A boy's brain at night poised for fight

Dear Finn,

Your brilliant human mind is much older than you are!  It is as old as all human time. It is designed for you still to be cave dweller, ready for action to protect yourself and the whole human species.

A bird starts calling out. But it is night time. Birds are not meant to call out at night time, unless…

Unless there is danger!  A bird at night will call when there is danger or great disturbance!

You are asleep. The bird calls and keep calling. It is worried because there are extreme winds, and those winds even carry a whiff of smoke from fires up North.

You wake, and your clever brilliant body and mind gets ready for action. You wake in a way that is fully energised and ready to fight a danger or run from it. The bird calling has told you of possible danger.

Then your modern brain does a check around and there is nothing in your room to fight. But that energy has to go somewhere.

You yell and yell, and the bird keeps you awake and ready to fight. So you fight your bed, your pillow, tossing and turning and full of that energy which has to go somewhere. It’s angry now, that energy. More yelling.

This is natural. It’s the clever part of your ancient brain. It made your body ready to fight or run. It also wanted to sleep!

As you grow up, the modern part of your brain will get better at really knowing when it’s just a bird outside worried about the strong wind and smell of smoke.  It will get faster at working out what you really need to do.

When you came to me for help, at first the headphones didn’t work.  When I gave you two pillows to block out the sound though, you even got back to sleep.

That was your modern brain working it all out and getting help. Humans are also designed to work together to fix problems and face a danger.

It is OK that your ancient brain woke up raging, you were ready for danger, because birds don’t call out at night for no reason!

Come and get help too, as each time you do this you let your modern brain get really smart as well.

Love, Mum

Art, Autumn.

Thirty-nine degrees yesterday, then thirty-four at 9pm.  

I swam and floated the mauve line of sea under animal clouds and grapefruit segments of sunset.

Still hot.

I’m sitting with music-man as he frowns his new arrangements, and I’m reading Anais Nin, sucking juice from the words and spitting out pips.

He is stabbing at the song like sex, calling and string-hitting so fast I can’t type in time, and this thing we call a process is  not a process but an attack on our arts; I see a dartboard that we each throw at, blind drunk, faster and faster, soon something will hit and hook and be that big score, the word, the note. But in the meantime, it’s a calling out blindly.

There is an atmospheric pressure, the jostling of seasons colliding; it is it furiously hot for Autumn’s first day, and in a month we’ll all be windscreen wipers batting back water, we will be drenched gardens and rotting leaves.

But today, oh today. The burn of the air, the jostling wind, shoving out Summer for Autumn just as Autumn will rot out to Winter and Winter will lie still even as we sleep cold and dream richly, all of it underground, all of it subliminal, cold and wet silently fecund.

He sings tremulous half-notes that will soon be sustained and pure, I type blindly, as staccato as he sings, blind and blind on our keys, we are frantic exhalations. Breathe, try, breathe, pant then later, slower, softer, when the drift and eddy can happen and thought twining in the leaves and sheaves, a sifting sorting time for the gold, the copper, the veins, the proteins.  But for now, the art as impulsive action, motor skills not enough - not brain to hand, but psyche to air, and the mechanisms we have in our bodies are striving and struggling to hammer it out.

Oh this season of jostle, Autumn the best time always, reading Rilke at 3am, reading prose and thrumming out poetics, and seeing it all as if the scales have been lifted from my eyes:  this season, this love, this music, these words, the art that is here and here we are - humble and hopeless in our straight pure love that wants only to arrow out and cloud-shoot for dreams.

Aloha from Aloha street

Hop shuffle click – a soft stutter and coo as pigeons dance in the tan-bark garden made hopeful with potted plants trailing.  From the clothes line hang two feeder trays. I put seeds in. The birds come and come, flagrant in their desire to have a soft slow eve, no foraging, just a take-away dinner of treats in the tray, like a fish and chips summer supper in shiny paper. 

In a quiet moment I relax and realise that I sow: home, seeds, gardens, ideas and love.

Well not so quiet a moment really, I have Samantha Brown playing, that late eighties blonded jazzy red-lipped siren. She sings: ‘I saw a bit of silver lying in a puddle, I went to pick it up, but I didn’t want to get my hands muddy.’

I got my hands muddy for the silver, then all muddied I began to garden. I sowed a seed in the office of my Lisa, my psychologist, seeded the plants that could have wilted or rotted, sowed the seeds of separating and leaving my long marriage.

I did not know if it would grow. I had so much fear. But I feared even more a future with who he had become, and me.

I daily grieved the house I would leave, that of the first clothes-line of pinned baby clothes size ‘00000’. Oooh, those little grow-suits waiving on the line!  Oh, the painting and fixing, the joy of cracks to be filled, plaster and dust, night ghosts and the morning garden, and my dad a-jingle with advice and tools.

I have a little house now. My Aloha, my welcome, to myself and all who come.

When I water, the butterflies are seduced, diving into the smaller sprays. With lavender and rosemary, the bees come too, and on the hottest days they crawled into the dish of honey-water and sipped and slipped and I had to tease one out on the fine point of a stick.

The washing whips and flutters; I share plants with my neighbour, I pay bills and keep passwords and details like a Mother. I book the lawyer, the plumber, the candlestick maker. I do it all because I can, and that realisation is like sapphires glinting, that my mind so sharp at work can do this love-building, this making of place and time and space.

Little altars abound, here the photos, tendrils green from plants, and my dad’s ashes. He is proud, it sings in my bones and muscles as I make and heft. Here the book-nook, the typewriter, the toys, the record player.  I will sing, I will play.

And such songs, art and weaving, cooking and feeding. Phone calls long overdue now long and late; the thrumming harmonics of old friendships re-found abound, tree-high new foliage that’s root-deep in trust. Muddy at times as we churn old earth over, then green glinted gold, as leaf-blooms of voice curl and unfurl through the long and lavender night.

I feel the stars get closer, an optimism sharp as light, a tumbling cascade of dreams and plans, a meteor shower of glimmering things, soft rain of light, soft rain.

how to rebirth oneself? Maybe here

Good morning. I can hear the birds at their feeder: slim pigeon, fat pigeon and the Sparrows with names like Icarus and Shaula and Savannah and Little Stevie.

I can hear my son on the couch playing Youtube videos. He has told me to go back to bed. I have wept all night and he knows and he is being kind and also self-serving, because Youtube culcha is naughty funny grimy slinky.

So this me, now, separated, living in a little house in Aloha street. Welcome!  But how to begin again here, in this blog that was begun when I was a (mostly) happy wife, building the dream home within the old home's walls, with a man I sometimes referred to as this ship's Captain?

I left him two months ago. Tired, too tired of being the lone hand on the big boat. Tired, so tired of being lonely in a marriage with a man who who had grown complacent, entitled, and small of spirit.

So I built a smaller boat to better fit my solo hands and it has been fine, even grand at times.  My son my first mate, and on we go, rough riding but oh such views. And I thought my love and care could carry every one, and that I could cope.

In here are old blogs about the building years. I am glad to have them. I have been out of the home for two months. I left it because my ex cannot afford to move and still keep a part time roof over our son. I have left him there so that he could still be a Dad as he tries to get more work to support himself.  Two months and yesterday I found he'd ensconced a woman in for a little love-nesting while I had care of our son.


letter to my ex:

I didn’t go looking, and even when I found it my head grasped all these other ideas: oh that’s my red silk scarf and those lanyards from Tracy and my birthday party. I picked them up, but they were wrong. I saw a red shoe and picked it up thinking these things were mine, foundlings you had put together to give me. But the shoe was wrong too. Then the bra, my fingers finding this satin greasy feeling. Wrong again. Then it began to dawn on me, ‘not mine’, as I found the dress.

And in moments something clicked. Your assumption you would leave our boy with me for 5 days until new years day, and your rage when I countered that. You planned for her to be around a few days. A few pairs of undies in the basket in the study I once loved. Sleeping together. Cocooned in. The intimacy of that speaks of long build.

I have cried all evening and night. Not your concern but I will have to get my bro to help me look after our boy today, I'm tapped out.  

What you’ve done is smashed every positive memory I have in the home I left when I left you.

Wrecked it.

So, I hope for you that it worked. That in fucking her there, and having her stay, it exorcised me fully and fast.

I hope that when you lie in the bed we bought with wedding money, in the room we painted surrounded by the pictures I framed, under the chandelier that has my childhood memories, all you see is her reflected in those crystals and the gold. Her body, not mine.  I hope you can see Diane by Klimt and not remember Windsor. 

I hope that when you walk the hall along the wallpaper I chose and the pictures I filmed and framed, you see it now only as she did, that the house is quirky and that the mum and baby photo is nice.

I hope that when you sit in the backroom now you hear her voice not mine, and that the making of the shelves with my dad is eradicated by the presence of her.

I hope that the bath now is soaked in her image, a picture there of a woman drinking the coffee you made her, lapping away at your little love offering. So intimate. I hope when you sit along our son there you don’t, any more, remember him and I in that bath with bubbles and toys. Just her. No back-story any more of finding the tub on the roadside. No image of my Dad up to his knees in floorboards, or me pregnant on the toilet.

And I hope that the veranda is the same, clear of me, clear of Max, and the pear tree is no longer a story of triumph but something she just looked at.

So yes, since you fucked her and made intimate moments in the home we built and that you live in with our son I hope it worked to serve you well. I truly do. You chose exactly that. So that is what you now have. You chose to make intimacy there and I hope it resonates sweetly for you.

That house now is nothing to me, only a roof over our boy's head. Handovers at the door. I’ll return the house key so you can feel free to keep making new memories to eradicate the old ones, the ones you made with your ex and her family.

It’s a good bridge out, to exorcise the young excited couple from the home, the new parents from the home, the Max from the home. It will make selling up easier.

                                                                         ***

So there is my rancour and oh it feels good to pour it here. It is freeing. I am free, I am going to rebuild, for I am my Mum and Dad's bright strong girl with hands and shoulders for making, and love big enough to billow out the sails.

there is love

This post is half a year old, written before my dad died and when we had a view of his prognosis that was more optimistic.  Yet I still wanted to publish it, because I like to honour my son's evolution, and mark where he learns and grows...

Finn, you still seem so little. But big things abound. Your hero’s journey enters its dark night; you rush on with footballs and pause to lay car-tracks. 

It’s Father’s day and your Grandpa is dying; for my Dad now there is a timeline and a prognosis. Six months, twelve months, maybe more but who knows? We all love him so, and your love for him is so big it spills out in tears and fear.  But off we go for hugs and snags and play. You have some words like cancer and chemo, but we don’t use them this day; time enough for that when hospital begins.  I talk to you about it, that there are weeds in the garden of my big Father’s body. That there is a treatment like weedkiller that will make him feel bad because it kills good things in his body-garden too. That it is not his fault, and it it is not contagious.

You sense my worry and feel your worry, despite our shelter that curves over you like a bull-nosed veranda.

Coming home from the visit we all just needed rest. It had been a big day with Na and Pa, and I felt tetchy and tired.  And then bad things happened around a good little girl, and just like that you fostered her and cared. All your tired green shoots of love and the gruff stuff of big brothering, wrapped around a little girl; and you gave her the gift of normalcy.

YELL> THUMP> BANG! Bad monsters. Ugly hard sounds of shatter from next door. Screams.

When the police came because neighbor J had called them I got them chairs to sit in our front yard. J could wait for her daughter to be dropped home there, and talk to the police about how her ex-partner had become violent on her and her little home next door.

Finn, you were so curious about the police being out in our yard with her.  You peered at them out of the front window. You were worried about the daughter, A, a sweetly smart little redhead of three years that you’d been friends with for her whole life.  When she came home, she came straight in with us for a play, as J was still making her statement. You were so kind with her. She was worried, intuitive, wanting her Mum but also wanting your assurances and company. 

But why were the police there?

Why? Because it was a safe space for J. Because she had just been physically attacked, because I heard it, for yet another time. Because she knew she could bang on our door for help, as she had done before.  Because we can welcome her lovely girl for a play with a boy who who adores her, and he can be her sheltering veranda, a little space that’s warm and safe.  

She’s a strawberry of a girl, she admires you and plays to your level and calls you 'Faann', and in turn you get to be a big brother. You and she played, and peeped at the police. I told you they were helping A’s mum find ‘stolen house keys’.  It helped A understand why she wasn’t in her usual home next door, which had been trashed by the ex. Finn, I think you knew that it was more than that, yet you played, you made fun, and you shared your eve and your telly and your parents and your pizza. 

Later on I told you the truth. That sometimes men think its OK to hit and kick and throw things, when its never OK, no matter how bad a tantrum is going on. 

So on one of our own hard days I was reminded of my privilege: a ‘throw me in the air’ Dad, a safe childhood and safe home. And of my NORMS that aren’t privilege, that should be the given: I’ve never been hit, kicked or choked by the one I call my love.

But back to you, my Finn. 

You can be mighty, you can be naughty, you can buzz like a bee, you can drive my heart wild with it, but today you fostered. You gave of your good life to a little girl who was your friend, and you did it with grace and empathy.  I saw your care and I fell even more deeply in proud-Mama-love with you.  

My sweet sun, you are as juicy with love as an orange-half. Let it flow, little one, it's your superpower.




* J and her daughter moved away a month later, to a big house with the Sister/Aunt.  We've lost touch but I like to think they are safe and thriving.  Finn misses A, which is OK.  One day some random chance will have them meet!

My Dad died. Here is why I loved him and thought him my sun.

I love you Dad for so many reasons, but mostly because you took me seriously. I wasn’t a girlie girl, I was a tomboy, and you let me be that, and you enjoyed it too.  From the moment we moved to Vermont I was always down in your tool-shed alongside you. So you taught me- how to use tools, clean them, and put them away.

You showed me how to make a box. We had to measure up, with a ruler. I think that was the only time I saw you measure with anything other than your hands and a pencil! I had to saw the wood, make it all fit, glue it and nail it. You said if I could make a box I could make anything.  Then you gave me scrap wood to extend a tree house in the paddock next door. I made it awesome and spent many times there, bombing Dean and his mates with pinecones.

Because of you I know how to hang wallpaper and that it only sticks of you swear at it and stomp on it.  I read a famous five on my bed as you hung the wattle-flower wallpaper. I know you hung it the right way round, despite the ongoing tease from us all that it was upside down. You did good, Dad, and the swearing kept it firmly stuck for years.

You taught me how to change a car tire, clean battery points, top up my oil and water, and we even re-sprayed my first car together, a hideous shade of safety yellow so everyone could see me and my Volvo coming.  

One night outside KATEES nightclub Jenny Aitken and I changed a tire while drunken guys catcalled. I felt so proud. Thanks for that Dad.

When I was little and asked for a toolkit for Christmas, you didn’t laugh, or encourage me to get a doll. Somehow you found one- a miniature set in a wooden carry box. And they were real tools, with weight and purpose and red handles- a hammer, saw, screwdriver and more, all to fit my small hand. 

 I used some of the nails from it to hammer extra planks onto my cubby walls. The planks turned out to be walnut, and destined for the kitchen as shelves.  You were so angry when you realized what I’d done. But you also praised my straight nailing!

Other parts of being your tomboy girl were riding the old postie motorbike around the paddock, feeding apples to the horses next door, and climbing. I was about nine when I climbed to the top of the pine tree in our yard. Then I looked down and freaked!  And yelled out a VERY bad swear word little girls shouldn’t say.  You didn’t rescue me. You came partway up and talked me down.  I could feel proud, even as I got a bum-smack for the swearing.

Thanks Dad, for teaching me to shake hands properly.  You taught Dean and me that your handshake is your word, so when you give it you must see the thing through and do it right.  Because you hated   ‘gonna-do-ers’ I grew up believing in doing, in taking action on dreams to make them real.  It’s a good life lesson, thanks Dad.

Some other life lessons I got from you Dad: the world is not straight, so measure it by eye and hand. Cracks will always come back. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix them each time they do. Be useful. Don’t wallow. When you feel blue go for a drive out into the country, or find something to fix. Climb the tree, don’t be scared. Someone will be there to talk you back down.

Dad, all these things you left me with help me feel sound, and useful, and like I’m meant to be here, and that’s such a lovely thing you gave to me.  You used to thrown me in the air until the sky touched my head, and you made me feel so loved.

 I need to give you something back and so it’s this.  You are in the warmth. There are droplets drying from your skin because you have just swum. The heat is rising, and the sun is straight above you. You have no work to do, nothing to fix.  You are drifting in an out of a dream, sitting in your chair, basking like a lizard in the sun. 

Happy Birthday my Big Boy!

Dear Finn,

You are seven, you are my big boy, you are loved.  You just had your birthday and we’ve celebrated by road-tripping, first to Murchison then looping around beautiful coastlines.   In Murchison you played hard with Gilbert and Hermione, nestled in a bean bag with Spencer the red-haired cat, slept once again in your bubble-van bedroom, in the part that curves over you like a pale gold cave and has all the little windows.  You picked up eggs from Bipp’s hutch, you bounced on a net-less trampoline, you ate rye bread without noticing it was ‘brown’ and you picked up an acorn from the road and admired its tender green smell.  I love to watch you in flow in the country; you have it in you gut deep, just like me.  Murchison is our good family tradition, many years now doing the Easter egg hunt or the New Year’s Eve party, the winter bonfire and the long and lovely meals together with your ‘country cousins’.  You know you have big mob out in the world, your non-blood family who have laid their tracks beyond the Melbourne where they were first my friends.  Now they are your friends, lighthouses dotted around the state, beacons of love for you. 

                And now you have just covered more country, with me, on our first Mum and Son road trip.  The map showed you how far we drove. Way past Geelong, which you know so well from car-shows with your Dad, across a place called Winchelsea, and into Colac where we stopped at the RSL for crunchy salty chips and you kept swapping your raspberry for my coke!  Down we wiggled, through a place called Simpson, and then there we were at the house in Coorimungle.  Two days of ‘Aunty’ Tracy and her husband Luke, and five working dogs. Oh heaven. You befriended the littlest of their border collies, Uda, and tried to contain your excitement and learn some dog handling techniques from Luke who is an expert trainer and handler.  We ate junk, then apples, and broke rules then you’d re-find the ones that actually serve you, hopping off your device to go outside and run with the dogs.  You flopped on a couch with Uda alongside you, got filthy, had your first outdoor loo-poo and your first experience sleeping with me in a big double bed where we woke to the perfection of sunrise seen from a hilltop: orange bands deepening into violet-brown  beneath sea-coloured sky. 

                At Port Campbell you didn’t care when your toy boat didn’t start up; you ran into the waves and chased their frills over and over, soaking your sneakers which we had to pop into the dryer later on.  At the Twelve Apostles your clever Tracy explained plants to you, and different scat that we found, and how the fat penguins enjoyed their protected beach. Not every boy has the Park Ranger’s coordinator as their guide! In Timboon the tatey cakes were ‘so crunchy, Mum.’ And you crunched through two, your appetite made sharp by the cool apple-crispness of the air.  You walked barefoot through Timboon, your shoes a soggy heap in the car. I teased you that people would think I was a bad Mum. ‘We’re in the country Mum; it doesn’t matter.’

                You always amaze me, my gorgeous boy, but I have learned new things about you: your generosity of spirit, your spontaneity, your ease and confidence around new people, and how readily you can flow into new views and terrains.  Just when I’d worry you might get bored you’d find a beauty and exclaim in your piping voice, ‘Mum!’  (The silkiness of Uda’s coat, the orange and brown birds on the water tank, a sky with an ocean- tide of curling spumey clouds.)

 I tumble into yet a deeper level of loving you.  Finn, you are seven.  You are my son. You are loved.  

Rainy days and Arthur Mee and ‘Things to Make and Do’…

From my seventies suburban childhood some aspects, objects and books still cavort in my mind, taking succour from thin after dinner mint chocolates and the recalled smell of ‘Le Jardin’ perfume.
There was the avocado-coloured bath, the pine kitchen table with yellow vinyl seats, the olive and taupe floral wallpaper in my room, then those special books:
The ‘How and Why Wonder Books’ kept me informed and titillated with art and history, chemistry and anatomy. I loved the way each double-page spread in ‘Anatomy’ delved one layer further at a time, like a fleshy striptease, from skin and hair, to muscle and ligament, to bone, to internal organs, culminating in the weirdness of a forming foetus in the wildly curious and curiously addictive ‘Human Reproduction’ chapter.

My ‘Illustrated Children’s Bible’ shocked and intrigued with it’s provocative breast-of-Salome exposed amidst a flirt of jewel-hued veils; turn the page and John’s head bled like an uncooked corned-beef on a gilded tray held in her talonned hand! There was David peeping at Bathsheeba and YOU COULD SEE a little watercolour furriness above her thighs…

But best of all was the inherited set of ‘Arthur Mees Children’s Encyclopaedia’.
For a reclusive kid seemingly everything could be learned from those soft burgundy tomes from art, to wise thoughts, to natural wonders, great men and women of history and even French! But the very best and for purely the reason of what it’s title denotes was the ‘Things to Make and Do’ section in every volume from two through to ten.

I still have the complete set of ‘Arthur Mees’ (mine are circa 1951-1954) and recently trailed loving fingers through them. Yes! Those ‘Make and Do’ sections (usually three per volume) were as good as I recall. They put the ‘Dangerous Books’ for girls and boys into the mediocre-shame bin they deserve.

In the world of Arthur Mees’ children there are tooth-decaying recipes for toffee apples where no ‘get Mum to boil the sugar’ is required. There are lab experiments involving sulphur, naked flames and mercury. You can learn how to make a high speed Billy-cart with laughable ‘brakes’, how to light a fire, make a firecracker, make a battery then make a light. How to sharpen your pocketknife with sand or how to semograph that there are spies in your village. In Arthur’s world kids don’t just run with scissors, they learn how to engineer a working guillotine from Daddy’s spare razor.

And the loveliest part? Despite all of Arthur Mee’s epochal love of the English as the God-blessed race and the English Child as the Superlative Human, through every book and every tale of art, science, philosophy or things to make and do- girls were there. They were depicted alongside little boys in apple-catchers making the toffee or waving the semograph flag, they were depicted as women building short-wave radio or leading an army, discovering a bacteria or writing a literary classic, and oh, there they were again making a model-plane on a rainy afternoon, while the eggs and custard boiled for their ‘nursery tea’.

Later, fully into the fifties and away from that second war that saw all hands and brains in use this would not have happened. Arthur, for all his faults, depicted his times, an era where (albeit briefly) strength and knowledge were both required and cultivated in all.

He can cop a lot these days, but for us fans the books are beloved treasures, smelling of silverfish and early adventures on rainy days. I’m digging through them again; it’s time my little one learned how to toffee an apple and make a waxed-paper sailboat.

The explosives section can wait until he can read it himself.

eventually, insomnia, my love.

In my golden memories of late-childhood I recall sleeping. I slept the deep bone-sleep of the child who spent days perfecting handstands between eating rounds of white-bread sandwiches washed down with milo.  I slept listening to 3XY radio and  I slept with the dropped book squished somewhere against my hot little body. 

Then in the mornings, once I’d been good and earned my reading-rights by getting up for breakfast, washing myself and doing a house-work job like dusting with an old singlet of Dad’s, I’d be allowed to go back to my room, to sleep-read, which is possibly the most delicious sensation I know—pages are read, face drops onto arm or pillow, wake, read more, drop off dreaming the next part of the story…

I don’t sleep like that now, not with that heavy sense of ease and rightfulness.  These days I doubt sleep, and perhaps knowing this sleep in turn is skittish with me, thin like the meanness of dieting, jumpy like a new love, uncertain and fleet of foot.

And yet, and yet… my body gets tired but I love what night-wakefulness can do If I let it.  There is no fight sometimes against 3am, no fight and no hope-for-sleep and no anything so sometimes I simply mediate a huge blue flower across the dark expanse of my forehead.  Sometimes I get up from the kicked sheets and beaten pillow, and these times are sublime.

There is the night being washed.   Who is doing this washing, how does it happen always this way?  The utter clarity in the chill air, my toes scrunching on the warmer greyed-wood of the deck, and the possums have stilled in my presence.  Night-flower-scent, delicate, moreso than under the sun of daytime.  Jasmine and honeysuckle and the gorgeous sexiness of orange roses.

Or 5am, my mind yearning towards coffee and the sharpening into day, perhaps I do some words or read.  I go again to the back veranda to sail in a brief dream-burst upon tiny wooden boats silhouetted on a sky that is striated pink-- a mobile that takes me briefly into fantasies of the spice isles, where I lurch against rigging as my grin splits my face in two and my lips catch salt-spume.

Eventually, in insomnia, I wonder why I would sleep when there are waking dreams?

come shrug with me

Parents used to have more social time with friends in the sixties, seventies and eighties than parents do now.

As kids we ate a yellow TV dinner whilst they entertained with tinned things on ritz crackers, BenEan wine (or if you were classy, Mateusse), Neil Diamond on the record player and a blue haze of Stuveysent smoke.  They laughed and ignored us, we survived it. Mothers and Fathers, hear my Call to Arms.  Come and hang out. I will not cook from Nigella nor entertain your kids.  I will wear lipstick and I may make lewd innuendo in front of your darlings.  Ring the doorbell.  You might get a ritz cracker with a tinned oyster while our kids hunt for snails in the garden. When there is whining or dobbing we’ll ignore them, and They Will Survive.

Ok, so in truth MY mum and Dad did a bit of the above, though the meal would have been a cooked one for us kids…but yellow, like maybe fish fingers.

But I recall them entertaining. Be it a drop in from neighbour Margaret that lasted for three hours and a packet of mint slices, or the more posh dinners, or the family arvo teas or BBQs, the house often had people in it.  Any kids present were left to their own devices. We got up to some mischief, got bored, whined, dobbed, but weren’te given the huge amount of air-time that prevents ‘grown-ups’ from having a bloody life.

I have decided to become a big supporter of Childhood Boredom, something I’m learning to instil finally (hopefully not late) in my son who as an only child has ruled the bloody roost for too long!

The best gift my Mum gave me as a kid was boredom.  She’s an interesting person.  But she didn’t load me up with pre-set interesting play.  I didn’t go to Kindergarten, I dagged around behind her doing bits of housework.  I got bored. I found things to do. I was eager when schooling started.  Later I learned to make things, draw, colour, hook rugs, tapestry, annoy my brother, have a fight, survive it etc.

So yeah, forget waiting for an invite for some posh nosh.  Forget me setting up a fun learning activity for the kids.  Come over. We’ll talk in the kitchen and let them work it out. I won’t ignore them if they damage themselves, but unless they’re bleeding, murdering or setting fires I’m going to take a deep breath (and a deeper slug from the wine-glass) and then I’m going to shrug. 

Don’t you think it’s time we all learned to shrug again?  Ahh, the shrug, that lovely loose physical manifestation of ‘care factor?’ and ‘I dunno!’…

On re-reading the journals of Anais Nin

Recently I was scanning my bookshelves and found an old 1964 edition of the ‘1931-1934 Journal of Anais Nin’.

The last time I attempted to read some of her journals was about 17 years ago. I had graduated with a literature major, knew I wanted to stay at university longer and do an honors thesis in literature, and was tossing up between attempting something on Nin or something on the poetry of Coleridge.

Neither won. Broke and sick of the struggle, I gave up the attempts to stay in academia and went out to get a job. I continued reading the Anais Nin journals, and continued my personal war with her.

At 23 my moral certitude was high and I railed against her even as I begrudgingly admired her. I was too young to know I could admire her but not want to be her. So I seethed at the lies of omission in her journals, how she fails to cite her husband Hugo as the patron of her lifestyle, the source of the income she passes on to an increasing friendship circle of hungry writers and artists.

Now I’m finding it a joy to read this journal. Maybe my moral certitudes have been softened by my observance of life. People’s marriages are complex and interior worlds, everyone is fallible, and an individual struggling to be heard as an artist to me now has a ‘moral’ right to grow their creative flow as much as to protect another person.

The journal I’m reading covers one of the most fecund times in literary history, a period between the great wars and more specifically a period in France where the communication of psychology, the relative ease of writers banding together to print their works, and political tensions combined to create strong opinions and heady thoughts.  This was café society at its purest, and amongst her friends Anais counted Antonin Artuad, Henry Miller and Otto Rank.

It is the conversations between Henry and Anais that I am now finding so rich and fulfilling to re-hear. Reading these  is awakening the critic and the feminist and the writer within who have been dormant for a while out of necessity.  Their conversation is a distillation of ideologies emerging at the time about how men write, and how women write. Henry is the almost caricatured male: active, vulgar, sexual, pugilistic, drawn to the ugly, writing the male orgasm in all its linear trajectory.  Anais is the archetypal female, writing her unconscious, immersed in sensual observation, artifice, and writing narrative that expands like ripples on a pond. Their arguments and friendship reflect at times the misogynist talking to the feminist, at other times the duality of a whole and healthy psyche, the male and female at one.

During the time she wrote this journal she begins her first novel that will be published (‘A spy in the House of Love'). Henry is writing his famous novel ‘Tropic of Capricorn’.

Both of these novels are their attempts to write June Miller, Henry’s wife, out of their systems, to write until she is understood and in some way therefore diminished. That both love her and are sexually fascinated and repulsed by her underpins their own explosive sexual and literary affair over these years.

During this journal Anais also undergoes analysis, first with a Dr Allendy, then with Otto Rank, a student of Sigmund Freud. Her aptitude for psychology as an analysand leads her into a study of it under Dr Rank, and her work from this time draws heavily on Jungian  symbolism and is nourished by early psychoanalytic theory.  I believe it leaves a legacy that female writers have followed down the twentieth century and beyond.

Reading the journals again, and feeling this time such pleasure in her strengthening personal self, her burgeoning intellect, her crystallization as a writer of something very fine, I am happy to feel compassion for a woman of her times, a woman writing herself into an existence out of the ordinary, out of what was given her by men in a still-tightly bound society.

In reading the journals again I have been able to reflect on my own shifts since those first attempts years ago. It is good to realize you have changed; it’s so incremental a process that it can be easily left unseen.

The train, the rain, and ‘Pomes Penyeach’

I love train travel. Even the morning commute across two trains from West to East I used to love. I love the sway of them, the rumble of them, the narrowness of them forcing all these bodies together as a reminder that in each separate skull exists a universe of memories, ancestry and experiences. I don’t even mind that sometimes people on them are strange or smelly.

I have a train-affectation others might find strange. On train trips, long or short, I always have that arts-student staple: a ‘slim volume of poetry’. I started collecting battered old ‘slim volumes’ when I was in my late teens, often buying them from the Lake Bookhouse in Daylesford, and usually buying ones with loving inscriptions in the front leaves. The inscriptions could sway me to buy something more than knowledge of the poet. I loved that people used to give each other slim volumes of poetry and write messages in them too.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties I also fell very romantically in love (and with a surprising subtlety of inaction) with a man in his (very) late forties. He would perform at a place I often went, and scatter poetry recitation between music making with a glib and puckish sense of mischief. I adored him and knew nothing would or could ever happen, so I didn’t feel the need to test my developing wiliness on him! He must have known of my crush, and he always treated me respectfully, coming over at breaks to chat about books and music.

When I turned 21 he gave me a used 1960’s copy of James Joyce’s ‘Pomes Penyeach’. On the third page in and in a broad stroke of ink he’d written, 'To A, with love,...'

The book though old was entirely unmarked save on thing: A single page had its corner folded. On that page was an asterix above the poem title. And the final word of the poem was underlined. To this day I wonder if he was telling me something, or if the notation was inherited with the second-hand book. The wondering was always OK and still is. On trains, reading the poem again, my heart feels warm and pleased with the gift he gave my young and chaotic self.

Alone

Thee moon’s greygolden meshes make
All night a veil,
The shorelamps in the sleeping lake
Laburnum tendrils trail.

The sly reeds whisper to the night
A name- her name-
And all my soul is a delight
A swoon of shame

(James Joyce, Zurich, 1916)

reading Rilke at 3am

as I battle the dreaded insomnia again, and again, and again in its usual cycle of (hopefully) around three months, I find myself crashing in my blue-room, a kind of study-come-boudoir with a very  comfy couch bed and a the ever-present pattern of leaves on the window from a large tree outside.  At 3am, or 4am, I'll creep in, too restless to inflict my twitchy feet on Husband, but clearly also too restless to attempt sleep.
With the light on soft and a dim view of the street, I again, as always come Autumn, pick up poetry. Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us that all is sacred, can be sublime. That he does this with reference to a God he knows but has no secular faith in, that he does this as merely a conduit to the sensual and only then the sublime, is why I must return.  He knew secular faith but could not feel it, he felt the sensual world and mastered a prose that steps back from being a knowing guide - it is his observance alone that takes us freely to our own realizations, Yes, that is so, just like that- YES!

I am stunned, always, by the modernity of him, and yet how well he fits an epoch of deep introspection, critical thought and a tradition of intellectual questioning.

All that nestled in the sheer beauty and familiarity of his prose, so new, so sure, so skin-felt and heart-drummed. To be so taken up, out and through by words still quite stuns me.
I can imagine no better antidote to 3am restlessness. If you haven't, please do.

Twintown drinking

It’s the same old pub in the same old town. He can smell the fryers out the back doing their turnover of bacon, burgers and parmas. Late arvo light shafts in and shines on the trophies and pictures of local footy players that adorn the walls. Kids are playing a desultory game of pool on the torn up table. His mouthful of fish and chips taste sharp with salt and lemon and the glass he’s holding, has stuck, hilariously he thinks, to its tacky coaster.

                ‘Fortune’s Legacy’ won today and everything is good because he’s going to leave, live like a king, maybe go to Sydney and buy an apartment and be close to his daughter and grandkids.    Everything in the pub looks different now,  haloed with an aura of sentimentality that blooms from his chest, making his beer taste like heaven and the weathered faces around seem very dear.

                His heart fills fit to bust and his glance slides along the twinkling row of bottles on the top shelf, rainbow coloured spirits and liqueurs, the sea blue of Curacao like the sea near his daughter’s home, tawny Scotch as welcoming as those soft leather armchairs in posh lobbies, Vodka that glints like diamonds!

                ‘My shout!’ he yells out deliriously, and waves his arm towards these riches of colour. ‘My shout! Anything you bloody want, me horse won the race!’

                                                                                ***

The fryer gives off a greasy smoke than always stinks up the pub with fug that smells like rancid fish.  It’s late arvo and dirty sepia light pushes past the small windows, showing the grime of a million cigarettes smoked over a hundred years.  Million- yeah right.  He was meant to win one.

                His parma is cold, the cheese congealed and the sauce a hard crust like blood on an old wound.  He reckons it was yesterdays, reheated under the Baine Marie, they do that here. Over and over the same food, the same songs on the jukebox.   Same group of kids, just different versions of them, always playing pool and drinking.  Now he’ll never bloody leave. He stares into his beer, annoyed by the smug faces around him with their same beaten look and their same stupid stories.

                He reckons he might just have enough for another pint, and filches around his pocket, where the ticket is. Stupid fucking horse.  He has three bucks in loose change left, not enough even for a pot.  The dark walls, smoke and stink close in and the clatter of voices merry with drink makes him angrier by the moment.  Time to go.

The Source

  

You were a sunny child, into tree houses and throwing pinecomb bombs, part of the rough and tumble mix of neighbourhood life. Loud, scabby-kneed, natural. Then something happened which you now realize was a catalyst in changing your shape, your personality, towards something more inclined to sit always outside the circle; you became introverted. 

In 1976 when you were five you got Scarlet Fever. It must have been bad because as Dad took you ino the local doctors you left your body and saw him carrying you, small and slumped in your flame red dressing gown. You saw the shocked faces in the waiting room and how the receptionist rushed you straight into Dr Glassspole’s office. Your face! Suppurating red sores where only an hour before your freckled skin had been.

During the six week recovery you saw the EverReady Bunny come through your pink and orange floral wallpaper, quite a few times. You saw an angel that looked like Glenda from the Wizard of OZ.  Sores popped pus into your ears and you got an ear infection. Trolls gambolled beneath your bed; fever and shakes; you rode life-sized My Pretty Ponies, shakes and fever.

From then on your ears were vulnerable to tinnitus, a low whining that made you feel as though a mosquito was trapped in your head.  You also had a form of synaesthesia, that weird little crossing of neurological pathways and misfired synapses: words could have tastes so viscerally real it made you pull faces and salivate. Once someone said ‘due diligence’ in a meeting and you gagged on the taste of Coca Cola syrup, so strong and present it was as if you had sucked Cola laybacks from the post-mix gun behind a bar.

So now you have this aural sensitivity that makes sound, especially voices, a tangle of threads to be unpicked. Chatter spools all over the floor like old ladies crochet yarns. You understand conversations better from outside the circle. You hear better from the front of the room. It got you labelled Geek years ago, something you cultivated with talk of seeing angels, demons and ghosts.  .  But they weren’t. They were people. Doing things that looked real. It just took you til adulthood to figure it out.

The first time you helped the police you tried to do it anonymously, but you were so naive about the perfect accuracy of your ‘tip’ you became a suspect. Oh irony, it has a salty sweet taste but it will always smell like brackish water.

You had slept and you had followed a woman, through brush, who seemed to be following a grey metal lock-box held out in front of her. You saw the grey van with its bong-smokers parked on the gravel in-road. You saw its license plate number. You saw the signage on an old warehouse nearby.

You saw the slick sepia river, the tree stump at its edge. You saw a beautiful woman in heels being led by a lock-box that yearned towards the water.

Then,  a week later,  her face and shining hair were on the news.

The Source dreams

A prologue

Come with me, walk carefully and quietly. Stay back! We follow a woman as she steps carefully in high heels through the mud and undergrowth.  She is in the wrong shoes for this job, but it’s her lunch break and the only time unaccounted for. 

The water smells brackish, shallow and mineral-rich.  Will it be deep enough beneath that surface that is slick with oily stains?   Watch your step; there is so much rubbish, detritus of trysts and parties: cans, glass and condoms. Follow her.  Watch her.  You may need to remember this moment.  Her hair is sable-brown and neatly rolled in a French pleat.

 A man is dead, and there is a box to remove from the world, a grey metal lock-box she holds out in front carefully, like a tray of canapés being proffered. Stories trail behind her, little lost and secret stories. They cling to her pencil skirt and whine for attention.  No time for them.  Not now. Her heart beat is a bass-heavy thump but in her head is a crazed jazz treble: logistics, logins, passwords, email accounts. Another box, this time in a bank. Two PO boxes in two towns, and at the huge hospital on Broad street one body.  

One beloved, known, mapped by her fingers body.   A man is dead and the box must disappear.

Watch her. Follow her. You may need to remember this moment…

Little Boy Hansel

It is full dark and the trees whip and whisper.  Way up, up high, the orange street lights try to hold back the sky. There is no-one about--is there?  No squares of warmth and voice fall beyond the darkened window panes that sit behind long and low front yards. 
He is 107 centimetres tall and not yet six years old.

In his t-shirt pocket is a little plastic bag of coins.  He waves the blue arc of torch-beam like a light- saber through the cold night, the dark night, the excited night.  In response it asks: 'Little boy, little little-little boy, can you remember the rules?'
He toes the kerb, looks left and right, then bolts across the road, a river of risk, and leaps onto the safety of the kerb (embankment), punching the air with his beam, legs pumping along the path, one house, two house three house, four!

In his head his Mum's mantra: 'careful in the car-park, ask the staff for help, any treat you choose, my big boy...'

She stands in the shadows under a tree and lights a cigarette, able to see him nearly all of the way.  Prouder than she'll be when he starts school or performs a solo. Remembering, as she puffs her mum-blues out into the cold air, her own adventures in creeks (Rivers and Dams!) and tunnels (Secret Caves of Treasure), but remembering too that just short years older than him and the adult world had proved itself capable of a darkness worse than storm-drains.

Puff. Risk. Managed. Puff. But. Still.

The air stills, her neighbours pull away in their heavy-duty car and she imagines him suddenly mangled beneath it.

The beams trail away, replaced by a swinging solid line of blue. Here he comes, whistling on his lollypop, pleased and proud.  Whistle-Toot and in he tumbles, back to TV and bath-time and all the overblown baby-rituals of coddling.

So many risks ahead, most of them unmanageable. This his first.
Whistle-toot!

Puff.

Pull up a chair, grief.

I sat in a park alone. Let the wheel turn as it would. All went silver into nothing. Then the view again. Silver. View.  I found that finally I was crying, the tears thick, oozing gently past my lower lids and onto my cheeks, immediately effaced by the wind that was mildly warm but gusty.  After ten or fifteen minutes the view took more colours. I realized I was crying not for my Uncle who just died, but for myself and his children. That I was crying because I know and fear that when my Dad dies I will be infantile with grief, an utter child again, railing and flailing.  I understood too that that though I will cry for when my Mum dies it won’t be so outraged. I hold her too close inside, she’ll always be in me chattering away, whereas the loss of my Dad will come with a fear that he is indeed lost…He lives not in the world of talk which can resonate inside, but in the world of activity.  I will see him in the repairs of my home, in my own tendency to not let myself be picked over in a fight, my straight and sound work, in some of the charm he transmitted through genes or all the living. I should trust I will have him close, yet somehow it his death I fear more greatly.

The wheel turns, the warmish wind blows, it is autumn, thinning of the veils.  And there!  Colour again.  A shed so blue it is sky. Its trim is the burnished brown-red of olives. The taste almost on me, of olives on a day hung cerulean blue.  Death-thoughts subside in the moment of that shed’s painting, all the confluent story of someone choosing those colours, dreaming that scheme; then two little girls emerge from the shed on hot-pink bikes. I remember being six or seven and going to Dad’s work, the excitement of it, the great warehouse where I rode a big purple woman's bike round and round the empty concrete floors. Hot chocolate in the dark wood office.  Just another childhood Saturday.

And now I build those childhood Saturdays for another, good reason, sensible loving reason, to have held down on grief and mortal fears. Good reason to go now, away from the salty words and into the sweet of my son and his little limbs sprawled on the couch. But I know too I’m not done crying, that in the mix of life and the days there is so much salt ahead, salt enough to make a statue of a wife, or salt enough to buoy a ship.

Which will it be?

A silent moment in the music

It’s a glaring autumn day and I am pleasantly mellow from a new sleeping pill I tried last night.

I was in bed, hazing and fluttering to the wind and creaking house, and felt as though I was back in the era of coming down from a night of hard dancing and partying.

I recalled a wild time. I had been with the usual crowd of about fifteen friends and it was a surprisingly small club and a winter gig. The DJs were from Detroit and the crowd worshipped their mix of dropping in Motown to high NRG beats.  I left everyone in a moment of clarity and certainty that I wanted to observe and absorb the undulating crowd of arms in the air.

Upstairs I prowled the mezzanine then bumped into an old friend that I had dropped for his ruthless wildness.  He was still elfin, delicate looking, shave-headed, his homosexuality projecting from him like a prowling beam.  We fell into each other’s arms and grinned ecstatically. “I want to hang out with you.” “ Yes, let’s go NUTS.”

He offered me cocaine,  e, speed…patting his cargo-pants pockets and beaming.  But even with the gleeful daemons wanting to play I had a ‘one elixir' rule and my choice was drink…”NO, let’s do shots!”

We sank shots and then champagne from the mezzanine bar then drifted down to the floor, soon in the middle, riding high on the wave of sound and people-pleasure, dancing like gleeful imps and air punching. I forgot the old ruthlessness he could show and swam with him instead in the moments of being beautiful and glorious.

He was my age, and at over thirty we were older than many in the crowd, so we busted out tricky moves from the early eighties house-music days and soon had a circle of dancing ‘fans.’

We danced for hours, leaving only for more champagne and toilet breaks; him coming into the ladies and using the make-up of many passing girls…

At dawn I still liked him, a lovely thing, and we parted to go to separate recovery-days, mine at a small club where the flavour was trance and jazz and fusion, him off to an outdoors day-rave.

It was years until I saw him again; he was skipping lightly arm in arm with beautiful young queers through a park I was in with my son.  He beamed at me and nodded at my boy.  I smiled and clasped my child’s hand.  A flicking moment where we acknowledged a passionate past friendship and respected the gulf between our now-lives.  We had forgiven each other;  me for his diamond-hard- core, him for my casting him adrift when he broke one too many times.    Forgiven each other through a communion of wild dance.  Would I want him in my life again?  No.  But how I love that memory of our dancing.

 Another jewel in my box of pretty things.

morning prayer for Uncle Jeff

Do we all know how to pray? Do I know how to pray if I want to?

Long ago in childhood in sweet soft faith I could pray easily to God to bless my family then hop into bed.  A faith that I lost in early adolescence.  Once that kind of faith is lost I don’t think we can get it back.

Yet this morning I find myself wanting to say a simple prayer. Perhaps just to the sky, which is softly striated green and grey with dawn. Perhaps to the birds that are bright with trilling, chattering arcs and falls of song.  Ok then, I will pray to nature in the way of my women.

Take my Uncle Jeff softly back to yourself. Once he was a white-haired boy-child with all the sparky attitude of a younger son loved hard and ready by his big brothers, loved by his parents.  You were his parent too, and now he has died and you may bring him home to you.  His body to blaze briefly like a star, his ash to fall and mingle with earth and water. He is yours again, an elemental and beautiful thing, atoms borne aloft, ready to become his star again. 

I don’t know how to pray, but I bless him into rest, away from pain. I bless him with love. I knew his story not nearly enough, but I always felt his wonder and love at the family and children around him, his pride to be part of it all.  

Great mother and father, take this loving man and enfold him into love. Blessed be.