Bloody Mainlanders

A physical system can have as many resonant frequencies as it has degrees of freedom; (according to wikipedia)

Kharon: Have you watched the bubbles in the water, gathering and dispersing? And the bubbles gather into foam. Some last for only a short time, some burst as soon as they are born, others a long time. In no other way could it be. So it is with men.

Hermes: You comparison is not inferior to Homer, when he compared men to leaves.

Kharon 19.1 ~ Lucian of Samosata.

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Hobart had recovered from the heat and had returned to that raw river front feel that we all know and love and admire. I check the news in the morning to make sure we had not gone to war while I slept.

I had not planned on writing about the Colin Stetson show on the last drab gray Sunday afternoon of 2014 mona foma. But then I read in the Guardian that “his thing seems to be to play, at deafening volume, a few notes over and over, drench them in reverb and the repeat relentlessly for what seemed like hours.”

A little harsh I thought. While Colin plays a few notes (more than a few!) over and over, and while they were drenched in reverb, and while it did repeat relentlessly, to make this criticism is like saying than Jimi Hendrix just played a bunch of notes real fast, or that Bob Dylan writes a bunch of rhymes. True, but missing the depth. And of course I understand that not everyone can like everything.

So if Colin Stetson plays a few notes, adds filter (directly to sax and man), and repeats what can we say about his music. The first thing we most note, is that he meant to bring two saxophones to play, but the bass sax was misplaced coming out of Sydney Airport. Bloody Mainlanders, always trying to sabotage Tasmania! If he had the instruments there would have been more variety.

To me this show captured the mystery and power of music. A puff of air, a vibration, carried by electrickery, waves shaking the thin eardrum film of skin, nerve impulses surge and spread that mass of hot blood loving brain fat. And this puff of air has the power to transport, to transform. This puff of air can recall memories, can inspire dreams and tears, can move one to abandon, can drop one into despair.

For myself I was carried away with this strange, bubble popping sound, this flowing Dantesque soundscape of wailing cries in the distance. I was standing off to one side, and could look behind the performer and see out the industrial windows to the harbour outside. The wild wailing of the sax, the occasional sweeping roaring rush of agony or ecstasy (for at a distance, with no context, they can be confused) released from some sort of unknown depths surrounded me as I watched the birds circle and hover. The birds were reflected back and forth, up and down, darting, sweeping, moving through the air. Like the waves of sound formed from a puff of air, rumbling down the shiny metal tube, glowing yellow red in the false light of radiating waves, the birds split the air and swam in a atmospheric sea of freedom we can only dream about, only for a moment touch.

And he played one tune called “Dream of Water,” and all my dreams of stepping into rivers and the bubbles forming foam fell and tumbled. A sound track to dreams. A column of air. As many resonant frequencies as degrees of freedom. The birds circle and then -- that is all.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2014/jan/20/mofo-festival-concludes-with-john-grant-mylo-and-death-metal http://ancarinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/brass.jpg

Poppies

Poppies... Poppies.
Poppies will put them to sleep.
Sleeeeep. Now they'll sleeeeep!

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Three days of rain, off and on, rain
Ulster exploding green bloom rain
Tank filling shower easing rain.
Driving the windy scenic road
Hand free driving, half joint lighting
Winding bogged culvert verge puddle.

Poppied rows roll up over hill
Waiting the man card in my hand.
I dream as I in the wet wait
Dreaming naked dear heart running
Wild dog free the rolling poppy.

And we arm in arm bed tumble
Licking nuzzling sticky warm
Gummy opium sweet dreaming
Sunlight warm belly legs arms heart.

Sweet dreams a raft the rolling sea
Entangled embraced we sound snore.

early morning haiku

although technically it ain't a haiku - close enough for government work

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the early morning sun

blushes pink cresting crashing

foam

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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Night Lights

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I go outside
Into the night.

To doormouse feed my head
And relieve the black dog

Black black sky peppered
Countless twinkling stars

Look into the darkness
The emptiness, I can not
Even see the mountains.

A car, alone, a single car drives
Down the highway, out of the
Small town, heading inland north.

The trees the sided of the road
The fence posts occult the lights
Of the pitching rising car.

The head lights throw a flickering
Shadow pattern onto the bricks
Of our house.

On the next night
I come home late
The sun has set the darkness
Has settled over the wide slow
Ancient old valley. The whips around
My face is stung the teasing
Mist of rain.

On the autumn rain sidewalk
A single red maple leaf
Introduced.

Open the Curtains

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Sure the gods can destroy anyone they wish at any time, but without devotees that gods become no more than a tale with which to scare naughty children at bedtime.

Open the curtains
Upon waking.

The children gently snoring.

The acute angle
Of the sun
Etches deep shadows
The covered with trees
Far off mountains.
Crisp cool moontime
Retreating.

Driving my love into
The city of work
(Her hell of alienation)
The overnight killed
Animals curl the warming
Blacktop - seemingly asleep.

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Around 300,000 animals are killed on Tasmania’s roads every year. The death toll includes 3,000 Tasmanian Devils a year. Roadkill is a major threat to the survival of the species now that it is depleted by facial tumour disease.
Save Our Animals

The Old Men of Argos Huddle in Terror

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From Aeschylus tragedy Agamemnon, Line 1020.

Over the weekend there were two football grand finals on television. On the Saturday Geelong and Collingwood struggled in a close run thing for three quarters until the Cats skipped away and won the game. On the Sunday Manly defeated the Warriors. On the Sunday night, for reasons which had nothing to do with football, I was unable to sleep. Having not much else to do, I read the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. More exciting than football, the creative spark forced me from my bed. I am not fluent in my translations, one could compare my technique to a person attempting to solve a cryptic crossword. My lack of skill or fluency does not stop me, for my main goal is to learn and to gain fluency. In this instance the only way to learn is to read.

This piece is from Agamemnon, the first part of the Oresteia. A wonderful, brutal, strange and powerful work. Agamemnon has just returned home from the long war against Troy. Home to Argos and to his wife Klutaimnestra, who has set herself on killing him. She feels she is in the right, as he sacrificed (murdered) their daughter Iphigeneia. She was sacrificed to allow the Greeks to launch their campaign against Troy. For ten years the war dragged on, and for ten years Klutaimnestra, the wife of Agamemnon and mother of Iphigeneia, nurtured her hatred and desire for vengeance. Who could blame her? Even the old men of Argos agree 'blame is present against blame, difficult it is to judge. He endures who is enduring, the killer has to pay.'

Using flattering words, a warm bath, and a krater of drugged wine, wielding her sword and a net, Klutaimnestra rolled out the wine dark carpet for the returning hero. She stabbed him twice and killed him. Splattered with blood she plunged the sword a third thrust to convince herself that the deed had been done.

This passage is from one of the songs of the Chorus of Old Men. The old men sense that something is amiss, but unlike the audience they do not know what is to come to pass. They are fearful for Agamemnon as he strides across the barbaric carpets. He seems to be taking on the manners of the East, of the Trojan king Priam. Klutaimnestra appeals to his vanity by telling him that the feet of a hero should not touch the dirt. The old men see this an affront. The red carpets flow from the palace doors and across the stage. The Phoenician carpets call to mind the wine dark blood which has flowed across generations of the House of Atreus and which will soon flow again. The old men are scared and they sing a long passage, of which I cut out a bit to make a (hopefully) nice little poem. In ripping fifteen or so lines out of a much larger poem I can only do violence to the original, but I have endeavoured to minimise the harm.

Robert Browning is not much spoken abut these days, but he was insightful in many ways. I agree with him in the spellings that he uses, for instance I much prefer Klutaimnestra to Clytaemnestra, Kassandra to Cassandra. He did some very literal translations from the Greek. He did this in opposition to current ideas about the beauty of the Greek language. In this he showed ancient Greek to be a highly flexible, and at the same time sparse language. This sparseness, which is increased by the heightened language of the tragic form, is a peg that allows the translator to hang any garment desired, be it gaudy or plain. I think this was the point that Browning tried to make in his, even to this day, despised translation of Agamemnon.

As a example let us look at the last line of this passage (line 1034), in Greek it reads, Zopuroumenas frenos. From the dictionary we find out that Zopuroumenas means kindle into flame and frenos meaning midriff, or breast and by extension heart, mind, sense etc. (As an aside Zopuroumenas can also mean kindle into life, as in the quickening of the embryo.) In Browning we get 'the enkindling mind.' From E. D. A. Morshead we get 'my soul is prophecy and flame' which Robert Fagles in turn translates as '...and the brain is swarming, burning.' Which is best? Which is most correct? Which is nearest to the mind of Aeschylus?

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The Old Men of Argos Huddle in Terror.

Once upon the earth
One's life blood black.
Can anyone with charms
Sing it back?

Once there was one who rightly knew
How to call back the dead.
Fearful Zeus struck him
Thunderbolt dead.

Had not the deathless
Arrayed our portion
Against another,
Bright laughter
Would burst forth.
Outracing
My heart.

Now
However
The lower gloom
Beneath the darkness.
Sick at heart,
I murmur and grumble.
Unable to hope
For that opportune day
To unravel, and so
Bring to an end.

Kindled my heart leaps into flame!

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The pic is from http://www.theoi.com/image/F6.1Artemis.jpg

Helios

Hymn 31 - to Helios

Begin your song of radiant Helios,
Muse Calliope, child of Zeus.

Cow eyed Euryphaessa
Glorious child of Gaia
With starry Ouranos.
Married Hyperion
His own sister.

And she brought forth
Beautiful dear ones,
Rosy armed Eos
Fair haired Selene
Tireless Helios.

Resembling the Gods,
He brings to sight both mortals
And the deathless ones,
Mounted his horses.

Terrible the glance
His eyes from out
His golden helmet.
Rays radiate from him,
Radiant, glittering
Hair falls his forehead
Gracefully captivating
His far-shining face.

Beautiful clothes
Delicately made
About his body
Shimmer the breath
Of a breeze.

With his stallions
And his chariot
And golden yolk
He established
From Heaven
To Oceans edge.

Rejoice Lord!
Of your own will
Bestow to me
A life welcome.
Beginning with thou
I celebrate with song
The mortal race of demigods.
Whose deeds the goddesses
To mortals pointed out.

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the photo is from http://www.theequinest.com/horses-of-helios/

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Selene

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Homeric Hymn 32 to Selene

Sing Muses of the broad winged moon
Sweet sounding, song knowing
Daughters of Zeus, Son of Cronus.
Her heavenly radiance from her deathless head
Encircles the earth, as her golden crown
Gleams upon the gloomy lower air.

When she rises from Oceanus river
Bath dripping wet her flawless skin,
She dresses in far shining garments. Divine Selene.

She harnesses her radiant neck arching horses,
She drives her impetuous full maned foals.
In the evening, in the fullness of the month
The full moon becomes as it must.
Her beauty increases as the glow waxes across
The firmament. A token and a sign for mortal lives.

Once upon a time, the son of Cronus mingled
Her bridal bed, and she conceived and brought
Into being a daughter, Pandia.
Most beautiful of the deathless ones.

Rejoice queen! Pale armed divine Selene
Cheerful and fair haired. Of you and your
Tidings I begin. The deeds of divine
Heroes I now celebrate in song,
Pupil of the sweet mouthed Muses.

Hymn to Demeter

Hymn 13 - To Demeter

Flaxen haired goddess
Demeter majestic.
You I celebrate in song.
You and your daughter,
Persephoneia, beyond beauty.

Hail and Rejoice Goddess.
Preserve our city.
Attend my song.

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Only three lines, this is basically a small section taken from a much longer hymn of Demeter, which hopefully I will be able to translate as I gain more experience and confidence. Only three lines, but it gave me lots of pause for thought. As people used to say about the Australian cricket, it was the best because of the short and sharp nature of the Sheffield Shield Competition. Each games was important, each innings, each over was important. So with this little three line poem, there is in fact no place to hide.

This translation is as much, if not more so, for me than it is for the general reader. So I go only beg your indulgence in my exercises.

hukomon - fair haired. This seemed a fair enough translation, but after looking deeper into the descriptions of Demeter it seemed best to go with flaxen-haired, as Demeter is a corn goddess.

koure - this means Demeter's daughter, more generally it means daughter. But it has overtones of the young daughter on the cusp of sexual life. A maiden is how we often see it defined in dictionaries from the early 1900's. I will leave it at daughter, but as I understand things, this word; like most words has deeper meanings.

perikallea - peri-kallea simply means very beautiful. Peri means about, around. This is what it means when used in the word peripatetic, where is describes Aristotle teaching his students, as they walk around the grounds of the Lyceum. This word is also defined as simply very, which is a fine word, but is one without much punch, so I decided to use another meaning of peri; beyond. And Koure (Demeter's young bride virgin daughter) is then described as beyond beauty. It seemed to be the correct intensifier.

The final word which I enjoyed was arkhe - this means simply to begin, to lead off. Further investigation gives meanings such as to govern, to lead, to command. After much thinking I went with attend, as this gives a dual meaning of leading, but also of paying attention. Maybe not the most correct translation, but for the poem it seemed the best word.

The image comes from here: http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/K3.2.html

Ambiguous

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Dawn the thin twilight
Naught as night, not yet day.
Transported by dreams
Shaken false awakening
Half awake half asleep.
Clouds half cover the sky
Torn gray smudges interact
With the new gathering blue.
Low air and thick and heavy
Water vapour mingles.
Quilt covered body parts
Warm, exposed is to chill.
Merge we two into one
Side by side.

And birds start to chorus
And the child sings
Made up songs in bed.

Away with words!

Went to the end of year event for the tasmanian writers centre.

Two writers read from their most recent works. Geoff Dean and Paul Tully.

It was a fun night and both artists read well, I wished the second piece went
longer, but nothing to fuss about.


These events are interesting to me, as for various random reasons I no longer read new works, so with book reviews and events I keep more or less in a state of misunderstanding the world about me.


Beyond the obvious problems of discipline, the pleasure of being autodidact resides in the ability to roam widely over the various spheres of human endeavour. I have been making an investigation into the ancient cynic school. The saying of Diogenes have been recently smacked into my brain pan. And then I stumble into this reading.


So I kicked around a bunch of impressions and crumbs of error.

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Night of Geminids. Iron duke rivulet under common concrete falling down and around click clack footsteps echoing slap upon the brink of brick pain mint. Pooring stream from down the dark clouds table top gathering of mountains. The rill is exposed just by the shop that sells shin splint gouging running shoes. The natural is made artificial the natural is carved and formed by the rent apart rational.

Silent over watch potion the entire history of this town. Long alone dead pale as white fellas ghost watch over the land. Endless tears fall and fill the lyre bird introduced gullies and tumble run down into the high street over covered tiny poxy sewer stream. Over and above nature the creek channelled and aggregate concrete made into the shape and plastic path and wonder wanted for the men of the purse tightening city and of only note counting commerce. Long away along dead spat upon sailors and looked down upon whalers and convict atains watch out over the wide estuary raising flags and firing cannons as warning alertings for again the summer run of flash rumpus core rehabilitated into characters of the new mythos and the city and smart smugglers and extortionists and this is what you get or need.

Night after Geminids streaking lines fine across the dark night sky long into the morning. Low Ligny roof wine dark down wooden walls and beams iron strong wood. Wit and running light touch along the wave splashing beach. Big crowd of many people and the low murmur of voices and settling into seats and tables and ability to hear. Rough Huon river pine valley. Hard to hear all the grunts and twitterings and choral murmuring.

Old blanket man poor on a park bench of cops and cars and this is the underbelly soft of church ill dreams, nightmares of the press ganged working people here and there and in all manner of nations far flung upon the sea side beech. Hunger - desperate time rewindings and bindings again. Trains tramline river bridges cover rhythm street thoroughfare. Worry. Security. Sniffing druggy headed hang dogs. Hang the Dawg. The sun and the air that is criminally vulgar. Blind man palsy sight.

Failed at strange unexpected as the same time twice only and not in any other way so to add it all up...

The voice of a woman. Fifty dollar note lady bluster. White light white heat golden frond. Money brings as much grief, as much mayhem as frozen down dead dog tails.

Under pass unable to tossings and turnings asleep newspaper doona. A citizen of the world self sufficient Malone and a crisis of faith. What is to be done? The essence of tragedy two ways both right both wrong both lauding death. No flaw, just the role of human, just a human choice over flowing with ignorance and the darkness. Or the muse to the Helicon rhapsodos 'Wicked rough sleeping Shepard, vile belly alone...'

Gnomic with gold rum glasses and a mirror shiny clean window reflection to see one's self as one really is, to understand. This is the foundation of speaking the truth, this seeing correctly. Poverty as the road is no longer the road to self sufficiency.

Ice popping glasses and the pouring lungfish of organic red wine, and then the next tale. Matching depression to second sight the poets dream of the seer. Full sight in the detail. Deep fried dog turd. Shocked turn away around a mocking modesty and dreamy visions of long alone thyme. Together book ends of dank under flesh like the grinding error of Cassino and the blasting destruction of civilisation; even the fear of the lord could not perturb the stings of falling tumbling earth shattering bombast. Pugilist aching rambles round and about home and dreams to the future. Freedom of the Press, freedom to speak all based on free from fear and favour on seeing how one really is to be and has been.
Dangerous muddy waters swirl rising and more than just a hard boiled roman a hiding a biography of Hobart in a time and a place no longer around. Again to this sense of place. Revealing a memoir. Bringing out the second site the unveiling of what really is, the struggle to speak truly. Wandering the city streets and back alley cop ways with a torch, a way of seeing and a citizen of the world weapon.

Thick lactix devil milk dripping and a brooding violence just below the poetic service before the stitching up of words and words are snitched together. Prologue of gaunt ten pound shop steward dripping magic molten metal flames and injuries. Night whores of ancient knee trembling tradies, apple cherries from the dark Stygian Isle of black war. Coal smoke and the hydro town mountain brooding above the surface of violence. Past town ingrained into memory and fleeing supple suddenness of a whipping gale.

And a slow descent into the dark and flashing light.

Poetical Manifestations

This document is not a well thought out plan or campaign. It is not a
critique or any sort of guide. It is a ramble shambles, a sort of
hobby horse of the kind one often finds drunkenly stumbling along the
queen's briar patch of a highway. It is at best a handful of poetic
fragments that vanity wishes to be recorded. It is at best derivative
and repetitive, and yet...

The revolution MUST be made by the shattered scattered broken remains
of the present capitalist militaristic system. Peace is not the absence
of war, peace is no longer opposing the progressive.

What the thirty years since the Thatcher Reagan era has killed is the
very idea of cooperative spirit. Substituting a broken down ladder of
aspiration.

And now our society is made up of monads randomly colliding the void.

---

1. Sound over Sense. Meaning is lost and disjointed. After years of
writing technical documents I have learnt that precise language is
no stop to misunderstanding. Why bother. 'All things counter,
original, spare, strange;'

2. History states what is. Poetry shows what should be.

3. Fear not contradiction. The small petty minded feed upon tiny
glitches, slips of the tongue. Ignore them, they are of no
consequence. 'The wise contradict themselves'

4. The pedant abhors errors. The seer adores error. 'Errors are the
portal of discovery.'

5. Aspective not Perspective. Hills mock the straight line.

6. History is the contemporary. The Ever When. The All at Once.
Economics is home-life. History and Political Economy must be
the domain of the poets. These things are too important to be left
to historians, or even worse politicians. '...a higher thing than
history'

7. Reserve the right to use any word needed. If the word or conceit is
archaic or poetic, so be it. If the reader needs to consult a dusty
old reference book, how can this a bad thing? Art should allow,
should force the reader to make links.

8. Think not of Euclidean lines, but rather the Mandlebort set.
Think of frost crystals forming on the window pane. (How long
is the coast of Tasmania?)

9. Creation is the tension between what the author meant and what the
reader understands. 'I go back to the top of the slide'

10. Truth is always progressive. Art is always progressive. Beauty is
always revolutionary, as Beauty must be the truth. The truth is
constant revolution. 'The cold knife thrust of the syllogism'

11. Socrates knew only of Eros. The great daemon that conveys and
interprets. Old the creative, the vegetative urge that comes
before and causes all things. The lighting that steers all things.
Plato is fit only to be mocked.

12. DIY becomes Do It Ourselves. We must band together. For protection
from the capitalist culture mongers, to extend experience and
knowledge. Truth is always social. Beauty is always social.
'O Multicolored mind, deathless'

Reticulum

Into the Heraclitian fyre. Reading a book on microbiology, specifically about the structures within cells. It seems the endoplasmic reticulum has taken on more roles than when I was in high school; well it is good to see talent rewarded. Reticulum is defined as from a latin word for network, more poking about gave other meanings and uses of the word reticulum, including the stomach of a cow, a constellation, even a snood. So I jammed all these fragments into a notebook poem. Entered it into a contest and did not even rate a mention. So here it is...

---

---

Upon false bridge, above the bloody sand
Trident fisherman taunts and turns vaunting twists
While sea monster fish men fight clumsy.
Thrown, the weighted net expands and flies
Across the distance, bringing victory
And defeat. The one event contrasting.

I take the dog for a run in the dawn
Twilight early morning and the red sky
Burns and glows the bodies of sinners
Stoking the deadly judgement fires
Beyond the obsidian smooth lagoon.

Shallow filled of the retreating ice,
More ten thousand isolating years ago.
On the shallow ridge line to the south,
Red lights blink automatic guiding planes.
Surrounded always a thin spiders web
Network of roads and highways of commerce.

The brush again and over again rolls
Thin net long hair covered for service.
The tides roll daily back and forth gentle.
Hungry and exhausted flights of sea birds
Rest rare salt marsh fringed glasswort and pig face
Winged far Siberia. Calling in the night
Feeble and tired and the tiny sea star
Ejecting live surprising birth only three
The entire world and across the waters
Low and flat toxic algal bloom lagoon
Ignoble west flank black line barrack causeway
Blinking away dreamy sleep lights Sorrel.

Low in the south west sky the rhombus
Thin hair cross hairs of an eyepiece.
Cattle low and wander the green pasture
Eating and fourfold digesting unknown
Cattle thoughts as myriad folds catalyse
Blind countless transactions and combinations.
Endless the surface. Wide transformations
Are performed and the suns energy released.

Waking the first light frost of morning
I arrange the kindling and split logs,
And touching a match bring warming fire.
On the pitted surface the suns energy
Forges frothy warmth and cosy home house life.

Driving visit historic Richmond gaol
And the rooms of punishment that brought
Civilization the land without the fall
And the wrist binding tripod cat o' nine tails
Extended the love of Christ and the shorn
Hair of the women fleeing rape and the coffin
Sized black rooms of silent aloneness.
The children are too fearful to enter,
After almost two hundred years of silence.

Gallery Opening

Echoing church bells clang out five
End of work week ending the day.
Out they pour from shops and walls,
Work sites, to queue the pub bars,
Cash point, hole in the wall.

Daylight of children
Wide parliament tour
And museum wanderings.
With the setting of the sun
With the rising of the wind
I wandered old shop town shore front
Factory warehouses transformed.
Flowing tide climbing the stairs.
Old grain silo segmented homes.
Working harbour view. Side step
The head feeding night dark park.
Splashing beef blood red wine entry.
The newly moved gallery home.

And an exhibit of two young local artists was being opened at
the Colville Gallery. Still new to town, I thought it worthwhile
to investigate. And I am glad that I did.

Aquinas taught that art must have three elements to be
beautiful, Integritas, Consontia & Claritas. These are sometimes
defined as Wholeness, Harmony & Radiance. Wholeness and harmony
seem to be easily understood in relation to a work of art, and
it is Claritas - Radiance that is more problematic. Claritas
must be the ineffable and must refer to something internal
and organic being emitted from the work under consideration.

This construction seems however to lead us into a circle of
confusion. To be beautiful the work must radiate. But what
is to be radiated, and how? Maybe we can find a more easily
grasped concept in the works of the Victorian English critic
and oft named hedonist, Walter Horatio Pater. For in his
masterly work on the Renaissance, besides leading young men
astray, he used the concept of a 'lovely strangeness.' After
the storms and stresses of modernism, our age should not find
the idea of strangeness in art to be too confronting. Beauty,
after all, will be convulsive or it will not be at all.

In the works on display we can get an idea of both the
strangeness and the loveliness. The works of Matthew Armstrong
were all landscapes of our naturally artificial world. However
none contained any images of people, only the tatters and
droppings of humanity. All of his works were set in a twilight
atmosphere. These two facts worked to inspire a charming feeling
of wonderment in the viewer, raising questions rather than
offering boxed answers. Is this meant to be set in the rising of
dawn, or the passing of the day, does the lonely country road
beckon one forward with the sky glowing home fires of love and
affection, or does this road and this sky lead us into certain
oblivion? This allowing and encouraging the viewer to supply
elements to the work is to me an important element of any art.
For to tie up all the loose ends and offer up final denouement
is the work of a mind too caught up in the dominant bourgeois
shop keeper error, where all things fetter under a certain type
rational control and all stories come complete with closure.

Turning to the other wall, we see the works of Chris Bennett,
again a young local artist. Chris' work does not have the
metaphysical twilight blue palate of Matthew's work. But
his works equally emitted the lovely strangeness, were
equally concerned with light and tensions unresolved. In
contradistinction to Matthew's Chris' works all included human
figures, with most of his figures questioning the viewer. In
'The Lull' a couple sat together and ninety degrees apart in a
room lit by an external light. These paintings for the most part
were works of the inside, of humanity's built environments. In
'11PM' a questioning face appeared as an apparition from a
darkness vaguely reminiscent of Rembrandt shadowy world. The
'Indistinct Horizon' was almost a fugue in in black and
white, an individual sitting on a public bench looking over
an endless sea and sky pregnant with pure white nothingness,
while a silhouetted trash can turns into a possible momento
mori tombstone.

Both artists had very solid technique and understanding of
composition, so the elements of wholeness and harmony can
be easily seen, whether in the rich dark green detail of
the obscured row of plants in the foreground of Matthew's
painting 'The Domain', or in the slight and powerful blue
brush strokes touches on the bottom of the lamp post in the
'Indistinct Horizon'. The question than revolves around the
idea of claritas, which we see that both artists were able
to radiate a lovely strangeness, charming and compelling the
viewer to engage with the works on display.

In all I can only hope that both artists have long and fruitful
careers and I will look forward to seeing more such pieces.

Meandering Shelters

selling packing the house - delving with lawyers and banks and agents and all sorts - it's a bourgeois town. got a copy of 'The Golden Bough' for the trip. so we are almost there - just a few days to go.
this is, like all poetry, an autobiography. the last few days in a few lines.

---

I - Rex Nemorensis

Early Morning
Patty cakes &
Car tunes
    Slight aroma
    Burnt edge
    Burnt toast
    Butter Honey
        Thick rich scent
        Coffee's on 
        Blurry growl
        Opens her eyes
        Closes her eyes

Kookaburra sings
Chattering braying jackass 
She holds enfolds the snake 
The serpent in her strong beak
Breaking bones upon the branch

Deep dewdrop night
The trees show 
The first blush
Of autumn

Butterflies spread
Their wings 
Warming
Themselves

Chauntering 
Chattering 
Singsonging
Obsessions

The dog sits
East West Axis
Sphinx wise

EMERGENCY ISSUE RESCUE FLAGGED

No scanning of prison staff
And they are calling all the time
To see if we are okay

II - Laughter none

Puddles of bubbles and sinks
Of slops of last nights stew

Dreamy blue sky 
King of the wood
Runaway slave
The mirror lake
Mortal combat
Forest husband

The purple bloom of Iola
The crimson crush of rose petal
Spilt blood and fleeting beauty
Point to an ancient 
To a deep sorrow

A sad philosophy
Goods of the spindle

III - Violet Stained Dawn


Admixture is more everyday than Purity
Purity is blockage a dead end
The way of death constriction
A closure a resolution
    Purity is a narrowing
    Purity is delusion
Admixture is the everyday
The contact which brings 
Renewal

Thin clear night wine stars electric sky
Sparkling

Overnight 
High Pressure System
Clear clear jet clear
The earth gives up heat

The hollowed out immature dragonfly
Hangs Christlike across the fine
Lines of the spider dew drop web
Early morning low angled sun
Refracts the drops of water
Forming spherical rainbows
Around and about the corpse
    Regeneration
Allowing the spider
To live another day

The light and the water mix
And rise and form a billowing
Blanket over the creek

The night time gentle weeps
The crimes of day light.

Cyclone

with the kids at the beach, thinking how full of crap are the theists. how bereft of
imagination are there small brain pans which can not conceive of millions and billions of years of evolution slowly twisting turning the world into the one we see now. the grandeur and the depth of the universe, the smallness of our existence. am i to really belief this is only 4000 years old? but how can one argue when it is of course satan who planted fossils to cause us to doubt.

---

Low tide as clouds of sand rise the wind
Whirling across the face of the beach.
Dripping of wet sand warm from my hand
Clear green soda bottle transparent waves
Roll swell and fall onto the slabs of black
Basalt millions of years ago laid down.
High tide and I recall a childhood tale
From Flinders earliest fossils found
How the thin fingerling of cyclonic
Rains sauntered far flung Carpentaria
Down the rising gulley wadi dry creek bed.
Crashing the water flows over the rocky
Tableau blocks, actualises countless
Tide rolling and surging back timeless
Tiny rivulets of miniature fractured waterfalls.
Constant like this for millions of years.

Disappointment

Apparently there is a disconnect between our desires and the external world. this is clearly seen in the realm of the commodity, how all things are engulfed the cash nexus. seems like i am adding nothing new to the discussion, and yet it needs to be said over and over again. or maybe the poem itself is a Disappointment, i know i am not very happy with it.

---

---

Woolgathering mornings of coffee and shivering
Inane frail sunlight. Overcast of overnight rain.
Playing sing song episodes of fancy. Sun and shade.
Pale mild eyed lotus eating of melting butter
And viscous honey milk swirl of slightly smoky bread.

Days of rain mean the creek behind the house is in flow.
Fingerlings pierce and dart the bent over shore side grass.
The sun falls in parallel lines alternating light
And dark as the surface constant flowing blades shift.
Fluffy clouds disperse and evaporate the afternoon.
The wild new green grass over recent hillside fire.

Walking with the children in the humid afternoon.
The others in wide directions of moving one two
Three four, unknown unknowable. Dirty shiny clothes
Sweating and puffing to never again see never more.
No response no acknowledgement no feelings social.
This is how commodities freedom communicate.
And the row shelves of tin canned packaged food and drink
All worldly goods bear odious white paper labels
Of Arabic numerals and laconic symbols.
This is how commodities are presented.

And in the library excitement of knowledge fails
As story time lack of imagination and funding
And smug narrow minded babbittry of risk averse
Satisfaction scrimps and steals from future generations.
And the rows of books collecting hundreds if not more
Years of human knowledge and striving, numbered and priced,
Odious and laconic. A type of rationing
As strong as any program of war communism.
Frayed and torn covers, splitting plastic jackets, brittle
Cellophane tape, mouldy yellow brown of Bovary,
Seeking approval unsteady underlines of students.

This is how commodities are presented
Disappointing in the particulars.
Disappointing in circulation.

Twilight

An old poem (written some 5 years ago) i guess it is about the war on terror.

---

The twilight exhaled
A sexless sorrow

But our leaders heard
Only meaningless rain

Wealth devoured the obese
Commuters carried bombs

Infants were born grew and died
This infinite war

Laws hammered the lonely fire
Intensified the endless war

Sorrow floated the sickly wind