It's All in the Detail

The House on Lopez Cotilla (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1988)

2011-12-28T21:10:00.000-08:00

This is the first story from my book, The House on Lopez Cotilla & Other Stories, co written with Lyn Daws about our time living in Latin America during the 1980s and 90s. (Shortly available through Amazon.com)

My wife and I had come to the house looking for a room that had been advertised in one of the daily newspapers, El Mercurio. Someone with good taste had arranged the high ceilinged room very simply and beautifully. Desk, stool, arm chair, a fold out sofa bed and hanging above it, a portrait of a Buddhist monk. On the other wall there was a wicker crucifix made by Indian people from the nearby Sierra. The room opened out onto a courtyard of cracked Spanish tiles and geraniums in rusty cans. And suddenly there she was speaking her polished and flawless English, eccentrically dressed, a wizened but beautiful, old Mexican lady. The business of actually acquiring the room was no problem and it cost next to nothing. Socorita -- "my name means help" -- was drinking long glasses of Agua de Jamaica with us and telling the first of many stories.

She told us about her schemes : a floating hotel complex on an ice cap in the south of Chile, a chain of desert retreats for burnt out gringos in Baja California. All that was needed was a financial backer. Was she a mercenary con-artist ready to put the bite on unsuspecting foreigners? Was she a bit touched? Senile? Or just plain loca (crazy)? Her smile was beguilingly childlike and her smooth face, very pretty for one so old, had the indications of a person whose conscience did not bother her one little bit. That was somehow disconcerting.

"All my life I have tried to help the poor and God has been good to me," she explained.

"Upstairs I keep a room for homeless boys and another for country girls who come to Guadalajara in search of an abortionist or a badly paid job."

"Now it is different. You don't know how worried I am about this house," she gasped, raising her wrinkled hand to her forehead.

"I'll have to leave here any day now -- I can't really explain why but as long as we keep the gate securely locked there ought to be problem -- for a while at least."

At the time it was hard to imagine a sweet old lady like Socorita being pursued by someone who had a score to settle with her. We dismissed her talk as fantastic ramblings since she was, after all, pushing eighty and there seemed to be no sign of the homeless unfortunates whom she would have us believe were still enjoying her hospitality and charity. Socorita did, however, tell us about her past in Mexico City and her tumultuous affair with an American gangster, Harvey, whom she claimed sent his henchmen to kidnap her in broad daylight when she ran off with another man.

Frankly, it was hard to visualize the amorous component of this given Socorita's advanced age. Many of Socorita's stories seemed to date from her high flying, champagne soaked days in the twenties and thirties. What could possibly be the "terrible secret" of the house on Calle Lopez Cotilla that was going to drive a defenceless, old lady to seek safety elsewhere?

The next morning two old women wearing brightly coloured turbans, long strings of pearls, abundant rouge and scarlet lipstick pass by our open door and proffer a courteous "buenos dias" with a smile. One of the vampish old ladies is unmistakably Socorita, the other, a total mystery. In the following days nobody who lives at the crumbling boarding house can tell us much about the other senora except that she shares Socorita's room and that they can sometimes be seen sharing cake crumbs from the same plastic bag in the communal kitchen together. Eventually we come across the curious sight for ourselves, behind them on a stove a tall billy of anise, arnica, manzanilla, sevila and dandelion root is brewing.

"Iz good for 'catarro' (a cold) ... mey name iz Teresita ... I lern mey Ingleesh Tijuana ... perdy good, verdad?"

Her eyes are watering and she coughs terribly. "Perdy good" were about the only two words of English Teresita spoke and it was impossible to know what these two words ever referred to since she laced her racy and incomprehensible phrases of Spanish with them whenever she spoke to either one of us.

Teresita said that Socorita was her best friend and her eyes became misty. Socorita -- in private of course -- described Teresita s "a pest" and said she did not know who Teresita was or what she was going to do with her.

"How she ever wheedled her way into my life, I don't know," says Socorita, throwing up her hands. One suspects that there might be, or at least there was at some stage, more to the relationship than first meets the eye though these sorts of things simply are not talked about in Mexico!

Neither of them would talk about their own age -- only the other's.

"You should see how Teresita's hand shakes, it must be terrible to get like that!" said Socorita in a tone of disgust.

"Nevertheless she'll have to work, I can't have her living off me forever. I'm confident of finding her a job as a maid. We're applying for a position tomorrow."

That was when we saw them pass by our door. Late in the afternoon of that same day we caught sight of them straggling back towards their room which is situated in the courtyard behind the kitchen. They looked the worst for wear, turbans disarranged and sweating at the brow. Teresita shuffled ahead and Socorita took the opportunity to stop and talk at our door.

"Would you believe it?" she cried raising her eyes and hands to heaven.

"Just when it looked as if Teresita was going to get the job you know what she told the gentleman? She told him she was an 'artista', a singer and dancer, and then broke into an embarrassing Mexican love ballad!"

Later on Teresita took great pride in showing us the blurry, dog eared photo of a beautiful young muchacha in an embroidered huipil and black flamenco dancing shoes. She bursts into the first verse of 'Grenada' and talks about her "gran tour" of the Yucatan Peninsula in 1928 -- even throws in a few dramatic twirls and dance steps for us to show that it just seemed like yesterday.

One wonders what it was that kept them together. In their own ways they were very different, Teresita almost a beggar living on vile smelling, herbal concoctions, Socorita a shrewd wheeler and dealer who could always put her hand on money when it was needed. Perhaps it was the sheer frivolity of their fast living pasts? Perhaps they could reminisce together without provoking disapproval? Teresita with her unlikely tales of seductive Spaniards wanting to take her away from it all, Socorita with her stories about life as a gangster's moll. Neither had children nor it seemed aspirations to marriage or family life, this being so peculiar for Mexico that it placed them beyond the pale of other people's comprehension. This lack of sentimentality and what most Mexicans would consider moral scruples provided the two old ladies with a certain freedom.

Socorita's end came not via a gangster's Gatling gun but by keeping one step in front of a court order. It turned out that Socorita had not paid the rent on the huge colonial house on Lopez Cotilla for eight years. Each year she had somehow managed to sell the lease to some unsuspecting family, kicking them out at the year's end with the termination of the contract, pocketing the cash and reselling the lease at a higher price to the next unsuspecting family. The irony of the situation was that Socrita did not own the house herself but had simply taken advantage of the original owner's flight from Guadalajara some years ago.

The city is a major centre for drug trafficking to the United States and Socorita had obviously been involved with the owner in some way. It seemed, however, that he was suddenly back in town!

We spirited her away one rainy evening with her belongings which she said she could not do without. There were disintegrating bedspreads embroidered by the nuns, an unwieldy foam rubber mattress, various well used pots and pans as well as kitchen utensils including a smelly coffee filter made from an old coat hanger and piece of cheese cloth. (To this day we carry a replica of Socorita's coffee filter wherever we travel). There were feathered, broad rimmed hats, her selection of turbans and an overflowing make-up case. Even the portrait of a Buddhist monk that hung on our wall went. She explained it had been painted by a globe trotting, hippy nephew of hers who now ran some very lucrative ashram in Los Angeles.

We lugged the awkward bundles through the centre of town to a temporary hide out a few streets away.

"I am a broken woman", Socorita explained rather melodramatically, "pray for me."

We left her all sympathy and reassurances.

Three days later we went to visit our fugitive friend expecting to find her down in the dumps. There was surely no way she could wriggle out of this one. We rang the door bell choking on the exhaust fumes of the notorious public buses that pass along the narrow city streets. The heavy, fortress-like doors creaked open. Out of the inner darkness we were greeted by a radiant Socorita. By the twinkle in those green eyes we instinctively knew she had fallen on her feet again.

"I have a new house on Calle Modero," she beamed leading us through the labyrinth corridors of her temporary, shambolic abode.

Socorita had sought refuge from the law in this hovel along with the current family she had hoodwinked into the lease on the Lopez Cotilla house just a few blocks away. They too, for some reason, felt it necessary to flee. Was Harvey, the gangster owner of the property, or the authorities closing in? The family's legal position in regard to the house on Lopez Cotilla was shaky but they feared Socorita and trusted that she could find a way around "el problema".

The situation seemed like something off the pages of "Bleak House". Over home made biscuits, Socorita explained her "little secret" to us in rather opaque terms. The money she had spent on lawyers bribing them to locate and disappear various documents, the interminable bolting of the front door to avoid having Notice served, the years of subterfuge, evasions and legal circumlocutions seemed truly incredible to the non-Mexican mind.

Socorita justified all this criminal activity as if it were perfectly natural and common for Mexico, which on second thought, it probably was ... and still is.

"People in Mexico have to survive somehow", she matter-of-factly stated.

Socorita admitted, however, that she "had lost the Lopez Cotilla house" and breaking into English while smiling sweetly in the direction of the family:

"They'll lose everything of course, the house and all of the money they put down on it."

"But what can you do?" she shrugs.

A few days later back at Lopez Cotilla we are woken by a rap at the door of our room at around six in the morning. The sight before our blurry, sleep filled eyes is one of an army of removalists frantically carting huge side boards, antique wardrobes, bed bases and heavy furniture down the stair well and into a van on the street. Men are busy disconnecting gas pipes so that the kitchen stove and water heaters can be removed. Nothing is left intact and the fridge sails by as the family stand watching, white faced and not knowing what to do.

"I've come for a few more of my things," Socorita tells tells us at the door. She has come to claim furniture from the tenants, many of whom are understandably outraged by her attempts to take the very beds from which they have just risen. Most have paid their rents for the furnished rooms months in advance. Socorita explains to them (and us) that we will all have to leave by the afternoon in any case -- that's when the bailiff is due to arrive. It was unlikely that any of this furniture or fixtures were actually owned by Socorita. This was a well timed, pre emptive strike.

As it turned out we learned the baillif did not arrive until we had left Gaudalajara two months later. The family who leased the place had cut their losses and moved into the other house Socorita had miraculously discovered. Who knows what happened to Teresita, not to mention the many other tenants?

Where is Rogelio, the mariachi with a voice of gold and drinking problem? And Senor Broken Neck, as we called him, looking like an armadillo with his various corsets, neck braces and support systems -- the legacy of a jealous husband hurling him down a flight of stairs -- what became of him? What happened to Miss Americas, part time secretary and call girl with her monstrously, fat baby? Mad Lupe playing Rock Around the Clock at full volume day and night to stave off the domestic boredom and neglect of her husband who worked in the ticket booth of the nearby porno-show? Felipe, the Indian boy from Chiapas state and resident peeping-tom caught in flagrante many times spying on women through the bathroom skylight? And where are Lordes and Angel, the love bird newly weds whose nocturnal pantings, sighing and screaming kept everyone awake into the early hours? What became of the Lone Ranger, the old man in immaculate charro cowboy hat who lived next to us in the boiler room with only a radio and bottle of tequila for company?

And Socorita? Undoubtedly she survived in her new house on Calle Modero (at least for a while) letting rooms to unsuspecting tenants and ocassional foreigners who passed through Guadalajara. Though many feminists might envy her skills, in a country like Mexico she was sadly alienated from most of her compatriots hence explaining her preference for Gringo company. She felt that through long habit of association she was after a fashion a foreigner herself.

"You just can't trust Mexicans", she once confided cheekily.

It was at that point that we had entered and departed Socorita's life.

***

Medellín : A City to Die For

2011-11-25T00:49:00.000-08:00

We decided to continue up the slope in search of a vantage point on the mountain from which to see Medellin, and to admire it as a single entity with the objectivity distance lends, with neither prejudice nor love. On the left going up, on an old property, a steep bit of hillside with a withered, abandonned banana grove on it, you could read the following notice in crooked and half erased capital letters, like a Dracula poster: THE DUMPING OF BODIES IS FORBIDDEN

-- Fernando Vallejo, Our Lady of the Assassins, 1994.

Fernando Vallejo's novel written in the mid 1990s comes as quite a shock for someone in 2011 whose impressions of Colombia's second city are overwhelmingly positive. Forgive the double entendre but Medellin is a city "to die for".

There are few cities in the world so perfectly situated. There is a surprising sense of space and light, abundant vegetation and a freshness. Most other South American cities are choking on their own chaotic sprawl born out of no or little planning. Medellin is orderly. modern and looks to the future. A metro system runs the length and breadth of the valley in which Medellin sits -- something you would only expect to find in a French or Spanish city of similar size. Cutting edge architecture is on show across the city. Affluent neighbourhoods are abuzz night and day --- tasteful boutique hotels, clubs and outdoor cafes, sushi bars and yoga studios, large swathes of tastefully landscaped parkland cut through the urban landscape, spanking new shopping centres, clean, well maintained streets. Neon. Outdoor gyms. Fashion. Orderly flows of traffic and correctly parked cars.

In Vallejo's city, however, bodies are unceremoniously dumped on roadsides and in vacant lots. A look or bad word from a passerby is rewarded with a slug of lead between the eyes. Myriad car jackings, robberies and assaults at gun or knife point are a daily occurance. Vallejo's Medellin is the territory of narco traffickers openly launching fireworks into the warm night sky from the city's central plaza each time a shipment of cocaine is successfully landed on North American shores. Child assassins (sicarrios) gun down rivals at their masters' behest fuelling a never ending cycle of killings and revenge killings, the violence spilling over into the lives of the general public who live in total fear

How could life have changed so dramatically, so quickly -- at least on the surface?

Nowadays even Medellin's barrios housing the greater majority of its citizens -- its poor -- look stunning (at least from a distance) stretching upwards around the valley. On a fine day the warmth of the ramshackle terracotta, brick buildings provide a perfect looking contrast to the deep green hillsides along the valley's soaring heights.

In Vallejo's Medellin of the the 90s, the city morgue has queues at its door. The post mortem report and court summary have, for this writer become the most relevant and illuminating of genres :

My invisible man's eyes lighted on the 'observations' they'd left on a desk about the removal of a body: 'the apparent motive was to steal the victim's trainers', it said, 'but of the real facts and the authors of the crime nothing is known'. And it went on to speak of wounds to the vena cava and cardio-respiratory arrest after the hypovolemic shock caused by a wound from a sharp instrument. I loved the language. The precision of the words, the conviction of the style ...The best writers in Colombia are judges and their clerks, and there's no better novel than a court summary.

I find myself, however, defending Medellin -- and Colombia in general -- whenever I am asked about its reputation for violence. That nothing even vaguely threatening looked like happening to us during our stay there could be put down to good luck I suppose. Reading Vallejo's Our Lady of the Assassins , however, seems very much like reading a novel about some other notorious metropolis : Cape Town, Caracas, Mogadishu perhaps -- certainly not contemporary Medellin that to us felt perfectly safe and civilized.

***

Beneath the Surface : A Day in L.A

2011-06-25T23:11:00.001-07:00

Here we are (again) in the City of the Angels for a day on our way somewhere else. Why on Earth would you deliberately come here? Hollywood? Disneyland? The malls? The cheap, all-you-can-eat restaurants?

And you wonder : Is there really anything beneath the surface of this place?

We slept, ate California Rolls from the 7-11, lounged around the pool for an afternoon ... and then we were off back to the airport and on our way South, to the "real America."

How uncharitable we were towards Los Angeles ... the first time around.

Much to our surprise we have enjoyed the brief stopover on the way home. We look forward to the heat after the chilliness of Bogota. And after all that gluggy Ajiaco, yukka, rice, beans and those tiresome Arepas, we dream about popping those 7-11 Californian rolls into our mouths once more.

We marvel at just how we, like everyone else at the local Sizzlers, can pile up our plates to obscene proportions. The waitress is puzzled that we don't go back for seconds and thirds.

And that hotel pool. Towering palms against a clear, blue sky. Glistening, oiled skins. You feel as if you are in a David Hockney painting.

Planes from across the globe rumble overhead, suddenly appearing out of nowhere, perilously low as they track their way down onto the network of nearby tarmacs.

Unexpected gifts and unusual sights. Branches of ripe apricots hanging over fences offer themselves to us along Airport Boulevard. Magnolia buds (or are they stamens?) orphaned on hot asphalt.

Slipping back and forth between Spanish and English is common here, though there is surprise when I slide into Spanish, an obvious outsider. Spanish is everywhere. You hear it on the bus, along supermarket aisles, it floats up stair wells and along the bare, concrete avenues.

And you'll hear and see foreign languages and foreigners of all sorts in this city. (They've arrived on those same planes that come hurtling down to earth when you least expect it).

Foreigners have been passing through LA for some time. I always think how incongruous, how strange, it must have been for a poet like Brecht -- a committed Communist -- taking refuge here in the 40s. Was he Conflicted? Appalled? Or genuinely appreciative of the same American generosity we ourselves have unexpectedly discovered?

(I suspect he secretly enjoyed this Capitalist paradise as much as us.)

Brecht's mixed feelings were obvious in Contemplating Hell:

Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,
My brother Shelley found it to be a place
Much like the city of London. I,
Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,
Find, contemplating Hell, that is
Must be even more like Los Angeles.

Also in Hell,
I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless

Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which
Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.
And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty,
Even when inhabited.

Even the houses in Hell are not all ugly.
But concern about being thrown into the street
Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less
Than the inhabitants of the barracks.

(source: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/bertolt_brecht/poems/3862)

A day trip to Santa Monica (where Brecht once lived on 25th Street). The beach and the boardwalk. It's carnival atmosphere. The merry go round and the barnicle encrusted pillons of the pier. The soaring, art-deco perfection of the Clock Tower Building.

A perfect day and no more time to explore a little more ... beneath the surface.

***

A Well Worn Cassette

2011-04-01T20:40:00.000-07:00

***

I picked up a cheap copy of Mercedes Sosa Live at Opera Teatro Colón somewhere along Avenida Corrientes, Buenos Aires, in 1989.

That well worn cassette plays in the background as I write this posting. The recording never fails to strike a deep emotional chord. It may well be my favourite album and I have played it to death over the last twenty years or so. The tape is beginning to squeak somewhere between Gracias a La Vida and Como La Cigarra and the brittle, plastic cassette is cracking. I've trawled the internet for replacements of those songs - not a difficult task - but without actually buying a new copy of the recording I realise I will have to say goodbye to an extraordinary cultural and political event captured on tape. The presence of the audience in that recording as they sing and clap along, applaud and cry out, is like no other I have ever come across. There are subtle political associations, a subtext of communication between the cantante and her listeners, which is quite startling.

Listening to the crowd, tuning in to their emotion, seems as much a part of this recording as the incredibly moving songs delivered by Mercedes Sosa (1935 – 2009) herself.

I had no idea about the political and emotional significance of Live at Opera Teatro Colón until an Argentinian friend enlightened me. The discovery of those songs -- while learning the Spanish language -- accompanied my first meetings with Argentinians and Chileans back then. They related to me the atrocious sufferings they, family members and friends had been subjected to in that period.I began to see why those songs provided the consolation that they did.

The concerts given by Mercedes in 1982 took place during the dying days of the country's vicious military regime which had been weakened by its own huburistic and suicidal campaign in the Malvinas/Falklands. Returning to her homeland was an act of courage by Sosa. She was banned in Argentina and sought asylum in Europe after being arrested and searched on stage at a concert in 1979.

And so here you will find the lyrics (in Spanish) with English translations of the two tracks mentioned above. You will also notice that I've embedded YouTube clips of Mercedes Sosa performing the songs in this post.

Gracias a La Vida, by Chilean songwriter, Violetta Para, even in translation, has a power and delicacy anyone can appreciate. The song's quiet and confident faith in the goodness and value of life (written at a time when Chile was in the throes of Pinochet's terror) is striking.

Gracias A La Vida – Violeta Parra

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.
Me dió dos luceros, que cuando los abro.
Perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco
Y en el alto cielo su fondo estrellado,
Y en las multitudes
El hombre que yo amo.

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.
Me ha dado el oìdo que en todo su ancho
Graba noche y dìa grillos y canarios
Martillos, turbinas, ladrillos, chubascos
Y la voz tan tierna de mi bien amado.

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.
Me ha dado el sonido y el abecedario.
Con él las palabras que pienso y declaro,
“Madre,” “amigo,” “hermano,” y luz alumbrando
La ruta del alma del que estoy amando.

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.
Me ha dado la marcha de mis pies cansados.
Con ellos anduve ciudades y charcos,
Valles y desiertos, montañas y llanos,
Y la casa tuya, tu calle y tu patio.

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.
Me diò el corazòn que agita su marco.
Cuando miro el fruto del cerebro humano,
Cuando miro al bueno tan lejos del malo.
Cuando miro el fondo de tus ojos claros.

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.
Me ha dado la risa, me ha dado el llanto.
Asì yo distingo dicha de quebranto,
Los dos materiales que forman mi canto,
Y el canto de ustedes que es el mismo canto
Y el canto de todos que es mi propio canto.

Thank you to Life – Poem by Violeta Parra

(English translation by William Morín - with my own changes and adaptions)

Thank you to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me two beams of light, that when opened,
Can perfectly distinguish black from white
And in the sky above, her starry backdrop,
And from within the multitude
The one that I love.

Thank you to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me an ear that, in all of its width
Records—night and day—crickets and canaries,
Hammers and turbines, bricks and storms,
And the tender voice of my beloved.

Thank you to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me sounds and the alphabet.
With them the words that I think with and declare:
“Mother,” “Friend,” “Brother” and the light shining.
The route of the soul from which comes love.

Thank you to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me the ability to walk with my tired feet.
With them I have traversed cities and puddles
Valleys and deserts, mountains and plains
And your house, your street and your backyard.

Thank you to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me a heart, that causes my frame to shudder.
When I see the fruit of the human brain,
When I see good so far from bad,
When I look deep into your clear eyes …

Thank you to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me laughter and it gave me longing.
With them I distinguish happiness and pain—
The two materials from which my songs are formed,
And your song, as well, which is the same song.
And everyone’s song, which is my very own song.

***

In the early 1980s, Como la Cigarra (Like the Cicada) by María Elena Walsh, an Argentinian of mixed Irish and Spanish background, became something of an unofficial anthem for those Argentinians who had suffered the horrors of the junta. Its theme of rebirth in the face of extreme adversity spoke to the painful experiences of the poet's fellow countrymen and women.

Como la Cigarra – María Elena Walsh

Tantas veces me mataron,
tantas veces me morí,
sin embargo estoy aquí
resucitando.
Gracias doy a la desgracia
y a la mano con puñal,
porque me mató tan mal,
y seguí cantando.

Cantando al sol,
como la cigarra,
después de un año
bajo la tierra,
igual que sobreviviente
que vuelve de la guerra.

Tantas veces me borraron,
tantas desaparecí,
a mi propio entierro fui,
solo y llorando.
Hice un nudo del pañuelo,
pero me olvidé después
que no era la única vez
y seguí cantando.

Cantando al sol,
como la cigarra,
después de un año
bajo la tierra,
igual que sobreviviente
que vuelve de la guerra.

Tantas veces te mataron,
tantas resucitarás
cuántas noches pasarás
desesperando.
Y a la hora del naufragio
y a la de la oscuridad
alguien te rescatará,
para ir cantando.

Cantando al sol,
como la cigarra,
después de un año
bajo la tierra,
igual que sobreviviente
que vuelve de la guerra.

Like the Cicada – María Elena Walsh

http://lyricstranslate.com

So many times I was killed
many times I died
none the less I'm still here
coming back to life.

I'm grateful to adversity
and the hand holding the knife
for it did a bad job at killing me
And I carried on singing.

I'm singing to the sun
Like the cicada does
After a year under the ground
Like a survivor
Returning from war

So many times I vanished
Many times I dissapeared
I attended my own funeral
alone and crying.

I made a knot in my handkerchief*
To try and not forgot
This wasn't the first time
and I carried on singing

I'm singing to the sun
Like the cicada does
After a year under the ground
Like a survivor
Returning from war

So many times you were killed
And as many times you'll come back to life
How many nights you'll spend
in desperation.
And when you start drowning
and the darkness comes
Somebody will rescue you
and you'll carry on singing

I'm singing to the sun
Like the cicada does
After a year under the ground
Like a survivor
Returning from war

***

My Earliest Memory?

2011-03-19T01:31:00.000-07:00

I am standing just inside the cyclone-wire gate on a cracked, concrete footpath leading up to front door of the house where I first lived. It is late in the afternoon and the sun hangs low over a rusty, corrugated iron fence dividing our house and the neighbouring local milkbar. I remember a faded and flaking ad for Tarax lemonade painted along the full length of the milkbar wall abutting our property but my mother tells me there was no such ad.

***
The French novelist, Nathalie Sarraute wrote her "autobiography", Childhood (1983) in the form of a dialogue between her octogenerian self and an imaginary double. The important people and events in Sarraute's life - her father, mother and step mother - only exist as they are described via the recollections, musings, probing, questioning and argument between the writer and her double.

The work begins with an argument between these "selves" and the reason for wanting to write about childhood in the first place:

-Then you really are going to do that?? "Evoke your childhood memories"...

How these words embarass you, you don't like them. But you have to admit that they are the only appropriate words. You want to "evoke your memories"... there's no getting away from it, that's what it is.

- Yes, I can't help it, it tempts me, I don't know why ...

- It could be .. mightn't it be ... we sometimes don't realize ... it could be that your forces are declining ...

***

I suddenly see one, two, three boys leap over the tin fence as if they are fleeing the scene of a crime or making a quick get away. Their silhouettes are frozen against the dazzling background of a sinking sun. It is as if they are moving across my line of vision frame by frame, the action unfolding as if thumbing through an old fashioned flick book.

It must be late afternoon, early evening, about six thirty. It is getting cold and shadows are lengthening. I suspect it is Autumn. I look along the path directly before me and up through the wide open door of the house. At the end of the long passage way leading down to the main living area, a single bulb hangs illuminating part of the room. I am attracted by that glow and warmth. I start my journey following the light and the sound of voices towards their source.

***

Natalie Sarraute is known for her theory of "tropisms" - a scientific term used to describe the natural tendency of plants to grow in the direction of heat and light. For Sarraute these "tropes" in literary or linguistic terms are barely perceptible movements or communications that provide the basis of human language and conversation. Hers is a writing of gesture.

It is often thought of the French New Novelists, of whom Sarraute was a major though reluctant figure, that "the personal" is discarded in favour of cold, objectifying narratives which reduce characters to the status of pawns in some experimental game. This is not so and the story of Natalie's childhood subtly emerges like a seedling pushing up through the earth of her past life via this strange discussion with her double.

It is true, however, that the emphasis on innovation expressed by writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras and others led to a new focus on dislocated perception with an attempt to capture "character" in a particular psychological instant. The stories unfold episodically, almost through a series of flashes rather than a traditional linear narrative.

It comes as no great surprise then that the New Novelists were deeply influenced by techniques from the cinema — montages, fade-outs, and the literary equivalent of camera close-ups—as well as obscured chronologies and repeated scenes presented from differing perspectives. This made for a major development in Literature and some very notable cross overs into film, for instance the collaboration between Robbe Grillet and Alain Resnais on Last Year at Marienbad and Marguerite Duras' adaptation of her own novel into a screen play for Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Whatsmore and contrary to some critics' pronouncements, this new approach did not lead to the rejection of writing memoire, biography or autobiography: the most "personal" of genres. Some of the most imaginative forms of autobiography seem to have emerged, amongst these nouveau romanciers late in their careers,including Robbe Grillet's, Ghosts In the Mirror, Duras' The Sea Wall and The Lover as well as Sarraute's Childhood.

***

It could be that your powers are declining ...

So what is it that motivates a foray into writing about childhood? It's as if actually catching sight of "the end", of feeling it as real, has the writer bolting in the opposite direction seeking refuge.

The process of dredging up these fragments brings with it - as I am experiencing myself as I write - a mistrust of the veracity of the memory. I can see why Sarraute employed another self to contest what's remembered, to question the validity of the writer's memories which rise to the surface through a filter of other remembrances and stray perceptions.

***

The floorboards creak as I move along the hall. It seems to take forever, one plodding step after another. I am afraid of the dark and anxious to get where I am going. I am relieved when I arrive. The room is bathed in the glow of dull light emanating from the light bulb overhead and what I think is a fire place. I remember shiny, black briquettes overflowing from a heshin bag which sat next to the fireplace. My mother assures me, however, that there was no fireplace in that room but only a kerosene heater.

Broken briquettes. Coal dust. So many of the houses we lived in had fireplaces or wood chip heaters. But come to think of it - the heady smell of kerosene is also still with me. Lots of the houses we lived in during my childhood had kerosene heaters. So memories overlap and collapse into one another. Perhaps it is the red hot mesh of the burner radiating against the silvery, metal reflectors of the heater that I recall? I still feel my scorched skin from getting up too close. A whiff of black smoke that rises from the wire cone when lit. The heat generated from the mesh blazes orange. It emits a pungeant and consoling smell of burning fuel.

***

I remember a dog, a yellow dog, its tail wagging. It has dewy, black eyes. The dog’s muzzle is at eye level and she gives me a strong, sudden lick of affection. This causes me to stumble backwards and upend myself. I lie on my back and let out a howl and am aware of being picked up and consoled – “there, there” - though I wonder now if those words were even spoken in English. I am being rocked from side to side and shaken up and down.

Only recently I found a photo.

My father nurses me on one knee and the yellow dog – a Golden Labrador puppy - stares innocently ahead.

"M. e D. e il nostro carne Sindi" (M. and D. and our dog Cindy)

This note is scrawled in Italian on the reverse side of the photo. I am barely eighteen months old. I figure it must be early 1965.

Could the photo be the evidence of this, my earliest memory? Or am I folding the photo, an artefact from another time brimming with other sentimental associations, into the story?

The impossibility of remembering with any certainty.

***

Cacoyannis' Trojan Women (1971)

2011-03-11T22:55:00.000-08:00

Ragged female figures stumble through an obliterated landscape. Troy has been reduced to rubble. There are no gods or heros in Cacoyannis' 1971 adaptation of Euripides' Troades. No Hector, no Priam, no Paris no Achilles. They are dead. The "glamour" of the Homeric war narrative is no where to be found in this film. The drama shows what war means for women and children in defeat. Before us the wives and daughters of heroes and common folk alike are being shoved along a road like cattle. With their men already dead on the battle field or executed they are are subsequently subjected to being brutalized, raped and having their children kidnapped. And slowly we become aware of the Greek ships sitting off screen ready to transport their human cargo into slavery and sexual servitude.

Cacoyannis' film -- like Euripides play -- needs no special effects, no blood and guts to do its work. The dazed women of Troy's Royal family - Cassandra, Andromache and Hecuba - barely keep their sanity as they deliver their lines.

Here are excerpts from my "favourite" scenes:

Andromache (played by Vanessa Redgrave)

Andromache arrives on screen at first admonishing the women for their misery and self pity ... "our men have died nobly on the battle field and we women of Troy should be proud" she tells them, strutting defiantly before her Greek captors. This histrionic moment is short lived as Andromache learns what is to become of her : she is to be shipped to Greece to become the concubine of Achilles' teenaged son, Neoptolemus. But worse is to come. Andromache is then informed that her tiny son, Astyanax, has been condemned to death. The Greek leaders are afraid that the boy will grow up to avenge his father Hector, and rather than take this chance, they plan to throw him off from the battlements. And so he is. Andromache is carted off to the ships ... her husband's armour - emptied of its hero - clanging and jangling like a cow bell with every lurch and bump over the dusty road. Her humiliation is complete.

Hecuba (played by Katharine Hepburn)

The Greek soldier, Talthybius, returns carrying with him the body of Astyanax on Hector's shield. Andromache is already on her way to Greece and it is left to Hecuba to bury her grandson. The scene is hard to stomach - how would anybody cope with such a pile up of personal tragedy? Her youngest daughter, Polyxena, has been brutally murdered and thrown on Achille's tomb as a sacrifice, Cassandra, like Andromache, has been trundled off raving mad crying for her mother and now this ... the broken body of a tiny child, her grandson, presented to her like some smashed up piece of meat on a plate. The Chorus of women -- the civilians -- who are perhaps the worst of victims lament the loss of their land, their children and their future. Hecuba mourns this catastrophe and has been reduced to the status of refugee and beggar like her subjects. She will end her days in a foreign land as a slave to Odyesseus.

Helen (played by Irene Papas)

This scene is impressive for its sheer incongruity. Irene Papas, the best Helen imaginable, is cool and totally in control of the situation - unlike her Trojan counterparts. She is beautifully dressed, not a hair out of place and every line of her defense is delivered to full effect.

This is a court room scene played out in the dust. Meneleus stands in judgement of his wife spurred on by the crowd baying for her blood. She is, remember, blamed by everyone -- Royal and Commoner, Greek and Trojan alike -- for the war and teribble fate that has befallen them. Meneleus struggles with his desire for revenge and a desire to have her back. Helen is a defence lawyer, a rhetorician, who when given the opportunity argues her own case succinctly.

She asks Meneleus:

My husband - must I die at your hands? ...Is that your justice? I was forced by violence. I lived a life that had no joy, no triumphe. In bitterness I lived ... I wish (falling back into his arms, the camera panning the curve of her naked back) ... that like a painter, I could wipe out the beauty from my face and have an ugly one

It is claimed by some that Helen too is a female victim of war. Whether she is a genuine victim is debatable. In Cacoyannis' film she is not represented so. A Greek audience watching the play in 415 BC would have already known that Meneleus will let Helen live and take her back. Irene Papas' smirk as she makes her way through the hostile crowd towards the ships in Cacoyannis' film, suggests a quietly confident knowledge of her success and survival.

Endnote

Euripides' play was performed not long after the Peloponnesian War, it is often considered a commentary on the capture of the Aegean island of Melos and the subsequent slaughter and subjugation of its populace by the Athenians. Cacoyannis' film appeared smack bang in the middle of the Vietnam War and I wonder if like ancient audiences, cinema goers in 1971 made the link and were affected by the film as deeply as I am, 40 years later in 2011.

***

Writing & Work : A Sharp Nosed Insight

2010-12-18T21:19:00.000-08:00

So I would have you love writing more than your mother, and have you recognise its beauty. For it is greater than any profession; there is none like it on earth ... By comparison, the life of the craftsman or labourer is miserable. The reed cutter is slaughtered by mosquitoes; the bricklayer is filthy and exhausted; the washerman does the laundry on the shore, neighbour to the crocodiles; the gardener spends his morning drenching leeks, his evening in the mire ... So it happens that he rests dead to his name, aged more than any other profession ... I see the coppersmith at his toil, at the mouth of his furnace, his fingers like crocodile skin, his stench worse than fish eggs ... The barber shaves into the end of the evening, continually at call, continually on his elbow, pushing himself continually from street to street, looking for people to shave. He does violence to his arms to fill his belly, like bees that eat at their toil ... The mat weaver lives inside the weaving house, he is worse off than a woman, with his knees up to his stomach, unable to breathe in any air. If he wastes any daytime not weaving, he is beaten with 50 lashes. He has to give a sum to the doorkeeper, to be allowed to go out to the light of day. The peasant fares worst of all : he complains eternally, his voice rises higher than the birds, with his fingers turned into sores ... He is too exhausted to report for marsh work, and has to exist in rags ... He reaches his home in utter poverty, downtrodden too much to walk ... If you know how to write, that is a better life for you than these professions I describe ... Look, no scribe will ever be lacking in food or the things of the House of the King, may he live, prosper and be well!

Excerpt from The Instructions of Dua-Khety (circa 2000 BC)

I have just finished reading Peter Parson's book, City of the Sharp Nosed Fish - Greek Lives in Roman Egypt (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).

The "sharp nosed fishy " city referred is "Oxyrhynchus" in upper Egypt, famed for its sand covered dumps excavated by Grenfell and Hunt between 1897 - 1907. More than 50,000 fragments of papyrus spanning the Greek and Roman periods of colonisation were unearthed.

Many lost works of Egyptian, Greek and Roman classical literature were re-discovered as well as censored Gnostic Christian gospels. Apart from a huge number of everyday documents - accounts, tax returns, census material, invoices, receipts, correspondence on administrative, military, religious, economic, and political matters, certificates and licenses - personal letters and notes of all kinds were also recovered.

Together the texts provide an amazing vision of a Roman/Hellenic colonial society in late classical and early 'Christian' times - the best we have.

An important document, the Instructions of Dua-Kety (see above)aka the Satire of the Trades, is written by a father to a son encouraging him to take on the profession of a Scribe. The text was copied by student scribes for over a thousand years and the full version we have today was found in one of the uncovered rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus. It provides an interesting perspective on what it is to be a writer - as opposed to a member of other professions. It provides a fascinating insight into - and disdain for - blue collar worker in ancient times. The "satire" itself is I think a beautiful piece of writing in its own right and reminded me of Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man in its breadth of vision and poetry.

A full version of the Instructions of Dua-Kety can be found here.

For more about Oxyrhynchus visit this site.

Image: A private letter on papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, written in a Greek hand of the second century AD.

Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons

***

Maninjau

2010-10-07T16:35:00.000-07:00

A poem about Lake Maninjau in Western Sumatra for you to listen to as well as a slide show to make up for the inability of the spoken to word to capture the beauty of the place. But then can photos ever really convey the fullness of such an experience, of that being there?

Maninjau

Bayur Village
Lake Maninjau, Sumatra

Twisted, thick boughs of prickly Somona,
Red skin - a deceptively, aggressive sun,
Dream vignettes of home,
And an ant universe full of movement.

Perfectly formed mangoes are ripening in their own time
While fishermen, knee deep in amber water, scoop lake snails into their nets.
A tree of tangled swallows' nests,
Seed pods exploding into soft, wads of floss.

Yellowing palm fronds, tiger striped by the shadows
Rustle in the wind which skims the lake each afternoon .
Delicate flowers whose names nobody knows.
What protection are you afforded?

A fortress of rice paddies and fish ponds?

You will not last.

Always in the distance ...

Clouds struggling - and failing - to breach the scarred, volcanic walls of Lake Maninjau itself

To A Little Radio

2010-10-04T04:34:00.000-07:00

Du kleiner Kasten, den ich flüchtend trug,
Daß meine Lampen mir auch nicht zerbrächen,
Besorgt vom Haus zum Schiff, vom Schiff zum Zug,
Daß meine Feinde weiter zu mir sprächen,
An meinem Lager und zu meiner Pein,
Der letzten nachts, der ersten in der Früh,
Von ihren Siegen und von meiner Müh:
Versprich mir, nicht auf einmal stumm zu sein!

Here I am on the porch of our lonely, lakeside losman in Western Sumatra, twisting the dial of my short wave radio in search of a stray English language station, a simple night’s entertainment.

And there we were in the pitch darkness of a two man tent somewhere in Europe angling the antenna after a hard day cycling back roads and mountain passes.

Lilliburlero … familiar GMT pips … “This is London” … the consoling presence of the BBC. Deutsche Welle. Radio Netherlands. Strains of Yankee Doodle Dandy prompting an immediate twiddle of the dial as the Voice of America beams in with typically strident, propagandistic tones. Others ride on the wave of the English language —- Moscow, Beijing, Bucharest, Stockholm and everywhere in between.

I have always carried a radio with me wherever in the world I have journeyed. Internet may have largely superceded the airwaves, but still a radio is a necessary travel item which knows no borders and can be used in any situation.

Brecht — in the most desperate of times — understood “that little box” links you back to your homeland, your language, your culture - wherever you are - for better or for worse:

You little box I carried on that trip
Concerned to save your works from getting broken
Fleeing from house to train, from train to ship
So I might hear the hated jargon spoken.
Beside my bedside and to give me pain
Last thing at night, once more as dawn appears
Shouting their victories and my worst fears:
Promise at least you won’t go dead again! *

Brecht - To A Little Radio (1942)*

Out of the blue, quite literally, an Aussie accent. Radio Australia. The signal waxes and wanes. The Aussie voice blares for a moment and then just as suddenly evaporates back into the ether.

A pang of homesickness.

*Translation by John Willett in “Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956” © 1979 Methuen London Ltd.

Set to Music by Hanns Eisler
Hollywood Songbook (1938 -43)
http://eislermusic.com

***

Last Year at Medanbad

2010-10-04T04:16:00.001-07:00

Medan, Northern Sumatra

…scultured portals, ranks of doors, galleries, transverse corridors leading to deserted salons encrusted with the ornamentation of another age. Silent rooms where footsteps are absorbed by carpets so heavy, so thick that one hears no step as if the very ear were far away, far away from the numb, barren decor, far from this frieze beneath the cornice with its branches and garlands like dead leaves …

L’Année Dernière à Marienbad, Alain Resnais/ Alain Robbe Grillet, 1961

An empty hotel. A hotel from another century. A hotel in the international style of the late 1950s. Hotel Danau Toba Internasional, Medan —- and not another guest in sight. They’re here of course. We’ve heard them in their rooms. A sudden, galloping snatch of Bahasa. Muffled, fragments of English from behind thick walls. But no physical evidence of their existences.

In the lobby - sparkling rippled marble and shimmering, cheap glass chandeliers everywhere. There’s a smiling, neatly dressed concierge. Two smiling, neatly dressed staff at Reception. and a smiling, neatly dressed doorman. They perform their functions adequately. They move through their paces. The only sign of the “Duty Manager” is the one which sits on a heavy mahogony desk designating human absence.

The Japanese restaurant, the Old English Tavern, the Family Karoke Lounge and the Gift Shop with its handicrafts and souvenirs, all are “tutup”, all are “closed” —- I suspect they have been for some time.

You look out on lush, perfectly clipped lawns, a garden brimming with bourganvillea and palms. Stillness. There are forlorn islands of plastic garden furniture under blue, canvas umbrellas —- all without people.

And the waters of the “free form” pool with its kidney-shaped curves, cascading waterfall and slippery slide shimmers without a single swimmer.

this posting inspired by an old favourite of mine …

***

Sins of the Husband - Part 1?

2010-07-10T04:37:00.000-07:00

This could be the first in a very long series of domestic transgressions committed (and documented) by yours truly. I couldn't resist taking a photo of what I found at the foot of the stairs the other day. The thongs, slippers, shoes, runners and sandals in the picture mysteriously appeared strewn from one end of the house to the other. Worst of all, this footwear - according to a reliable source - is routinely "retrieved" and placed in such pointed arrangements for my immediate attention and action.

Future instalments of Sins of the Husband will include:

- an in depth investigation into toothpaste speckles inexplicably left on the bathroom mirror (electric toothbrush technique may need improvement);
- coffee grounds left daily in the too tightly screwed cafetera which on their release spill out over the kitchen floor and need to be mopped up by one angry, interested party;
- dirty socks and undies thrown into the clothes basket which is full of clean washing fresh from the clothes line;
- food dropped between my bowed, husbandly legs at the table. This has led to a whole set of dining room chairs having to be reupholstered in wipable, food-safe vinyl;
- tangled shirts and trousers thrown willy-nilly into the washing machine complete with pocketted shopping dockets, tissues, notes and coins which rather impacts the quality of the wash. You know, the sticky, "snow storm" effect on fluffy towels, etc?

Oh yes, and much to my embarrassment ... and much worse than toothpaste speckles on the mirror ... residual evidence of husbandly number 2s left in the bowl. I blame it on the porcelain of the new loo which requires a few more good blastings to improve slip value and efficiency. It has been pointed out to me, however, that there are NEVER any traces of wifely number 2s left on the back of the bowl so admitedly the problem may need reassessment.

Please do add to the list of husbandly misdemeanors if you know of any - but surely, such crimes are rare amongst us men, or at the very least, are few and far between?

Arigato Gozaimshita Pompeii

2010-07-04T07:21:00.000-07:00

A recent book hunting mission to my local St. Vinnies delivered into my greedy, grasping hands The Romans by Karl Christ. Like many of the books I come across on my op shop forays I had previously owned a copy and thus knew in advance the pleasures that lay between its covers. Professor Christ is an eminent classical scholar and his book is full of fascinating text, gorgeous plates, maps and plans. Catching sight of The Romans on the shelf at St.Vinnies I elbowed aside a spotty faced competitor - "too young to appreciate such stuff" I told myself - self justifying my desperate and unseemly lunge forward for the prize.

I've spent several hours now with my nose between its pages but just noticed something very strange about the book's glossy dust jacket - something quite extraordinary, ground breaking, revolutionary, something that might change our whole understanding of Roman, if not world, history.

The Japanese were at Pompeii!

By that I don't mean your ubiquitious, infectiously happy, camera toting types piling out of tour buses and swarming over the ruins which are already threatened by Naple's encroaching suburban sprawl.

I mean the Japanese visited the ancient Roman town before its cataclysmic, volcanic demise in 79 AD --- and I have proof.

Look closely at the illustrations above. You may recognise the famous wall painting from Pompeii of Terentius Neo and his wife which is now safely housed in the Museo Nazionale di Napoli. What shocked me is the fact noone has noticed the image in the background of what looks like three teenaged, Asian girls accompanied by a big, fat Tele Tubby like creature with an idiot look on its face and the word BARBAPAPPA (?) scrawled in faded blue letters.

Had the wall painting been vandalised by a trio of crazed, Japanese school girls? Impossible. Had someone at Chatto and Windus played a cruel trick on their employers with the result that a whole print run had to be dumped before its release? Hmmm. Maybe ...( but wouldn't the company simply keep the hardcovers and replace the dust jackets?)

I look at my copy of The Romans more carefully and run my thumb nail across its shiny surface. It hits an edge. I realise the picture of the Japanese girls and Barbapappa is some kind of ingeniously planted sticker which blends in against the golden background of the painting. It appears the oriental trompe l'oeil and trick has been played by one reader upon another - in this case, on me.

I've always admired the portrait of Terentius and his young wife. They stand before the viewer with the refined air of a couple of intellectuals. He is holding a papyrus scroll against his chin, while she has her stylus and diptych open, as if in the act of finishing off a poem. But something doe not feel right about the portrait. Terentius and his wife - in cahoots with the artist - were themselves pulling a swifty on the viewer. In reality (according to the curators at the Museo Nazionale di Napoli)Signore and Signora Neo were humble folk --- bakers --- and certainly not intellectuals. Here are a couple of nouveau riche poseurs putting on airs and wanting to be remembered for posterity in a manner well removed from their humble origins. Their tools of trade were not the stylus and the papyrus but the rolling pin and pizza pan!

So a big "arigato gozaimashita" to whoever fiddled with the dust jacket of my book. You got me thinking about that famous portrait and deeper issues of pretense and illusion.

Visit the Museo Nazionale di Napoli online to view and learn more about their magnificent
collection of wall paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum

***

Getting Pissed in Ancient Rome

2010-06-30T04:05:00.000-07:00

Even the best beer swilling Aussie would be hard pressed to drink a Roman under the table --- a Roman of the ancient kind that is.

Any member of the upper class worthy of a local Etrurian Red, fruity Graviscanum or top notch Falernian was keen to be the first to empty his cratera (drinking dish) in a single swig.

Getting pissed in ancient Rome was an art form. At the end of the main course diners often continued their drinking turning what might have started out as a restrained and tasteful affair into a frenzied accommissatio - quite literally a skoling match. This drunken cavorting would of course be accompanied by dancers, circus performers, striptease artists and whores.

Many a Roman dinner party apparently unravelled into an all-out orgy especially in the reign of Nero which was satirized with great humour by Petronius:

The banquet began all over again, and Quartilla challenged us to a drinking-bout, the crash of the cymbals lending ardor to her revel. A catamite appeared, the stalest of all mankind, well worthy of that house. Heaving a sigh, he wrung his hands until the joints cracked, and spouted out the following verses,

"Hither, hither quickly gather, pathic companions boon;
Artfully stretch forth your limbs and on with the dance and play!
Twinkling feet and supple thighs and agile buttocks in tune,
Hands well skilled in raising passions, Delian eunuchs gay!"

When he had finished his poetry, he slobbered a most evil-smelling kiss upon me, and then, climbing upon my couch, he proceeded with all his might and main to pull all of my clothing off. I resisted to the limit of my strength. He manipulated my member for a long time, but all in vain. Gummy streams poured down his sweating forehead, and there was so much chalk in the wrinkles of his cheeks that you might have mistaken his face for a roofless wall, from which the plaster was crumbling in a rain.

(Chapter 23. The Satyricon, Petronius, c.27-66 AD --- click here to access the whole hilarious and saucy text)

Good wine from the colonies also flowed at Roman dinner parties --- even if it did possess the foul and resinous tang of the pinewood barrels in which it was transported to the capital. Romans drank about 100 million litres a year, most of the grog having its provenance in Achaea (Greece) or Gaul (France) with some stiff opposition coming from the wine growers at Trier on the Moselle river. Indeed, the poet Ausonius (4 AD) waxed lyrical about the Moselle region and the new German drop which was making a splash in Rome in much the same way high quality Australian labels have 'old world' vinters shaking in their boots today:

What colour paints the river shallows, when
Hesperus has brought the shades of evening.
The Moselle is dyed with the green of her hills; their tops quiver
In the ripples, vine leaves tremble from afar
And the grape clusters swell even in the clear stream

A lot has been written about Bacchus - favourite deity of the empire's drunks, sex addicts and ne'er-do-wells. It was a custom to sometimes throw the last of a particularly good bottle of wine on the floor as an offering to the lewd and bleary eyed deity. All this imbibing and licentiousness sounds a bit on the groggy, sickening side. It's true that belching at a Roman dinner party was perfectly acceptable and Juvenal (c.120 AD) lampooned a lot of this seamy behaviour in his writing. J. had to admit, however, that only the greediest diners and worst drunks "vomited up their meal into pots held by slaves or on to fine mosaic floors."

To be fair the Romans did develop quite a sophisticated quality control system as regards their wines - a kind of ancient "AOC" (Appellation d'origine contrôlée). Not all wine was gut wrenchingly rough or disgustingly resinated à la Grecque.It is the case that Romans drank their wine diluted - sometimes with sea water (yuk!) or else sweetened with honey or spiced for a bit more zing. Most of the stuff was transported and kept in earthen ware amphorae but the better wines were actually bottled in glass. These were marked with a distinguishing pittacium (label) stating their vintage and place of origin. A middle-aged Horace (65 BC) claimed to have drunk a wine older than himself and the Roman Consul Lucius Opimius (121 AD) reputed to have imbibed a fine wine kept for 125 years.

Unlike his decadent upper class counterpart, your average Josephus Blow was unlikely to have participated in such gluttony and inebriation. The Roman working class man was remarkably frugal and the poorest survived on a sparse diet of rancid gruel, a few olives, the odd vegetable, some bread --- and a heminae or two (2 heminae =1.14 pints) of house red from his local taberna. Analysis on skeletons from Pompeii suggest most of the population was chronically malnourished and many showed signs of badly worn vertebrae and joints --- a result no doubt of back breaking manual work.

First century carvings at Ostia suggest that drinking, gambling and snacking on a sausage, bread and seafood was pretty widespread nonetheless --- and of course, if Josephus Blow didn't blow his meagre wage over a game of dice in the taberna, he probably blew it on a blow at the local brothel thereafter. Men and drink --- the same the world over regardless of time, place or class?

Image above: Drinking Contest between Dionysus and Herakles(Roman mosaic from Antioch cir. 250-300 AD)

***

Books in the Blood : Herr Georg Nagel

2010-05-07T04:49:00.000-07:00

Photo: One of these bearded men is my great, great, great grandfather, Georg Nagel, founder of the the first Deutscher Verein in Australia ... which gentleman, however, is a mystery!

Last year I came across an obscure book my brother-in-law had casually borrowed from a public library in a small country town. The book was called, Bendigo – the German Chapter, edited by Frank Cusack and produced by the German Heritage Society of Bendigo in 1998. I flicked through the index and much to my surprise found references to Georg Nagel (variously spelt 'George'), his sister, Charlotte Sophia and the latter's husband, August Wilhelm Heine - all of whom are my ancestors - Georg being the grandfather of my great grandmother, Violet Nagel nee Beaton.

The most astounding discovery was that Georg was founding father of the Bendigo Deutscher Verein (German Society) in the mid 1850s, was president in 1873 and remained a member until his death in 1906.

… the Bendigo Deutscher Verein customarily celebrated its date of origin as 5 September 1869. On that day some fifteen members of the local German community gathered at the Black Swan Hotel in McCrae Street and, apparently, at the instigation of the chief spokesman, Herr Georg Nagel, a local Deutscher Verein was formed … each member [subscribed] a small amount monthly to relieve distress amongst fellow-countrymen. Some twenty or thirty such cases had been helped in recent weeks. The society, it was stressed, would also have a social and cultural side to its activities and business matters dealt with, meetings would conclude with musical entertainment.

( from Bendigo – the German Chapter, ed. Frank Cusack, GHS, Bendigo , 1998. Page 15)

It appears Georg was instrumental in producing a newsletter and organised a library for the German speaking community of Bendigo as well as facilitating welfare support for German families and compatriots less fortunate than himself. I find this interesting as I, the writer of this history, have worked in publishing, teaching and community development all of my life. In the book there are two photos of the Deutscher Verein members – one of the many moustachioed gentleman in the first picture is undoubtedly George, though which one is anyone's guess. There is also a photo of the Picnic Committee in the 1890s and one of the men in the photo may also be Georg. Could one of the women be Caroline Nagel nee Meyer or Georg's sister, Charlotte Sophia?

Georg arrived in the colony before 1849 and was born in Clausthal , Germany . He left Adelaide and went to Bendigo in 1852 and was a miner, mining director and founder of Nagel and Co., at Windmill Hill in 1860. He was a resident of Epsom and White Hills.

His sister, Charlotte Sophia, was born in Bremen in 1833 and arrived in Adelaide on the Courier in 1853. She married August Wilhelm Heine in 1854.

It appears that August Wilhelm arrived on the George Washington in 1849 at Port Adelaide and moved to Bendigo in 1854/1855. He was initially a miner and resided at Sandhurst , Mandurang and then Axe Creek. Georg's Nagel's wife to be Caroline Meyer also arrived on this ship as a 16 year old and must have been very sad on arrival as her mother, Augusta, died on the voyage while giving birth.

Nonetheless, Caroline married my great, great, great grandfather, Georg, a year later at Kooringa, a mining township in the Burra Mine area of northern South Australia. She was seventeen years old.

What is interesting about Axe Creek is that it was the site where two twin brothers, August Friedrich and Carl Heine, are reported to have planted two acres of vines. They later went into partnership with their ambitious cousin, Wilhelm Greiffenhagen, who established the world famous Hercynia Vineyard which - in part - is still in existence under another name.

For more on the history of the Hercynia Vineyard click here.

The Nagels a Generation on …

Georg's son, Adolphus, married Elizabeth, the daughter of George Samsum from Hobart whose father of the same name was convicted in London and transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1830 for ‘stealing a leg of mutton'. George Samsum Snr. ran the Blue Flag Butchery and Grocery Store at Ballarat during the Gold rush.

What is certain is that the Meyers and the Nagels, like my Cornish ancestors, the Rowes, had a history of mining experience in their homeland before leaving for South Australia .

As mentioned above, Caroline and Georg were married in 1850. Like the Cornish, many German miners from the Hartz region of Germany immediately made their way to Burra upon arrival. The connection, once again, to mining is interesting as it would suggest that the Nagels and Meyers were almost certainly miners in Germany . They were in Burra at the same time as the Rowes and seem to have followed an identical path to Bendigo . Indeed, ‘Nagel' and ‘Meyer' are listed as being amongst the wave of migrant families to South Australia assisted by the German government and local authorities in the Hartz region between 1848 and 1854.

Georg and Caroline moved to Bendigo after a year or so and just like my ancestor, Francis Rowe, 'George Nagel' is noted as a signatory to the Bendigo Gold Miners Petition of 1853 – a radical involvement which foreshadowed the 1854 Eureka uprising at Ballarat .

I wonder about Georg Nagel's political affiliations given his involvement in the Bendigo Petition. 1848 was of course the year of the failed German Revolution and the same year in which the family migrated to Australia . There may be no connection and only coincidence but it has been commented upon by many historians that a number of German miners who came to Australia in that time were ‘idealistic' proponents of social change and were very involved in organising at both Bendigo and later at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat.

Georg and Caroline had thirteen children.

• Emma 1851
• Edward 1859 (born White Hills)
• Ernest Alfred 1867-1905 (father of Lisle Nagel & Vernon George Nagel who played cricket for Australia in the Bodyline Series alongside Donald Bradman). Married Elisabeth Faulkner (1874-1961) in Epsom in 1894
• John Henry Ludwig 1874-1875
• Charles 1852 (married Annie Trask in 1888)
• George Owens 1861 at Epsom
• Albert Frederick 1870 (died at birth)
• Adolphus (my great, great grandfather) born 1854 in South Australia , died 1924 in Bendigo . Married Elisabeth Margaret Samsum (1867-1953) in 1891 at Hobart , Tasmania . Three children: Rudolphe August (my great grandfather), William Robert and Doris Alice Elizabeth.
• Francis 1863 at Epsom
• Frederick Leopold 1871-1872 at Sandhurst
• Augusta 1857 – 1943 at Bendigo
• Louis Arthur 1865 at Epsom
• Doris 1872 at Sandhurst, died 1943 in Western Australia . Married Walter Hugh Blackburn in Perth 1905

In a database called German Names from Burra 1845-1851 – A Directory of Early Folk , Georg Nagel (miner) as well as (Augusta) Caroline Meyer and Carl Meyer are mentioned.

Carl is shown to have been a signatory of a petition dated 17/3/1851 to the Lieutenant Governor. The German community wished to swear allegiance to Queen Victoria and become British subjects, but at the same time wished to avoid the long journey to Adelaide required, and thus the loss of income involved.

I have always thought myself a native as I have no knowledge of any other country ...

The longing to become Australian citizens (or British subjects) was very strong and this is shown by the application for naturalisation papers by the family. Georg was granted ‘Naturalization' on the 14 th of October 1851. His application provides some information including his age, address, occupation and place of origin. Georg was a resident of Halston Street , Redruth , South Australia . He was twenty five years old when he applied for citizenship and came from the ‘Bremen Republick' in Germany . He had resided in South Australia for two and half years.

August Wilhelm Heine, who was to become Charlotte Sophia Nagel's husband, was naturalised in 1901 at the ripe, old age of seventy-four. He had been living in Australia for forty-nine years and he and Charlotte were residents of Bellett Street , Camberwell when citizenship was granted.

The Meyer family are named on the shipping list of the George Washington which departed Bremerhaven on the 25 th of October, 1848 and arrived in Adelaide on the 2 nd of March, 1849. There is also mention of some Nagels but these may or may not be related to Georg. It is possible the Nagels arrived earlier. There is no record of them arriving from Bremerhaven on the Auguste nor the Meline (1849), the Ceres (early 1850) or even Skjold in 1841.

It may be that the Nagels departed from a different European port in the period 1848 to 1854.

The George Washington passenger list provided some fascinating information on the Meyers including their occupations, ages and places of residence. As can be ascertained in the excerpt below, Augusta Meyer died along with her nineteen year old son, (Carl) Ernst during the voyage. Many other passengers on the boat also perished so I presume there was an outbreak of fever on board. Another son, (Carl) August, seems to have died on the day the ship docked in Adelaide .

MEYER, Johann Carl Christian; Occ: Kunstuntersteiger; Age: 48; Res: Polsterberg; Information: Moves to Port Lincoln in 1849. Naturalised in Port Lincoln, occupation at that time was miner.

MEYER, Auguste nee WUSTEFELD (wife); Information: Dies during the voyage.

MEYER, Adolph; Occ: Ore-sorter; Age: 14; Information: Resident of Redruth in 1851.

MEYER, Carl Ernst; Occ: Goldminer; Age: 19; Information: Dies during voyage.

MEYER, Caroline; Age: 16. [Our direct ancestor]

MEYER, Sophie; Age: 8

MEYER, Carl August (also Ernst); Occ: Goldminer; Age 22; Res: Polsterberg; Information: Supposedly dies 3 March 1849.

Georg migrated to Australia with his sister, Charlotte Sophia and brother, Johann Wilhelm Nagel. Johann Nagel and his wife Metta had a son, John Heinrich Ludwig Nagel who Anglicised his name to ‘John Henry Louis Nagel'. In 1911 at the age of 60, he applied for naturalization and his letter is quite touching. I'm not sure if there was much anti-German feeling prior to World War One but I suspect it must have been difficult for anyone from an ‘ethnic minority' to become a citizen in what then must have been a very Anglo dominated society. It seems one had to prove without doubt facility with the English language and convince the government of one's unquestionable allegiance to King and Country.

John Henry's letter – with its lack of punctuation and rudimentary expression – reads:

To the (Minister) for External Affairs

Sir

I am in receipt of yours of March 31 asking for definite information residence (sic) in various States well I have resided in WA about 16 years, in (SA?) 10 years in Victoria 32 This is as near as I can come as I was not using the shaving brush when I came to Australia and my memory does not carry me back to exact dates and those who could tell have joined the majority I have always thought myself a native as I have no knowledge of any other country

I am yours

Respectfully

John H L Nagel

New Gods

2010-04-10T21:41:00.000-07:00

Ancient City of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
3010 AD

The pantheon in ruins which once rose high into the heavens comprised six massive terraces. On each of the six circular levels of this ziggurat our archaeologists found alcoves dedicated to each deity where worshippers once flocked to pay tribute in droves. The Gods were displayed in all their pomp and finery. There was Lady Prada and Lord Armani, their sons Gucci and Ermenegildo Zegna, Salvatore Ferragamo and an exotic water Goddess who went by the name of Shinju Pearls. The God Versace and his consort Rolex seem to have been exceedingly popular.

Perhaps the most ingenious aspect of the floor plan of the temple complex was the way in which pilgrims were basically forced to proceed along a single, predetermined route up and down the 6 circular levels, filing past and paying homage to a variety of deities along the way.

The individual chapels themselves seem to have been lavishly decorated and seductively lit, placed behind glass and displayed a number of ornaments and statuary.

We came across some beautifully crafted life-size figures made of some hardened polyurethane material and have ascertained that these sculptures - or what we think they called mannequins or dummies, appear to be divine temple guards of some sort created in the likeness of humans but sporting the heads of an animal which is now long extinct, its name and association lost in the mists of time. The figures (shown in the holograph above) stood at the entrance of a temple dedicated to the God, Calvin Klein.

Hail TAG Huer Full of Grace, Bless Us Lord Sony Ericsson, Deliver Us from Evil O Mighty Nike! The glyphs we have recently uncovered have thrown up their secrets revealing a vibrant religious culture centred on this 500 year old site which the people called, “Pavilion” located at the heart of a great city once called “Kuala Lumpur”.

Evidence of indecent rites - the act of ”Lambo Rectum Iri ” or “arse licking” in the vernacular - was also performed in the niches dedicated to the worship of “minor Gods”, Addidas, Quicksilver, Illy Coffee, L’ Occitane, DKNY and Levi Strauss to name but a few. Apparently the followers dressed in, covered and coated themselves as well as imbibed materials and liquids which induced trance like states, turning some into zombies. These mesmerized individuals were able to do little more than chant the names of their beloved deities and make ever larger offerings of mysterious paper tokens and silver nickel disks at the various alters.

Why did this highly advanced society of god fearing people perish? How could a people with such technology, creativity and abundant energy suddenly disappear? Our experts are still investigating but we feel it may have something to do with a global practice of human and environmental sacrifice to strange and occult “market forces” expediting total economic and societal collapse. Archaeologists working on a number of other sites across the world have found evidence of the same practices.

We continue our work which will hopefully one day provide us with a clearer picture …

***

Akhmatova at Easter

2010-04-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

It's Easter Sunday 2010. The papers are full of feature articles and editorials about the "meaning of Easter". Saccharine, feel-good writing. Yuk! And I dare not look out for the Michael Leunig cartoon for fear it might bring on actual nausea. Don't people tire of those stupid Mr. Curly characters and ridiculous ducks quacking on across the page like their salt-of-the-earth, effete creator who has amazingly managed to secure a column for himself to bore us even further. Yet the occasion demands time for some reflection about suffering. Hopefully this modest posting won't unravel into the same sickening cliche of the "vox pops" mentioned above as I devour yet another Easter egg washed down with strong Lavazza. (If it does unravel, apologies in advance ;-). But seriously, Akhmatova is a worthy subject to read (and write) about if you are at all inclined to reflect upon and pull out some meaning from a two thousand year old tale that seems to have persisted in the public imagination for as long as it has. So I'll press on.

Until the collapse of the Soviet regime, poets were accorded rock-star like status and acclaim in Russia. They could fill concert halls and football stadiums with adoring fans in a blink. Print runs of poetry ran into hundreds of thousands of copies and poets banned by the regime circulated their work via Samizdat (underground publishing networks), generating mythical reputations for themselves and wild demand for their work during their time in the sin bin and even more so after their eventual "rehabilitation." I wonder how the Soviets could have been so stupid as to continually feed the market for dissent and subversion as well as they did.

I've just read, however, that sales of poetry in Russia are now at an all time low. The Russians have obviously "caught up" with us in the West --- no more stadiums packed with poetry loving fans throwing their undies on stage! They have wisely learnt to ignore the Arts or at least to allow it to find its own ineffectual level amongst ivory tower Academics and a fast diminishing population of readers and followers of the Arts who like the artists, novelists, poets and playwrights themselves (excluding those "artists" involved in the powerful Porn Industry) have no money and thus no power to influence or change anything very much.

The title of the biography I have just read, Anna of All the Russias, was apparently borrowed from Marina Tsvetaeva, another brilliant poet of the early Soviet period who described Akhmatova as if she were a Tsarina, the latter's persecution, suffering, illness and poverty elevating her to a position of lofty respect and admiration.

Akhmatova's first husband, Nikolay Gumilyov was executed by firing squad in 1921 on the trumped up charge of conspiring to overthrow the State (a poet???) and one of Akhmatova's most beautiful short works, He Did Love ... (1912) is about him. It begins with the memorable lines:

There were three things in this world he loved,
White peacocks, Evensong and worn, weathered maps of America

This blog is dedicated to the concept of Detail and I can't think of a better poet than Akhmatova if subtlety, fine feeling and upending conventional expectations is what you're looking for.

He Did Love ... continues:

And he did not love children crying,
Or tea served with raspberry jam,
Any female hysteria in his life.
Now imagine it ... I was his wife!

I love that wry last line. It comes as quite a blow after the lyricism of describing everything a sensitive bloke like Gumilyov loved and hated in this world. You're oohing and ahhing and thinking o0(isn't he nice ... and isn't Akhmatova even nicer to describe her husband with such affection). What a shock when you discover in the last line --- and with the hindsight of a little extra research --- that Akhmatova found her poet-husband almost intolerable from the day she tied the knot! Akhmatova was Gumilyov's total opposite ... and she knew it. The marriage was a disaster.

Akhmatova had at least two or three other significant relationships as well as a string of countless, one night stands. You can see why judging by Nathan Altman's 1912 portrait of her which today is housed in the State Russian Museum --- she was stunningly beautiful, sophisticated and sexy.

A fascinating detail at this point: Akhmatova had the honour of being described by Stalin as "a nun and a whore". Apparently the great, twisted man himself took quite an interest in her poetry full of religious imagery but even more so took a perverse, voyeuristic interest in Akhmatova's sex life. KGB records unearthed in the 90s reveal constant surveillance of her amorous rendez-vous and even detailed accounts of who did what to whom and for how long ... funny to think all this detail tickled ol' Joe's fancy to the degree that it did.

And then there was Lev, her only son by Gumilyov, who because of his connection to famous literary parents was expelled from University, persistently persecuted and eventually sent to prison and later a Siberian Gulag. Lev's treatment has the mark of the Psychopath (Stalin) written all over it --- find the victim's weakest link (in this case, Akhmatova's love of her son) and break her by breaking him.

Akhmatova's best known poem in translation,Requiem, begins with a sense of personal dread, fear and abandonment. No one is there to offer the victim protection. Akhmatova is just one amongst millions of Russians subject to terror and lawlessness. She has not taken advantage of her privilege and connections to escape to the safety of a foreign country (like many of her contemporaries). No one shelters her beneath their wing:

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.

I have read several versions of Requiem and the translation of the first stanza in particular fascinates me.

The Israeli poet, Bialek, said that "reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil" and I suspect this is true when reading Akhmatova --- there's a gap or a blunting of the language which arises out of the process.

It might take some poetic license on the part of a good translator (in the following case by the writer D.M Thomas), to recapture those hues and subtle tones for an English audience. Here is a much looser version of the stanza above. It brings out significant aspects and a certain feeling which is missing in the former:

No foreign country offered me protection
No foreign wing shielded me
I went through this nightmare with my people
There, where fate abandoned us.

What's driven home is the idea that Akhmatova is locked into her own "nightmare" but that paradoxically this dreadful experience is in fact rather unexceptional --- it's shared by millions of other people whose lives have been damaged and destroyed through terror. Akhmatova has chosen to stay and therefore she must be prepared to fight. It is her "fate" to have this experience --- there is no escaping it. She was destined to face her nemesis from the beginning ... and we learn she is also fated to eventually overcome it.

What a Psychopath like Stalin --- indeed, your common garden variety too --- did not / does not fully comprehend is that after incessant persecution a victim adapts and learns to deal with their subjugation by naming, describing and broadcasting it --- far and wide.

This "bad news story" is something the Psychopath finds hard to deal with because like all "malignant narcissists" he (or she) has spent a life time maintaining a public image of unchallengable superiority and righteousness that suddenly comes crashing down when their nefarious behaviour is exposed.

The Psychopath either rampages or crumbles --- crumbles in most cases, upending our Hollywood perception that such monsters are somehow invincible.

Stalin (by sheer luck) died soon after the writing of Requiem --- let's hope he did read it (likely)and tht it contributed to his stroke (unlikely). The poem which was banned was, however, widely distributed via the Samizdat network.

Akhmatova achieved a decisive victory over the State --- by naming and writing about her intimate experience of suffering and ensuring wide spread distribution of what she had to say about it. It's as if through intuition Akhmatova knew what to do from the outset. The closing lines of the PREFACE are tantalisingly prescient:

I. INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad.
Once, someone “recognized” me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who l of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I answered, “Yes, I can.”
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

For me the most moving section of Akhmatova's great work is about facing the threat of death --- the Ace any good Psychopath keeps up his or her sleeve to silence the victim when necessary.

But Akhmatova knows that Death comes to everyone anyway so with typical courage and wryness she responds with a challenge --- bring it on!

VIII
TO DEATH

You will come anyway - so why not now?
I wait for you; things have become too hard.
I have turned out the lights and opened the door
For you, so simple and so wonderful.
Assume whatever shape you wish. Burst in
Like a shell of noxious gas. Creep up on me
Like a practised bandit with a heavy weapon.
Poison me, if you want, with a typhoid exhalation,
Or, with a simple tale prepared by you
(And known by all to the point of nausea), take me
Before the commander of the blue caps and let me
glimpse
The house administrator's terrified white face.
I don't care anymore. The river Yenisey
Swirls on. The Pole star blazes.
The blue sparks of those much-loved eyes
Close over and cover the final horror.
[19 August 1939. Fontannyi Dom]

In Requiem Akhmatova assumes the persona of the Virgin Mary weeping at the Cross. One family's suffering begins to assume the dimensions of persecution experienced by a whole nation :

X
CRUCIFIXION

Weep not for me, mother.
I am alive in my grave.

1.
A choir of angels glorified the greatest hour,
The heavens melted into flames.
To his father he said, 'Why hast thou forsaken me!'
But to his mother, 'Weep not for me. . .'
[1940. Fontannyi Dom]

2.
Magdalena smote herself and wept,
The favourite disciple turned to stone,
But there, where the mother stood silent,
Not one person dared to look.
[1943. Tashkent]

Akhmatova smells victory, almost as if she has a presentiment of the way history will play itself out. Elaine Feinstein in her biography comments that in Requiem "it is not only her own anguish she is recording. Hence, her bold demand that if her country ever decides to set up a monument to her, it should stand neither by the sea where she was born, nor in the garden of the Tsar":

Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing. Even in new
grief.
Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth
Through which one hundred million people scream;
That's how I wish them to remember me when I am dead
On the eve of my remembrance day.
If someone someday in this country
Decides to raise a memorial to me,
I give my consent to this festivity
But only on this condition - do not build it
By the sea where I was born,
I have severed my last ties with the sea;
Nor in the Tsar's Park by the hallowed stump
Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me;
Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours
And no-one slid open the bolt.
Listen, even in blissful death I fear
That I will forget the Black Marias,
Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman
Who howled like a wounded beast.

In 2006 an Anna Akhmatova memorial was erected inside St.Petersburg's notorious Kresty (The Crosses) Prison in keeping with the poet's wishes expressed in Requiem. Here Akhmatova's son (and the sons of countless other Russian women) were imprisoned, tortured, broken --- and in many cases, executed.

This is the place where Akhmatova stood for three hundred hours in the snow, the gate slammed shut in her face "howling like a wounded beast" but here too at Kresty is triumph over terror and death --- "one hundred million people screaming" through the voice of a single individual.

Happy Easter.

***

Click here to read /download 29 poems of Anna Akhmatova (including a full version of Requiem at www.poemhunter.com

***

Click here to find out more about Anna of All The Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova, by Elaine Feinstein

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The Circus Comes to Town

2010-03-25T18:50:00.000-07:00

A small boy (Fellini?) is perched on a window sill looking down at a circus big-top being hauled into position by cotton reel pulleys and flimsy nylon strings. Inmates from a prison are crowded behind bars looking down at the same scene - not a real circus tent but a creaky, cardboard model obviously made in the studios of Roma's Cinecitta. We are watching from a child's point of view --- or at least through the director's dreamlike recollection of the "circus coming to town" with all of its attendent excitement and exoticism . There are typical lashings of artifice, humour and nostalgia. Fellini leads us around his imagination and memory like the ponies that come charging out into the circus ring under the whip of their trainer. Throughout the film troupes of clowns run here and there, play tricks, perform pranks, they are funny and cruel, delighful but also slightly sinister. We are lead through the circus sideshow --- the Tamed Wild Man, the Stongest Woman in the World, midgets and fakirs, acrobats and contortionists --- as well as an amazing support cast of freaks and human oddities (that by today's reckoning might appear politically incorrect).

At the beginning of the film the camera pans around to include toy caravans and a fake dish for a moon luminous against the night sky made of shimmering, black plastic. I've just watched Fellini's fantasy/documentary i Clowns --- nothing to do with i-phones, i-pods or anything i-contemporary, I might add.

Fellini did not need CGI or cuttting edge camera technology to create rich, detailed worlds populated by fabulous and grotesque characters stepping through free wheeling, dreamlike narratives which have you laughing, crying and gasping with awe. The Avatars and Alices of Hollywood pale in comparison. Fall down the cinematic rabbit hole of a Fellini film and you are in for a fantastic ride.

I Clowns was made for RAI Televizione in 1970 and to my knowledge was never publically released in Australia. It is perhaps one of the best documenatries I have seen because of its strange approach of combining memory, fantasy, story telling and interview into a strange kind of road movie. This is a film about extinction, about the passing of a classic epoch, a milieu and the tragic loss of an art form and craft

There's a sideshow of another kind going on in this film, another narrative dimension that comes as a very emotional and moving surprise. Fellini and his crew suddenly step out of the film and introduce themselves. The film soars in another direction, the crew travelling across Europe attempting to locate, film and interview retired clowns so that they themselves can tell their stories.

Many of these former clowns are shown to be in their 80s and 90s and for the most part are living on the margins of society in poverty. "Fanfulla", "Furia" , "Scotti" and "Gigi" pass their time alone in crumbling apartment blocks in Paris and Rome or trashy caravan parks scattered across the Continent with little more than their memories. They flip through old photo albums, talk about the secrets of their craft, recount performances under the big top and reminisce about colleagues who have passed away. The magic of the past, the hardship of the present. Their make-up has been removed, they are totally unmasked. The narrative, the artifice and the spectacle gives way to the plain, unromantic and difficult lives of elderly men struggling to survive.

The viewer gains quite an insight into Fellini himself who handles the interviews with skill, charm and great respect for his subjects. He too is greatly moved by their tales, appears misty eyed and I suspect wiped away a tear or two during the filming of this extraordinary work. The inspiration of the circus, of spectacle and carnival on Fellini is well known. I'm left with Nino Rota's famous score playing through my head. And there's that opening moment in i Clowns when Fellini, the boy, wakes up in the middle of the night, jumps out of bed with rapturous excitement and crawls up onto the wind sill --- the circus has come to town! --- it's the way I feel whenever I get the chance to view the work of Federico Fellini, my favourite film maker.

Watch Fellini "The Clowns" in Fantasy | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

You can download and watch the whole of Fellini's film at www.veoh.com (click the link or watch the 5 minute movie taster at the beginning of this post. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate a version of the film with English subtitles. The film above is in Italian with French subtitles.

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A Shopping List

2010-03-20T04:57:00.000-07:00

Carnation milk
Oranges
Berries
Apples
Herrings
Yoghurt
Icecream
Tomatoes
Lettuce
Carrots
Pumpkin
Bok Choi
Mushrooms
The Age
Mineral water
Chicken
Lamb
Eggs
Coriander
Pkt of clothes pegs
Spray and Wipe
Cat food (Fancy Feast or Dine)

The shopping list. The dullest genre of them all? If obeyed it serves its purpose well -- an aid to memory as well as a time and money saving device. I am ashamed to admit that the author of the above list, my wife, takes full responsibility for the business of making these inventories of daily needs and that I am but her agent sometimes entrusted to carry out the associated physical chore of pushing a trolley around the sterile, well lit aisles of abundance. And I know the rules. I am allowed to stray in my purchases but only within a slim margin of one or two extra items. I can throw in an occasional delicacy sporting a pretty Italian or French label to whet my absurdly over-cultivated, bourgeois tastes --- but that's about it. A good reprimand awaits me if I return late or laiden with extra items.

Someone digging around a decade, a century, a millenium from now would be intrigued by this unspectacular, quotidian document and what it would tell them about us.

The icecream and yoghurt are all low in fat and contain no sugar. These sweets speak the language of excess and escape from general dietary strictures while ingeniously helping to keep kilos at bay. The "Light and Creamy" tin of Carnation adds a divine touch to a good cup of freshly ground Lavazza -- and I must admit, I can barely live without this ambrosial union. And what do you make of the pegs? I am constantly buying pegs! Where do the fuckers go? Lots of washing I'd say. Lots of clothes being hung out to dry. Sweaty, dirty types? Exercise fanatics?

There's at least five good serves of fruit and veg on this list. The chicken and eggs are of course free range -- and don't fear -- the Spray and Wipe is environmentally sound : an innocuous but effective mixture of orange oil and vinegar. Melbourne's leading (middle class) newspaper, The Age, is included and the herrings (rich in Omega-3) speak of Jewish and Continental cultural influences reaching back into the obscure recesses of childhood and family histories. The cat food? No kids, four Siamese!

Le Duc Des Esseintes from JK Huysmans' 1884 novel, À Rebours (Against the Grain), would have loved Coles or Safeway. Each time I visit these "treasure troves" there seems to be an ever increasing load of crap on offer catering to every conceivable taste and consumer whim. There is not just a vertiginous choice of bread, butter and jam to be had but other stuff like hot house tiger lillies from Thailand to God knows how many varieties of diet lemonade, every conceivable type of toothpaste, not to mention toilet ducks, discounted Harry Potter books, cheap rubber thongs, second and third rate Hollywood DVDs, packs of multicoloured jocks, Taiwanese yoga mats, no-name Chinese TVs, ribbed, flavoured and standard issue condoms. The Easter eggs and hot cross buns have been on sale since January and Santa will undoubtedly be back on board once we're over the Resurrection. The list of what's available could of course go on and on and on.

Huysmans' is the strangest of French novels. It is - like most French writing ever since? - about nothing much in particular. The reclusive and misanthropic Des Esseintes retreats to his country estate to generally carouse, do drugs, breed exotic flowers, distill perfumes, read Baudelaire and Mallarmé,Petronius and Apulius and enjoy his well stocked wine cellar ... as all good decadents disgusted with the human race tend to do. He catalogues his vast and eclectic collection of Art and Literature while pursuing and detailing a range of perverse practices and pleasures. He lists everything from how to encrust jewels into the shell of a live tortoise to describing how he doses himself with a great, big enema containing:

*Cod liver oil,
*Beef tea,
*Burgundy and
*the yolk of one egg".

Des Esseintes must be literature's first Anorexic/Bulimic. I've read the "enema" passage several times now - in both English and French - and am not quite sure at which end the "lavement" is being administered. Even so I understand why the public was so scandalized and how À Rebours was embraced by Oscar Wilde who made it the infamous "yellow backed French novel" which assists in the corruption of Dorian Gray.

À propos the enema, Des Esseintes informs us:

Then, when you felt you might reasonably say: "isn't it time for dinner? - I'm as hungry as a hunter," all you'd have to do to lay the table would be to deposit the noble instrument on the cloth. And before you had time to say grace you'd have finished the meal - without any of the vulgar, bothersome business of eating (Chapter XV)

*Huile de foie de morue
*Thé de boeuf
*Vin de Bourgogne
*Jaune d'oeuf no 1

Somehow I don't think these French delicacies will be appearing on my shopping list anytime soon, even if Des Esseintes' "noble instrument" for administering them might well save on dining costs, time, washing up and working off calories!

Photo top of page: JK Huysmans in Paris, 1896

Treat yourself (ha!ha!) to the pleasure of reading Against the Grain in English by clicking this link

For Huysmans afficionados dip into the French version by clicking here ... would love to get some feedback on "le lavement" and "le magistral instrument"!

***

A Family Crime

2010-03-10T03:29:00.000-08:00

Discovering an ancestor's crime creates a burden for a present day family member.

Who can or should you tell? Do others really want to know the details? What do you do with this "sensitive" knowledge, particularly when the crime is of a heinous nature?

I've carried that burden with me for some time now in relation to my great, great, great grandfather, William Adams, a labourer from the village of Tingewick, Buckinghamshire who committed a very serious crime - even by today's standards - and was subsequently transported to Australia in 1844 for it.

Although most Australians are now proud to claim convicts as legitimate family members, my impression is that our proud embrace of convicts is strangely selective.

A petty thief, a trickster, political agitator or a prostitute in the family is nowadays a source of great pride. The rogue, the under-dog, the victim motivated in their "wrong doing" by economic circumstances, appears perfectly legitimate .

But who really wants to claim a murderer or rapist for an ancestor?

The first chapter of my book, Opening Chapters which I wrote in 2001, tells William's story.

I carefully crafted a precis for the web so that distant family members could contact me if they required "the sensitive details" which have (until now) been suppressed. I wished not to offend others in the family who I suspected felt uncomfortable about its publication.

The precis reads:

Chapter 1 - William Adams & The Tingewick Labourers : Reflections on an Ancestral Crime & Conviction

In this Chapter I review the history of my great, great grandfather, William Adams who was convicted and transported to Australia to serve a life sentence for ************, in 1843. He was transported on ‘The Agincourt’ which sailed on the 28th of June, 1844 from Downs and landed at Norfolk Island on the 9th of November that same year. William was transferred to Van Diemen’s Land in 1847 and worked as a labourer on the famous Woolmers Estate at Longford until 1850. He was given a Ticket of Leave on the 7th of March 1854 and was conditionally pardoned on the 22nd of April, 1856. William married Elizabeth Southernwood in 1853 and sired thirteen children including my great grandmother, Mabel Ruth Howard nee Adams.

William's life journey is amazing. The details of his crime, trial, punishment and transportation as well as his new life after being issued a ticket of leave are fascinating, and I now think deserve scrutiny.

How did I come to this decision?

I think it might have something to do with my first posting on this blog which raised similar issues regarding the depiction of intimate moments and whether there are subjects which are off-limits to Art. If you roll your mouse back to that posting you'll see that one critic ardently believed that there are experiences which are so personal (the birth of a child, the death of an elderly loved one) that they should necessarily and always be kept out of the public gaze(Mueck Mania, 25 February, 2010).

The idea that anything unseemly in family life (and by extension, family history) needs to be hidden and silenced disturbs me. Would depictions of child abuse or wife beating also be included in the list of hushed subjects?

I am not arguing for dragging family skeletons before the public for ridicule or going out of one's way to rub noses in historical dirt.

Feelings of shame or hurt are obviously heightened the closer the person is to the perpetrator of an actual crime or the perceived transgression committed by a member of one's tribe. But I wonder for how long others are expected participate in a de facto conspiracy of silence?

Should we really be colluding in a never ending cover-up and censorship of the information? Should later generations of family members never be allowed to know about the crime committed?

Please correct me if you think my logic is unreasonable but I've started thinking that staying silent - mainly because of others' quivering sensibilities and squeamishness - about a crime committed by a relative 166 years ago is bordering on the ridiculous!

What is there to fear? What is there to be ashamed of? Others in my family need to consider these questions. Is there some irrational sense in which we feel our connection to William and his crime "taints" us?

And for how long should anyone be defined or characterized by a crime they committed?

It might be argued that this depends on how serious the crime was but I still wonder whether if it is right to only see William as a criminal - and nothing else but a criminal?

To fill in the censored section of the precis above:

In this Chapter I review the history of my great, great grandfather, William Adams who was convicted and transported to Australia to serve a life sentence for aiding and abetting in the rape of an itinerant peddlar, Ann Pepper and assault on her husband, in 1843.

Of course there is no need to justify, excuse or explain away what William did. My sympathies are squarely with his victims. In the book I write:

When finding out about the rape of Ann Pepper I searched endlessly for online Pepper family trees, raked over databases, looked through birth, marriage and death records and censuses - all without luck. What beame of Ann and her husband? Did they have children? Has a descendant of the Peppers taken an interest in family history and discovered the awful events that befell his or her forebears? I keep imagining the couple trudging across the English countryside with heavy sacks slung over their backs hoping to make a sale at the Tingewick Fair. I see them before me, their hair is dishevelled, sweat pouring down thier necks. They are tired, thirsty, hungry, worried whether they will have enough money to pay for lodgings by the end of the day, a day that would blight their lives forever. Family history research often catapults one into the past life-worlds of strangers who play their parts in the drama of an ancestor. In the excitement of unearthing a new and significant family story we can forget that the 'bit players' are the protagonists for someone else - for a member or descendant of another family.

After a century and a half a family secret has been been uncovered. I appreciate that the crime was a great source of anxiety for the Adamses - and the Peppers - who struggled to build a respectable life for themselves in its shadow.

I rather think, however, we should take some interest in what William became. As the Archer family diaries show, he was a highly valued and trusted worker at Woolmers Estate in the Tasmanian Midlands. He was a husband and father who successfully raised several children, suffered the tragic death of a son and became a fairly well heeled property owner in his own right. He sponsored (and paid for) other members of his family back in impoverished Tingewick to migrate to the colony. In fact William turned their fortunes around - for the better - in the long run.

When I visited William's grave in Tasmania some time back I was reminded of what George Eliot had to say about our forgotten ancestors, their hidden lives and what connects them to us and our present day prosperity:

For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.

***

Mueck Mania

2010-02-25T03:06:00.000-08:00

Henri Bresson, perhaps the world's most accomplished photographer, said that the best photos are never taken but only remembered and it is that wise perspective which comes to mind as I cruise the cool, air conditioned exhibition hall of the Gallery of Victoria.

I have come to view the hyper-real, gob-smacking works of Ron Mueck where I am confronted by an army of camera toting members of the public. I'm astounded by this photo mania and surprised that the gallery even allows it. I suppose the viewers have paid their admission fee and obviously want their own little piece of Mueck to take away - but it's what motivates this strangely embarrassing, almost frenzied behaviour in others which fascinates and puzzles me.

Isn't the experience of viewing amazing works of art enough? Post-cards, catalogues and fridge magnets lurch out at you the moment you leave the exhibition hall - no flies on the NGV marketing team when it comes to retail! But somehow exhibition souvenirs lack a key ingredient: the stamp of the viewer on the work itself and proof of the viewing for an actual or imagined audience. But let's not get too precious - blogging or publishing online might be considered a similarly suspect, egotisitical activity.

Photo opportunities unexpectedly present themselves from one day to the next often times when you haven't got a camera - but does it really matter that these arresting, often fabulous moments of experience are not visually captured? I've thought a lot about this having recently travelled overseas where I experienced the "trauma" of camera malfunction in a location of great beauty. There wasn't a single decent postcard available to make up for this "calamitous" stroke of bad luck but my "misfortune" served me well.

I concluded that the experience of seeing, remembering and savouring those scenes sans images was actually intensified by being forced to remember and write about what I saw on that day. And of course Google Images are always at your disposal if you desperately need a momento of practically any place in the world - throngs of travellers upload their albums online everyday. So why must the image necessarily be taken by you if it is merely a momento, a keep-sake?

Groups of school kids with camera encrusted mobiles are snapping away - mostly portraits of themselves alongside the over and undersized Mueck works which play vertiginous tricks with the viewer's sense of perception and perspective. There's even a minor "celebrity" from a TV breakfast news program who I notice is busy having himself photographed alongside Mueck's self-portrait, Mask II. There is an uncanny resemblance between artist, work and viewer for sure ... but really, what's the purpose of this visual souvenir hunting?

I can't help but approach the "TV star" and make what I think is a smart quip that totally falls flat : "the works are just like you ... much bigger in real life than they appear on TV". There's a giggle and he's off like a flash. Later on I think to myself that even you Dale, smug hater of media modernity, can be seduced into the sticky web of celebrity worship. How embarrassing - your're just like everyone else!

I also must admit that I would have loved a few close up shots of the fibre-glass stubble carefully planted across the silicone cheeks of the artist's self-portrait, or else the blue and red veins luminous beneath the translucent skin of Mueck's gigantic representation of a newly-born baby. But my camera is at home and I would not haved dreamed of brining it into a gallery in any case.

Christopher Allen writing about the Mueck exhibition in The Weekend Australian (Larger Than Life, Feb 27, 2010), believes that the motivation behind this frenzy of snap happiness is in keeping with the essentially commercial populism of Mueck's work. He believes it invites a certain kind of papparazzi consciousness - a voyeuristic desire to record experiences which should be kept private and away from the public gaze.

The idea that Art should shy away from certain sensitive areas of life strikes me as rather odd - indeed, extremely conservative. Art can go anywhere - and often does, honing in on experiences which are painfully personal and unsettling. We may not like it, but surely nothing is "off-limits" as far as Art goes?

It would also be interesting to go back to the gallery and visit other exhibitions to see whether the viewers are toting cameras - which I rather suspect they would be. So why blame the "voyeurism" on the nature of Mueck's work per se? I think Mr. Allen might be observing a general trend and being a tad opportunistic in blaming an artist he does not like for it?

I was particularly surprised by Allen's attack on the work I personally found most moving and technically masterful - that of a dying, shriveled, woman wrapped in a blanket casting a last, glassy gaze up at the viewer from beneath her blanket. This is an obvious nursing home death scene - something happening everyday behind closed doors.

Allen opines:

The trouble is that she is not dead, and there is something horrible about this voyeuristic intrusion into the last moments of a human being's life. There are things that should be respected, things indeed that should only be seen by people for whom they have meaning and who can share in their experience.

The fact of the matter - and anyone watching the life of a loved one drain away in the isolation of a nursing home knows exactly what I am talking about - is that the death of the elderly in this situation is hidden and needs to be revealed more often than it is.

Mueck does us a service by portraying the scene with as much rawness, honesty and squirm inducing detail as he does. His work is a tribute to the forgotten, to members of the community who are way outside the orbit of celebrity - to people like you and me who might well be dying in a nursing home somewhere, sometime in the future with no one to remember or acknowledge our quiet, unglamorous existences.

Note: Image of Mueck's Mask II supplied by a follower of this blog