Nov-Dec 2010

Dec 29. A beautiful day - the roos hung around all day, the males either showing off their sex or lying around, the female busy eating. Though only a couple of metres from our table football game (but below the balcony), the piercing shrieks of the girls (very competitive) didn't faze them. The sea was warm and the light wonderful, when our guests left, I walked my camera (forgot the cricket).

There are over 200 species of dragonfly in Australia. This one is of the Libellulidae family, the largest family in the world.

Tree death warrant

The Newcastle Anthology 'Time with the Sky' has arrived -

containing 24 poems, all interesting as usual (I think there are usually about 500 entries now, more than when I was judging).

My entry 'Real Love' is an eco love poem. A tender text that faces facts - mixing myth with science, personal histories, mortality and much more! extract.

Back in Valla

Party time with the Green and Bleating Tree Frogs calling, Black Cockatoos gliding over the forest and Pied Butcherbirds singing from the roof top. Our first party since leaving Sydney - we had pass-the-parcel, a juicy ham Bron had glazed, her first class Valla Mead (a complex but fleshy litle number with an aromatic lilt, from the added fruits!!) and more.

Quote of the week: “Birdsong also has the potential to lend insights into human consciousness, intuition, creativity, musicality, language, memory, the learning process and cognition.” Hollis Taylor, 'Blowin' in Birdland: Improvisation and the Australian Pied Butcherbird', in the latest Leonardo.)

Sun-drying some of our tomato crop

In Sydney

Only the letter D remains.

What if a series of haiku were written in the sky

and disentangled from meaning by the currents of birdbreath?

Only the boy remains and what he is holding.

What if he looked blue?

'Lofty' Nadjamerrek, ‘Kalawan’ 2008 etching, Image from MCA, via Injalak.

The best show I saw on this visit was Bardayal 'Lofty' Nadjamerrek (Wamud Namok is his "sorry name", during mourning) at the MCA. He learnt rock painting from his father and started painting directly onto rock in the late thirties, by the Liverpool River, stone country of the Arnhem Land plateau. As a prominent elder, Nadjamerrek presided over the clan estates with important rock art sites. “He was educating his western viewers with each new brushstroke,” writes Nicolas Rothwell.

I prefer his early work – of raw insistence, but he developed a wonderful variety and his rich red etchings (produced in collaboration with Injalak Arts And Crafts Association in Oenpelli, 2006) are surprisingly powerful (see image above).

I first saw his work in a great show, ‘They Are Meditating: Bark Paintings’ from the MCA's Arnott's Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2008. Raymattja Marika in that catalogue reminded us: "The deepest knowledge is abstract, we know it is there, but it cannot be put into words. It cannot be seen, but it is still there. When old people paint, it is as if they are meditating; it is not just a man painting a design, but the design is a real meaningful and alive totem, which somehow communicates with the painter."

Desire Lines 3# at Chrissie Cotter, Sydney

Bron 'hanging' her Amalfi series, beautiful hand-coloured etchings.

Bron at her exhibition, with Andrew (who may be thinking 'is this art?')

In English Air: Poem cards

Busy in the studio with John 7 or 8 new videos

- text from a new video 'Poseidon - Valla Beach'.

(See still, opposite above)

Poseidon – you’ve probably forgotten him. Creative, warlike and promiscuous, all three characteristics brought him grief with other gods and he often quarrelled with Zeus, the sky god, his brother. Poseidon had a short fuse, so sailors made him offerings before they weighed anchor, hoping for seas flushed with fair winds that filled their sails. Humans infuriated him, sometimes with good reason. After Odysseus blinded his son Polyphemus, the Cyclops, Poseidon took revenge by whipping up whirlpools and shaking out a violent storm.

This beach is closing on the wine-dark sea and Boreas is here, an athlete with wings and a pointy black beard running through the air, or is it Kaikas, the nor’ easterly that delivers foam and bluebottles but brought Greeks hail and ice? He’s the serious one, long haired, bearded.

Homer recalls how Penelope delayed the eager men, their glare of ivory eyeballs, hoarse throats and erections by weaving a funeral shroud by day and unpicking the weft at night, stretching time the way the tides do, in their doing and undoing, inscribing the shore with shells and seaweed, Poseidon’s wrack before the repetition of erasure.

Meanwhile Odysseus’ son Telemachus went down to the seashore, dipped his hands in the briny sea-foam and prayed to the Goddess Athena. She listened, let him escape his mother’s suitors and find his father, absent for so long. The two took bloody revenge on Penelope’s admirer’s, then having survived Poseidon’s anger, Odysseus, perhaps more safety consciousness after yet more death, erected a temple and made sacrifices to mollify the God and prolong life - that delicate membrane of light, energy and breath, linking every single thing and so extremely mortal.

We should be used to not understanding the sea, its story of where life began, and how, conspiring with the winds, it continually washes that story clean.

A cat that should not be here (opposite my study, high in a bloodwood in Jagun Nature Reserve). See my essay on the ethics of killing feral cats, and thoughts on the popular pastime of owning anamals as pets.

A wet Sunday (5th) - a walk in Jagun always throws up something new. I take photographs of ordinary things like a red leaf, or paperbark diagrams. The sublime has been overrated for some time now. The everyday is vital for how we view nature, how the aesthetic becomes part of daily life.

Socrates was the first philosopher to take the ordinary seriously, not so concerned with the good life calculated via abstractions like happiness, fulfilment, destiny, or even holiness - a notion of living in the everyday with a modicum of awareness and reluctance to be thoughtless.

Entering the dunes we get a good look at a red-backed fairy-wren in breeding plumage - 9 grams of sublime vision I must admit.

.Red-backed Fairy-wren, Noosa, Image by Nevil Lazarus

When we get back, a pair of King Parrots are sitting on a chair on our top balcony.

Dec 4th

I look out of the window at extraordinary flying, around here usually the province of galahs, today it was a squadron of mynahs dive bombing a pheasant coucal; earlier I had been playing table tennis in Bellingen and a scaly-breasted lorikeet flew across so low it just missed colliding with the ball.

The photograph I just took

(of silver light dancing on the sea with dark clouds inflating the backdrop to vast heights (something to do with what Matisse said about “the advantage of permanence”) didn’t really work)

For a while I only took photographs for the photograph,

not to capture some likeness of the world but to make

something, a weight on paper that can never be seen again.

I’m a dilettante, prefer nothing onerous or spectacular, but

this view that frames us - rosy-fingered dawn stroking an ocean

scratched across its taut blue negative tempts me so.

Reminds me that each sunrise is a flush of effort; Homer knew

dawn to be a goddess and that the natural cannot be extricated from

whatever’s left - supernatural bone-dust, unnatural splinters of glass.

B's new show opens in Sydney, Sat Dec 11 and following week

(closed Mon & Tues) - at Chrissie Cotter, Camperdown.

The Mogadishu poets' club

The Mogadishu poets' club seldom meets these days. Sugaal Abdulle Omar is one of only a handful of survivors who have stayed on in the Somali capital despite what has become of the once beautiful coastal city. "The poet is always trying to talk about peace," he says. "But there is nowhere to talk about peace here and no one who wants to listen." The Independent

November

B's birthday lunch - from the table we watched a pelican catch its own blackfish.

Leslie Nielsen has passed away at the age of 84; he is best known for lines like these from Airplane!:

Dr. Rumack (Nielsen): Can you fly this plane, and land it?

Ted Striker: Surely you can't be serious.

Rumack: I am serious… and don't call me Shirley.

Dr. Rumack: You'd better tell the captain we've got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.

Elaine: A hospital? What is it?

Dr. Rumack: It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now.

The Stoics used humour to deflate followers of Plato. I use humour in everday interactions, being told by colleagues at Sydney University that humour was my way of negotiating/ dealing with difficult situations. I find people without this particular sense unsettling.

''Not very friendly', not bloody surprising!

CARNAGE

This place is a continual exposure of beauty, recently damp, very green and very dangerous - four crashes in a week on the Pacific Highway just north of here. The last one (Friday 19 Nov) caught me a few cars back - a trucker described the scene to me,

two cars badly smashed, a front-on, plenty of blood in a blue jeep running down an older guy's head, no dying he thought. I took photographs from an ethically safe distance and then wrote to my MP and the RTA.

A week later a 54-year-old from Gulmarrad is still critical, the two youngsters in the other car (not their fault) were badly hurt but are recovering. Two weeks later - he died on the first day of summer. I hear the details, he was almost stopped at Deep Creek but the police were booking someone else, somehow he lost control of his Jeep, spun and went backwards into a Ford Mondeo, his head collided with the windscreen, and loose items from the interior hit the back of his head, his brain was irreparably damaged.

"The figures are startling. More than 60 people have lost their life on the stretch of highway between Maclean and Macksville in the past five years. In comparison, 21 Australian soldiers and one New Zealand soldier have died in the nine-year, billion-dollar, Afghanistan conflict." Coffs Advocate

I hadn't owned a car for over 20 years until I moved out of the city. Cars are a whole story in themselves, capitalism, mass production, fantasy, environmental destruction. Cars kill 4,000 people every day somewhere in the world. Fifty million have died since a labourer's wife Bridget Driscoll, aged 44, on her way to a Catholic fete at Crystal Palace, was run over by a demonstration car on 17 August 1896, one of only five or so in the country.

Andy Warhol, 'Pink Car Crash'. Anything is art.

From Warhol's very first show at the Stable Gallery in 1962, he transformed his commercial art and advertising imagery from the everyday into art. See Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol, Yale University Press, 2009. But for me his success has warped the nature of art and the art market. In a 1912 catalogue, reprinted in his hugely influential Vision and Design (1920), Roger Fry insisted that, “All art depends upon cutting off the practical responses to sensations of ordinary life, thereby setting free a pure and as it were disembodied functioning of the spirit . . .” I admire Fry’s championing of the experimental and international, but he threw the baby out with the bathwater. The local is important, the everyday is vital, but not the surface glitz of a Monroe screenprint (mass produced after her suicide) or Jeff Koons' 'Michael Jackson and Bubbles'.

Encouraging young people to write about the future, even with cash prizes and an internship with Good News Week was a challenge, but we eventually got nearly 50 entries. We chose 23 finalists, fifteen of whom made the Sunday workshop. It was a full on day but the young writers never flagged and all performed beautifully. The day was facilitated by the irrepressible Libby Feez with the inventive Tony Allison on production, with two wonderful and wonderfully enthusiastic young tutors, Jesse Emannuel and Alexandra (Lexi) Neill. The best possible account is given by Lexi herself.

The garden is growing, and my hard landscaping work has donated tennis elbow.

Fuligo septica or dogs vomit slime mould

Slime moulds begin life amoeba-like, but were once thought to be fungi. They are hard to pin down and hard to hold - break the light crusty surface and pure yellow slime emerges.

I agree with the poet Tim Key when he says, 'Let the poem do the talking.' See/hear the UK comic's unusual poetic approach to bankers.