So far and no safari
- Mark O'Connor
An invisible neighbour dumps a box of plants in the backyard. It rains softly over the town. Art Blakey has just played "Moanin" a favorite from 1958 but I've removed my earphones to see in May of 1993 a service today for Bob Harris, which John attended - without Martin Johnston's "In Memorium" (buried in my cachÈ of poetry, somewhere in a box labelled Tampax up the road at Jenny's place. I imagined Jas Duke playing chess with Martin: they would have found community though they never actually met. Bob, Jas and Martin: all to some extent "self-educated" - or at least (in Martin's case) "eccentrically" educated. But Bob didn't (as far as I know) play chess, and wasn't a lover of knowledge for its own sake. He was more directed, funelling all things into poetry. Jas could tell you about the I.W.W. or the American electoral system; Martin, anything you'd want to know about Greek-Turkish conflict or poets imprisoned by the junta. Jas would recite my poems. He knew them better than I did - his concern not my bad memory. That I couldn't locate Martin's poem for John due to our interior rearrangement - books elsewhere, except for a few odd titles, the hall piled with junk (what useful things become when shifted to inaccessible locations - a creaking metaphor for our lives' rearrangement, distantly though importantly by these dead poets. A young lawyer moves into Lisa's vacated flat. Rudi appears more ravaged, who walked - a young Czech - back from Stalingrad without shoes, to Germany in 1943. And I write in the kitchen with my second beer; the living room as yet uninhabitable. Rosemary walks the wooden floor in search of books with answers amongst what remains of our references. A green Olio Sasso tin empty, on the kitchen floor, smell of turpentine outside. I hold a shell to my ear to "hear the sea" I hear Germans or Swedes next door the steady rain not conducive for Eurotravellers' activities a wall of cartoons before me, faded, brittle, to be replaced by more recent follies. I think about Art - Art Blakey, that is, and the Jazz Messengers - and Jas, Martin and Bob: their notions of art about as various as it's possible to be. I remember once John and I, criticising Martin's long poem "To the Innate Island" noting (to his chagrin) this sort of poem couldn't be written anymore (the poem with a whole culture as its burden) but he'd written it, and there it was, and is. Younger, we were not aware how deep the cut would be. And now the poem exists; a construct which gives pleasure and gives the lie to notions otherwise expressed applauding the "vernacular republic" - John said of that one it implied "the kingdom of proper usage" was elsewhere. We wished to escape these handy apothegms, write what was possible as it was. I blow my nose with a red handkerchief, cook dinner, pour another beer, ease into this May evening; the imagined and impeccable response of Ken Bolton and John Jenkins: "Very well sir, it's your poem and you must include what you wish sir. I sir, desire only to obtain the bird." Yeats said: a poet "is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast." Yeats was a shit. The Indian summer is over, leaves of the fig only beginning to yellow. I'm happy we don't have real seasons - the sight of all that dead vegetation between Washington and New York last year's fall, and what a relief it was to get to San Francisco and the green of eucalypts: not simply a sense of being closer to "home". Groan of a tram from the Esplanade. A dirty wind distant radios turpentine the Triffids singing "Chicken Killer". Tambourine Life! I punch holes in the mystery bags - in the mixed metaphor of political commentators "puncture a few sacred cows" Buried items: my guitar with blackened bass strings. I couldn't understand why older people owned musical instruments they no longer wished to play - were these the discarded apparatus of courtship? (for me, simply the realisation that imagination exceeded physical capacity and I would never be able to play the tunes I "heard" - this and a hatred of the "folkie" strum. I would want to make an acoustic instrument sound electric; play against its limitations - of a piece I guess with my feelings about poetry; no wish to condone a limited and sectional interest in its workings. Works of the past remain great even if we venture elsewhere, they're taken for granted if used as templates and I always suspected the search for romanticism's narwhals - why not the washing machine? the sausage? (The Mystery Bags of Charles Peguy!) A pair of shoes sits in an upended bookshelf - the place where "In Memorium" should be? I catch the light rail to escape from paint, pass the lit windows of pubs, cars streaming home after peak hour, a lovely choreography; the restaurant (changed name, changed cuisine) where I was first led to meet Rosemary's parents - a mysterious "older man" (= "trouble") though I was still in my thirties. The rail passes into blackness after City Rd then the towering lights of this (so they say) sick city. Cross the north end of Exhibition Gardens to Lygon St where I buy a book about American punk music. At the University Cafe we dine with two lawyers. I nod off during a long argument on the inequity of rape sentencing; imagine I'm with a bunch of medieval scholastics investigating form and matter. To overcome paint smell cut up an onion and stand in a bucket of water (saith the butcher) Scatter newspapers and items over these floorboards while there's still space. Pick out a rough blues the guitar strings holding some kind of tone still. Metallic sky at 4 pm over Chapel St, a line of used refrigerators, grey over the art school "little fidget wheels" &c. Water slips down gum leaves, pools and drips from fig. Friday. A wrong number. I get up to see what happens next. A foghorn. Pigeons wheel over a rooftop laundry. Remember when the avant-garde writers would sit around describing the items on their desks? (If I buy a set of spanners will I become a mechanic?) Television squares the reflection of this couch into a few centimetres; stretches it vertically so that my legs, in the middle, break the screen in a dark stripe like a Barnett Newman (so who said: "aesthetics is for the artists like ornithology is for the birds"? Ad Reinhardt? Dancing laundry a gust of rain mahogany on pale hardwood (sneeze) "implements in their various places" another gust (the sky: piebald? "couple colour as a brinded cow"? (why compare a hemisphere to a beast? Ask the poets. Or I'll watch blank television like 1976. Birds manic at dusk a wide-screen movie through the venetian slats. The light that can't be photographed behind the birch. We are condemned to write as we please shirts flapping against the skyline traffic rumble downhill. could I burn the books (not the records!) to begin again not even a desk replete with objects to describe. I have floorboards, a TV (TV!) but I won't describe the casing - that would be too John Forbes. To describe the cathode ray tube would be too John Tranter (though from this I'm saved by ignorance). I'd mention the program if it were on (being a literalist) - tonight: The Maltese Falcon! Now the light outside has faded leaving the yellow of the hostel's kitchen. It's a cold-weather sky, Melbourne finally temperate and autumnal. A car horn stays on for several minutes. Somewhere in this city: a tram with my poem on it (two lines on a poster. Hope the artwork's O.K.) It's Saturday. We buy clothes, then a mirror; run into Jenny and Reg shopping together (who wear the same shirts in different cities) A side of my watch stained yellow with varnish; the watch dating from a trip to Adelaide and the Flinders Ranges i.m. Charles Buckmaster who went that way circa 1970 and wrote of Quorn and Wilpena Pound. I never met him (saw him working once in the Whole Earth bookshop) and would not have found much to talk about, I think, till later had it been possible. No-one to share a sensibility with (except maybe Ken, though our humour's a bit different and I'm slower on my feet possibly more lateral - excessively some would say. I wonder how much this has to do with the stroke I suffered in 1966. It started me on poetry - well, gave a space to begin writing in (like a hole in the head?). Maybe did grievous damage to my analytic capacities, holding in suspension self-criticism just long enough to give poetry a chance and letting loose the shaping intelligence later on the idiot product (like a surfboard lost in Peru). A pilot light splutters in the otherwise silent kitchen as a clear day clouds over. Rosemary, comatose, has missed all this. A household boxed and stacked is full of possibility - if we could live this way forever. But there are books to consult, pieces of music inaccessible here or elsewhere, which no-one could have imagined would be necessary - memory allows and does not allow a return to beginnings (brain-junk can't be disposed of so easily so a use must be found for these pieces apostle spoons, odd socks and vanished riffs, my old school motto: Labor Omnia Vincit (that futility, a prefabricated set of classrooms on Melbourne's (then) outer edge with a latin tag. We were mostly office and factory fodder harbouring a few right-wing councillors (owners of slide-rules). Monash Uni up the road was a different matter: the Labor Club brought new levels of boredom - my first experience of the "procedural motion". In 1968 I would not wear jeans - a phenomenon I saw as the upper class dressing down (the "boss class" as the Labor Club would say). I wanted to dress up wore black and white check trousers and neat turtlenecks like my favorite bands. Years later, long haired, bearded, in flared jeans I appear on the right of a photographed group: Kris, Retta, Robert and others with Robert Duncan; an inner-city backyard, Duncan having read with metronomic hand the beats between words just as important, and listened as we read portions of our own work, taken in particular by Walter's poem (Walter Billeter). I look all this up in old diaries - but I didn't keep one in 1976; my poetry notebook filled with intermittent scrawls, the writing getting larger and less decipherable at the end of drunken nights. Still no mention of Duncan's visit; just the photograph on the wall at Collected Works. I had been in Melbourne a few months; interviewed in a pub for a teaching job. I taught for a whole semester then drove back to Sydney thankful for sweat and alternative radio (Unemployed at last!). I didn't write about the things on my desk, I drew pictures of them: crooked chair backs, jars of pencils, book spines. I would copy labels, items from newspapers, misread headlines. In the library I would investigate Chinese texts, articles on geomancy and their bearing on the siting of cities - this was 1977: Alan Wearne in Sydney, with John Forbes held up a newspaper headline: the death of Elvis in Victoria Park (the headline, not Elvis) - just beyond the library where I ferreted that year salvaging from the stacks items on popular culture of a city in wartime and depression, the culture of Luna Park remote as Borobudur and Angkor Wat through which my father (still in uniform) walked; a set for an unmade movie - "snippings of idiot celluloid", not The Maltese Falcon - a jumble of genres when backyards of the poor were allowed to abut on the Harbour and in Melbourne the rich had no interest in Port Phillip Bay . . . . . . choppy, under cloud, the horizon clear to the Bellarine Peninsula as I round the Upper Esplanade heading for Acland St and music (the abrasive notes of Link Wray reverberating later in the emptied living room. Mauve and silver tonight, a red beacon intermittent over towards the rip as I round Alfred Square to the bottle shop. Return to a floor coated with fine powder, walls patched with white round the window, uncurtained, aquarium-like; slump on a couch before the television feeling rigorous in a sloppy way. The Selected Martin Johnston (John says) including prose to appear next month (will there ever be a collected poems?). We would taunt Martin with his prized pentameter "polychromatic springtime's gay cadenza" recited in race-callers' tones. Martin, I remember mostly weaving, snake-like at a table barely able to stand voicing his poems perfectly. This evening turns wretched. In cold rain I wait for a rail to Fitzroy, step off in Johnston St for a restaurant but before this into the Tankerville where Vince Jones sang, Wilbur Wilde sitting in - the band's slightly raised eyebrows as he played at Charlie Parker, a rock'n'roll honker out of his depth (his spacings meaningless unless as pause for the next idea. Painted on the bar walls, a Greek god with muscles twined like macramÈ. Then there's a figure like Toulouse-Lautrec at a funeral a bottle of evil purple liquid poured over his top hat by the figure (presumed) of The Artist; this scene overlooked by a goddess with misshapen breasts; the whole, a kind of pastel psychosis above the dado, the familiar tiles, the wood floor's perspective in the long bar rendering the pool table as a stage prop from Van Gogh. Brett Whiteley would have been outpaced here by naivetÈ's greater ambitions. The painting's unfinished, a segment of wall breaks off from this narrative indecipherable without a key. Is it still in progress? Or was it abandoned years ago when the artist enlisted on the other front (i.e. joined A.A.)? Over all this, Channel 9's quiz programs proceed uneasily high on a bar T.V. in the grasp of the Gods.Laurie Duggan