sphere of light to passion and to touch to put out ones mind hand. Cretan octopus sarcophagus motif wide brawny curvy lines likes the roads that curve and wonder and switchblade jack knife through low hanging fruit mountain cutting hills.

Countless flies stuck to canvas thick and glittering bright in the light french polish of beetle wings cracking gold like the flowers like the darling daughter of Psapfo. Three photos put together a naked man lining down. Headless. A tiger on the prowl Flashman glaring at the Victorian viewer muggings ready to pounce. A group of world war soldiers shooting at an unseen enemy. The shoddier comrades all behind a quick thrown together barricade. Haystacks like the ones Monet painted, now lit by rifle shot and the angry flames jumping from seventy five millimetre hell mouth rapid fire cannon. A foot stool of a young woman crouched foetal ball disturbed the boy and resulted in a quick move to view the hand made Mercedes Benz  inspired coffin.

Cackle my unknown subscription to the redirection pleasures binary and cuneiform next to next face to face toe to toe heart to heart lumber up limbo down absorbing the beauty with my locked embrace stumble round eyes. Ancient some 4000 years ago what hand held and made what school boy held the stylus and when did she cut the shapes and words meaning numbers Krypteia secret codes of the precision caste. To dominate and monopolise knowledge of things that are and are not.

Tales of the ATO MONA send the messages atwitter and face book abuzz with abused bit and bytes and I let my small voice be heard in supporting the gallery.   And this. For the exhibit spoke to many of the things I hold close. The Greeks Joyce Hegel the helix the making of connections the tendrils of chemical interplay stretching and grasping one anointer skipping and sliding away and deforming in an instant and voices like my name being called in the wind. So the drunken liberal rush of drooling words and the droogy eruptions and wandering cul-de-sac rocks and the curves and the winding roads. This should not be viewed as criticism, I am not in a position to discuss the works from any sort of a mechanical point of view. However I can embellish the passage I made with my son through the gallery. I have tried to use words to dissemble the key features of the exhibit. This is a document of my impressions of the exhibit. The words are meant to convey the synaptic freeing of firing connections, to show the ramshackle exploration of making. Content and connection yet lacking in context notably a political narrative.

The grand knock 'em down fight to the finish no hold barred nature nurture. For we are, the philosopher wrote a species whose nature it is to be artificial. The great and melancholic Dane, sobbing into frigid Elsinore blasts. Down the generations down the centuries. if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all -- what then would life be but despair? It is up to use to make the connections for ourselves, Theatre of the World invites us to, nay compels us to make connections.

The nine year old boy was able to pronounce the exhibit wizard.  As the mind of the child is still growing still plastic and striving after connection, how better to wander an exhibit of connections, but with a child.

My concerns are small and relate to context in the main. No political thread to allow us to return from the depth of the Minotaur born of sexual perversion and madness entombing labyrinth.

None to follow. The artists have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. We are left wondering, what is to be done?

Back to home threading the narrow town streets helter skelter smelter and the bridge and the airport and the pitt water and the mountains reflecting the sunset lagoon pinks and blues and browns and greens blurring the marriage of heaven and hell.

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The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom

Post number 100. I guess that says something about my stubborn perseverance in the face of constant ignoring :-)

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Funny old day, funny old life. Started in the morning. Woke up got the kids breakfast, and sat down to check my emails. This was followed by a quick check of the news. An article jumped right out at me, a leading midwife in England said something to the effect that women need to toughen up and not have pain relief in childbirth.

A short goggle search and some surfing later, and it was found out
that the article was poorly written and out of context. Indeed the
midwife was questioning the hospital systems over reliance on
technical fixes, as the birth process is more and more taylorised and turned into a production line. This post seemed to be a much more sensible discussion to me.

Even Tracey Spicer felt the need to speak out trivializing the report with an inane anecdote about her childhood, and some vague narrow evidence based only on her personal experience.

Like Pavlovian dogs responding to high pitched whistle of our spectacle masters vast hordes of bloggers hit the netwaves and gave us hundreds of comments by the end of the day. Reminding me once again that there is no darkness but ignorance.

And near the end of the day I watched a documentary on children made
orphans by the cyclone in Burma. Choking back tears my wife said, 'It puts into perspective the petty bourgeois women who complain when the doctor will not give an epidural in the first instance.' Crying over the hopeless children on the television I had no alternative but to agree with her.

In between all that I went into work, and made some utilities to
support our monitoring application. Log rolling, password changer,
nothing too brain burning - but things that had to be done.

And then I found my notebook from a recent poetry reading I went to
at the National Library of Australia (NLA)

On July 4 I went to 'An Afternoon of Poetry' a launch of two new CDs
published by the River Road Poetry Series. Scissors, Fire, Paper, Water is the 12th volume. The first volume having been produced in December of 2007. In the words of Carol Jenkins the publisher, 'I set out, on a whim, to put together a collection of poems that played a game of Scissors, Fire, Paper,Water.' We were to hear some selections from this piece, as well as volume 14 'Coffee with Miles' by Geoff Page.

This is a very commendable project, it is great to see someone willing to do this sort of work, when it seems obvious that money can not be a main determinate in the series.

The latest volume was described, quite evocatively, as being a living thing that one puts on, much like a jacket lined with field mice.

The event was in a conference room on level four of the NLA. Max
Harris looked angry penguin frail and old across the room. What would his judgement of the crowd of about 60 to 75 people (it was not more than 90) and the poems we heard?

The first reader was Stephen Edgar, a Sydney based poet. He started with a piece of 'languid ease' entitled "Red Sea", a poem of luck that seemed to lead us into a 'blind of ubiquity'. Nocturnal was next, a poem of 'midnight loss', after the death of a loved one. A tight and powerful piece, dealing with a subject we often do not want to have to face in our modern sanitised deathless world.

Inspired in part by the Ken Burns series on the American Civil War
was 'Sun Pictorial' this had an image of 'beauty of Baghdad' which
confused me, and made it seem as if the author was impressed by the
American shock and awe campaign.

And then he finished off with a childhood memory poem, 'In Summer
Wind' where radios murmured repetitively on a hot listless Sunday
afternoon.

Martin Langford came next and he spoke about how nature is made up of
not of words, but more than words, and some things I imagine which can not even be spoken.

Anecdotal, a slice of life passing away, a story of a WWII refugee come to live with the weird mob down under. Slowly, (what had he left?), but to murder himself with cigarettes.

Cezanne and Brahms and someone else I missed drinking in a beer garden overlooking the Hawkesbury River, yarning 'bout how this planet needs kindness. However after listening to his poems my mind sparked William Blake, the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Maybe old Ezra was right (without the antisemitism and fascism), maybe history and economics and the role of banking et alli are important topics for the poet.

On the far wall Jean Campbell midwife to 'the babe is wise'. Her legs crossed, her hat red, her gloves lace. Detached she looked vaguely out the window, holding up half of heaven, yet only hold one third of the poets places this afternoon.

Judith Beveridge followed, described as 'never a word out of place'
fine praise indeed!

Saffron Pickers, inspired by the events in Iraq, stories in
newspapers. 150 000 stamen to get a kilo of spice. Again there seemed to be no explicit tying of the back breaking poverty and never ending labour of the poor to the creation of fabulous exotic luxury goods. I know it is often hard to judge a poem correctly in this sort of venue, so I could be mistaken or have misunderstood, that is possible.

Mother & Child contrasted the child 'cascades of laughter' with the
sadness felt by the mother. Hopelessness hidden within a nature poem
cataloging the birds of the Australian suburbs, Magpies, Indian
Mynahs, Cockatoos.

A poem called Rain, which was unsurprisingly about rain. 'Rustling
like silk', 'loquacious rain' like a 'leaf mist' of grain.


And rounding off her section with 'Appaloosa' in the mist and the rain
she has 'always loved the word appaloosa'.

As the event wore on, I could not fault any of the poets for their
grasp of various poetic forms and technical understanding of the craft of poetry. As each one of us can only, as Aristotle says, know our own experience; I seek something else. Having grown up around the various slams and such like readings I want a bit more excitement, a bit more word play and derring-do in my poetry. There is a desire to create accessible poetry, but I stand in opposition to such an idea. People have always loved poetry and are surrounded by poetry in much of their day to day life, even if they may not always feel this fact. It seems to me that many poets fight a fight for accessibility that does not in fact exist. If there is any less love of poetry, it is the academic poetry that is filled with nice words and thin subject matter that the working people do not relate to. Working class culture is closer to matter and closer to the transcendental animal nature of human existence. Indeed for many of us the daily trip to work could well be the last time we get to say good bye to our children. (2000 deaths a year in the workplace.)


Mark Tredinnick read some of his luxuriant post modern bucolics, harking back while looking forward. Again we had the idea of the mind beneath the mind, of nature that exists as a terrible serene destructive counterpoint to our technical culture of failed words, and failed processes and ruined lives. Rivers run from swerve of shore to bend of bay before language.

Cicadas surface after 14 years, what intelligence, what will to power drives them out of ground to climb and shriek far into the
nights. What intelligence is in the cherry pip? What admixture of
marijuana and over the counter pain killers lead to the palace of wisdom?

Some images of God and more rain, and glib geometric Canberra.

The publisher Carol Jenkins read a couple of poems, one about child
fighters in Columbia, 'Trading in Small Arms' which while admirably
drawing attention to the plight of the child soldier could have gone
further in making her critique. This was followed by 'PET Facts'. This was a self confessed nerd poem which sent a rolling chuckle through the audience.

The final poet for the afternoon Geoff Page read. He started by
setting up a false dichotomy between performance and literary poets,
which to my thinking was a bad omen. All poems are about death, and
sunflower hallucinations and illusion and photo fallin' setting up a breath and death dialectic of rhyme, scrapping the lizards offa the texas trees. Or maybe some jazz poems about having a cup of joe with maybe slow silent way too cool Miles Davis mystic cool with the mad ones crossing a rain soaked angry negro rosy colored dawn street in maybe Providence or angry fix hipster Hartford, hands deep thrust into rough strong fabric trousers. angelheaded hipsters burning panorama of East St. Louis Toodle-oo.

All within Canberra's glib geometry? Quite a few poems, and by now I
have all but lost my note taking skills, and let the words flow riverrun between the Epicurean swerve. What have we, Beyond Good and Evil is a world that is hurtling into no future of unimaginable violence, and these poets, some of the most published, most awarded in the country can not get much above the shouting level of the agnostic. Surely the kindness we are to show the planet has to be more desperate than this.

I fear God's entropy and our own time wasting.

What could I see from all this? A technical understanding, an
infatuation with nature poems, and with being accessible, coupled with an almost total disregard for the political events which overwhelm working people the world over. If these are some of the 'best and brightest' of the Australian poetry scene, then viva la revolucion.

The New World

This is, for some unknown to me reason, called The New World. I guess it is about science creating a new world and then the tension between the new world and the old. I guess.

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Interface between the surge 
And the Christ
    Alone on the bus -
    I look out past coverts
    Of trees an 'arsh eroded
    Gullies - maybe 'alf a kay
    Away or so.  South west.
    
Two men bored digging
Old yeller faded plant
Her the interface
Of tech wild add the mild 
(man made - artificial)

Interface - Eaterdeath
Enter fade - Over & OUT
Yes interface of Air and Breath
Huh Interfrance of fist and flesh
Life and death - crunch and munch

And your  everywhen
All around is torn down 
Mangled spindled ripped
Apart asunder.

    Rold at in a trinity 
A tree facaded milky chai 
But even tree into won is not holeisit?
Rather still pater linear
    The Father = The Past
    The Son = (obviously) The Present
    Spiritus Sanctus  = The Future

Unknown unknowable

    And the interface of the old
(Accent on the first dare) and
The new (modern as tomorrow
afternoon) - One is ground to 
Powda (mode red-mixed with bland)
And high nigh into the sky
To girt girl wide contact
And flutter bye baby bird down 
Slowly over all days covering
The world with a thing coast of 
Dust, O'Halleron, California,
Texas in QLD.

A single tree growing 
Cork screw wise - a single 
Three from one base (interface
The dirt and sky) spreading into
Throe equal and coexistent breasts.
    The tree of the serpent (forever and on
                  you will toil for your food)
    The tree of the trinity

A hill rising up - rusting with 
Thrist - striving with hunger.
The rage - interfraud of land and law
The surface is the interface with
The devil. 

The double.

Remember to Kick It Over

I & I might call dis a collage, being an old timey web 1.0 sort of guy. (or maybe even a punky reggae party). Younger gen Y types might refer to it as a mash up. (Still others might just be honest and direct & call it a big old ball o' crap!?! (a pox on 'em i says)). Marley, Blake, Strummer, (ply upon ply), Dedalus & a bit of Lawson all hacked up together as a treat for eye and ear and brainpan.

Wrote it one morning while the kids ran riot throughout the house, and sally slept and jesus wept.

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Emancipate yourself
From mind forg'd mental
Manacles of Slavery.

Stef, she tapped her head,
Her forehead, with her hand.
It is here we must kill
Both Rome and Babylon.

Faces in the street
From marks of Trenchtown
Ghetto woe to Gaza's white
Phosphorus tv bombs.
To London's charter'd street
To the beat of weary feet.

In here, again she tapped
Her forehead, inhaling deep.
Speed thin sheen of sweat.

She inhaled and coughed...
Can I see another's woe
And not be in sorrow too?

Emancipate yourself
From mind forg'd mental
Manacles of Slavery.

It is here we must kill
Both Rome and Babylon.