Old conversations, enduring aphorisms...

I spent Sunday thru' Tuesday night with Pat and Pam - Simon's mum and aunt respectively. I gabbed and gabbed, making stuff up when all else failed. Tales of heroism and insight - tall and patently fraudulent, every last word of it all.
On the rare occasions I'd stop to draw breath, they'd interject with brilliant tales of their own lives. And in sporadic fits of lucidity I could only sit rapt. They were army brats throughout the 40s and 50s. Moved about all over the world with their career Royal Engineer father. Nairobi, Germany, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula. And although their father was tasked with building bridges - literal and cultural - in a final heroic effort to prop up the tattered vestiges of the war-ravaged, crumbling Empire, they always ended up being in the wrong spot at the wrong time. The time of the Mau Maus. The time of the Communist insurgents. The time of the disorganised and resentful vigilantes of every nation. And, conversely, the time of the Economic Miracle.
In my teens, Pat once shared an anecdote that I've never quite let go of. Held sacred throughout my life, in fact. By the early 1950s she'd been in Kenya long enough to be considered just another street urchin playing with little more than rusted and broken barrel hoops and sticks with everyone else and whereas the right age (ie. NOT adult) mattered more than life and honour, skin colour and country of birth mattered not one damn.
And the tourists would come. The ageing couples. The lesser dignitaries of every shade. The corporals of industry that would, in years and decades to come, achieve something approaching respect and captaincy in their short-lived and sometimes prosperous fiefdoms. The demobbed and disillusioned survivors of the long, terrible conflict. The new castes of proselytisers and missionaries of every creed. And from all of their mouths, nothing but complaint. The dirty rooms, the filthy streets, the appalling food, the grubbing locals, the stench, the chaos, the terrifying and possibly affected insouciance of the natives who would - according to every Briton of worth - enterprisingly steal every last penny given half a chance.
And the children would secretly laugh at the florid, indignant faces and the pale, translucent skin that burned within an hour of exposure to the sun, and the blustering, arrogant voices of the men and the braying, imperious accents of the women.
And all the while, this young grime-covered tomboy wanted to scream, "BUT YOU'RE IN AFRICA!!!".
These few words and every conceivable permutation thereof, have followed me all my days. And when my workaday mornings or bouts of moribund self-importance run the risk of blending into beige and wasted nothings, there lives in me an urchin that never fails to scream, "But you're here!"
Because I have been and I have known people who were so badly at war with themselves, their lives, the bodies and the days they inhabit, the streets they walk and the poor facsimiles of lives they have forged for themselves or settled for, who will never know. They have no here. They have no Africa. Or, in their hubris and foolishness, they have spared no effort to dissociate and erase themselves from these hallowed places.

Every reckless daughter, every fated son...

Of spirit and serpent.

The woman took the large, unadorned plastic container from the man's hands as wavelets licked at their running shoes. The younger man stood back on a higher ledge away from the lapping of the receding tide. He sipped a bottle of beer and watched on.
She knelt and tipped the contents into the water. It settled on the brine-kissed rock. On the leaves of kelp exposed to the golden afternoon sunlight. Onto the hissing foam. And as the sea lazily rolled back in, the ashy water ran over their feet and soaked their shoes and socks through. After some persistent shaking, the contents were dispersed and the woman took the man's hand and rose without noise, without sorrow.
The three of them looked at each other but possibly barely saw the faces of the others for the thoughts and the imaginings coursing through their minds on this stark occasion.
The men wiped away silent tears. The woman smiled.
Now holding hands, now resting arms on shoulders, the three made their way back to dry land. Far from final shorelines. Further from the loss of a loved one.

*****

Coming over the rise into Sutton Forest I saw the fattest rainbow.
Colours to rival Damballah, vigilance to rival that of the Rainbow Serpent and greedier than even Midgard's sentinel. For a second I felt it would swallow the sky or collapse in the attempt.
There may or not be a successful shot in the camera but I won't know this until I get home to Camille tonight.
In the meanwhile, take all my mock turtle meanderings with the smallest pinch of salt.

(For Simon)

Free now...

July 26th, 1919.

 July 26th, 1919. A child is born in a terrace house in Day Street, Leichhardt. The parents name her Jean Isabel. A few blocks away on Parramatta Road, Model T Fords were just starting to fight it out with the trams here in Australia.
 In the ensuing decades, she will go on to have many adventures, many children and many more heartaches. She will refrain from drinking and smoking tobacco until she marries in her early twenties. At which point another, larger war will begin that will forever change the fabric of the relatively genteel landscape she had known. That global war would end in 1945. The peace so desperately sought by the broken twentieth century world even now has not been fully realised. The marriage would end in 1965. In her heart, the peace Jean Isabel (a thoroughly 20th century woman) so desperately needed would not find its way to her in her lifetime.
But she inspired, she cajoled, she pleaded and punished, she led and acquiesced, she brutalised and nurtured, encouraged and derided, she wilfully ignored and occasionally meddled, she loved with boundless tenderness, she snarled and screamed like a banshee when she was in her cups, she failed miserably and succeeded with mad abandon.
She mothered as mothers always have, as mothers always will.
And at 1 AM on the 26th July, seventy nine years later, she would draw her last breath with most of her strange, fragmented children around her. Each one beautiful and unique and hopelessly individual in their strengths and modest successes, each one virtually interchangable and identical in there frailties and crimes.
And so, some 97 years after your birth, some 18 years after your passing, I send my love and thoughts to you, Ma.

Jaysus, how you loved this song...

The shattered dream of Montgomery Clift.

Your damned forehead. I don't like it one bit.
But it's the only one I've got and anyway -
Ah, stop it. That's probably not even a real Brooklyn accent. Nebraska, right?
And you're hangdog, man. Stop with the whole hangdog thing.
It's my thing.
Your thing is simpering, Monty. You fucking simper.
...Do not.
See?!
But Borgnine keeps beating the shit out of me.
Ah, Borgnine's alright. He's just acting out. He's normally a really sweet guy. It's Sinatra ya gotta watch out for. He's real nice to your face but he's a careerist if ever I met one.
Were Lancaster and Gardner really caught banging down on the beach?
Who cares. There's that whole fucking hangdog thing again. I think you looked your best when Tracy was giving you his steely stare in the dock at Nuremberg, even if you were all fucked up in your private hell by then, but what do I know?
...
Well, I heard Monty Clift got gunned down by his own team making his way back to the beach without so much as a single bugle to play Reveille.
But I guess that's just the way dreams always play out through all places, through all eternity.


Joe about Monty.

2 yrs on.

I tried out for a band at Taren Point. All the way there, I was neurotic and hung over and I kept muttering. To you, to the windscreen, to the passing motorists, but mostly to you.
I didn't want to play too loud (on account of the hangover).
What if I sounded too much like everyone else?
What if I sound nothing like everyone else in all the worst possible ways?
"What the fuck are you muttering?"
"I'm just antsy."
"Well stop it. You're shitting me."
"But what if -?"
"Fuck it. Just do the songs. You know the songs. Do the songs. Or do you want to - We can turn back right now, if you like." (This on that rare occasion when you were older brother and me the kid).
"We're almost there. Let's get it over with."
"Then shut up and listen to THIS."
And it'd be A Farewell to Kings or Exit... Stage Left or Tinsel Town Rebellion or One Size Fits All or Head Injuries or Place Without A Postcard.
After the audition, I hopped back in the car. You were one of the most impatient souls I'd ever met but never on those occasions. You were Buddha in those moments.
"How'd it go?"
"The drummer said I destroyed Friday On My Mind. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Is 'destroyed' a compliment these days?"
"Probably not. But fuck it. You came, you gave it all, you left 'em confused. Not bad for a day's effort. Want an ouzo and coke?"
You had an answer for everything.

Like our lives...

The Facebook years #1 (The Bushman's Blowie)

I was going to talk to you all about the near-full moon silvering the endless pastures last night. But frankly, I would rather briefly touch upon the Bushman's Blowie. An art I'm still coming to terms with, I'm galled to admit. Gloop drying down my salt and pepper goatee, awaiting the stares and subtle hand gestures of everyone I meet, hours later. BUT we're not here to talk about me.
We're here to talk about the finest Bushman's Blowie I ever did see...
In the late 70s I was tooling about, riding skateboards down at the Sydney Opera House with some other reprobates, when along the northern promenade a dignified couple in their late sixties leisurely appeared. It must have been intermission for the Berlioz or Shostakovitch recital because they were discussing the merits of the horn section with some animated yet knowing gravitas; she resplendent in a full length green silk creation and him in some Italian finery.
As we skated past, she stopped the conversation mid-sentence saying, "Excuse me, dear." And with one finger pressed to her nostril, proceeded to emit a substantial amount of gloog and snoodge from her other one. With consummate aplomb he turned away until she had finished this curious ablution whereby they resumed their discussion on the finer things in life.
For me, it was love at first sight.

Ein kleine mucous musik.

The rain.

Well hello, my friend.
It's been quite some while and you sound good - your tattoo against my roof.
I lay awake at this stupid hour before the light and hear your every drop.
And I think back on impossible and forgotten nights where I would huddle in bus shelters and under stairwells, between buildings and beneath hedgerows, occasionally in an unlocked car and, as sometimes fortune would have it, in a stranger's house
seeking to avoid your frozen embrace.
And I have hated you in ways that only the lost and the stupid and the desperate to survive can hate.
But not now, rain.
Now, I have my three blankets, a roof over me, food in my stomach and two more hours before the terror of another working day.

Let it come down...