Hi-hi-hiatus

You may have noticed that 'The Book and the Bodhi Tree' hasn't been updated since December which is due to the amount of other commitments, such as 'the book' (Jet's Lore), my memoir and a few other little projects I'm working on.

It would please me (and it may please you, too), if you dropped into the blogs I have been updating -

http://www.chasingawaysaltwater.blogspot.com
http://www.thelonecypress.blogspot.com

Thanks and love to all.

dorothy porter - an inspiration

I was met with sadness today as news circulated that Australian poet and verse novelist Dorothy Featherstone Porter died early this morning from complications caused by breast cancer.

She is (not was) a writer who courted spark and unknowingly commanded the respect from all who knew and read her. Her agent (and very good friend) Jenny Darling said Porter was at the 'height of her powers.' After feasting on El Dorado on the first day of its release, I couldn't have said anything closer to the truth.

I struggled to savour it on its first reading, but have since returned to it, languishing over the sparse, yet delicious undertones of narrative and plot. If you've never read Porter, do yourself a favour and start with either The Monkey's Mask or Wild Surmise.

A recent poem Foggy Windows, had been published in the Spring edition of 'Overland' and it displays the tight grasp Porter has with language and its relationship to the every day.

My own verse novel - 'seven layers of a wound' (extract below) - was in part inspired by Dot and my only hope is that by the time it has been brutalised by a merciless edit, it will be half as good as any of her work.

Condolences go out to both her family and partner, novelist Andrea Goldsmith.

Porter will always be a revelation, from Crete to The Monkey's Mask and beyond. Dorothy Porter, I salute you.

Pax vobiscum

58

You could surmise that much of my writing of late has been about death and dying. Please do not mistake this for my being all morbid and macabre, because I am neither of those things. Death and taxes are a certainty for the everyman (and woman), but for me, death is just as meaningful as life. Of course life and death are inextricably linked but for me the connection is, to a point, existential.

Fifty-eight.

Fifty-eight friends are dead from Cystic Fibrosis and with each death, you leave a little piece of yourself behind. Memories constantly surface and there wouldn't be a day where I don't think about the friends who are no longer with me, their friends or their family. There are days when the deluge stings my soul and my skin, where I'm flooded with thoughts of the dead. This is where the process of 'self' debriefing comes to the fore. I will expand on that in a future post.

I go through stages where that mulch of memories of the life and death of a particular friend is branded into my brain. This is usually accompanied by night terrors and I'm grateful that I haven't had many this year. It got to a point last year where I was too frightened to go to sleep because I feared where my dreams would take me.

The sting of grief is exacerbated at night and I don't have to be alone. It can happen when I'm out with my friends, though they would never know. A personal hell is just that. It's personal.

Death sits uncomfortably in the belly of society. With all that has transpired, from childhood to adolescence to now, there is plenty of room for me to be damaged, stained, broken. Instead, I am tolerant and accepting of what has come to pass and what will come to pass, which brings me to my own mortality. At my core, I'm a happy person, but in all aspects of life there is illumination, as well as an underbelly of darkness. Without the darkness I wouldn't be who I am, and I like who I am. I am a good person. I'm certain of that.

Who would you be without your own darkness?

Would you like the person in the mirror, demons and all?

I will always question, challenge, hope and provoke. Simply put, it's the way I'm built. For now, I have just the one question (yes, expect more):

Can I write the ending?

book of days

It's a lonely day, but it's mine.

poem

Shut the door, lock the gate,
leave me out with the waste.
Have me rot like old fruit
fallen from the tree.

You never deserved this
and I never planned it.
I don't blame the loaded gun -
I blame unfired bullets.

We could talk about whiskey and waste
but whiskey would talk, speaking in veils,
making my voice deep.
Deep enough so I sound sorry.
So sorry.

time

Time falls in two ways - before that and after that.

Nothing more, nothing less.

seven layers of a wound

'Seven Layers of a Wound' is a seven part non-fiction verse novel I began in 2003 about my first love. He knows who he is. This is completely unedited, which I'm sure your eagle eye will detect without too much trouble. It needs a brutal edit and I need to finish it. Here is the first layer.


The First Layer – Green eyes, Blue eyes, Your eyes.

his girlfriend's party

Had heard that he liked me more
than his girlfriend.
He called me in hospital, visited me with
fistfuls of daisies, and told me
how much he cared for me.
I knew where this was going.
And I liked it.
One night, she had a party.
Too sick to go, he called me
from her house.
Broke up with her.
On her birthday.
It felt like my birthday.


sixteen

it was crash bang boom and I was in love with him and he with me and it was going to last forever because he wrote me letters asking me to be his wife and have his children and we were sixteen but it didn’t matter because I loved him and it was going to last forever because I loved him and he loved me and it was going to last forever. Because.


the meaning of things

He went down on me for the first time
while our parents were in the kitchen.
My throat on fire, curbing that vocal wrench.
My juices seeped
because I’ve come,
so I grab his hair
shoving him deeper into me
so his tongue was hidden between
the layers of my cunt.
His hot tongue –
like it had been dipped in a freshly drawn bath,
was so warm.
He suckled on my cunt the way a baby feeds.

To be fucked by a tongue;
rising and falling and circling
past the lips of your cunt and into that warm
hollow.

You need a sharp tongue for that.
A long tongue.

We never fucked.


big girl's don't cry

Being sick was too much for him.
He wanted a normal girlfriend.
One who would not be sick,
who could do things normal
sixteen year old girls do
like dance,
go out in the cold,
have sex.

I cried for weeks —
a torrent that could not be stoppered.
I stuck plugs in my eyes to stop
the tears,
but circles darkened as though I had been
punched.

I knew girls at school had heard.
That they were talking about me.
I probably deserved it for stealing him away.
But I hadn’t stolen him from her.
He had pocketed my heart and come to me.


breather

I stayed away from school.
Melinda died and all I could think in the car on the way to her funeral was,
‘I wish he was here to hold my hand, and for me to hold his.’

She was his friend, too.

The wound of him never healed
for time doesn’t heal wounds like that when they’re raw and bloody and have left a cleave in your chest
where it dulls to a blunt unfeeling.
I partly melted until I was a shell of a girl where no one understood me
and I hid myself away.

He changed me.
He broke me.


remembering

His brother’s engagement party
where he vomited after too much tequila trying to impress me.
I wore my sister’s good jacket.
It was raining and the tyres packed the gravel,
pebbles rubbing against each other, crunching under the weight of my wanting to be tucked into some nook while speeches were being spoken and glasses raised.
I met his parent’s friends and I was the darling.
I was a part of him and he a part of me.

watching

She cries every night, mostly around ten.

Sometimes the levee will break during the day, but for the most part, she cries at night. I can see her through the thick foliage of a fig and a crepe myrtle laying almost flush with the grass, felled by its own weight.

I’ll be here when the roots pull away from the earth, surrendering to the ground.

So will the girl who cries every night.

29.4.08 10.30pm or thereabouts

No one likes being told where to go until they’re lost.

olfactory musings

I can smell the rain that has gathered in storm clouds, while the star jasmine that has weaved its way up and across the trellis outside my room shudders with each gust. The tangle of twigs loop over and under and over again, much like the rhythm of crochet. At soil level you can see the foundation chain, then as your eyes move upward, sprigs yield and curl around thicker branches, as if to seek comfort from the elements.

Meshed like yarn over hook, a mulch of memories surfaces where I remember gardens, forests and afternoons crocheting with my grandmother.

The rain has now been and gone and will come again, but it lingers, riding on the back of childhood.

coindidence? methinks not

It's been 102 years in the making, so how fitting that the piece de resistance - the final 22-tonne spire - was raised this morning, a day after Father Binns (who once lived in the Cathedral) was laid to rest. Befitting, yet bittersweet.

As it stands, St. John's is the last Gothic-style Cathedral to be finished in the world and I always wondered if it would be finished in my lifetime. It is a place of overwhelming beauty and despite being a devout agnostic, I still find religious (not necessarily all Christian) places of worship inspiring. St. John's, St. Stephen's, Stuartholme and other Cathedrals I have visited interstate and overseas have been instrumental in bringing peace into my life.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan's Morningside Heights (1042 Asterdam Avenue, if you ever happen to be in the area) trumps St. John's in Brisbane with its Gothic-Revival grandeur. This is one Cathedral that won't be finished in our lifetime, after it's humble beginnings in 1892. And did I mention the square footage? Just the length of the Cathedral is 601 feet long.

After spending (not enough) time there, I was catatonic, and my thoughts once again turned getting thee to a nunnery when I returned home. Aside from the architecture, what fascinated me was The American 'Poets' Corner', created in 1984 to memorialise American writers of the highest repute. It has been modelled from a similar alcove for writers at Westminster Abbey in London. The Corner, located in the Cathedral’s Arts Bay is made up of stone tablets, both on the wall and on the floor, each bearing the writer’s name, the dates of their birth and death, and a memorable quotation from the writer's work, the likes of which include Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein. I remember having my photograph taken and will endeavour to locate and post them. I was 19 and thought to myself (as only a 19 year old can), 'My name will be here one day', but there were two compounding issues that stood in my way - talent (and the lack thereof) and that I was not an American national.

So it goes.

To date, over thirty writers have been inducted and literally set in stone, and it's not just exclusive to famous poet's and novelists. In 1976, the year of my birth, poet Muriel Rukeyser founded The Poetry Wall in the ambulatory of the Cathedral as a place where poems will always be accepted. I recall writing one shortly before we left the Cathedral, sticking it crudely to the wall. Rukeyser explained 'the whole idea is openness, a free giving and accepting of poetry. Poets meet so many rejections in their work. This is the place where poems will always be accepted. They can be signed or unsigned and in all languages.'

Amen.

faith

I want to believe.

I so very much want to believe, but just can't.

One day I will understand; one day my faith in the universe and my trust in the circle of life will make sense, but I will never believe.

How I wish I could.

Lost?

Being alone can cut the yoke out of you which can become a wilderness of burdens.

Some people need to be constantly surrounded by people for a plethora of reasons. Perhaps they don't enjoy their own company and need to be stimulated by people, be it friends, family or strangers.

For me, introspection comes easily and with overwhelming force like when sheets of rain sting your skin. There's the notion of being alone and being lonely, and they share just as many parallels as they do differences.

For some reason, I always return to Jimmy Little's song 'Bring yourself home to me.' The lyrics are a roll of precious contradictions:

'I'm like a cripple that's got an itch to scratch
on a limb that's not there anymore.'

I urge you to welcome Jimmy Little and the revelation that is Geoffrey Gurrumal Yunupingu. One last suggestion - I've been flogging Ray LaMontagne's new record, 'Gossip in the Grain'. Go out and buy his other two albums - 'Trouble' and 'Till the Sun Turns Black.' You'll wonder how you survived without that gruff, desperate voice of his.

ocean

the ocean sucks the breath from me.
it paralyses my hands, turns my mind to mush and I cannot write,
leaving me helpless.

David Binns: the man and his art

[written in 2002, father binns was able to see my writing evolve over the nearly two decades we have been friends]

It’s at the old friary at the Brookfield Spirituality Centre where Father David Binns’ odd, yet stirring art hang like Holy lifelines from the walls. Paintings that have an odd edge, because this is art as we’ve never before seen it. The closest form one can link to Binns are paintings embodying the pre-Raphaelite movement created in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt. Lashings of art nouveau are also prominent within Binns’ paintings, where influences such as the likes of Czech artist Alfonse Mucha, who shaped the aesthetic of the art nouveau movement at the turn of the 20th century, are clearly manifested. The bearing on Binns’ paintings from French art nouveau untouchable Eugene Grasset materialises with such velvet efficacy, one could be mistaken for believing Grasset was alive and well; shuffling his brush across a canvas, fresh from having his posters shown at the Salon des Cant in 1894.

Aeons away at Corinda in Brisbane’s west, David Binns’ magnum opus is on permanent display in the chapel at St. Aidan’s Anglican Girl’s School.
‘I happened to come into the school the chapel when it was being built in 1988 and completed in 1989’, David explains. ‘I took it upon myself with the headmistress at the time and with her blessing, I began planning the decoration of the chapel, which was bare at the time. It’s a small chapel, so I needed to do something that wasn’t going to be overwhelming.’

Up until this point, David had painted smaller paintings and so on a scale he had only experienced when painting sets for the local musical societies in Toowoomba.

‘I wanted to do three paintings reminiscent of the traditional triptych, but in a more contemporary form. Traditionally, there is a dominant centre panel and two side panels which would close in during Lent. It’s is usually hung on the back wall of the chapel, but we decided that it would be best hanging on the side wall so students, teachers and visitors to the school could see it. I wanted to do three separate biblical paintings of women, with St. Aidan’s being a girl’s school. I think women in the bible are more important than people are led to believe.’

David bypassed the traditional way of using grids to map out his paintings, so instead drew it into squares, whereupon he would enlarge and copy each square. The original size of the drawing was drawn on two pieces of A4 paper. David then made overhead transparencies and using a projector, cast the images onto the canvas panels fastened to the chapel wall. Images were then pencilled onto each panel, which stand ten feet high and seventy-five centimetres wide. Despite their size, it took David only one hour to pencil in the images.

For David, the most difficult aspect to decode was the gradient of blue for each panel, as it proved to be an awkward size. Before he daubed his brush on the canvas, he prepared a watercolour version in order to set the pitch of colour – much like a toile, except on canvas. With the help of a group of year twelve art students, the preliminary work, such as the design of the triptych took a year, though the painting of the triptych itself took nine months to complete, ‘just like the birth of Jesus,’ says David.

His focal purpose for the piece was to appeal to a wide range of people including the students, from grades one to twelve, as well as the staff. ‘I wanted to make it fun too. The pleasure of the colour was integral because I love colour. To me, colour is God.’

The panels of the triptych which bleed into each other mark the beginning of Christ’s resurrection. Evocative of Robert Campin's 1426 triptych, Annunciation, the first panel is devoted to the subjects of the annunciation – Gabriel and Mary. Gabriel lingers above Mary, announcing that she is going to bear the son of God. In the vein of pre-Raphaelite art, David features lavish birds and flowers; embellishing the role of the hallowed femme fatales with their almond eyes and wanting lips.

These women resonate the traditional image of Jesus with their elongated faces, where the depth of each gentle motion of each sweeping shift has a texture of its own. Traditionally in religious art annunciations, Mary holds a lily symbolising purity and innocence. Her long, angular features and mournful face tell a tale as her fingers caress the lilies, while a feminine Gabriel hovers amongst ostensibly spirited birds.

The second panel tells the story of Jesus visiting Mary of Bethany and Martha – the two sisters of Lazarus. A pharaoh-like Mary sits at the foot of the painting, reflective in her position, while a practical Martha, the hostess with her sagacious long hair chastises Mary for her abstraction. This is placed within the bounds of slow ritual where movement takes shape and where Jesus works as mediator, praising Mary for her reflective bearing and humility. Again, wattle features in the background to tie the three panels together, while a gangly cat sits with Mary to add some light to the painting.

‘The challenge was to fit all of this action into one dramatic format,’ David says.

The final expanse of canvas symbolises the resurrection. The three Mary’s mourn at the tomb in various stages of dismay and wonderment, as Gabriel says, ‘Jesus is not here.’ The tomb is a sepulchre of emptiness and only the shroud remains as a symbol for the lost man. Birds make way for butterflies; the traditional symbol for resurrection.

In this panel, David has repeated the theme of a lingering Gabriel, the angel who reveals truths. Whereas the first panel has Gabriel telling Mary news of exultation, the final panel has Gabriel laying bear his hopelessness at the emptiness of the tomb. Both show Gabriel inverted and looking down upon his subject, conveying his sanctified empathy.

The triptych is a chance for everyone to view the sacred. It’s for people who share the similar vocations and beliefs, and for the apostasy, to realise the value of David Binns’ craft. For someone who had to forfeit art school and didn’t come from a background of religion, David’s contribution to the Church has been immense.

He says, ‘I had a childhood belief where I had this idea when I was about five or six, that if you could go to the absolute extremity of the universe and look back, the earth has a human shape, and that was God. It’s still my core belief and it has a fundamental truth, but is not to be taken literally. Every galaxy and every atom is God.’

David was around five years old when that thought barrelled through his head. There were other incidences that led me to my priesthood, but as far as that goes, that was my core belief and still is. I don’t take it literally, but there is some fundamental truth and it’s a powerful metaphor.’

For David, there are three reasons why he paints; ‘the first is to express and give form to inner thoughts and emotions. The second is to communicate and the third is the craft of art where hands and materials are used to create. From my standpoint, which has become the most important, is the evocation of the Holy – to be an open channel of the Holy and to let it shine through.’

David also designed the wooden cross that hangs behind the altar, as well one in copper that clings to the front of the chapel. This is encircled by twenty-four white doves that symbolise the school’s motto, pervola sonata – born to fly upwards. The ten stained glass windows, which have been donated by various community groups over a period of time, were also designed by David.

For an artist who has sharpened his craft where his triptych is particularly reminiscent of Rossetti’s iconic Beata Beatrix and The Golden Stair, one could be lead to believe that David Binns is at the peak of his artistic calling after having had formal art tutelage, however this was not to come to fruition. Instead of art classes, David learnt industrial, trade and geometrical drawing. After graduating secondary school, David had lessons with his art teacher, as well as finding his way autonomously with an apprenticeship in photo-engraving where he made print blocks for magazines. He enrolled in night school and spent four year studying colour drawing in Toowoomba, then began work at the CSIRO as an illustrator. ‘This gave me a love of exactness and detail. I always liked trying to get movement and energy in my paintings.’

Each week, David leads services and workshops at the spirituality centre, as well as spending time at the easel working on a new three part series of paintings, each consisting of eight works of art, entitled ‘Saints in the Suburbs’. The first sequence will be about the infancy of Christ, the second about the Ministry of Christ and the third, about the Passion: ‘I want them to transport biblical and gospel stories into our own time and place,’ he declares.

Through David Binns’ paintings, which appear to be more fable than art, we are able to see what lies beneath the surface of the acrylic; what lies at the core of the canvas. Through the subjects angular features, the gentle motion of each movement, the energy of the art nouveau inspired simplicity of line and rhythm as well as the manipulation of colour, it evokes to the observer that perhaps David Binns was born to reawaken both the pre-Raphaelite spirits but more importantly, the story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.