aortic song and no place for eyes

Ron Dowd
aortic song
linocut, collage 2008, 31 x 27 cm

no place for eyes

tonight cool wind breathes
over the softblack field –

from the field's heart the fruitbat
cries short notes

Field - morning, kangaroo valley

We stayed last night at a friend's place in Kangaroo Valley, and I went walking this morning into the bush and over some fields on the property.

Here's a field I love - it's one that for me resonates with the quintessence of field. (See my GANZ Journal paper and my thesis for more on this interest in fields.)

Sunrise

I took this photograph from our North-facing window this morning. I was visited by a dream last night and I was curious about it, uplifted, while at the same time aware of an old sadness beneath the uplift.

In composing the image there was a tension between wanting to lift the viewfinder fully to the sunrise and wanting to stay in connection with the human realm, not yet in light. In the end the composition stayed "snapped" to the dark city forms; it's not enough to have just an expanse of exquisite sunrise.

Monetary relationships and the DSM-IV

As reported in this recent NY Times article:

95 (or 56 percent) of 170 experts who worked on the 1994 edition of the manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or D.S.M, had at least one monetary relationship with a drug maker in the years from 1989 to 2004.

Whether these relationships affected the content of the DSM-IV is another matter, but it's at least worth knowing the facts.

A morning in the wildness of the park

This morning I walked and photographed from before dawn in Centennial Park, a haven in the middle of Sydney's busy Eastern Suburbs.

I'm reminded now of Robert MacFarlane's statement in his wonderful recent book The Wild Places:

I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing natural existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these are wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.

It's good to be reminded that we can experience wildness in the heart of our city, and not think of this as less than the wildness that is "out there" in the Australian bush.

Some images from this morning:



MacFarlane goes on to say:

I had come to see wildness as a quality that flared into futurity, as well as reverberating out of the past. The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency.

There's a sign in the park that reminds visitors that the ponds drain large volumes of rainfall from suburbs such as Bondi Junction through the Botany Aquifer to Botany Bay, via a complex system of streams, drains, and groundwater flows. And there's good evidence that in the Northern parts of the Aquifer at least, the sandstone filtration produces water quality better than that coming out of our taps. It's encouraging that a wild system system can maintain its health in one of the most densely populated areas of Australia.

And finally, a poem relating to Centennial Park that I wrote last year:

the way we walked

we could feel it in our bodies,
had already slipped into our mythology –

the gravel path, the darkening sky
the swamphen strutting on the lilies –

how the green leaves gorged the lagoon
how rain fell upon them, drumming

how we attended to the beats
saw flashes in the west

saw the swamphen, purple
moving over the extent

Black mountain flora

Eucalyptus woodland at the Australian National Botanic Gardens (Canberra). Something about the open aspect of this woodland, the way the ground is revealed, its dryness and heat, and those qualities in the trees themselves, is appealing. It creates for me a "hook for dreams", a potentiality for revery.

Occupied territory of another sort

Australia's ACT (the Australian Capital Territory) strikes me as a powerfully symbolic territory (of a different sort to Winton's territory occupied by the ratepayer) and one that has a place in our collective psychic life.

This fact has not been lost, of course, on the original inhabitants of this land, who for 36 years have resiliently maintained the Aboriginal Tent Embassy near old Parliament House, and right on the Griffin land axis.

The Griffins delineated a land axis, aligned with the summits of four local mountains. It went from Mount Ainslie to Mount Bimberi in the Brindabellas, passing through Camp Hill and Kurrajong. Crossing this at right angles was a water axis along the river, which in the plan became a chain of ornamental basins. By integrating the site’s topography with their design, the Griffins presented the site itself as a symbol ‘of a democratic national identity’ (Vernon, 2002). (The Ideal City)

I found the Griffins' land and water axes to be palpably powerful, on a beating hot New Year's Eve walk that we took last year, past some of the war memorials of Anzac Parade.

Hot letters on the Australian Service Nurses National Memorial:

A shimmering Royal Australian Air Force Memorial, also hot to the touch:

There seem to be many rich layers of land and water "markings" at play in these axes, several cruciform incisions at the heart of our democratic system, overlayed with the complexities of histories and current-day relationships between indigenous and "imported" cultures.

Dispossession is the shadow side of this occupation of territory in such a grand way - I was drawn to this in my poem on the land axis.

on the land axis

dispossession strikes a chord with me –

you want to make this place
eucalyptic

have set your gunyas
here on the levelled lawns

let in long summer evenings
the smokes of your dreamings
mingle with the scents of roses –

me, going from door to door
looking for what's been lacking –

returning, in the end
to the little timbers
the jetty, watching the meteorite

that falls and boils its way
into the churning sea

There are also some thoughts on Canberra in canberra, new year's eve.

canberra, new year's eve

the big lamps hover
in ceremonial attendance
over the wide empty way

the avenue, the monuments, the dry leaf-strewn earth
vent the day’s heavy heat

at the nurses’ memorial
they touch cast letters –
A for australia’s like a small body
exuding body heat

at the air force shrine
bright steel’s hot to touch,
bronze searing

over at vietnam
a quiet thermal outpouring’s going on
while three pink and greys
haggle noisily

korea’s faired best –
granite and stones having reflected
much of the day’s onslaught –

three bright-metal conscripts
standing fresh and prepared
like sentinels for an evacuated city

the inhabitants having made
other plans for the evening

Energies can potentially be evoked by such national symbols on this grand scale - something I was attempting to consider in some recent linocuts (especially meteors over a field and meteor falling on a slope) - perhaps there can be a redemption for Winton's youths suffering the occupation of the ratepayer; a potentially more inclusive and energised life for them, rather than one of social and cultural marginalisation.

And I had in mind in my figure on a land/water axis linocut (at recent linocuts) a figure in touch with some kinds of ceremonial or "knowledge-based" markings in the land and/or water.