Where the Indigo Melts

Having established my team support of great Australian poetry in the previous post I thought I might give this one the chance to undo it. My summer purge of old an unread paper turned up a lot of beige pages of attempted poetry. The only one I thought I'd save to at least type out properly was this short story from Grade 12, the year The Monsoons is set and the year the previous post talked about. I handed this in as an English assignment, partly as a pisstake but partly because I wanted to plead the cause of writers we weren't studying like William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut and Anthony Burgess. Mr Kneipp laughed in his hip to be square way, and got it completely wrong by saying it was like something out of Mad Magazine. It was ABSURDIST! Alright, my sister gave me that term but I knew what it meant. Anyway ....

I've corrected a very little punctuation where it might have misled and some spelling which might, even at my ethereal height, have embarrassed me. So .... (Oh, by the way, the scrawl in the column is a sign of the times, it's the address of a party and I think even I remember whose it was.)

Where the Indigo Melts

"Hello!" shouted James T. Eggyolk to the crisp blue policeman beside him. Well, that was his job (someone had to do it) and he did it well. The policeman sighed and picked out five soiled notes.

"Thanks," smile the policeman wearily and handed the notes to James. "James," he said shyly.

"Yes?"

"Would you ... I mean, after all, I've got nobody to love after my kids went on strike and..."

James frowned a little. He knew what was coming. No cop needed what he wanted and if James Eggyolk was going to do it he would make the cop suffer.

"Double the price," he said firmly.

"James!" pleaded the cop. But James was a hard man and, striking kids or no, he was going to get double the price.

The cop broke down. "Alright," he sobbed, "alright. You'll get your pound of flesh." The cop hastily fumbled in his pockets and threw ten soiled notes  at him. Satisfied, James shouted, "Hello again!" and quickly walked away from the suffering policeman and down the street.

Seeing someone he didn't like the look of James smashed him against a brick wall. "So what if my name's Eggyolk!" he screamed at the bewildered  prime minister. "It's not my fault!" He released the prime minister, who had started sneezing, and went on his way.

"Life's not meant to be easy," said a dog telepathically. James, who hated smart dogs, frowned and kicked it in the ribs.

Already he was home. He shuffled in and shuffled sourly up the slimy stairs, singing songs of stupidity in a sleepy voice. "Number seventeen," scowled the door blankly. James told it to shut up and pounded it open.

His flat was kept nicely neat in a natural way. Everything was where it should be and no mistake there was. Corned Beef, his pet aardvark, was trying to sing. James grinned for awhile but, bored by this, became very serious indeed. "One day," he frowned, "you're going to sing Blue Suede Shoes in Spanish." Corned  Beef looked back in shame and hid his hairy hog eyes with his broken tennis racquet.

James shook his head. "Something's got to give," he sighed and sulkily removed his coat. If Corned Beef couldn't sing in two week there would be no life left to live. It was a fact he had to face and his revolver was always ready.

Yes, life was boring for James Tomato Eggyolk, and he was the first to admit it. He was bored with saying hello to policemen for money. He paid his nightly visit to the refrigerator and all that was there was a rotten lettuce with its yellow leaves grinning at him.

Furious, he threw it out the window whence it fell into the mouth of a large grey criminal. "I didn't do it, honest!" screamed the criminal through his newly acquired rotten lettuce and scurried swiftly away.

The aardvark tried to say, "what's the matter," but it came out as, "rrrrrrrrg!" James laughed loudly but it turned into a silent and sarcastic smirk as he read the words, "dream your sleep to self," behind his eyes. But he could not. Sleep, that is.

It always reminded him of the cat. "Meow," the cat had said, waiting for milk, but, having no milk, James gave it a bullet instead. Right between the eyes but the cat liked it and came back for some more.

"Dream you sleep to self," read the sign behind his eyes and James, for the first time since he knew he was born, slept. It was very dark inside his skull for awhile. Then, all of a sudden, he saw an angel. The type that never die but just fade away.

"Hey, you," snarled the angel. "Yeah you! Your purpose in life is to say hello to policemen and if you don't like it -- tough!"

"Get lost!" said James.

"Oh no!" screamed the ethereal figure. " You don't get rid of me like that. And anyway I'm going to tell you my grievances."

This was getting boring so James pushed the dream out of his eyes and awoke. It was morning. Corned Beef woke him by scratching his arm lightly.

He crashed out of bed still in his smart new suit and screamed tearfully, "this is useless. You're never going to sing . Something had to give."

And it did. He raced to the cupboard, snatched his revolver and ran down, down, down to the street where a small red statue said, "telephone." He ran in, called the police department and shouted, "Hello! Pay me by mail!" He then raised the pistol to his heart and pulled the trigger.

Click!

It was empty. For the first time in his happy existence he cried.

Prayer for Those in a Coma: Bruce Dawe and my teenage nervous system

By the age of seventeen the only heroes I had were literary. I know that sounds like I'm making it up as an adult but it's true. Still a child, I'd lost myself in the complete many volumes of Dickens at the top of the white shelf in the library at home. They were old commemorative editions with beautiful yellowed plates of the masterful illustrations of  Phiz and Gillray. Then it was Jules Verne. I knew his name for the steampunk before their time films of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, From Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leauges Under the Sea. But the first novel of his I read was Drama in Livonia, a Russian-influenced whodunnit. I can still remember the breathless empathy I felt with the nameless figure of the opening who ran for his life through a dark and frozen landscape. My brother was into cricket, often listening a wall away, to the micro hurricane howls of short wave radio of the games at Lords deep into the night. I didn't see the point in that. If you gave everyone of them a ball they wouldn't have to fight over it. No, the imagined realm was where I walked when I wasn't walking here.

Soon enough all this turned to sterner stuff and out came the Orwell, Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess and Kurt Vonnegut. This world was populated with victims that felt pain when injured, met the hostility of the world around them with wit or a sense of the absurd and knew that the currency of language, gold standard of ideas. These authors I trusted as seasoned guides. They cast light upon the shadows beyond the influence of my cloak of middle class comfort, warned me of the dangers of being conspicuously alive and the worse ones or feigning death among the living. As to poetry I found it as threatening as that James Joyce person that Nanna was always on about who seemed to offer nothing but more mystery. And then I read a poem called Hopeless Bloody Hopeless.

It was in a Secondary School English reader that had belonged to one of my siblings and included page after page of extracts of novels, journalism and poetry that first arrested and then hooked me. Hopeless Bloody Hopeless came one step closer to me than anything else in that already bold congregation: it was in Australian. It's a list of despairing images taken from life and filtered through Dawe's poetics and is deceptively plain spoken until a zinger breaks the surface here and there. The illustration was a photo of a beauty queen appearing for charity with a spastic child. The juxtaposition of this intentionally heartwarming image and the scabrous verse beside it sent me into the same kind of dizzy horror as when I saw my brother's Frank Zappa album covers or a lot of the sleeve art to come once punk rewrote the book. I felt guilty for looking but weak for not looking, self-hating for pushing anything remotely corrective like pity, and lastly worried in that cold and blubbery worry that once it's found you is with you for life. Because of a poem.

As luck would have it we had a volume of Dawe's called Condolences of the Season which I read the way I listened to new albums by bands I loved, carefully, in awe and several times a day.

So that when we got to choose an elective for English I went for Australian poetry without even looking at the others. And it didn't occur to me to care about what anyone else thought about it. I needed to know things.

Mr Handicott took it: Contemporary Australian Poetry. He was a published poet himself, a practicing Christian who once put a small play I'd written at the top of the class but forbade us performing it as it took the lord's name in vain (I would have done a rewrite if I'd known, fer Chrissakes!) He also had a huge Victorian explorer's beard which might have been an heirloom as its rust red was at embarrassing odds with the mild chaos of straw exploding from his skull (his case was the first I knew of to be called cheese and tomato). In another class he'd read out one of his own pieces about wining and dining a woman who then turned cold at the sight of his former lover through "the window of my wallet". Might sound naff described so but it had both comedy and sadness blended well and was judiciously chosen by a teacher wary of his students' imagining of his life beyond the quad. Anyway, he took the modern Australian poetry elective and offered us a feast.

We got the Judith Wrights, Kath Walkers and Kenneth Slessors in normal English class but here we got the good stuff, the fresh, the poetry published that year, that month. He showed us the short, fat journals emblazoned with cartoons of mafia funerals or barbarian hordes, all refering to the fact and act of the current poetry of the wide brown land. I couldn't believe it but I didn't have time to as Roneo-ed sheet after purple sheet landed on the desk including, with its pleasantly rummy fumes, the breath of fire.

One I wish I remembered better was by Rae Desmond Jones. It was a narrative. A woman from the upper middle world gets out of her Merc and happens to walk down a laneway  between factories where she is attacked and spread over the bonnet of the Merc and sprayed with gold paint. Her attackers kneel and pray to her "but the machines do not stop".

It sent shivers down my spine just to think of it and I had trouble re-reading it the same way I couldn't bring myself to look at the full page photo of the dying victim of Buchenwald in the big World War II history book in the library. So poetry was what I wanted to do from then on.

....

But whenever I tried it nothing came out. Nothing worth anything. Seriously, without false modesty, I tried my hand at poetry but bullshit bullshit bullshit was all that I could fashion. But then, on some grey predawn back there late in the year, I stopped chopping up the lines like lettuce and allowed them to join until they had to end and what I had was dowdy ol' prose, country cousin to the rarefied verse.

First thing I did was write a play. It was a Pinter ripoff -- my sister was studying him at uni and there was a production of The Homecoming which really put the hook in me -- but it was an ok Pinter ripoff with just enough Goodies and Python in there to make it seem like I'd given the ripoff process a little thought. Oh, the other influence was Look Back in Anger which ranted with the anger of an adolescent who'd watched some movies and read some books beyond his years. I'm not trying to diminish John Osborne, there, but giving you the self-flattering reason for my admiration of it. My play was called A Tinful of Potholes. It got one reading with my sister and a few actors she had indulgently invited around. It would embarrass me now. I haven't kept a copy but I remember feeling proud of it. Why not? I knew very few others of my age who'd attempted anything like it and none of them had finished theirs.

That was almost it for plays. There were a few others but it wasn't until much later that I had anything performed. Besides, something else happened. Back in the normal English class, Mr Cooke took us through the dramatic monologue, particularly Browning's My Last Duchess and Eliot's Journey of the Magi. That last one sold me and I kept a copy of Eliot's selected works handy. Really, it was in my port along with the vegemite sandwiches and Web of Life. So I wrote an exercise book of Eliotesque drivel. One piece from that did work, though and I revisited it many times since was initially called the Patrol. Eventually, needing material for the last Cubist Cigars show I redrafted it as The Soldier's Story and performed it at 45 Downstairs in February 2009. So something came of that.

But it ran its course. No, I couldn't write like TS Eliot but I could at least sound like Bruce Dawe. Bruce Dawe whose work was Biblical and vernacular, worldwise and sentimental and very, very Australian. I had a copy of the anthology Condolences of the Season. I've still got it. The spine has gone but my sister's name and address are clearly biro-ed on the title page for all the honest world to see. I couldn't write like Bruce Dawe either. Well, not poetry. He helped me with my prose, though. Even after the maelstrom of James Joyce's influence it's Dawes that still kids me that I can do something with these memories. He wrote the poem that finally turned me from claims at poetry and the resignation that I was better folding that into what I could do with prose. Prayer for Those in a Coma describes the comatose as sailors who are drifting in dark waters following a submarine attack. It ends with these words and they steady me to this day:

"Lord, whom our coma helps us not to see,
these men are tired and weary of the sea..."