IN THE BELLY OF A PARADOX

"…because like Jonas himself I find myself travelling towards my destiny in the belly of a paradox."

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (Hollis & Carter, London, 1953), © By the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane

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Trimble : Here's to IMPERMANENCE!

Hemensley : Cheers! And Happy Birthday Bernard!

Trimble : Happy Birthday!

Hemensley : And to Thomas Merton!

Trimble : Cheers!

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Sat in the garden of the Peacock Hotel, down from the peak of Ruckers' Hill, opposite to what'll always be the Town Hall despite 'Northcote Council' no more, subsumed within Darebin (impermanence). I'm keeping the dizzies at bay, enjoying a pot of the local cider, Ken's on the Cooper's Pale. Barman asks me where the burr in my accent's from --Bristol? Hah, no! But it is West Country, i say. He lived in a village just outside of Bristol once, he says (impermanence). A lovely day for it today, he says. Twenty-two degrees, blue sky, sun, a breeze. Tell him i've just received email from Weymouth artist friend, Lucas Weschke, call him Cornishman, who imagined i'd be "reading this in a land of blue honey --here it is fucking miserable and my heart feels like January." I respond that i'll send him last vestiges of our 40 degrees with which to flay his winter miseries --tho’ neither of us exclusive of either's nadir...

Hemensley : MERT (--Ken noted the birthdate yesterday, 31st January, on Facebook. He asked Bernard, in passing, what he thought of The Seven Storey Mountain --B. replied he had the books but doesn't read very much of anything in recent years --I suggest a New Year's resolution for necessary rectification! Ken says Seven Storey not his favourite --like me enjoyed Asian Journal more--Ten years ago, en route London, I was in Bangkok with Cathy and went to the King's Palace and felt i'd been walking in Merton's footsteps when i read B's copy --disagreed with Merton’s disdain of the magnificent Hindu murals which he called Disneyland kitsch! --But before I can show Ken the Merton volume ive brought in my shoulder-bag, a loan if he wants it, he's offering me J P Seaton's translation of Han Shan --i love this one, he says (--Han Shan probably many poets, he says, --Shih Te also --people added to the poem through the years --like the Homer? i say) : "Here's a word for rich folks with cauldrons & bells / Fame's empty, no good, that's for sure"…

I brought this, i say, first edition, The Sign of Jonas, Merton's journal, 1946-51. Ken reads a page, --he's a great writer, he says eventually… People forget Thomas Merton's a Christian, always a Christian, a monk --it was a hard life, --he wasn't a hippy! Laugh. Look at a passage in the introduction ---such clarity, says Ken (--what is clarity but a profound embrace of reality, and such an embrace charity? --brings to mind etymology encountered in the late 80s, that reading time's flurry of Heideggerrian language, Jan Gonda's Sanskrit commentaries, continuing elaborations from 60s/70s Anglo-American poetics featuring Olson, Duncan, Blaser, Kelly & co's Henri Corbin, MacNaughton, Thorpe, Prynne et cetera --but perception defined as "being rightly taken" which completely displaces any personal standard, relegates it to the casual lexicon --"being rightly taken" suggesting that what's NOT isn't 'perception' at all but another flake of illusion fomented both by the poetic & the everyday, --from "philosophy'''s perspective, --language & life floating between the inane & the banal) --prologue, p8 : "Stability becomes difficult for a man whose monastic ideal contains some note, some element of the extraordinary. All monasteries are more or less ordinary.The monastic life is by its very nature 'ordinary.' Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings. The exterior monotony of regular observance delivers us from useless concern with the details of daily life, absolves us from the tedious necessity of making plans and of coming to many personal decisions. It sets us free to pray all day, and to live alone with God. But for me, the vow of stability has been the belly of the whale…"

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Bernard & i call him “Mert”, which familiarity probably reflects the Counter Culture's wish to recruit him to the most agreeable aspect of his ecumenism, this time's hybridity always preferred to orthodoxy & tradition (until & unless of course the latter's deemed to be the hipper) --perhaps, tho, he always came across as 'human', responsible to the problematics of practice, therefore never prim or artificially pious --a poet, a writer, editor of famous little mag (Monk's Pond), artist, --a parallel life the which he ameliorated to his monasticism… As Ken said, Thomas Merton never not a Catholic --and the straying in Ken's case is Bukowskian, as reflection of daily circumstance, rather than the Buddhist temptation, pagan as far as old fashioned church would be concerned, the Buddhism of which Ken's a novice, our Brother Pots & Pans albeit issue of traditional Catholicism & later tuned-on by India including Bede Griffiths' spiritual common cause…

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That's why we honour & admire you, i say --because you do it! One has to acknowledge the actual experience --in all things. Ken deflects my honorific with chapter & verse about his constant straying, 'playing up' --but even this has a Beat Zen status --would you agree? he says (about the Beat Buddhists, which recalls Dave Ellison's & my DESPERATE MYSTICISM hilarity, serious all the same) --Some (Phil Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger) walk the walk, but all of the others, in & out of formal practice, are touched by it forever --they live in its language, persuaded by it psychologically, aesthetically, poetically, practically --this domain of the post- & neo- religions, politics, poetics. And Kerouac's closest to that spiritual, psychological oscillation --high on the way of The Way, then strayed, fallen over --contradictory thus fallible, exemplarily contemporary, but not the career-success contemporaneity from which hype & glister our Jack ran. Ken says Big Sur's Kerouac’s best book, wouldn't you say? First Kerouac i read, at sea in 1965, i chime --but Big Sur, Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, similar confrontation, collision, alternation of the dream & the drear, the dread, the 'slough of despond' . On same page Ken & i --not like some, --i mean, he says, the Buddhist thing is for the ordinary, for ordinariness…

(--begs question, i say: for us the daily ordinariness is where it's ALL to be found --for example, Ginsberg's beautiful Sunflower Sutra, that heightened & luminous experience in the railyard shared with Kerouac, --"i walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shape of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. // Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees and machinery// (…)Look at the sunflower, he said, (…)" --Whitmanian this is, such retro-riff brilliant in & for the demand of 1955's NOW!)

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--some people don't get that, Ken says --they get it all wrong, they don't think they're ordinary, they want to be famous (--but finding their own difference & exploring it, as in Paul Celan's "each man's particular narrowness", dramatically opposes the inflation which characterises this time's 'celebrity culture' --ah yes, we agree about that)! --another cider, another Coopers, perfect little bowl of chippies & mayo --and present him with Jill Kamil's guide book to St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, and also Patrick McCauley's collaboration with Raffaella Torresan, The Sea Palace Hotel, his poems & photos, her paintings (--Raoul Duffy? says Denis Smith at the Shop next day --i can see, i say, --and Marquet?  --the little boats in the harbour...) [Later Ken messages me on Facebook regarding Pat & Raffy’s book, “Did I tell you I stayed in India at The Seaweed Hotel, on the beach at Kerala, at a place called Kovalam a sort of hippie paradise before I went to Bede Griffiths place...” Small world!]

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--Albert Marquet & i --exhibit 1: some poems in A Mile from Poetry (1973-4), after his Honfleur Harbour paintings --number 12 for instance, "at that sitting no yacht club though plenty / of tinsel & flag. generation or two & it owns one / sure enough (see the photo by any jack with guile / enough to cover his head with a cloth) // the little boats / the little boats / dead still" --initially welcomed by Adders but then used as cipher for my own sinking --"your little boats wont save you" he shot across the bows --Thank Heaven i knew where the life jacket was --swam with my little illustrated book of Albert Marquet into the international waters of which the Merri Creek was a vital tributary, --as far as the Oz Po salts would know i'd been lost at sea or like Robinson, shipwrecked! --twenty years, more? --hardly recognised when i returned! --exhibit 2: Marquet's erotic paintings which Paul Buck showed me in Maidstone in '87, --an immense compendium with the unlikeliest contributors such as Marquet --middle of the afternoon, balancing teacup & slice of cake, after walk around the partly flooded town, not only sightseeing the swollen Medway but the hotel where Jean Rhys once lived --you like her don't you? Paul remembered --portrayed, if nowhere else, in my book, Montale's Typos, in the prose-piece "England, River & So On (in the mood of Jean Rhys, after a theme of hers)" --for example, "I dreamt of being there again, & of looking thru the window, outside looking in, at her dresses on the bed, & her bib-&-braces. And the river just outside the hedge, the rushes, the submerged & sprouting stalks of this & that, greens, browns, greys, & rainbows there & gone, glints of red & turquoise; mud & shadows…" --brother B. published it, the first of his Stingy Artist editions, 1978 --quite a publisher, i impress upon Ken --

-- To Bernard! in unison salute --on eve of Ken's joining the Theravadans --

K H : And Mert!

K T : Mert!

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[February 1-11, 2018]

POETS' PORTRAITS

Should you come up to the Shop today you'll be in for a big surprise... and for certain because : charcoals by Raffaella Torresan on the high windows at the far end of the room, portraits of seven Melbourne worthies, drawn at different times in the Nineties, four of whom, sad to say, have died. The upper 4 & lower 3 sequence I've arranged in the window frames features Adrian Rawlins, Shelton Lea, Geoffrey Eggleston & Myron Lysenko, followed by Ted Lord, Colin Talbot & Patrick McCauley. Legends is a better description. Incidentally, I wonder who has drawn the women poets over the years --which isnt to join the "it's all blokes" chorus, since one's a poet ahead or despite of gender (& 'because of' would surely now apply equally)... And, another thought, is it usually women making portraits of men?

The first portrait we acquired was Nancy Buller's water-colour of Peter Bakowksi, mid-'90s. He'd sat for a St Kilda elderly women's art group I seem to recall. A chance purchase --there it was one Sunday, in a church hall or a temporary gallery at the Bowling Club --perhaps it was a St Kilda arts festival. Retta thinks she, Catherine & myself all saw it together. I bought it & someone from their group delivered it to the Shop... Next in the collection was Ashley Higgs' silk-screen of Pi O, which I saw at a Council of Adult Education exhibition in Flinders Street --more a glimpse than a study but the profile's unmistakable in its white on yellow cartoon. Its success depends upon the speed of one's look! Then, Javant Biarujia's hand-coloured photo-montage, Frank Hardy (Brushing Up On A Fallen Hero In An Era of Abstraction And Angst), featuring the laureate of Carringbush & his glowering dog in gentling yellow & sepia. It might be a surprise to many that once upon a time --this work is from 1982, acquired a couple of years ago --Javant was as serious about art-photography as writing. About the same time I bought Grant MacCracken's fiercely funny oil of the busking poet (himself as Sham Cabaret, all black shades & leathers) outside of Paul Elliott's Polyester Books & Music in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. It was in the window of the Smith Street, Collingwood picture-framers during an exhibition of his signature moonlit grey & white narratives a few years ago. Next, two pen & inks, drawn from photographs I believe, Judy Johnson by Erin Hunting, & John Tranter by Tim Bruce, both from a 2007 Victorian Writers' Centre exhibition of prize-winning authors, curated by Pam Davison. I'm constantly amused when people mistake the Tranter portrait for me! Of course it's not me, I exclaim --it's obviously Tranter! But I do confess the jolly, full cheeks' expression, could be me in a certain frame of mind (probably full of wine)!

There's a suggestion of the curled lip & raised eyebrow in Raffaella's Adrian Rawlins (1990), a touch of Frank Thring or as David Pepperell called him, Dr Nosh --perhaps thinking of the cheese-platter reward after the artist has finished! Shelton Lea (1998) combines street-wise & imperious but vulnerable too. A difficult face to capture because so well known. Geoffrey Eggleston (1994) she entitles 'Geo Egg' ("Come on the Egg!" one of his old mates yelled across the slope at Montsalvat as son, Nathaniel, buried the casket of ashes, reminding me that was the nickname we'd learned from Mike Dugan in the '60s). Flamboyant in cravat, he also wears that wonderfully stoned expression one recalls over the decades, beady-eyed, mirthful yet serene. Myron Lysenko (1995) is boyish, & there's a kind of blur as though the spectacles are necessary to clarify things. Ted Lord (1998), 'Teddy', seems to float out of a long history; he swims in mortal tenderness. Colin Talbot (1995) has a youthful, handsome athlete's face with a hint of smile he's stringing out like a kite. Patrick McCauley (1998), rugged, windblown, the patina left by a harder life, shared in the visages of Shelton & Ted.

Raffaella Torresan literally sees the best in her sitters, the best & not the beast. Her charcoal portraits are affectionate. The affection attracts & communicates life as well as likeness. It's a truism that drawings are more like living things than any photograph can be, and I swear another species of life is enacted here.

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--Kris Hemensley
fin, 20th September,'09--

KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 20

LAUNCHING SPEECH FOR LITERARY CREATURES
[Literary Creatures : Drawings, Poetry, Group Terms : A book of animals in alphabet; edited & drawn by Raffaella Torresan; published August, 2009, by Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, Vic. 3204]
+ Raffaella Torresan's exhibition, Book Animals (8-19 August,'09)]
Saturday 8th August,'09 at the Victorian Artists Society, 430 Albert Street, East Melbourne.

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[Not all of the following notes were used in the speech, nor do some of the spoken comments appear in these notes, as is the way of speeches!]


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Congratulations to Hybrid Publishers on the publication...
And congratulations to Raffaella on bringing her idea for the book through to this gorgeous fruition!

I was explaining to a colleague recently my continuing reticence to publish in what can be called authorised anthologies, but had to say I did have a couple of poems in an animal anthology... The 'Contemporary Australian Poetry' perspective gives me problems but 'Animal Poetry' evidently doesnt! There are reasons for this, which I'll touch upon in a moment...

All of us grew up with 'literary creatures' in the poems we encountered at primary & secondary school... For me it was the likes of Shelley's Skylark --"Hail to thee, blithe spirit! / Bird thou never wert...".
And D H Lawrence's Snake, which I'll always remember for giving me the word 'expiate'; that final stanza --"And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords / Of Life. / And I have something to expiate : / A pettiness."
And, of course, G M Hopkins' The Windhover --"I caught this morning morning's minion, king- / dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon..." --Hopkins whom I didnt understand at the tender age but in my young 30s finally got!

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The poets in Raff's book are mostly not the Australian canon --apart, say, from Bruce Dawe & Les Murray... And there's Bernard Smith from the highest echelon of Australian art --his Place, Taste & Tradition written when he was 21 or 22 years old, published 65 or so years ago? --as legendary, I suppose, as Phar Lap, the subject of his own poem in the book... But no Judith Wright & co., or what the wider Aussie net could catch.
Literary Creatures is Raffaella's own anthology, a personal anthology of predominately Melbourne & Victorian poets, invited by Raff... As Alan Wearne says in his introduction, "What really grabs me about this book is the wonderful off-the-wall combination of contributors she has been able to assemble; from Les Murray to the late Geoffrey Eggleston via Robyn Rowland and Lynn Hard is quite an accomplishment."
Alan distinguishes between 'big survey' or 'state of the art' anthologies & such a collection as Raff's, the genre collection...
Well, it's the season of the big numbers --the Nicholas Jose Macquarrie, the John Kinsella Penguin, Jamie Grant's 100 Australian Poems, Geoff Page's 60 Classics, but the genre anthology is something else...
I've been thinking about this recently, in another context, & came up with the notion of the affection for the subject propelling the work (the poem, the painting) into whatever expression... As Alan says of the genre collection, "that's when we really get to discover plenty [of works] that are refreshingly different, be they naive or sophisticated... a lot like discovering a new species"...
Readers are in for a treat...

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At the risk of offending by omission I'd like to mention some of the poetry to delight me...
No better place than here to quote from Jen Jewel Brown's Nest of Vipers, beginning "Like a hiss of poets snaky at being overlooked / their unpaid brilliance rears / Glittering scales of justice rattling inflate / bare fangs spit venom angst ennui" etc
Becca Kellaway's Ode to a Wombat had me in fits, especially "O! for a cool slab of VB, that hath soaketh / In an esky, chilled by its icy embrace / tasting of angels' piss; but it so inebriateth / Mine mind, that I no longer see her face. / Instead tis thee, Wombat...."
A different kind of poignancy with Kerry Scuffins' Totem Horse, especially the last line, "Let her run, let her think she's free." --which raises enormous & philosophical issues, & the relation of reality & conceit in which we humans hold all animals...
Bruce Dawe's "This dog and this cat / weave their lives / within our own..." ; "we have by now been thoroughly integrated / into their mutual strangeness / (as they into ours)" might extend Kerry's thought...
I liked two kinds of beautiful poem --Eric Beach's wonderful vernacular ear, rhythmic & tonally perfect --"they would've laughed marco polo out of town / if he'd tried to describe a flock of emus / as busy as a fat lady's bum in a tight pair of slacks / in an egg & spoon race..." ; "larrikin bird, disdaining fines, eating fences / strange to see you smoke through an exercise yard / wheeling in humped, broken ranks, one eye cocked / to a sun drilled like a rifle bore..." --And Lorin Ford's courtly, romantic pantoum, Like Bees in the Lamplight, "Too beautiful to put away in the wardrobe, / the Chinese silk dress on the wooden hanger / caresses the mind as water soothes the skin. / Gold butterflies swarm like bees in the lamplight." etc
Many, many others... Robyn Rowland's cuttlefish & sea-horses, Les Murray's Two Dogs, Jenny Harrison's Showering Together, Aileen Kelly's Domestic Geese, Jenny Compton's hens, Phil Motherwell's Cuckoo-bugger sitting in his gum tree, Alex Skovron's possums, Patrick McCauley's platypus, Jordie Albiston's Whale Song...
Some of which we'll hear very soon from the poets themselves, though most are for the readers of the book to discover...

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So, let me repeat my congratulations to Hybrid Press, to Raphaella, & to all the poets for a lovely book --which I hereby declare launched!

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[Bernard Smith spoke about poetry & painting, & read from memory some of his poem, followed by Jordie Albiston, Kevin Brophy, Barry Dickins, Jennifer Harrison, Marietta Elliott-Kleerkoper, Ian McBryde, Patrick McCauley, Grant Caldwell & Kerry Scuffins. Raffaella Torresan's thank yous closed the formalities.]

[Extras :
*One Summer holiday, when I was about 10 years old, my father & brother Bernard & I, visited Sandown Zoo on the Isle of Wight (then part of Hampshire, in the UK). Mum must have been with the babies. Dad was a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories, which enthusiasm Bernard & I inherited. I had learnt the word 'kadoga', which was how the great apes demanded surrender when they fought their enemies. As we walked around the zoo we passed a pen of llamas. I cant remember whether we were talking about Tarzan, but I looked over the fence and caught the eye of one of the llamas. "Kadoga!" I said threateningly. The response was swift & violent. The llama spat at me full in the face. My hair was matted in llama vomit! My father & brother fell about laughing. We returned to the chalet for me to wash & change my clothes! What is the moral of this story and how does it relate to the relationship of poets & animals?

*The Victorian Artists Society is situated in Albert Street not far from where the offices of the AEU (the Amalgamated Engineering Union) used to be on a terrace in Victoria Parade. I would visit the gallery in 1967 in the company of Loretta Garvey & sometimes Peg Cregan, who worked in the office at the AEU and needed such a place as the VAS to repair their spirits at lunch-time! A particular painter impressed me greatly with his water-colours --wet looking earthy landscapes. McAlpine?

* With Raff's anthology in mind I looked at the beautiful edition of Judith Wright's collection of poems, Birds, republished by the National Library of Australia, illustrated by historic paintings from their own natural history collection. Judith Wright & her lorrikeets... "On the bough of blue summer / hangs one crimson berry. / Like the blood of a lover / is the breast of a lory." Once upon a time when I was a poet, I read on a bill with Chris Wallace-Crabbe & Judith Wright at the May Daze poetry festival at the University of Melbourne, 1974. Her poetry-speaking voice that day reminded me of a crow. She wore a hearing-aid of course but I didnt immediately think of deafness, rather, my English ear registered Judith's caw-caw as essentially Australian --as (Anglo) Australian as the long, long faces of the figures in Drysdale's paintings. "But 'The heart's red is my reward,' / the old crow cries / 'I'll wear his colour on my black / the day the lory dies.'"

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-Kris Hemensley,
August 7/8th, 2009-