PLAYING WITH KNIVES
‘The cover of Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire shows a vast and terrible conflagration. Flames reach high into the sky, devouring the air and seeming to set the wide river alight. In the distance, an eerily familiar pair of ghostly towers rises above the smoke …’
See my review of SHIRLEY HAZZARD by Brigitta Olubas in the June 2013 issue of Australian Book Review.
THIS (HITCHHIKING) LIFE
(First published in The Australian, 27 April 2013)
Once upon a time I was very familiar with the cars of other people. During my twenties I hitch-hiked everywhere. It was the public transport of my generation. At major intersections there would be a queue of us patiently waiting our turn to be picked up. You learned that travelling with a girl was easier. You learned to hide your pack behind a bush until a vehicle stopped. You learned to be agreeable and not to argue. Sometimes I made up stories about who I was, for the pleasure of lying without guilt or consequence.
I told one driver I was a zoologist, recently returned from studying tigers in Sumatra. There was an illicit thrill in making up convincing answers on the fly with zero knowledge of tigers, Sumatra, or any aspect of zoology whatsoever.
‘They mate for life,’ I said, ‘making nests high in the trees. There are less than 600 left now because of deforestation. We’re working to create reserves for them.’
’Good on you,’ said the driver. ‘Best of luck with that. I had no idea …’
I was suddenly filled with shame. It was like a bad taste in my mouth. There were no more stories about Sumatra or Antarctica or studying to be a nuclear scientist.
I remember an elderly couple in their 1960s car, gilt with chrome, perfectly maintained, the wrinkled seats still smelling of polished leather. The wife opened a tin box and took out sandwiches of white bread which they chomped on contentedly. After a while I realised they were not going to offer me one. A Thermos flask of tea then appeared, the cap turned over to become a cup. After testing the temperature with her little finger, the woman leaned over to let her husband sip the tea while he drove, as though she were feeding a baby. The old Ford was suffocating and I was glad to be dropped off at the next town. It felt as though I had been kidnapped and whisked back in time.
There was the Scotsman driving north who asked me to read the signs at every intersection. He couldn’t read, he confessed. Every time he took an unfamiliar route, he picked up a hitch-hiker to navigate.
There were nurses in short skirts driving mini cars, playing loud music and smoking furiously.
But the lift I remember more than any was with a farmer, the car littered with straw and bits of machinery.
‘I can only take you 15 minutes down the road,’ he warned.
I jumped in without a thought. It was almost dark and threatening to rain. He was going to visit his wife, the farmer said. He hadn’t seen her for a while and there was lots to tell. The tractor engine had blown a gasket but he’d found a replacement in the barn. A cow had given birth to twin calves, and that wasn’t the half of it. His wife was a music teacher, he said. They had almost nothing in common but were happy from the start. The car pulled off the road though a stone gateway. It was quite dark, no moon in the sky. Against the black sky I could make out the blacker outline of a church steeple.
‘She died six years ago,’ he said, answering my puzzled expression as I got out. ‘I come up a few times a week to have a chat and keep her company for a while.’
The car rolled on into the dark cemetery, its lights soon swallowed up by the shrubbery and looming yew trees.
I have stayed grateful to those kindly strangers who invited me into their cars. They were an important part of my education. Those brief encounters were the beginning of an important lesson: that other lives existed beside my own.
Do you have a monkey mind ? New Yorker Daniel Smith does. He says chronic anxiety is the only mental disorder which can be both excruciatingly painful and funny at the same time.
Check out my ABC Radio interview about Daniel Smith’s new book on anxiety, Monkey Mind.
(Source: Spotify)
THE LOOK OF LOVE
Michael Winterbottom’s new movie, with Steve Coogan as Paul Raymond, the King of Porn in sixties London …
THE GIRL WITH ANTLERS
I often think of the girl with antlers.
Decades have passed since I first saw her, yet when I close my eyes she is there in every detail. Her face is oval, framed by falling hair, and almost pretty. I’m not usually drawn to a pretty face, preferring stronger lines or even jolie-laide like Charlotte Gainsbourg, but there was something special about the girl with antlers.
It was her expression I think: a knowing half-smile as she looked at you, as though in possession of some mysterious, wonderful secret.
She might be the younger, more mischievous sister of the Mona Lisa as described by Pater: ‘older than the rocks among which she sits; like the Vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her.’
Her breasts are bare and from her head grow two extravagant antlers. She bears them with pride, decorated with wild flowers which hang down in garlands entwining with her hair. The image has a quiet power as well as beauty, drawing your eye back again and again. It fascinates - in the original sense of fascinere, of casting a spell.
I don’t recall where I found the picture. In an antique shop in a Welsh country town one winter’s afternoon perhaps, or pressed between the pages of a book in my grandmother’s house. Wherever it came from, the picture hung on my wall for years while I was a student, alongside a nude by Mapplethorpe, a black-and-white photograph of Debbie Harry, and a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. Somehow, in moving house, moving relationships, moving country, the picture was lost and I forgot about it for years.
I was in my thirties before I saw her again. Visiting a lawyer in Canberra on some business or other, I stopped enthralled as I entered his door. There she was: the girl with antlers. It was the very same image, hung in the hallway as though to announce the resident spirit.
I was running late. There were documents to sign in triplicate and deliver somewhere or other by 5 PM. Only as I rushed out, hurriedly shaking his hand, did I ask the bearded lawyer about that picture of the half-smiling girl, with honeysuckle, daisies, and eglantine hanging from her horns.
‘Ah, you know about her . . ’ he smiled, waving and closing the door behind me.
I have searched Google and Bing, Yahoo, and even Wolfram Alpha, but no search engine can find her for me. In scandinavian mythology, I learn, there was a goddess who ran with the reindeer herds, clothed only in furs and with spectacular horns growing from her head. She was a figure of potency and awe. A kind of Artemis. A search for images of ‘girls with antlers’ brought no more luck, delivering manga drawing to me, some pornographic curiosities, but mostly pictures of arty Tumblr girls, posing with horns held to their heads. My curiosity is shared, it seems, if not always in the same way.
I have never found that picture which so fascinated me. I often think of her, convinced the image has some meaning I can’t quite place, some ancient cult-like significance of which I am unaware. Perhaps I’ll never find her again, but if you see her, be sure to let me know.
THE DAY I DECIDED NOT TO GROW UP
I remember exactly the day I decided not to grow up.
I was twelve years and 364 days old. The following morning I would wake to birthday cards in the mail. There would be presents to unwrap at a party in the afternoon. This year though, anticipation was mixed with dread. There would be 13 candles on the cake. From tomorrow I would be a teenager, and after that you became a grown-up.
I liked being a child. I especially enjoyed staring out of the window, watching clouds change shape. A ship slowly turned into a piano, and then a cliff face hanging in the air. But I had seen what happened to other boys when they became teenagers. It wasn’t an attractive prospect. Their faces erupted with spots. They got boils on their necks. Limbs started to grow at unequal speeds. Stray hairs sprouted from their chins. They had to spend months – years even – preparing for exams and probably missing Star Trek on TV.
From my observation the world of grown-ups, too, was agonisingly boring. A conspiracy of tedium. My parents had to work every day whether they felt like it or not. They had to wear the same dull clothes every day; as a nurse, my mother even had to wear a uniform. They had to do the washing and ironing and pay the bills and keep the garden tidy. They worried about money all the time. There were whispered conversations about the cost of school uniforms. Being grown-up was a strange totalitarian state to which I seemed destined to be exiled in a few years. The scale and complexity of this world awed me: I felt like a figure in Jeffrey Smart painting, small and fragile, overshadowed by vast industrial structures. My entire spirit revolted at the thought, that evening before my thirteenth birthday.
Everything happened exactly as I feared. The following year, my voice broke. My schoolboy complexion erupted into a volcanic landscape of red pustules. Hairs spiralled zanily out from my chin. When I shaved, the razor lopped the heads off my spots so that they bled. I went to school with little squares of tissue paper dotting my face, feeling like an outcast from a leper colony. My only consolation was the sight of other boys with just as many spots dotting their faces. It baffled me that one of the worst-afflicted seemed unconcerned by his appearance, no more than his beautiful long-legged girlfriend, captain of the netball team. There was more homework too, of course, but that at least I didn’t mind.
Finally, after all the study and when there were no more exams for me to take, I discovered that I had become a grown-up. I wore a suit every day. I sat in meetings discussing budgets and timelines and contract deliverables. I discovered the benefits of adulthood too: those things I knew little about on the eve of my thirteenth birthday. There was sex of course. There was travel. There was work: the joy of doing something well. And then there was love.
A few decades on, I have lived in five cities, thinking each was my home. I have had four professions, each time becoming restless and abandoning it for another. And I have discovered something else. That twelve year-old boy never did grow up after all. He is still there, gazing dreamily out of the window, chin on his hand, happily watching my life unfold and repeatedly re-make itself, as he once watched a cloud change shape over and over again.
I discovered as well that there were other people who had never grown up. I know them by certain signs. And if we ever meet, you and I, perhaps we too will know each other and exchange a smile of recognition.
FIRST AID KIT
My new favourite band for the new year … Two swedish sisters with unearthly voices singing country music. What’s not to like?
WILL.I.AM SHAKESPEARE (BORN 1964)
What if Shakespeare had been born on 23 April 1964 not 1564?
What sort of person would he be today? What would we think of our Gen X genius? I wondered this recently at a production of King Lear, reminded yet again of how vividly and immediately Mr Shakespeare speaks to us about our own lives, even after 400 years.
I love and work with words every day, yet confess they rarely move me emotionally the way a song or a movie can. Words have a quieter music. Shakespeare is the exception. There are some speeches in the plays which always move me close to tears. It is a truism to say that he remains an extraordinary artist of genius, yet how would we view him as a contemporary in 2012?
Shakespeare was a creature of his time, of course, when English crystalised into the lithe and robust language we know today, but can anyone doubt that his genius would have expressed itself in other ways too?
I imagine him as a teenager in a ’70s suburban bedroom, listening to Bowie or the Velvet Underground, writing songs that would astonish the world a few years later. Hitting his twenties, he would form a band because that was what you did. He grew the funky goatee beard that became his trademark. Despite the band’s top ten album, their music was hard to define. Punk? Hip-hop? Jazz? Classical crossover? It was their songwriter and singer who got all the attention anyway, and he soon drifted into acting. There was a famed performance at the Donmar, then Will moved swiftly into directing himself. He was a man in a hurry.
Will made an arthouse movie that became a cult. People in anoraks could recite whole scenes from it. He made a Hollywood movie and won the first of several Oscars. Each film was utterly different apart from the astonishing dialogue that made you want to rewind and watch scenes over and over. What’s your favourite WS movie? became a popular topic for magazine articles. He disappeared for a year. It turned out he’d been living incognito in Berlin, writing a novel. He gave it away as an ebook from his website. There were a hundred thousand downloads in the first week. The following year he was directing a Bond movie for the fun of it.
And what about his personal life? There were rumours about his sexuality. There were rumours about affairs with actresses and models. Some of these people he had actually met. Then the Murdoch press hacked his gmail account and published a series of explicit, lyrical emails to ‘my dark lady’ in Chicago. She was never traced.
In later life Will retreated to his house in the country, a few km from his friend Sting’s estate. He was labelled ‘eccentric’ and ‘reclusive’ simply for refusing interviews with the tabloid media. He emerged once to put on a strange, spare play that disturbed its audiences. Critics were divided, but in the years that followed it spawned dozens of imitations, starting a whole new movement in the theatre. And then there was silence.
Who is the real WS? journalists asked. It was a question he sometimes asked himself, then shrugged his shoulders.
ROBERT GLASPER EXPERIMENT. Cherish the day
The excellent Robert Glasper with Lala Hathaway.
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