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.
