2025 Another Year

Lutruwita.

Here I am, in Nipaluna (Hobart, Tasmania). Time spent in Ireland is fading, and missed. Will I return? I mull over the prospect and remain in stasis. Does becoming older deplete capacity for action? Perhaps. But the desire to be there continues, so does memory.

The steady blur of drought continues in Lutruwita while folk in Queensland and New South Wales fling their sodden selves at the sun, saw up broken trees and shout at insurance companies. The floods (and winds) are retreating, for now.

Is the planet listening? Are its caretakers?

This blog has been recessed, dropped into oblivion – except in my mind ­­– and revives now almost like a redress, as if my small world awaits reinvention.

I write therefore I am? No. i am therefore i am. [   ] and …

Yesterday, I was moved – emotionally charged more likely – by Quinn Thomson’s extraordinary Swansong concert, as they prepare to transform their spine-tingling soprano notes to another voice. And the night before another event: ‘country music’ with Kasey Chambers – icon of Aussie ‘back-road’ music – and her band. And a few days earlier: the electronic and piano creative phenomenon Nils Frahm. What contrast, and yet, so much love in each room for all three performers; and, from each of them, love of where they are, who they are, who they are with, and of each place. The word ‘diversity’ feels overdone in these times; but until I find a worthwhile substitute, it’ll do for underwriting hope for acknowledgement of all that’s good and honest, and imbued with kindness, integrity, hopefulness and inclusion.

Place. Where we are and who we are in it? Right there. Right here, now.

A native hen – a flightless rail –gathers her chicks into a pile on the verge of the path beside the Hobart rivulet. A male hen startles with its warning honk as I pass with the dog. I apologise, keep the dog on a tight lead, walk quickly on. A wallaby dashes off at a glance from the dog and to the blare of a crackle (the group noun!) of white cockatoos. They cluster in a eucalypt canopy until one disturbs by its departure and they all scream off towards the city. These birds are novel in the valley, incessantly flapping and raucous. Where have they come from? Why? But my questions soften when I hear today that flocks of white corellas in New South Wales have been falling from the sky, poisoned.

At the river, a platypus scrabbles about in the bank. People gather to watch, film its actions, chatter. Only one platypus today. More than one is a ‘paddle’ of platypus. My neighbour reports she saw seven in one day, all solitary. Do they ever settle for a convention? How protected are they, despite Council’s efforts to promote their habitat to locals and tourists?

Last weekend – extended by a public holiday – a spot on the East Coast of Lutruwita became ‘my place’, thanks to a friend’s shed. Four days of solitude (with the company of Juni the whippet), beach walks and swims, painting, cooking, playing music…. Rejuvenation without driving, or the necessary appointments that seem to clog propensity for deep awareness. Quietness, solitude, occasional shared meals; and listening to trees in the wind and to birds reinventing song when they felt like it. Magpies, miners, crows, parrots. Solo, and in twos and threes.

I didn’t see the big snake on the path to the beach sighted the day before by my host, nor the massive shark reported after our swim on the hottest day. I think about the warming east coast current, the demise of kelp forests, the falling corellas and the frail platypus populations. Our future. More sharks, snakes, fires, floods? I’d better learn to honk like the native hen. [ ] …

performance development

IRELAND &

Back home: show and yell

while at BCA…

Time.

Burren College of Art, Newtown Castle, Ballyvaughan Co Clare, Ireland.

I’m in Ireland but my heart is not quite here. Each time I come to this blog I experience interception and I stop writing. Attending to creativity – to what might be art – feels as if it’s being shred, as if I’m becoming too steeped in dismay. Each day the news from Gaza shatters my equilibrium. Israeli actions in the Occupied Palestinian territories become more and more inhumane. Atrocities perpetrated against Israelis by Hamas, and the tragedy for hostages captured by Hamas, are reprehensible and depraved. But so much media and response has been ignoring the plight of what Palestinian people have endured (and survived) for decades, since – and including – the Nakba, the Catastrophe (1948). The Israeli occupation of Palestine and its imposed apartheid and violence is counter to all reason and compassion, and – as war crimes – sabotages international law. More than anything their actions are escalating to genocide – supported by the west.[1] Arab states too have neglected Palestinians. When will compassion speak?!

I have also been hyper-alert to the impending Referendum in Australia and cast my postal vote several weeks ago. Last Saturday the majority of Australians voted AGAINST establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice in the Constitution, after years of preparation and the Makarrata declaration (2017). But, over 4 million voted Yes. I hold to that, to staying open and welcoming to Indigenous voices; to listen to their continuing stories about, and responses to, the attempted genocide by settler-colonialists that was their history and continues as a legacy of survival.

First Nations response to the Referendum:

We are calling A Week of Silence from tonight (Saturday 14th October) to grieve this outcome and reflect on its meaning and significance. We will not be commenting further on the result at this time.

We will be lowering our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags to half-mast for the week of silence to acknowledge this result.

We ask others to do the same.[2]

Yesterday I drove to Ennistymon – a small town in the Burren – to the river Inagh and its falls tumbling behind the main street. I joined a Burrenbeo Trust education-walk led by otter expert Ruairí Ó Conchúir. We didn’t see any otter (due to their reclusive nature) but I now know more about their habitats and habits; and that deploying a ‘kick-net’ in the river is a testing method for water quality: insect larvae that salmonoids and eel feed on can guarantee otters then have a steady diet of fish. The chain of survival.

I’m reading Rebecca Solnit again – thanks to the BCA library – her ruminations on ‘lost’, when travelling, walking and attending to any sense of place.[3] Yesterday, when I was walking in the Burren, I felt as if the hedgerows were seething with potential: butterflies, insects, birds, seeds and flowers. Lost in place, in being? I try not to think too much about the dying ash trees here (due to Die-back), particularly the young trees that spring up along hedgerows and are so prevalent along the roads and on the lower slopes. They appear as if they are caught in winter bones.

I do think about motion, the dance of being present to movement, in its many iterations, as an improviser noticing the body travelling through time and space, generating actions through discovery. I keep returning to the question Is this art? Or, to use phenomenology-speak: I’ve bracketed-in that question into my research on ‘performance improvisation’ while at the residency. Does ART become art during or following intention? I’ve just discovered planchette, a writer’s implement – a heart-on-wheels-with-a-pen – that became synonymous with séances (in the 19th century) and automatic writing. It is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for improvisation: the Art of Spontaneity.

Feeling ‘lost’ while improvising could be my dragging hem: the vulnerability and cliff-top moments before wings unfurl. Finding form – in language, motion, or sound – might be expressing the evolution of art, the smudge of the stamp. Whatever it is, the process – intention – of spontaneity becomes a ‘finding’: gesture, word, melodic shape, noise, silence, stillness. It often feels like a deeper connection with my-self, ‘in the moment’ of what is.

I go on…to find…create…know…walk…dance…sing…

The spray of Irish rain. The not-quite-drizzle. I think of what Laurie Anderson says in Another Day in America:

And ah these days. AII these days! What are days for?
To wake us up. To put between the endless nights.

Dry days… to wake me up, to put between the (endless) damp ones. Many fields have become turloughs, lakes that appear after rain; they will disappear into the limestone ground during dry days, only to burgeon with the next downfall.

Since I wrote that last paragraph we’ve had a few warm, dry days, enough to confuse deciduous plants. Russet on-hold, except for a few previews. I spoke to an Irish woman yesterday who had taken the ferry to one of the Aran islands, to swim at her favourite beach. Talking with her I had the sense that she was squeezing all she could from the weather, as if it were gold. Today the blustery weather is summoning rain again, the Irish familiar. It punctuates time, and space.

Two Palestinians were to join us here for their residencies but they are trapped in Gaza. We grieve for them but can never imagine their shuddering, monstrous reality. And, the grief for so many in Australia after the referendum must be like a tidal wave.  I will try to keep listening.

[1] Genocide: https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide

[2] https://ulurustatement.org/a-statement-from-indigenous-australians-who-supported-the-voice-referendum/

[3] Rebecca Solnit. A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 2006

Newtown Castle/The Burren College of Art

The Falls at Ennistymon

One more performance, in Ennis, with Kate Hilder!

Final performance invitation

The space of silence…

Hut in the woods, near Gort, Co Galway, Ireland.

During this retreat I’ve discovered the world of composer Annea Lockwood (Aotearoa/New Zealand-American). How have I missed her? She has spent most of her eighty years listening to, and recording, the sounds we live amongst, and teaching others how to listen to sonorities around us.

[Is listening art?]

Annea Lockwood says (in her film: link below) that she ‘listens to dusk, her favourite time of day’. This has prompted me to go outside each evening, stand very still and listen – to dusk. It’s often been very still, and at first, silent; if I listen, I hear sounds. The sudden flap of magpie wings, a barking dog, tits chittering from beneath a pile of branches, a banging door, a puff of wind across wet leaves, drips from guttering, the breath of a horse, a fluttering leaf, the scurry of a squirrel, a conversation between birds in the canopy. Music of now.

When I listen to the world outside my door and when walking in the woods, and, to what’s within myself, my body remembers the state of being stationary in deep silence; and yet I feel it’s elusive, squashed into what Bourdieu calls the habitus (‘personal habits, skills, and disposition of character’). I hope I’m becoming more alert to the losses I sustain by inhabiting rushing and checking what I’m conditioned to think is essential (emails, messages, ‘the next thing’…). I clearly exist in the epilogue of the media generation and capitalism’s projects, no matter how much I think I’m a ‘subversive’ (whatever that means!).

I’m reading Annie Ernaux ’s The Years: a recent history, told in a unique kind of memoir in third person:  

This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subject that she has seen – perhaps nothing compared to those her granddaughter will see, as will all beings who are alive in 2070. To hunt down sensations that are already there, as yet unnamed, such as the one that is making her write.

…To save something from the time where we will never be again.           

An extraordinary narrative of how social and political dimensions (and events) effect lived experience, memory and meaning. As Deborah Levy says on the cover: ‘One of the best books you’ll ever read.’ Annie Ernaux is fully deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2022. But what would she say about our world now?   (The Years was published in 2008)

I brought with me one book of poetry: John McCullough’s Panic Response, a collection of poems about making sense of the mind:

Thinking is always chasing,

the mind approaches then loses impossible quarries —

a sequence of stumbling phrases, gasping air.

When I dip into his poems, I’m always nourished by them and by how he writes to filter the shifts and shapes of being human.

Friday night was Culture Night across the Republic of Ireland. The country was thick with events for all ages and tastes. Gort had many to choose from: exhibitions, music, nature walks, a talk by the icon of Irish folk-lore and stories, Eddie Linehan; and an event hosted by Gort Cancer Support: a touring portrait, remembering Vicky Phelan who campaigned against Ireland’s CervicalCheck screening scandal. She was not told of incorrect smear test results after Ireland outsourced the screening to a bogus Texas company. She died in 2022 – and many other women also died as a result of this mess – after a vigorous campaign, that included her refusal to sign a non-disclosure statement and High Court action against the lab (which did not admit liability). She is celebrated in Ireland as a huge force for advocacy in women’s health and as an agent for change in the very compromised Irish medical system. The presentation – by David Brennan, close friend and owner of the portrait – was deeply affecting and an inspiration for how one woman can destabilise paternalistic systems enough to generate change.

[Ah, but there’s still so much more to do!]

A highlight during Culture Night was attending a River Walk with an orchestra of local young string players. They walked two kilometres (there and back) beside the river while playing their instruments (cellos strapped to waists), followed by family members (carrying cases) and people from the community. A rainbow heralded the beginning but rain held off for the whole event. There was so much joy on the faces of everyone. As we arrived back at the car park, we celebrated with the band as they played, and danced in a circle, for their finalé.

One of the delights too of being in this community is staying long enough to meet artists, and to connect with artists I’ve collaborated with in Ireland, in person and online. Through an invitation to join KAVA[1] in 2018, while I was at the Burren College of Art, opportunities have emerged that have included participation in several KAVA exhibitions and an offer to compose music for HERSELF, a film celebrating St Brigid (2023 was the inaugural St Brigid’s Day, a public holiday). I am indebted to Shona McIlvray, a member of KAVA and a passionate community artist, for the invitation to create sound for the film and for her generous offer of this cabin for retreat; and it’s been a delight to meet Jill Beardsworth, the filmmaker and to see her new film at Culture Night: a beautiful documentary created with adults living with intellectual disability. I met Darryl Vance too finally, at his wonderful exhibition (on recycled cardboard) in Kinvara, after many online conversations for the KAVA Not Over Yet and Cahoots (mail art) collaborations (that mostly happened during COVID lockdowns). And I must mention the artist Antoinette Hensey too, my host in Monkstown, whose leadership held KAVA together for many years before she relocated east.

Before leaving Hobart, my friend and improvisation mentor Andrew Morrish suggested I contact Kate Hilder, who, like me, has been an improviser for many years and a beneficiary of Andrew’s mentoring and encouragement. She is from the UK and lives in Ireland now, not far from here. Yesterday we met, practised for a couple of hours and performed to a small audience in a cosy yoga studio in the centre of Gort watched over by a huge bust of Buddha and a garden gnome. The resonances that come from sharing the wonder and strangeness of improvisation and deeply knowing the idiom set us up for a day of rich emergence made all the more fabulous by our initiation into each other’s practice. Kate’s voice, my viola, language-experiments and our dance-bodies found form in solos and duos as we cascaded along a continuum of similarity, difference and shared imagination. We want to improvise again while I am still in Ireland. Make it all up I say!

[Is improvising art?]

Just a few more days in this neck of the woodpile and I’m at the Burren College of Art for four weeks of finding art in being human. Does that mean play?

This blog is feeling more like an epistle than a blog, so it does, as the say in NI.

Here’s a link to the Annea Lockwood’s film ($5 to download it for 24 hours) https://vimeo.com/ondemand/annealockwood/560449669).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/vicky-phelan-exposed-irish-smear-tests-scandal-dies-cancer

https://www.darrylvance.com/

[1] KAVA: Kinvara Area Visual Artists (Kinvara is a town near Gort, close to the Burren)

Being human

Centre panel of the portrait of Vicky Phelan.

Does the Buddha have their eyes closed, and is that a sneer or a smile”

Woods, wouldn’t you know it.

Crack (craic) prediction

Memory and movement

Gort County Galway, 14 September 23

Times like these: the gift of a cabin in the woods near the Slieve Aughty Mountains, County Galway; long days without interruptions; trees, silence, stillness, enough to eat and sleep; the surprise of three deer and a bird singing on the doorstep; creative solitude.

I drove through central Ireland a few days ago: from County Derry, Northern Ireland – where I’d been staying on a farm with my very generous, kind relatives – to the edge of the Burren, south Galway, in the Republic. The island of Ireland might be small but slowing for hay-machinery, speed humps, towns and villages, and taking detours accidently, set me on a slow course: about six hours to my destination. Approaching Cavan from Monaghan the road criss-crossed borders several times as if confused: yellow dotted lines define the edges of the road in the Republic; a continuous white line in Northern Ireland. Metaphors, comparisons, history, maps: plenty of scope for speculation.

Even though the rain and mist obscured the limestone hills on my way here, I am relieved to be back in the South, in the Burren. I’ve spent more time in this part of Ireland than elsewhere and felt almost a sense of coming home. The rock walls, instead of green verges and hedges, remind me to stay very alert on the roads unless I want a grey stripe on the hire car.

But my visit to Belfast in the North hovers, days after taking leave: graffitied walls, the peace wall (an attempt at the ‘bigger picture’); razor wire and tall fences; bunting and flags dedicated to identification; dirty streets and curfew gates; groups of men in dark suits standing on corners; the hop-on-hop-off bus tour selling the Troubles history as if it’s all over and rosy now; the iceberg-resembling mausoleum of the Titanic Museum that draws more crowds than anything else in the North (along with Game of Thrones iconography); very good Indian food; the plethora of languages in the International Youth Hostel; the woman I met from Georgia while strolling through Queen’s University: she was ‘chilling’ after giving a paper on economics at the European Studies conference (UACES), ironically in Belfast, post Brexit. And the welcoming Crescent Arts Centre, a free-thinking sanctuary for artists and writers. While I sat writing in the Crescent café the man near me sketched a miniature landscape from a photograph for two hours without any movement other than his hand. That’s focus.

Before leaving the city I met with an old school friend who has lived in Belfast for more than forty years – through the Troubles – and seen his share of division and explosions and the slow transformation towards peace. “It’s the young people who will change it,” he told me. “They don’t have our memories.” I wonder will he be right. Hate and bigotry is contagious, but so too is harmony.

We had an unplanned walk around Belfast’s back streets after coffee when neither of us could remember where he had parked the car. We found it eventually but not before images of tow-aways and Troubles narratives began to infest my mind, and I could guarantee his blood pressure was unstable until that blue shape manifested.

We drove along the Ravenshill Road to the hire car company, past the Free Presbyterian Church started by Rev Ian Paisley, the man who could have fought for peace and saved hundreds of lives but instead stirred division until he agreed to work (briefly) alongside his greatest rival, Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuiness, as late as 2007. (The Easter Peace Agreement was in 1998). Now they are both dead, and Stormont, the Northern Ireland Parliament, is ‘on leave’ because the DUP (Paisley’s party) has refuse to work with Sinn Fein: power sharing collapsed in 2017. Fortunately there’s another non-aligned party, The Alliance Party, emerging.

Has the window for peace cracked again? Add the contentious Brexit protocol on trade and the recent law passed by the UK Tory government making it almost impossible for Troubles perpetrators of violence (including British soldiers) to be located and charged and the Northern Ireland script stays noir.

I stare past the ferns, trees, ivy and grasses. The three deer that came into focus leapt away when I stood to take a photograph. There’s not a whisper of wind. The sky is bland: I’m guessing more rain is coming. There’s only myself, my mind and some potential for a flowing of imagination.

The haven in the woods

Ballentoy Bay, Giant Causeway Coast, Counties Antrim//Derry, Northern Ireland.

A script on the wall in the ‘Reflection Room’, Belfast Town Hall.

Travelling south and north

Written from Belfast … after 3 days in Monkstown, near Dún Laoghaire (‘Kingstown’, when under British rule) on the Granite Coast, on the southern edge of the Dublin sprawl.

I’m beginning to feel ‘on tour’, as images and memories of home blur only to be supplanted by so much here, in the locale as well as in the sense of myself in transit. So much is different, the same and evolving. The sense of being without an anchor pervades at times. I keep active: walking, visiting galleries, finding food, writing and reading in my room, and listening to local radio and music. I write about my plans for this adventure (if that is what it is), attempt to précis my intentions and brighten the scope of what I want to express in the next two months. Is this art? is the question that will inhabit most of what I hope to do when composing, writing, drawing, and painting; and in my improvisation practice, my primary intention.

I haven’t felt the disoriented time-warp sensation that usually lingers for several days, the legacy of flights between hemispheres and time-zones, but I have been wakeful in the early hours, the time to practise slow breathing or listen to local radio.

After six days based at Trinity College in a tiny student room at the top of five flights of stairs – certainly not conducive to moving a large suitcase up and down without a lift – I caught a train south, that skirted around Dublin Bay, to Monkstown, near Dún Laoghaire, an area stacked with Georgian buildings and a plethora of architectural species built after Irish Independence and the shattering of British control. My host tells me many Georgian building were dismantled after neglect. There’s beauty in the heterogeneity, the shoreline and the extensive open spaces and parkland left vacant after deconstruction.

The railway line was partly built on reclaimed land (a ‘dyke’). It passes Sandymount, made famous by James Joyce. In Ulysses, Stephen says “I am here” when he stands on, and then walks, the wide strand’s flats at low tide. When I look across the wall to the strand from the train people are wading in shallows out past the grey sand that fills the foreground. At low tide you’ll not find enough depth above your knees unless you walk a long way out into the bay. The stunning early autumn weather is tossing people out of their homes after two months of incessant rain, wind and storms.

I’m staying with a friend – an artist I met a few years ago in the Burren – in a quiet apartment a short distance from the railway line and the sea. The extended park wrapping the apartment building brings in nocturnal visitors: badgers, red foxes, squirrels; and, during the day, many kinds of birds – blue tits, magpies, wood pigeons, bullfinches and robins – that vie for seed from cylinders hanging from the ceiling of the porch. Last night I was thrilled to see three badgers close to the back porch, snuffling about in the grass for feed with their long, striped snouts. When I stepped out to video the badgers they remained, unconcerned; but when I tried to video the red fox it slunk off under the trees. It returned the following night when there was no competition and I tried to be completely still with my camera.

My Monkstown host took me on a tour of Dublin that included: a history tour of a heritage eighteenth century terrace, reassigned to social housing for Dubliners in the early twentieth century; the Natural History Museum; and the Museum of Literature Ireland where James Joyce and Yeats feature almost to the point of annihilating anyone else. But if you look there is a wall of names and photographs celebrating others, including: Anne Enright, Medbh McGuckian, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Sean O’Cassey, Samuel Becket, Eavan Boland, Doireann Ni Ghriofa, Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin, Marion Keyes and many others I’d never heard of. Since then I’ve read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like This. It’s everything a novella should be, and I hope she was on that wall. The film An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) was based on her novel Foster. I loved that film too.

Badger in the backyard of Monkstown

Lifejackets sculpture, Dún Laoghaire, Granite Coast, South Dublin.

Belfast (& Northern Ireland generally) does graffiti like nowhere else I know. This one’s creative! Don’t mention the war!

Writing presence in Dublin

26 August 23: Inkslingers writers’ group event, IWC Open Day, Dublin

I admit, using first person can feel like a grape seed between my teeth. But here I go again. (Well there she was again, the infernal “I”, almost an advance, a clutching to myself.)

(Do me, my and myself add even more seeds?)

I’m in a room with people I’ve never seen before. We/I evaluate words, put some down, put others out. The room heaves with breath, thoughts, intention.

Am I really here, ascribing thoughts in the haze of recovery. (Twenty-three hours travelling yesterday, mostly above ground).

This could be a celebration: of arrival, of dates lined up by coincidence such as with this event, with the American football games happening today in Dublin. (I wish they’d all go home. Woops! I meant to avoid the political).

I’m in advance of myself perhaps. An Australian masquerading. It’s all pretence, the director might say. Identity and so on.

But the show must go on, I say to myself.

(Improvised text written in open writing session at the Irish Writers’ Centre Open Day, Dublin: Inkslingers writers’ group. Convened by Harry Browne)

Prompts for the 30 mins writing time were: season of fruits; director, evaluate, admit, celebration, advance)

Protest! Image at the ‘It Took a Century’ exhibition of women artists, Irish National Gallery. ‘Direct Provision’ provides (or not) accommodation for asylum seekers.

Samuel Becket Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin. I would love to have looked inside, played/improvised in there…waiting for Godot!

Trinity College, Dublin, a mecca for tourists to see the Book of Kells.

22 August 2023

Tomorrow, I fly to Dublin, via Abu Dhabi. Time above ground and sea…to wonder, resist, salivate, summon, conjure, wrestle, snore. Almost 24 hours between here and there. For two months of art practice. A summary perhaps.

Ireland again. Post-covid (is that right?), and yet, and yet, anticipation is like a drumming rain. I load up with hand cream, melatonin, vitamins, compression socks, water bottle, laptop, aspirin, cords, plugs, spare underwear, the ubiquitous smart-phone, a meditation tool that measures HRV, a kindle with many downloaded books, the LRB newspaper, money, three coats, tissues, eye mask, face mask, diary and a list of what I have forgotten. I imagine an exorbitant amount for excess luggage at the airport (after I was unable to pay excess online), and an argument with an officious teller to allow my viola on board.

Twelve months – or more – of anticipation, amidst the mires of living. Anticipation towards suspension and re-imaginings. Renewal? Invigoration?

What is the artist’s imagined life? Attending, submerging, faltering; marks, echoes, filters, roots, branches, hum, flame, ash.

And next? Conversations, over meals on the plane, in the throbbing middle-eastern airport, in a Dublin cab. Numbing adrenaline in turbulence.

Yet, I go. Therefore, I create.

war

24 February 2023

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I feel a weight of sadness accompanied by anger deep in my chest. It’s as if my incredulity at so much hate and ignorance in one man is transforming into a hopelessness about the state of the world, with Putin driving the crushing machine. He signifies all that is insecure, monstrous and territorial in the history of patriarchy and its repetition of horror and errors.

He is shitting on Ukraine. That metaphor feels inappropriate – not strong enough, too psychoanalytic? Shitting conjures the venom of Putin’s intentions: his self-obsession, retrogression and filthy malevolence; his corrupted mind that is driving this war while also flinging Russians into a tomb. He performs like a two-year old hovering over a potty, and with that level of emotional intelligence.

I swim where the river meets the sea in the southern suburbs of nipaluna. The Derwent here is an estuary where you would once see whales and where now the absence of kelp – due to the warming of the east coast currents and the invasion of spiny sea urchins that munch kelp off at the roots, making them less resilient to the increasing advent of storms – reminds me of the local diminution of diversity. A preface to the planet’s noir tales so riddled with the cancer of disregard.

Swimming here feels like I’m dipping into a warm void, a salve, bliss that sponges off the detritus of despair, if only briefly. The sea-floor is bare of sea-grasses and I avoid the blackened sand washed across the shore from a storm-water drain. Last week, at my granddaughter’s birthday party, a falling eucalypt branch narrowly missed the children playing on the grass above the beach where the drain ejects: a terrifying reminder of how being alive can be being dead, in an instant. And as one Ukrainian woman said today on radio (paraphrased): now it’s like my grandmother described it in the second world war: it’s all horror and shock and overwhelming fear.

I clamour

like a bug

tapping under the archway of new

what I see is not always

the getting of wise

spring

5 October 2022

Spring (in the European/Roman calendar) is here. Indigenous seasonal edges are more nuanced, expanded to seasons beyond the embedded tradition of four markers.

Whatever the seasonal names, evidence of change is everywhere. The red cabbage has telescoped into bright yellow petals that are bringing bees to the garden. Nasturtiums, borage, kale, apple, cherry and bay are in flower. The hellebores – winter roses – are sending up serrated celadon leaves to accompany the sepals, dead-heads, thriving vestiges of prime moments during winter when purple and white clusters hung theatrical and monastic against hibernating hues. My hellebores are gleanings, from the Cascade Gardens, collected several years ago on morning walks. Each year, particularly in spring, I’m reminded of past thefts, accretions stolen from public gardens and suburban borders, transplanted and fertilised with optimism. The garden is almost unrecognisable to ten years ago when it was weed-infested with red hot pokers and grasses. Time and growth, and decay.

I’ve recently watched, once again, Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners. There’s a poignant moment in it when she shows us the back of her hand: evidence of time, aging, work, la main de l’artiste. It’s as if the shutters on Varda’s brilliance are removed and we join her in recognition of our own – and humanity’s – finite existence; we glean our own becoming. She is not hiding herself, or us, from the reality of being human. I found this revelation deeply moving, and as I type I’m aware of the backs of my hands: the deepening rifts between the bones, and veins like protruding confluences. No amount of hand cream can smooth the blotched skin or eradicate what the marks signify: lived experience of increasing age.

 I’m writing haiku and tanka, short forms of Japanese poetry that compress experience into three or five lines. The Irish Writers’ Centre’s brilliant short course on writing the body (The Miracle Machine, with Angela Carr) has re-opened the page for my pen to again find form, to follow my yearning that is so often discounted and put aside or curtailed (strange word!). I experimented with stream-of-consciousness writing before I returned to haiku, and rediscovered the satisfaction of précis.

The hump of grey hills

past the birch screen.

A silver-eye tangos.

Huge grey cloud

like a floating balloon.

Ominous or pregnant.

Grass in guttering,

gathered celadon fronds weep.

They’ll be stalks in summer.

Silver birch now green,

winter bones bend to spring.

The glint of summer approaching.

Where am I, you ask

as the day raises its brow.

photinia red

near the roof of a street hedge.

The hills are becoming azure.

Your body will know

it’s all there, in your senses.

Slow everything down.

There are more than five

senses. Pulsate everything

as if a flying bird.

What would touch feel like

when I’m at home & alone?

Perhaps the feather of god?

Are you taking heart

when the fine line starts to blur?

Water the red rose.

Can you hear the birds

carolling across the creek?

The knock of morning.

the year…

January 7, 2022

The [Western] new year has been birthed and already it is wheezing. Tasmania’s covid cough is at pains to massage and message its gifts to & fro. The pan of the demic is on-wing.

I invite the third/3rd year of this zoonotic prion into my dawns and dusks and funk because I now have no choice. Governments (and their pathetic nepotistic health advisors) plot and preen, and here we are, at the cusp of catastrophe. The island (surrounded by water I think) was promoted as an idyll of pathogen-free living – until it wasn’t: from December 15 when the tunnels were blasted open. The foe is here. Whinging won’t heal anything but complain I will.

What is this year? Where are the last two years? What will fester next year? This maelstrom of disease is but a ‘symptom’ of the planet’s fermentation and hysteria as it plunges towards immolation.

I will digress now to what could be known, to remind myself of the pleasures of being alive and present; and to not forget the birth of a beautiful grandson with an exquisite Celtic name: Gwydion. And to let myself be 70 years old!

This morning, beautiful rain, after a month of summer dryness. Leaves drip and shine. The air is clear and still. Sparrows chant incessantly from the olive tree that flourishes after the unusual spring rains. My nine varieties of tomato plants are as tall as small trees. I inspect the flowers daily for fruit, stake another branch, douse the plants with worm waste and add mulch. It’s as if my waiting signifies hope, and that the appearance of red, orange or black tomatoes will reset my vim.

I lost my vim last year. This is an admission, a revelation of mislaying treasure. I feel as if I often embody a habit (dark) that hides what might be, what is. Improvising explodes the malaise and it is through improvisation that I throw off the cloak.

Last year, 2021 was a great year for making it up: guest performer at the opening to Sally Rees’ Crone exhibition; inviting friends to improvise with me at the Sidespace gallery (Salamanca Arts) during my t[w]o islands installation in July; improvising at the Launceston Improvised Music Alliance with Karlin Love; workshop weekend sessions with the Hobart improvisers’ collective; improvisations (pre-recorded) broadcast on radio for Sisters Akousmatica at the Junction Arts festival; regular mentoring sessions, on Zoom, with Andrew Morrish (improv teacher/mentor for 20 years); discovering the brittle acoustics on the stairs of the house; playing with loops.

I invoke the generative arts, those gestures of mania and exposed-suppression, into the un-becomings of the malaise of my future; to salute what can be and what is and what might be shared.

I’m alive.

t[w]o islands a bricolage

It’s happening, the installation from Ireland and Tasmania fidgets.

Autumn studio

Salamanca Place, Hobart, autumn. The ground is russet with fallen leaves from European trees. Exotic, exquisite, anticipated.

I’ve hired a studio for two weeks, in the artists’ heartland; well, that’s what’s performed here.

I have so far met no artists, not yet – aside from Joe CEO, a composer I have known for a long time ­– but I can hear one, scratching behind a closed door; and I heard a brief conversation between artists as they unlocked studio doors. I felt like an eaves-dropper, illicit, inscrutable.

Studio spaces are set up for visual artists, not sound artists. The rooms bleed noise, and walls, or partitions, are separated from the roof void by dusty beams, electric wires and netting. The tin roof is sectioned by strips of dirty, opaque, corrugated fibreglass to let in light. There is one small sash window with twelve panes. No heating is provided. I sit with a knee rug to write.

This is not the west coast of Ireland – that wild, imagined and remembered place where I dwelt in stone towers and halls – but local, and good enough. I step through a portal and the ordinary transforms. I’m sitting at this table, writing, in the soft light, knowing I will soon need to walk up Kelly’s Steps to move my car; and that I will need to prepare for tomorrow morning because I have invited Ruth, an artists’ coach, for conversation, about how I might begin to glean and be. I feel ready to float things, but the imposter inhabits my mind, ghosting.

 I have set up four tables with several notebooks, work-in-progress, art materials, sound gear, my laptop and a typewriter. My intention over this fortnight is to collate fragments (and create palimpsests) from residencies in Ireland and Tasmania (since 2015), in preparation for an installation inJuly, in the Side Space gallery nearby. A gleaning, bricolage, a showing, an extended improvisation.

piano rolls on the roll

Easter plus ...

Easter 2021 has fallen into the cache we call memory. The imagined has passed, made real by action and inevitability. The arrow of time feels surreal these days, in the COVID19 New World of being-alive on planet contagion. Surreal is not quite it; perhaps vibrating uncertainty is a more appropriate tag? []

Yesterday I endured an hour in a suburban cattle-yard waiting for my first vaccination for which I was quite apprehensive. Staff were cheerful, confident and reassuring, strikingly marked against the silence, palpable anxiety and resignation quivering in the queue. An official, a voluminous man in high viz standing at the front of the hall, began to sing a slow love song. It was beautiful; people clapped and I heard a ripple of bright chatter. For a moment I was back in Ireland, where music remains the habitus of being alive and death. The man in a cap sitting beside me –­ 1.5 metres away – smiled at the singer and turned to ask me questions almost as if we were on a date. I deferred to the bland, generalising answers that are my default after sixty-plus years of practice defending my disinterestedness in men’s flirtation. After the vaccination, while I was waiting for possible shock, he found me and wanted to know why I had a better iphone than he did (enabling the vax app) and why I had already booked my second jab…as if taking initiative was a representation of crime. I walked out before he did, leaving him to sort his own future.

Today I’m expecting reactions to the jab – soreness, fatigue – but so far nothing more than my usual tiredness and a strange alertness that I’m sure is an adaptation to media fears for side effects, such as blood clots and symptoms.

Two weeks ago, I joined other artists at Easter on the trek into takayna/The Tarkine, this time to the north west: five days at Arthur River for the Art in takayna project, rolling art-activism organised by the Bob Brown Foundation.

There we were, a random collective of painters, botanical artists, photographers, dancers, poets, videographers, sound artists and volunteers camping on sand, hidden from the quad-bike fraternity behind tea-tree scrub in the Manuka camping grounds. Two Aboriginal leaders, Teresa and Nala, lead us to significant sites deserving protection by Aboriginal management. We were invited to look at petroglyphs, middens, hut depressions and seal hides along the takayna coastline, north and south of Arthur River, where Tasmanian Aboriginal people had carefully selected places where they could sustain daily practices and ensure shelter in, and wonder of, place. Before the horrors of settler invasion and Robinson’s round up. The shock to learn there are no descendants of takayna people remains with me, like a burning infection.

I was enthralled by our excursions, and learning of the legacy of Aboriginal knowledge and life. But I was appalled at the lack of respect given to Aboriginal country, and by illegal recreational bike-riders zooming along tracks, foreshore and beaches, marking middens and other sites, penetrating the silence with a rude sense of entitlement.

Activism in takayna is a solid, continuing and intelligent response to raising awareness of takayna’s plea for protection. May we go on campaigning

Quad bike and dirt bike and 4x drive tyre marks at Sandown Point, takayna, NW lutruwita

‘There’s no justice. Just us.’ (Terry Pratchet)

The above quotation is from Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I No Longer Talk To White People About Race.

How to be me in the changing world? How to be me/changing me with you/changing you in the world? On a planet of febrile health, fracturing bones, cataclysmic thirst and desperate hunger where difference is dissuaded and capitalism enacts bigotry and control.

Is there an oasis of time? An island of kindness?

Flare

15 August 2020

I’m leaning towards more frequent blog entries, pointless though they may be. What is leading me towards publishing these ramblings more often? Perhaps it’s this enveloping entropy of the COVID19-world, infusing my mind [and body] with a sense of gratuitous stasis overlaid by existential anxiety about uncertainty. I can do little [if anything] to avert this collective disaster – that might morph into universal catastrophe – and so I remain numb while alert, scared yet proactive, annoyed but resigned [perhaps].

Fire has been over-used as a metaphor for the Pandemic; nevertheless, fire speaks for the invasive ‘behaviour’ of this thing. What began as a smoke signal [poisonous bat/snake-incense] has emerged into a pulsing conflagration inoculated [!] against efforts to water-bomb it out of existence. Images of charred remains, spontaneous flare-ups, ember attacks, flickerings and scorched domains connote the virus’s multivalent contortion, on every level of lived experience. Do we now need a candle to show us the way, notate a vigil, requiem for our infected planet?

And yet, because the virus has become a political and ideological boxing ring, its infiltration has jumped fences [!] of gender, class, nation, race and ethnicity [etc, et al and so on…] in ways that are amoral, toxic and offensive. While climate performs its narrative [non-fiction], of exploding and vitriolic truth.

I’m aware I’m a compulsive attender – to radio and TV reports of the viral progressions and statistics and all the repercussions. What is this addiction doing to my body? To my mind? To you?

the herald-ess?

A good-enough life

4 August 2020

Days are lengthening. The News reports snow falling in upland suburbs, cars stuck because drivers are not ‘driving to the conditions’. I’ve launched a second heater: one not enough to hold off the blood-cold of this Antarctic blast. Verna, the whippet puppy, refuses to exit into the rain and cold and pisses on the laundry floor, beside the puppy training mat. I step in a pool of piss in my slippers and swear. She chases my three-year-old grandson through the house and leaps onto her chair to rip the nose and eyes from a grey teddy while he tries to rescue the perishing toy. She tires and crawls under her blanket to sleep, only to be poked awake by the boy - for a hug.

            The joy of young children and puppies.

This winter-of-our discontents

Image: Antoinette Hensey

16 July 2020

nipaluna/Hobart

Here we are, in the winter-of-our-discontents.

Sick oh sick, said Lear.

Melbourne under COVID19 lockdown again;

Tasmania beyond the moat: ostensibly pathogen-free, for now, as if …

How do I/we live, and let-live, in our contagious world? This outrageous evil-cell world. The devil and his/her/its music!

Did I ever live in a clean world? A memory: semblance of order: disinfected, reduced, enlarged, complacent, terrified, ambivalent, hopeful, despairing, denying, dirty, sanitized, pretending … 

When will it end? Will it end? What is “it”? How will it be, when it ends, if it does? What will be next? How will the virus wipe itself from the map of our immunities?

I’m looking towards trees, scattered leaf litter, fallen branches, skeletal frames of the deciduous awaiting revival, dove skies, lost birds, broken rocks, starting bulbs, budding wattle, proud hellebores, daffodil memories.

Spring will come. And then?

Back room music during the plague

the infecting dystopia [ ]

22 March 2020

Autumn holds breath while summer huffs its epilogue. Mornings are more muted as sunrises seep pastel into now and maples shine russet. When daylight saving cadences, soon, the brief reprieve – morning brightness – will be summer’s folding, until the equinox and winter’s prelude. Unless winter refrains from coming, and masquerades as spring.

The COVID19 virus [ ] has manifested in displacement: climate change, global warming, call-to-action, bushfires, extinctions, sea rises [ ] are now in the stalls, forced to watch the crystallising performance of a world interpellated by lung-fire, sham and repetitions of denial.

As I listen – from the disinfected safety of home – to the descending and fracturing modes of change, I tune in to potential death – from disease and decay – before the planet can swivel again, and save itself [with help of course].

Help has isolated itself in bunkers, as if the plague is running in the streets on the backs of dust motes and in the speech of small children. We [the olden folk, the vulnerable, the disabled, the indigenous: all categorised now] wash our hands, dutifully, breathe into tissues we discard, and walk quickly past others masquerading as human like us [ ]

The world – so recently remembered as understood [ ] – is now radically alchemical. How will this transmutation be known? Will it cadence to a chant we can pronounce, or modulate to dissonant, garbling endlessness. There’s a strange screech in the air.

hope collects in the imagination []

distilling fear into

opaque and thrumming

continuity …