Articulated

So because of a combination of illness, poverty, and family stuff, I was unable to spend much time visiting Dark MOFO this year. This is not to be taken as a criticism of ticket prices, as they seemed quite reasonable considering what was on offer. No this is much more a comment on my own inability to look after myself. Surely a topic for later essay.

I did get to see the Memoriam by Amelia Rowe, which I wrote about here.

If you lived anywhere in the area you were able to see the light installation Articulated Intersect. An artwork by the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Living in Dodges Ferry we could see the dancing beams of light from our back yard.

The family went to Okines Community House to take part in the Okines Community Gardens Winter Feast. This too could be seen as a festival of light. Hundreds of glass jars were turned into lanterns and decorated by the local children. The kids paraded down to the the aptly, if unsurprisingly, named Okines Beach. Local husband and wife duo Serena and Andy How killed it with a cover of “Ramble On”, while later Bigger Than Bill played. In the distance, searchlights danced and intersected in the waning crone moon solstice darkness. Fairy lights hung, like a failed spider web, from gum trees. Fires burnt in 44 gallon drums which had holes punched to create intersected patterns of rusting metal and flame. Light was all around; candles and flashlights, mobile phones, the flames in the hand built, bread roll baking, oven. And the light that was brought to life was overwhelmed, while teasing and dancing with the endless, bottomless, darkness of the sky, of the ocean.

In an interview with the Guardian the light installation artist noted that search lights were used as propaganda by Nazi's as part their infamous Nuremberg Rallies. As I was wandered, with the children, about Sullivans Cove, we chatted about the use of search lights in other situations. I noted that search lights were used by the Red Army in the climactic, apocalyptic battles which ended the rule of Nazi Germany. Red Army Commander Zhukov described the use of searchlights in the famous night attack by the First Byelorussian Front. “We concentrated a huge striking force on the bank of the Oder: the supply of shells alone enough for a million artillery rounds on the first day of the storming. To stun the German defenses immediately, it was decided to begin storming at night with the use of powerful searchlights. Finally the famous night of April 16 began. No one could sleep. Three minutes before zero hour we left our dugout and took up places at our observation posts. To my dying day I will remember the land along the Oder, blanketed in Aprii fog. At 500 A.M. [0300 Berlin time] sharp it all began. The Matyushas struck, over 20,000 guns opened fire, hundreds of bomber planes roared overhead. . . and after 30 minutes of fierce bombing and shelling, 140 anti-aircraft searchlights employed every 650 feet in a line, were turned on. A sea of light swept over the enemy, blinding them, and pointing out in the darkness the objects of attack for our tanks and infantry.”

We meandered along the waterfront, and stumbled upon the work by Chinese contemporary artist Yin Xiuzhen, [URL] Washing River 2014. Blocks of ice were made from the polluted water of the Derwent River. Passersby were invited to, using a variety of cleaning implements, clean the water, as the ice melted and the water returned to the river, to the barren ocean. This artwork highlights the need to clean the river.

So, after my Okine and my MONA experiences, I thought a lot about light, and noted the many relationships with light and dark and colour. As I walked around the city I noted the reflections of the traffic lights in the windows of the ships and offices, and how this light was distorted by the imperfections in the glass. I noted how the light smeared and spread in the puddles on the ground, in the darkness of river stretching out, how the lights of the houses on the mountain spread up the ridge, and then fell away into the deep frightful darkness of the unsettled forest. I noted the dust and small insects flying in and out and around and about the bright searchlight beams. And the light warming my hands in front of the burning fire in the oil drums.

Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt. Eriugena. All things that are, are light. And I thought of light and how much we depend upon and are light. From the burning of the sun, to energy converting single celled algae.

Omnia sunt, lumina sunt

The lair of light soots efficient metronomes into the yesyokes. Like the arrival of the 456. Omnia sunt, lumina sunt all things that are, are light. The promotional literature, Let there be light -- Trite Cliché Immature -- takes away mystery, leaving all things created by god. All things are light. Why? How? Is the mystery not that all things arise from nothingness, that single infinitesimal moment of radiating energy and inflationary expansion. That the word world is nothing but the many billion years old hydrogen atom combined and recombined and fused and torn asunder and vomited out in mindless explosions of mind numbing power set hurtling across the random swerves -- until one fine morning the atom rearranged asks why am I here? Want is light? Why are all things light? Why are there things rather than nothing at all?

“The light & heat of the sun; these are composed of minute atoms which, when they are shoved off, lose no time in shooting right across the interspace of air in the direction imparted by the shove.” Lucretius De Rerum Natura

No god - no mystery - just intergenerational long fears. Light is real and subtle and it is the mystery. And when I look around all the green and all the flowering birds and animals born of light. Color and sound and life non-existent without light. For light is Eros, first born from out of the yawning emptiness, from the gaping nothingness, the generative spirit. Light is constant, the inescapable, the massless quandary. For we can go no faster, the light chases us and we can not flee, we can not outrun.

From my backyard the pillar of light rises over the neighbours house. Only certain places, one must avoid the street lights, one must avoid the light falling from windows. And the matrix of cloud and night sky tumbles and rumbles and turns this way and that, so the column appears and disperses, comes together and falls apart. Blasting Loretta Lynn as I drive into town (40 kilometres) the light glows and stakes shape more solid as I move closer and over the bridge and into the city. From light to stone.

So I wondered and wandered and went down across the wide Derwent estuary to partake the opening night of Sound to Light -- Crossing Borders (STL). As well as the exhibit I saw some audio/visual performances. STL is described as a dynamic, playful, chaotic, experimental project. A social art project that seeks to transcend boundaries between disciplines, but more importantly -- and something that can only be done at this time in history -- seeks to transcend physical location. This could not have been done before the invention of high-speed networking. Like the ancient shamans who could be in two places at once, nowadays artists are able to perform this miracle of bi-location. Optical fibre being part of the infrastructure of modern shamanistic practice the name of the exhibit takes on a special meaning.

Up Woobys Lane, through the courtyard, into an industrial revolution rabbit warren of an old warehouse. Low skeletal ceiling, silver insulation skin exposed. Rendered sandstone, convict-hewn blocks, photographers moving about for a better composition. Pale smart phone light, apparitions in the crowd, petals on a wet, black night. Electronic equipment humming, buzzing a series of sounds and beats, screens projecting the present and past in various combinations, strange generated life forms dancing and swirling. Art, as Andy Warhol said, is anything you can get away with; and everything we do, as John Cage said, is music.

Beyond the large performance space, a series of connected rooms of various installations. I would suggest visiting the soundtolight.net website to get more detailed information about the artworks. I can only describe my impressions, and what I saw. With much happening not everything could be given the attention required, and not everything could be properly critiqued.

In one room amplifiers, wires and a small wooden table. On the table Oscar Ferreiro & Heath Brown assembled small pieces of bone. The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone (well as a Dylan freak how could I pass this up?) Small electronic widgets attached to sawn and white scrubbed clean bones. The small motors recorded, and the manipulated sounds filled the little room. The natural and the artificial, prehistoric flutes made of bone and the most up to date technology. Further on a stand in a hallway a simple music box, with a twin in Melbourne. The pair move so slowly that no eye can detect movement. Played back as a time-lapse video the movement becomes apparent, the structure and the music is revealed.

Like Chinese guerrillas amid the peasant class, like fish in the sea, we move through light and sound. Moving from room to room. Agreeing with the Joycean poverty atmosphere of old warehouse art gallery was a room designed by Dylan Sheridan & Laura Hindmarsh. This was a flickering magic lantern room of images thrown onto thin screens in the darkness. This created a melancholy feeling. The impression of being a young child, a poor Edwardian urchin, sneaking a peek into the fabled nickelodeon. Take me away from all this death.

Chris Vik, of Ethno Tekh played his Kinectar. He has written some software to interface with the Kinect sensor, allowing artists while wearing special gloves, to create music by gesture alone. A very cool idea indeed, bringing sound to the language of gesture.

If Sound to Light -- Crossing Borders was meant to be a dynamic, playful, chaotic, experimental social art project, then one is forced to admit that they have succeeded. This type of technological art, this type of social art, this type of shamanistic bi-location will only extend and grow over the next period. In the way that the continual revolution of capitalism is threatening many old style business models, so too is the industrial scientific revolution forcing us to revalue art and the production of art. Recalling Socrates and his contrasting writing to the living word of knowledge. So we must ask if technology, as an extension of writing is not as well a pharmakon. Is technology a remedy, or is it a poison, or (most likely) both at once?

The boat of Ra-Set moves with the sun "but our job to build light." Ezra Pound Canto XCVIII

With one child just minutes away from yet another hospital visit,pale gray and listless from asthma, and one child on crutches with a broken foot, I can be forgiven for missing the unveiling, unleashing of Ryoji Ikeda's Spectra light tower. But I had an opportunity after the STL opening to wander into the domain, near the empty tomb to see for myself up close. Judging by the crowds and the traffic and the families and photographs this was a big hit with the locals. And why not? 'Tis a beautiful thing. Tall and proud and silent the beam of light rises up to the very heavens. All sorts of images and thoughts rattle around my noggin. Storming the gates of heaven. An echo of the blitz. Sublime Rothko silence and religiousness.

Only when I leave the car there is this noise of sine waves that fills all things, and to me subtracts rather than adds to the art work. I wanted the silence to stand and stare and wonder. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts with my own head.

And standing, and walking around I am breathless, but then from nowhere, from deep recesses within a nagging doubt arises. Why? What of this tower of light? Is it more an attempt to control and dominate nature? Is the empty night sky full of wonder and the cold wind of outer space, not enough? Is it not enough to point and say this is art? Like the gardener who digs up the native plants and replaces with roses, or the surfer who sees the ocean and demands to run on top of the waves to control and so dominate the sea, or the matron who see the fox or minx and wishes to flay the flesh as fashion; so too does this installation seem to want to control and dominate the landscape the city the very night itself.

A wonderful art piece to be sure and like all large scale public art, it is more than art. Rather a victory of technology of harnessed nature, of money and power, of government and business and bureaucracy.

Or is it more like the green blades of grass struggling to the light from under from the cracked concrete? The light life force, the will to power?

Or maybe a sound and fury signifying nothing, an insult to poor and voiceless in our society? Spectra must be all this and more. I think the artist said it best when he spoke of this work (like all art works) as being something different for everyone.

The Dorian Mood

The Dorian mood, 

or

I wanna go for a whirl

Of all the ancient now long dead civilizations the Minoan culture of Bronze Age Crete has a special hold on my feverish and fettered imagination. Like all things ancient, any ideas we have of yon olden days are much more about how we want to see and how we interact with the world, than they are about what the people who actually lived in ancient climes felt and thought. If only because our understanding about those long gone days is so shallow and fragmented.

"There dwell Achaeans, there great-hearted native Cretans, there Cydonians, and Dorians of waving plumes, and goodly Pelasgians."

As much as an island can be a crossroads, Crete was the crossroads of the Ancient North African and West Asian cultures. The stepping stone and ruminating place for the passing of culture onto the barbarous northern lands. Homer tells us that the island was home to many different groups, Achaeans, Cydonians, Dorians, Pelasgians as well as True Cretans. Adding the influences from merchant activity and Crete can pass for a member of the global village, a seemingly modern multi-cultural land.

Much has been lost from cataclysms and wars and revolutions and plain old forgetfulness. Sadly we do not know the older script of these eteokretes, Homer's true Cretans of the Odyssey. So we do not know what sort of language they spoke, was it part of the PIE language grouping, or an older style of speech lost in the dust of earthquakes and wars and ruins of massive relentless tsunamis? There is debate even about the meaning of Minos. Did this word mean king, or war chief, so that all rulers of Crete were called Minos? Did it mean more like ascetic? Or was it, as most assume, just another name among many?

The Minoans seem to closely match the imagined pagans dancing through the opium dreams of the Victorian decadent Algernon Charles Swinburne. Minoan arts holds an erotic orientalised fascination, a playful, exuberant sway over the imaginings of generations of artists and scholars. Exposed bosoms of matrons hailing the sun. Bull leaping male and female athletes glowing shiny and naked and well oiled and the sparkling sun bestowing countless kisses on the tips of frothy waves. Naked soldiers eating and drinking in laconic commons. A chanting, incantation hissing priestess holding over her head writhing snakes of prophecy and good fortune. The wild songs to the Great Mother wailing over the mud brick cities, across the wild mountains and the deep valleys cut, out over the wine faced sea.

Crete may have been one of the birth places of the infant Zeus. Where the Great Mother in her birth pangs dug her fingers into the rich volcanic soil on the flanks of Mt Ida (or was it on Anatolian Ida?) and brought
into being the Dactyls. Spirits of knowledge and metal melting and pouring and many magic crafts. They taught useful and helpful things to poor ignorant mankind. Wretched ones, mere bellies. Crete, where Daedalus built the cow shaped frame for the Poseidon unnatural love after the white bull cursed Queen Pasiphae. So mating she brought into the being the hideous Minotaur. Daedalus (of Joyce fame) then force built the labyrinth to house and keep from human eyes that part man part bull prodigy of that god toying unnatural union. Needing to flee from the enraged king he built wings of feathers and bees wax. The son of Daedalus disobeyed the father and fell to his death.

After seeing the new exhibit Theatre of the World at MONA, I felt that I had to bring along the rest of the family, who were sadly sick with colds when I first went. Knowing what to expect I made a beeline for a
surprisingly dark, small and claustrophobic room. In reality it was no more than a trick of weak lighting that made the room feel so small. What was in this small dark room that so caught my eye and imagination?

Recently I read an article about MONA which stated that the gallery had subverted the traditional gallery experience by not raising buildings to the heavens. Rather submersive the entrance took one down down to the underground. I can only agree with the weeping philosopher in saying that the way up/down are one and the same. Regardless I trundled my tired old frame down the stairs into the belly bowels of the limestone earth.

One often hears lurid tales in the more lurid mass media articles about the obsession with sex and death of the owner and staff of MONA. And one would think that I was joining in the general death loving frenzy by going into this one particular room. For the room contained some half a dozen various coffins and caskets. Caskets gathered from across time and history, across space and geography. All these categories fell into disrepair. However death that was not my desire, indeed I did not even understand that the object that so interested me was a coffin until later, assuming it to be a chest for linen. I stumbled upon the room, the object, and my eye and my will fell upon the octopus with her outstretched arms.

What however is a larnax? It is in this case a coffin, but it can also mean a chest, as in the case of Hephaestus, as mentioned in Iliad 18.413, it seems to be his silver tool chest.

From Samuel Bulter's translation.

The bellows he set away from the fire, and gathered all the tools wherewith he wrought into a silver chest; and with a sponge wiped he his face and his two hands withal...

The word also can mean a water trough, by this I assume the containers still seen on farms for watering horses, pigs, cows and etc. In the final passages of the Iliad the bones of Hector are gathered from the
fire:

And the white bones they gathered, brothers and comrades
Swelling sorrow flowing tears down their cheeks.
And the bones they placed into the golden urn, covered gentle
With shimmering, gleaming purple robes. They placed the urn
Into the hollow trench and covered smooth with close set stones.

When one thinks about classical art, one thoughts are often drawn to the rigid poses of the Egyptians, or the mathematically precise statues and architectures of the Greeks, or rather the lovingly intricate folds of senatorial robes. In thinking of classical art the mind does not usually jump to ideas of naturalism, and even less does the idea of abstraction come into the conversation. Or if abstraction is thought of, it is of the geometric designs of the 'Dark Age'.

Formal, religious, locked into forms and a lack of experimentation are some of the things that people will think when thinking of ancient art. But of course this is wrong. A central dogma of science is that the processes occurring now have occurred in the past. So for the example of geology we have weathering, erosion, plate tectonics etc, all having occurred in the past. All of these processes of the past are still occurring. In the realm of art these can be taken to mean that in the past artists were like our current artists, they were effected by events happening around them, the great social movements, they were interested in change and development, in trying out new things, and most importantly (and often forgotten) they knew that art is fun, a type of playing.

What did set Minoan art apart from other cultures? One element being the sense of motion not often seen in the older monumental art of Egypt and Babylon. A sense of asymmetry. Objects would be purposely skewed off centre. Lines would take on a life of their own and would bend and twist and arabesque across the surface to be covered. Colour, when viewing the recovered artifacts seems to be almost non existent, but in reality the ancients loved colour and used it with a lack of inhibition that would make the most radical fauvist blush.

So what was drawing my mind? A simple baked clay Minoan casket from about 1350BC. What was it I liked about this piece? The symbol of the octopus with long tendril tentacles reaching out in wavy lines from
the body of the beast. Much Minoan art used these realistic images from nature. With the octopus being a common subject. Within a traditon of lines and formed like the constant waves upon the island, the constant motion and rolling tumble of storm and fair, the octopus sometimes appeared as natural, sometimes as little more than abstracted lines of tentacles rolling, undulating the constant swell. The constant surge wearing away at beaches and rocks the background to a tradition of movement and playfulness.

The always in the background threat of earthquake and tsunami to more than once wipe out all that was gained and forced the people back upon themselves. Great fire belching volcanoes sending out rolling waves to rumble mindless over the city walls, across the land, deep into the rich farmlands.

So this tension of natural and abstract moved across the generations with the creature becoming no more than a one sided line. In a similar way that we have moved along until we are no more than one sided adjuncts to the machine, and one sided dreamers of shopping schemes.

This could be seen as a model for our modern art. Once we drew things. Since the Renaissance a certain type of artist spent their entire lives defining with mathematical perversion the role of line and shadow. Now some of our artists are happy with no more than a collection of lines and a random splashing of colour. In this way we can see the dogma that I spoke of before. What is true for us was true for those who came before us, and what our ancestors did, so we are still doing.

So in a darkened room exhibiting the concern of MONA with coffins and caskets and all things deadly, I was able to admire this 3000 year old coffin, decorated as it was with asymmetrical designs and swirls. And
of course I wondered about the body that was stuffed into such a small casket, as well as wondering what the original colours were, who had made this object, who cried and what rituals were performed. The size and shape of the object. How was the body meant to fit? Were bones broken? Was it meant to represent the chest where people would keep their few belongings? Was it Egyptian in origin, does it represent the box in which Horus the husband of Isis was tricked into entering. The chest that became his coffin. This box which floated down the Nile and into the great sea beyond. Which Isis found bound in the giant tree trunk supporting the ceiling of a palace of a local king. Her cries of pain so profound and powerful as to cause the death of children.

I stood and thought about thinking, about the way in which this simple object made me think about the past and the future. But mostly I liked the way that this one small thing silent out of the pages of history seemed to me to be like a snapshot, a photographic object, which was able to stop time and movement. Like the photograph a newspaper or a political party uses of their opponent. Head back eyes half shut mouth open in laughter, to display the worst aspect of the candidates character and appearance. This Larnax, while not being shuttered in motion to cause embarrassment, does represent a frozen moment. A slice of life. A Series of questions. The moment when the practise of art was in the process of moving from one generation to the next. A moment of death, maybe an old patriarch or even older matriarch passing, and the wrinkled craftsman, out of respect for an old friend, makes one last casket in the fading style. The moment when the artist was surveying what had gone past and what was valuable to keep, to preserve. The moment younger hands took the reigns, when younger talents took over the workshop and studio.

A moment of tradition captured, made solid. A moment in the movement of art made solid. A moment in an anonymous individual's life. That moment of death. Did he or she pick out the casket themselves? Was it chosen after death? Was the object a rushed job due to a sudden accident, or illness? Was the casket chosen after a long and happy life, or a short and brutal one, a life of mediocrity? So many particulars, so
many questions. Questions which may or may not have answers, questions which I do not have the resources to even begin to answer.

All of this and more.

---

This description came from the email sent to me from MONA concerning
my tour of the museyroom.

Larnax (chest-shaped coffin)
Crete, Late Minoan Period, c. 1325 - 1275 BCE
Fired clay with painted decoration
95 x 122 x 49 cm

The custom of chest-shaped, clay coffins, or larnakes, is believed to
have originated in ancient Crete. The deceased would have been laid in
a flexed position and the gable-shaped lid secured with cords. The
shape may well have been based on wooden storage chests used within a
domestic context but, if so, none of those survive: recent scholarship
has identified Egyptian linen chests as the probable model

The shitty shadow play

A friend whom I have never met, but only through the inernet, Ian Milliss wrote this article for the 250th anniversary issue of Art Monthly. Our digital dialogue has allowed me to develop respect and some sort of affection for his views and opinions. This article made me think about stuff, and I was at first going to reply with a witty internet sized one liner, but the more I thought the more words and ideas were vomited forth. So I guess you should read his article first, to get some context. Or not.

---

The shitty shadow play of a shitty world, so a pal of mine in Canberra called the art scene and the local artists. This is caused by the global fordism of art, as Ian so clearly points out. The idea that Disney will buy out the museyrooms is a dystopian fantasy that sadly can become true, if we do not keep on guard. (One only has to look over the history of the cinema, and the banal state of publishing in the Anglosphere, to see the danger will are facing.) Indeed David Walsh refers to MONA as a subversive adult Disneyland, and much as I admire and appreciate the gallery one has to ask the question, how subversive a can a Disneyland, adult or otherwise, become. Is the goal of art to titillate and 'shock' with walls of vaginas, and smears of poo? Or is the goal of art to, in simplistic terms, try to make us better people, to try to make us see the world though the eyes of pure childhood playfulness anew? We have only a tenuous grasp on life, and we should not settle on facile blandness.

The mass production of art combined with, not a lack of talent, but rather a lack of ideology. Indeed ideology seems to be a dirty word these days, but to me it is nothing more than an attempt to bring things together, and attempt to make sense of the contradictions of internal world versus external world. A gathering together of threads, going way way back to the PIE *weid- meaning to see.

Too many people, schooled as they are in the vapid world of witty one liners and the constant fear of any authentic activity take ideology to mean little more than impractical thinking about things. Not really understanding that there is more to life than the constant one sided pragmatic jumping from one crisis to the next with not understanding as to how all things are interconnected and come together. Art is seen as apart from politics, apart from our interpersonal relationships, apart from the choices we make as consumer. Of course like all things human ideology can become perverted, and can become a hindrance to thinking and activity, but this is why the critical activity must also be turned inward, one must constantly question oneself. So when new experiences, new ways of seeing arise they must be integrated into one's ideology.

We can see this negative understanding of ideology clearly in recent critiques of the green party, who are constantly assailed for having principles and a policy they are not willing to throw overboard at the first opportunity. This can be summed up with a quote from Michael Danby, the federal member for Melbourne Ports, reported in the cesspit of pretend pragmatism vexnews

'The Greens have discredited themselves with many inner-city voters I talk with every day by voting with the Liberals on asylum seekers. Frankly I’ve been struck by the magnitude of the criticism I hear of their self-indulgent and viciously ideological position on asylum seekers, that is costing lives.'

While I do not like to see the Greens on the side of the LNP, it is wrong and a misunderstanding to say the Green Party voted with the liberals. They voted as they saw fit, in a way that they felt was true to their positions and policies. On the other hand the liberals in a choreographed display of populist vengeance (who can forget the staged spectacle of Joe Hockey and his histrionic welling up at the idea of  sending unaccompanied children to Malaysia, while at the same time cynically supporting the idea of turning back boats) voted in a way that would bring maximum disruption to the government, regardless of any ideology the LNP may have.

But I digress, for it is late and I am tired and a bit tipsy.

Art should be part of this trying to make sense of the world, and while I do not disagree with the idea that the world is in many ways unknowable and in constant flux,  one has to also admit that the world is repeatable and in many ways can be known. This can be seen in the simple act of cooking dinner, I apply heat the water boils, I apply a knife to the carrot and it cuts, I add yeast to flour and the dough rises.

One day art in the future will dissolve, and this process is beginning,. This can be readily seen with our street art, as well as the space created by the internet. When this day comes art will be simply a part of everyday life, and there will no longer be a need for the priestly caste of critics to mediate and tell us what is pure and what is impure. Conversation will become inclusive. The conversation will no longer be the purposeful obfuscation using silver dollar words. The conversation will no longer spew forth from one sided two faced confusers with a weak grasp of the ideas of thinkers such as Derrida. The weakness and shallowness of these types of posers support their ideas with a firm grasp on the language and tropes of the arts bureaucracy and ways to job the system. Everyone will be an artist precisely because there will be no artists in a festive echo of Lenin's idea that one day the lowest clerk will be able to run the affairs of the state. Art and humanity will be free and human activity will be seen for what it can be, a type of play, a thing of joy, and not a hammer with which to batter the other in vain attempts to gain control and dominance. Art will be enjoyed for it's 'spiritual value', not it's exchange value. Art will become integrated into life, and indeed ones life itself will become art. To me this should be the aspiration of all artists. 

With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall

Gallifrey Falls!

Penna Mona Penna

---

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.

---

Cringe

Years later he still was haunted by his mothers death, he remembered the night she died. May 28, or was it the 29th? Her dead yellow mutilated body twitching slightly vomit spittle collecting the corners of her mouth. his aunt Helen crying. 'ive killed her I sat there said Katherine your fought long enough, give up, it is over.' and like that the sickness left her body. years of pain, cancer growing in her body left. the disease killed itself. some one stopped a clock. he could only stand there.

his sister cried. 'shut up there is no reason to get hysterical' he snapped

fuck you she was my mother too I can cry

someone called the ambulance his Uncle bill took him for a ride, while the ambulance crew took her away outside was a clear endless spring sky ablaze with stars

see over there - Uncle bill pointed just over the two storey house to the left of the huge willow tree just a twig barely higher than a four year old boy once now towering and threatening, taller than the house - Venus and Jupiter in conjunction

the two planets fused into one bright spot of light

and into the car, a huge American car with three wiper speeds bill opened his door and dragged his 20 lb shoe across the floor of the car. bills left leg was noticeably shorter than his right. the result of an industrial accident. bill's leg was crushed between two RR cars.

the two drove - quietly or with short forgotten snippets of conversation they just drove ran some errands something he could not remember.

back home more cars had arrived. he walked into the kitchen his father and godfather, and some other family friends sat at the table drinking whiskey.

passing through the liveing room where the women were he dashed up the stairs tow at a time. at the top of the stairs he entered her room, where she had died where his aunt was changing the bed, straightening the room. the bed was empty, she was gone, already at the funeral home.

the room was still full of medical supplies the oxygen tank - used for her last days, she panicked when the mask was lowered onto her face - covering her nose and mouth - NO she screamed do not suffocate me - NO let me die my way.' liquid nourishment. the pump which filled her thigh with food the medicines call liquid to be injected, mixed with the food as her stomach had been partialy removed the drapes etc. all the care administered by him and his sister.

she was gone, nothing to say to his aunt.

he made his way down stairs he sat at the kitchen table with his dad and godfather bob. bob with the limp who at age 24 went on a week long toot woke up in jail in Rochester arrested for murder. freed when the real criminal was caught he hasn't had a drink since. now he reads kierkergaard japsers Unamuno - remarried in sadness and hated by his children.

bob sat and talked while he had a drink with his father. remember the 63 strike and we sat around all summer and watched the mets that year - god they were awful marvellous marv who could loss the ball in the sun on a grounder it was so hot that summer.

and he did not listen he just sat and stared. the doorbell rang his sister answered the door. it was is gf carol, he had planned to have dinner with her that night. she stood blonde and high school sad by the kitchen table. I heard I am sorry - I cooked us lasagna - he could hear the tears in her voice. 'she was real nice - I really liked her me and marylou ate some of the lasagna but we saved some for you and some Boston cream pie. my mom sends her condolences and her love'

thanks sorry I am no fun tonight

it is ok I understand I will go call me up tomorrow

he kissed her - I will

bye im sorry

so am I

he sat down again to eat the dinner carol had cooked for them carol was his high school love. she got sick on prom night - and they lost their virginity together on a cool fall afternoon behind the school after a Saturday afternoon of football and schnapps - the first woman he confessed to love.

he picked and played with his food alternating bite of pie with bites of pasta - eat your food like a normal person his father commanded

let him eat like he wants, who is he hurting bob said

he looked at his dad drunk again like always tall and lean his hair combed straight back pulling his lean face taunt his skin seemed to tight for his body his cheeks were hollow and his eye runny he could tell his dad had been crying drinking himself deeper into abyss of pain that was his life, his self his dad was pale the whitest white person in town which set off his dark rugged Irish workingman looks. black Irish and proud of it fierce blue eyes under the shock of black brows

he looked at the tattoos on his arm, a paratrooper descending his chute unopened his hand locked in prayer.

soon the house filled with people and he retreated to his room right next to hers where he had lived listening to her cries her moans the sounds of a slow death echoing his room.

the next three days came the wake and flowers and masses and cousins from Michigan NY Ohio Pennsylvania all across the industrial NE.

uncle Jacky who warned against disturbing good scotch with water or even ice

Wanda and frank with their huge tragic polish twelve children family

and Helen and rose and Josephine and Sophia and Stanley and all of the great bringing together of the family.

he stood unsmiling uncrying in the receiving line across 2 days and heard all the apologies and all the I-knew-your-mom-whens.

till bill and tom and Kevin and jimmy came by. then he cried great tears fell his face contorted he and his friends slipped away to have a smoke.

im sorry I cried so, it was just so nice of you to come by you did not have to he said

yeah we are just good guys said tom his racing buddy bragging buddy comparing fuck notes buddy soon to leave maybe to never to be seen by him again.

thanks again he said drawing back on a Marlboro to hid the Mary Jane scent - yeah man I did mean to carry on so it is just - that you were the first people I knew who came by

how are you doing Billy asked you need anything -

they were next door neighbours his best friend since third grade and they had lots between them talking about everything baseball all they wanted to do, all the beer they would drink all the first they would fuck as the grew up together.

and now everything had changed.

---

So polymathemagical Rachel/Paige; a friend of mine (an acquaintance, person I know, a colleague, a comrade, just a random person I occasionally run into?) organised a Cringefest at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart. This was meant to include readings from old teenage diaries.

So being as vain as the next poet, I thought I would go along. Plus I thought it was a very cool idea, and I am always open to new ways to do art. Sadly due to work and family commitments I could not get to the reading until late.

If the idea was to find cringe worthy diary entires, I feel this as good as any. It is something I wrote at a very young age. I did not really make diaries in the sense of a day to day discussion of what has happened and my feelings. I wrote at that time something that may be better called journals. And this was one of only a few things I wrote about the death of my mother. I was only 17 when she died, and this event hit me pretty hard. The reading of this long ago diary entry is doubly cringe worthy because of the 'heavy' subject matter, and of course the less than deft way I handled the material. But I was only 18 or so, and back then I was much more green than I was cabbage looking.

I typed it up as the original book is a bit fragile, and the weather in Tasmania is always a lottery. Tidied up the spelling mistakes, but not so much the grammar errors. I did not add or subtract anything from the initial rush of crappiness. So thanks for indulging me and my addition to the cringe fest.

The art works are from the diary. Things were different in 1978.