A different 'Beauty'! The Wolf Bride...and Other Tales...Tails?!

I've been busy scribbling, drawing, writing...and painting too.  'Brave New Works' happens on the first weekend of November, and I'm in for the extended, deeper, richer version of 'The Wolf Bride', and decided that while I was at it, I might sneak in some other fairytale bits and bobs, and call it 'The Wolf Bride and Other Tales.'  I've also been experimenting with set/installation ideas, and refining what/how I want to perform this time.  Definitely not stuck in a chair, I want to be up and moving, though I'll have to sit down for the songs.  So I'll need to 'choreograph' movements and mime, and work out how to move from 'singer in chair' to 'actor on stage' fluidly and gracefully!  I recently had the great good fortune to be invited to join a wonderful bunch of creative local women, with arts practices eclectic and wide ranging, in a week long workshop with award winning dancer and choreographer, Clare Dyson.  What a brilliant time we had, with serious play, improvising and nutting out performance ideas around the notion of 'Object as Metaphor'.  And what a joy to spend a whole week with my head in that creative place.  So I've got ideas brewing!  And in the meantime, new paintings!

'Sleeping Beauty' is emerging.

She was going to have bare feet, but then I decided I needed some more red in there 

(and I'm not so great at toes!)

She's a very flexible 'Sleeping Beauty'!  I'm really pleased with the climbing rose twisting out of her hair, creating the thorns that envelope the castle.

I decided it was high time Oberon got his Titania back, as I sold the first one.  I also decided it was high time he stopped looking at younger women, and had a mature Titania more suited to his own age!  

Base drawing (found a photo of a lovely older woman on the web for reference, then changed it around a bit, but it always ends up evolving and morphing in the creation anyway).

Base drawing completed, graphite on canvas.

Acrylic over-painting, face almost complete.

Almost done, bit more detail to do on her hair.

Titania (II) complete.  I don't think she's going to take any nonsense from Oberon!

My Wolf is still speaking, new poems still coming.  I'm not sure how/if I'm going to incorporate these into the performance in November, it may be better to leave them as something the audience can read independently of the performance, in hand lettered poems on the walls, or little books of wolf poems for sale, perhaps.  Here's a new one:

In soft black earth

her heel's imprint,

a fallen shard of sky

in bright spring rain.

One paw on either side

I stoop to drink

the white clouds drifting

in her wake.

I think I will also have some of my little 'Snow White to the Woodsman' booklets in the exhibition, so the next painting might be Snow White.  But I still have lots of 'Wolf Bride' things to do, including one more big painting, a possible new song, and extended narrative, so we'll see.  I shall be busy!

Please remember that everything on this blog is © Christina Cairns, unless otherwise credited.

How life in a small country town turns out to be BUSY!

Yes...I know...It's been quite a while.  But I promise you, I haven't been lounging around in my PJs and ugg boots in front of the fire all winter (just some of it).  I've been BUSY!

Big things are happening.  Firstly, there's this...probably the biggest.

We have bought a small slice of paradise, two and a half acres to be exact, and are now in the midst of getting shed quotes, fencing (pulling out old and putting in new), water tank arrangements, and house designs, and all that goes with building from scratch on a blank canvas.  Not something we've done before, so it's all a bit scary.  But exciting.  At this stage, we're planning on a strawbale/mudbrick combination, but nothing is settled.  It's going to be a BIG couple of years.

Then there was more music as a student at Tech, more gigs, even some recording.  I even got to play a shiny black electric guitar and pretend to be a rock chick for about 5 minutes (though, sadly, I think those days are long past for me really!).  

And for the last few months, I have been busy making a book.  A book of maps, though not ordinary maps.  More maps of the mind, of the imagination, maps of thoughts.  As part of the 'Brave New Works' arts festival held here in Denmark every year, an exhibition titled 'Everything is a Map' was held, and so, silly me, I decided to create a book of maps.  I didn't realise quite how much it would take over my life, and for the last couple of weeks I've done not much other than live, breathe and (not) sleep maps.  Indeed, I didn't actually sleep at all the night before it had to be handed in, which was actually a week and a half AFTER the deadline, but thankfully, I was granted a special dispensation and allowed to let that pass by, and I scribbled the last few words on the last page before rushing into town to drop it off as the exhibition was being set up, to open the following day.  Yes, just a little tight! So tight in fact, that I didn't have time to take any photos.  So I have a few 'teaser' pics that I took of some of the first pages, but I promise to post photos of the whole book when the exhibition is over and the book comes home.  But, PHEW! what a job!

There were also walks along the glorious beach at Greens Pool, looking for maps in rock and sand and sea, as the sun sank down in the west, and where, it seems, 'X' may actually mark the spot.

As part of my music assessment, and as an extra submission for the map project, I recorded a song version of a poem I had written a few years ago.  My friend and fellow student played lovely cello.

And last but not least, as I remembered that today is Remembrance Day, I have posted a song I wrote about my own Granddad's experiences in the Great War, and my feelings when I visited the battlefields in Belgium where he fought.  It took me quite a few goes when I first recorded this, to get through it without having a bit of a blub, so it is very rough (I will try and record it again when I have time).  But I managed to sing it at a Spirit of Peace community event held in town last weekend, and my mum was in the audience to hear it.  And I didn't cry.  It's called 'Passchendaele.'

The Wild Man in the forest...

Terri Windling has been writing the most wonderful series of blog posts on the magic and myth of the wild wood.  I'd love to start a whole new 'movable feast' on the subject, but I've been down and out with the flu for coming on three weeks, so while the spirit is willing, neither brain nor body are functioning particularly well at the moment.  So in lieu of some new thoughts on the subject, and because I've just been reading through old scribbles that go back more than 15 years and don't know what to do with them all, I thought I'd post a couple here that are somewhat relevant to the idea of forests, and wild woods, and the dangers (real and imagined) to be found within them.

Terri mentions the old Irish story of Suibhne, the cursed king who is banished to the woods where he lives out his life in the tree-tops like a bird.  He  is a mythic figure that I find fascinating, so here is a poem, from 2007, from the point of view of a woman who loves him.  It might become a song, I'm not sure...like so many of my poems, I'm never really sure if it's finished.

Suibhne’s Lover Laments (early Dec 2007)

Shall I tempt you down again

My mad and melancholy king?

Gently I’ll unwind the feathers 

twisted in your hair.

And soothe the searing truths the thorns

have written on your skin.

Shall I tempt you down again

My solitary lover?

From the treetops of your exile

in the chill and biting wind.

To the friendship of my bed

your scars with kisses cover.

Your darkened eyes replete with pain

You cannot stay, you cannot stay

The wind will call you out again

My mad and melancholy king.

What use a warm body and a warm bed

when you from languid arms are seized?

By the song of the wind among the leaves

of the silent, frost-festooned dark trees.

Shall I tempt you down again

My sad and solitary lover?

From the exile of your mind

in the biting wind.

And in my warm caress, again

your human soul discover.

Below, and rather a lot longer, is a short story written a couple of years ago. It was an attempt to re-imagine the classic 'stolen by faeries' tale in a 20th century, Australian setting. The physical place is one that I knew and loved as a child, so I hope the descriptions of it come alive. I like the idea I've got happening, but I don't think it's working. As with many of my scribbles, I have a problem with endings, and this story just doesn't seem to know where to end. Constructive criticism is welcomed.

*        *        *

THE BLUE GLASS MARBLE 

There it is again, the same few seconds of news footage. I’ve watched it on every station now, I can’t seem to stop, though it chills me to the bone each time. My life has tipped sideways. Everything I was told, everything I’ve believed for the last fifty years is a lie.

Every TV channel is buzzing with the story, the miraculous survival of a little boy, found after almost four weeks lost in the bush. He is delivered into his sobbing mother’s arms by an SES officer, the camera behind her as the boy flings his arms around her and holds on as if he’ll never let go. He buries his face in her neck and the footage ends, fading dramatically to black. But each time, just before he drops his head to her shoulder, he stares into the camera for a moment. And grins. The image shimmers and I see the lank black hair, the pinched face. The grinning mouth filled with rows of oddly pointed teeth...and the eyes that are not human. And I want to scream at his mother, like I screamed at my own. “It’s not him, it’s not your boy. He’s still out there!”

*       *       *

I remember those last days of stifling heat when summer digs in and refuses to give an inch to autumn, when everything is waiting, praying for rain. The light so bright it bleeds the colour out of everything. The trees looked drab and greyish, everywhere the smell of hot dust. Like a half-done watercolour painting, only the sky finished, and so blue it hurt your eyes to look at it. An ordinary Saturday morning, and Jackie and I were keen to make the most of the day, but mum didn’t have any spare coppers so the pictures were out. We decided to head down to the creek and play explorers or Kokoda track soldiers. The war was over, but it was still a heavy presence in our lives. Uncle Joe had come home...but dad didn’t. I could vaguely remember him, a smell of tobacco and a laugh, but I was only four when he left. Jackie was a few months old. Dad was a bloke in a photograph on the mantelpiece to him. Mum made us lunch to take exploring, a jam sandwich, an apple and Uncle Joe’s old army canteen filled with water. “Make sure you look after your brother” she told me as she sliced the day old bread. Once, that would have been as far as it went, but Jack fell out of a tree last year and broke his arm in two places, so now it was followed by “...and keep your shoes on...keep an eye out for snakes...don’t get sunstroke...and don’t let Jackie climb any trees!” I said “Righto mum!” keen to get going, but I was just happy she let us go at all, she’d got kind of clingy and worried for a while after the tree episode. But Gartie would always say, ”you can’t molly-coddle them Patty, boys need to go exploring. Grows them up.” In hindsight, I wish to God mum had said no. But I didn’t know how the day was going to end.

Gartie had dragged the old chair off the back verandah and planted herself under the big old fig tree in the backyard, by the chook shed. She had a jug of lemonade, and looked like she was set for the day. It was the coolest place to be, she said. She was plaiting her long white hair when Jack and I went out to get a kiss goodbye. We never went anywhere without getting a kiss from Gartie. She gave us a peck on the cheek, and pressed a caramel toffee into each of our palms. She always had a tin of them. She had almost no teeth now, so she reckoned she just sucked on them till they were paper thin and she could swallow them. “My only vice!” she’d say with a toothless grin, and give the tin a shake.

With lunch in my school bag slung over my shoulder, shoes on as required by mum (though they’d be off soon enough), we set off down the street, heading down the end to where the road fizzled into a dirt track that ran along the ridge of the hill. About two miles on, another track dropped away to the left and we carefully picked our way down that because I knew from experience that sliding on your bum down the gravel hill when you’re wearing a pair of threadbare shorts is rather painful.

When you get to the bottom, the track widens out a bit, and then you hit the creek. There was a fallen tree across it up the hill a bit, but the water level was so low it was barely more than a trickle, and the prospect of cool wet feet was infinitely preferable to scrabbling our way through the prickle bushes to the old log. Shoes off then. We only had two pairs of shoes each to our name, so it wasn’t a good idea to go sloshing through a creek with them, even the second best ones.

The far side of the creek always felt like entering a different world. It was mid-morning and already the temperature had to be nearing the old century mark. The bush surrounded us on all sides, the track meandering along the creek line, between dull blue-grey shrubs, granite outcrops and tall white gums. There was that oppressive hush you get in the Aussie bush in summer, as if everything is just too hot, too drained of energy to move or make a sound. There would have been magpies warbling as the sun came up, but now, apart from the occasional ‘Caar caar caaaaaaaaar’ of a crow somewhere, and a few half-hearted cicadas it was almost completely silent. I could hear a vague trickling which meant the creek was still running this far. Sometimes it dried up completely, or just left a few muddy puddles here and there. That was good, it meant we might catch some jilgies. Not that we did anything with them, you can eat them but they’re awfully small and they can nip with those claws so I don’t know why anyone would bother. Jack wanted to catch tadpoles, but I reckoned we wouldn’t see any this time of the year. We were heading for a spot where the scrub opened out a bit to a view down the hillside, and big chunks of granite like the walls of an ancient fortress were strewn around. The track curled around there and plunged down towards the creek again, at a deeper spot that almost always had water, and in winter there was even a small waterfall. The shade was thicker there, and it was slightly cooler, a good place to sit and dabble our feet in the cold water. I slung the strap of Uncle Joe’s canteen over a branch and let it dangle in the water to keep it cold. We ate our apples, made small boats out of bits of paperbark and sticks, lay on the rocks and stared up at the clouds and talked about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Jackie wanted to be a cowboy. Well, he was only seven. I wanted to join the navy. Like dad. All the typical stuff a couple of young boys might do on a Saturday at the end of summer. A completely unremarkable day in all respects.

After lazing a bit on the rocks, I remembered mum’s warning not to get sunstroke and decided it would be better not to bring Jack home glowing like a beetroot. He’s got fair skin and blonde hair. ‘Golden hair’ Mrs Pendleston next door calls it. I’m darker like mum, brown hair and eyes and I get tan really quick. We decided to be brave Kokoda diggers, cunningly sneaking our way through the dense jungle of New Guinea right under the noses of the Japs. Crawling through the low scrub, keeping my eyes peeled for Japanese soldiers...and dugites...I squeezed through a narrow gully that split a large boulder in two, and found a different track, running parallel to the one we used, a bit higher up the hill. It seemed to be heading uphill slightly, gradually veering away from the other track. I could no longer hear Jackie scratching through the bush away to my right, so I stood up for a moment to get my bearings. And I had no idea where I was.

It was the same, and so not the same that my head spun. The fall of the land was identical, I was part the way up the hill on the opposite side to the track we came down, except I couldn’t see that track at all now, there was dense forest there, not sparse trees and grey-green scrub. The creek still ran along the bottom, but it was a roar of rushing water, deeper than it ever gets even after the winter rains, a torrent. It sounded like a proper river. The trees were the same sculptural gums with their pale ghostly trunks and weeping spear point leaves, but they were dense. And they were big, metres across the base. I don’t know how long I stood there with my mouth open wide before I heard a scrabbling sound and Jackie burst through the gap split in the rock and breathlessly rushed up to me, tears streaming down his face, sobbing. “Where’d you go? Why’d you leave me? I’m gonna tell mum and she’s gonna tan your hide Tommy...wasn’t funny.” He stopped and looked around. And shut up. His words sunk in finally and I said, “don’t be soft in the head, I saw you five minutes ago.” Jack exploded in a combination of anger, bewilderment, terror and vulnerability that only a seven year old can pull off. “You’ve been gone ages! Ages and ages. I’ve been down across the creek and up the other side and back this side three times looking for you. It’s getting late, mum’ll be worried. You’re really in for it!” I looked around me, it was clearly just after midday, so I didn’t know what the heck he was on about. “Don’t be silly Jacko, I’ve really only been gone a little while. And look at the sky, can’t be much after lunchtime mate. You just got yourself into a state. Mum isn’t expecting us for hours, we’ll have some lunch and then we’ve got the rest of the afternoon.”

After the initial shock of being in the same but different place, we took it in our stride as only small children can and became intrepid explorers, discovering the dark heart of Africa, or the source of the Nile...or both at the same time. And of course, there were Zulu warriors to fight, and lions to kill, and crocodiles to watch out for, and an entire city of gold to find.

It really was getting late, the sun was low and it was time to find our way back to the track we knew, and home, when a voice clear as a bell and not five feet away said “my, what beautiful children have we here!” I swear he hadn’t been there two seconds before, but on a granite outcrop just ahead sat a man. An odd kind of man. A strange pinched face, with sweeping cheekbones and large eyes that sloped oddly upwards. With a smile that did not warm my heart at all. When he stood up and bowed to Jack and I, he seemed impossibly tall and impossibly thin and dressed in such an odd assortment of clothes he looked like a cross between Robin Hood and an old swagman. A ragged, tattered, khaki coat that might once have been an army great coat from the first war, but was now covered in a bizarre combination of tweed scraps and old bits of wool and rag strips all in shades of green, from the dull grey-green of eucalypt leaves to the bright lime of new fern fronds. On his head was what I think is called a coachman’s hat, a little like a top hat only shorter. It looked like it had been dragged backwards through a hedge far more times that a hat should be. There was a brilliant green feather stuck in it, from a Ring-neck I think. His hair was long and black, but I noticed it had a green sheen when he turned into the sun. Jackie and I stopped dead in our tracks at the sight of him, so he came down from his perch. As he approached every hair on the back of my neck stood up, every nerve quivered. My nose twitched as if it smelt something very bad, but my brain wasn’t getting the message about it. His eyes were all wrong, the pupils were the wrong shape and the whites of his eyes weren’t white at all, they were green. Every instinct told me to run like hell. But I couldn’t move.

He bowed a second time, sweeping his hat flamboyantly off his head in a gesture that didn’t belong to the middle of the twentieth century at all. Like something out of a movie. And then he extended his hand for me to shake. There was nothing I wanted less than to touch it, but I couldn’t help myself. His hand felt cold and dry like old paper, and when I withdrew mine my fingers stung with electric shock. He bent over and looked Jack in the face, then chucked him under the chin like some old maiden aunt might. “What a delightful child! So beautiful. “ I felt Jackie’s grubby little hand find it’s way into mine and I hung on tight. “He’s my brother Mister.” Jack stared at the ragged man with his mouth wide open until I nudged him. Mum was very big on manners. He shut his mouth for a moment, then opened it again and asked, eyes big and round, “Are you Peter Pan? Are we in Neverland?” The man looked surprised, then chuckled to himself. “Nev...erland?!” Then he leaned forward and smiled at Jackie. “Well, perhaps we are indeed in Nev...erland.” I didn’t like the way he smiled and I really wanted to skedaddle out of there as quick as I could. ”We have to go now mister, mum will have the dinner on and we mustn’t be late or we’ll cop a wallop.” “Ahhhh!” the man smiled and nodded his head. “You must not keep your mother waiting on my account then. Off you go then, enjoy your dinner. Perhaps you might like to visit again, sometime.” He smiled and waved us off, and we backed away then turned to get down the path as quick as we could. We hadn’t gone more than a few steps when he called out again. “Boys, dear boys, I almost forgot. Look what I’ve got in my pocket!” I didn’t want to stop and I didn’t want to look, but Jackie turned and pulled me up short. The strange man was now sitting cross-legged on a smaller rock right next to us. I had not seen or heard him move, he was just there. He was gently unwrapping something, folded up in a crisp white handkerchief which wasn’t what you’d expect a swaggie to have in his pocket, that’s for sure. He held out his hand for us to see. Nestled among the folds were three perfect strawberries as big as small peaches. The smell was glorious and they made my mouth water. Jackie made a soft ‘ohhh’ sound. Strawberries are a Christmas treat. It’s the only time mum can afford them. “Now, I have more at home...many more, so why don’t you lovely boys have these three. You can take them home if you like...or eat them right now!” He smiled his withering smile. “ There’s one for your mum too. I’m sure she won’t be too angry with you for being a little late if you have such a lovely gift for her.” Jackie stared and his eyes grew about twice as big as normal. I finally worked up the will power to say “thank you but mum doesn’t like us taking gifts from strangers” and got as far as opening my mouth when Jack said, “but what about Gartie, she’d like one too?” The stranger smiled again, and placing the handkerchief and its contents in Jackie’s hands, he waved his fingers elaborately round for a few seconds then, like a conjuror in a magic show, he produced a fourth strawberry from behind Jackie’s left ear. He added it to the three in Jackie’s hands. “There you are, can’t have anyone missing out, can we?” Jackie looked slightly odd, transfixed by the sight of the fruit, but he knows mum’s rules as well as I do. I guess he thought a swap was different because he said, “I’ve got a marble in my pocket, a good one. It’s my favourite. Would you like it in return?” My jaw dropped open because no one, no one could have convinced Jackie to part with his special marble. It was cobalt blue, it looked like some jewel from a maharajah’s crown, and it was Jackie’s most prized and sacred possession. The man laughed and said, “oh no, this is a gift. I wouldn’t dream of taking your marble. Off you go. Enjoy!” He bowed once more, and I half dragged Jackie along with his precious strawberries down the path. When I turned back to look, the strange man was nowhere to be seen.

It really was getting dark now, the sun was just below the horizon, and Jackie and I half ran and half slipped down the hillside. I was trying to find the big rock with the split in it. Some instinct told me we had to go back through there to get home. Jackie wasn’t paying much attention to where we were going, he seemed more worried about crushing the fruit. Their scent was overwhelming, and I wasn’t even carrying them. It made you want to sink your teeth into those strawberries and feel the juice run down your chin and drip off. But I wanted to get home more. Finally, I skittered down the last strip of track to find the boulder with the gap just off to my left, beneath an enormous tree that wasn’t supposed to be there. Jackie was meandering behind me, sniffing the handkerchief wrapped parcel with a dazed look on his face. I yelled at him then, angry and scared, an eleven year old boy who just wanted to go home. I grabbed the handkerchief in one hand and his shirt sleeve in the other and dragged him down to the boulder. “For Christ’s sake, let’s just get home Jack!” I let go of his shirt to shimmy through the gap, and turned around to yell at him to just COME ON! He had stopped. He looked scared, scared like he’d done the most awful thing and he could never, ever fix it. Something dropped from his hand. There was strawberry juice trickling from the corner of his mouth. I heard him whisper “I can’t”, then he seemed to waver. I could see the tree behind him, except I could see it through him. He sobbed “I CAN’T!” And then there was a crackling like lightning in the air, my hair all stood up on end...and it was night. Deep, black, long after midnight night. A hot, still, summer night with no sound of a river, and the vague shapes of scrubby bush and a scattering of white gums in the moonlight. I screamed “JACKIE!” and tore back through the gap in the rock, but everything was just the same on the other side, black night and low scrub. I must have gone backwards and forwards through that gap a dozen times, yelling my head off, sobbing, finally dropping exhausted onto a flat outcrop clutching the stupid handkerchief and its squashed contents and sobbing myself to sleep.

I woke to the bright, white light of morning and someone shaking me gently. “Wake up lad. You’re safe now. We’ll get you home.” I opened my eyes to find eight men standing around me, two in police uniforms. One of them knelt down next to me and said, very gently “can you remember what happened lad? Do you know where your brother is?” I shook my head and tried to reply, but my mouth felt so dry and cracked I couldn’t speak. “Jesus Pete, give the kid some water for chrissake, he’s been out here bloody days.” A cup was held to my lips and I drank. “A man...a man...gave us strawberries” was all I could get out. I still had the handkerchief clutched in my hand, so I tried to open it to show them. But what dropped out of my clenched fingers wasn’t a white handkerchief stained with the red of smashed fruit. It was a torn piece of cloth, with three stones wrapped up in it. I recognised the cloth. It was the sleeve of Jackie’s shirt, the one I’d grabbed.

Seventeen days after we were lost, a man chasing a lost dog found a small boy, filthy and emaciated but alive, curled up in the foetal position beside a granite monolith just above the creek. He was dressed in Jackie’s clothes. Everyone claimed it was a miracle. I thought so too, until they brought him home. No one else could see it. To them it looked and sounded just like my little brother. But I could see what it really was, maybe because I’d been to that place through the split in the rock, I don’t know. I could see the outline of Jackie, the sun shining on his hair, his smile. But it was like a translucent mask, and beneath it had a pinched face, tiny pointed teeth, and its eyes were the same as the raggedy man. I watched helpless as it grew stronger and stronger, and my mum grew weaker. It never looked better than emaciated, but its grip was like steel and it left dark bruises on me. I wonder if Gartie suspected somehow. In the year that followed, the thing took pleasure in getting me blamed for its own mischief, and Gartie always stuck up for me, even when mum didn’t believe I was innocent. Thirteen months after they brought it home, my mum died. And on the day after her funeral, I killed it.

It was bloody strong but I was more than a little crazy. Apparently the neighbours heard the noise and the screaming and kicked the door in to find me with my hands wrapped around its skinny little neck, bashing its head into the cement floor of the washhouse. It was well and truly dead by then, but I was still screaming, “you killed my mum, you killed my mum!” I don’t really remember much of it now, I was dragged off by the police and doctors were summoned to calm me down. I’ve got a big gap in my memories between twelve and sixteen. Four years of shock therapy and tranquillisers and I don’t know what else, and over and over they hammered it into me that the story I told them was just that, a story I’d invented to hide from what I’d done. I murdered my brother.

And tonight I’m sitting with my toast and baked beans balanced on my knee, watching the news, and suddenly I know it’s not true. I thought I was a murderer. All those terrible, lost years. It took me so long to find a way to live, to appear to have a normal life, to look and behave like everyone else. To find someone who could love a murderer. I told Margie. I had to. She took my hand and said “You were just a little boy. We’ll never speak of it again.” And we didn’t. The kids don’t know. They don’t even know I had a brother. And I’m sitting by myself, a lonely old man, and Margie’s gone and I can’t even tell her I’m innocent. Maybe she knows. I hope so. All I can think is, if the raggedy man’s got a new boy, what’s he done with my brother? Where is Jackie now?

*       *       *

I didn’t touch the box with the taped label “Important” for seven years. After dad died, Mike and I went through everything, got rid of lots of stuff. I found the box, had a brief look inside and saw a newspaper cutting with some highlighted bits on top of some other papers, and decided I couldn’t go through it now. It hurt too much. We were just getting over losing mum, and suddenly dad was gone too. If dad said it was important, that was good enough. I put it away to go through later, some time when I felt more able to cope.

It was a news report that sent me back to it, about a discovery near Earl Brook, and I remembered the newspaper article I’d seen. The box was in a plastic crate up in the roof space, covered in dust. I dragged it down, and started sorting through it. There was a bizarre collection of things, old school exercise books filled with scribbles from fairytales, a torn scrap of fabric, some sort of old medical file, and newspaper clippings, a couple about a boy lost in crown land near Earl Brook. These were odd in themselves because they had almost identical headlines but were fifty years apart. “Lost boy miraculously found alive.” I picked the recent one up. I remembered the case, from about eight years ago. It was all over the news for about three weeks, the media talking of paedophile rings and kidnappings and serial killers and generally doing everything to sensationalise the case and distress the parents even further. And make other parents paranoid and afraid. I remembered it especially because my boys were little then and it was close to the bone.

Dad had highlighted bits in orange. ‘Earl Brook’, ‘found alive after all hope gone’, ‘miraculous survival’, ‘experts at a loss’. He’d scribbled ‘Erl Brook?’ and ‘it’s not him’ in the margins. And ‘where is Jack?’ which meant nothing to me until I read the older clipping. “John (Jack) Pembroke, aged seven, was found alive yesterday after being lost in bush near Earl Brook for three weeks. Authorities have dubbed it a miracle. John and his older brother, Thomas, aged eleven, became lost at Earl Brook on the 2nd of March this year. Thomas was found five days later but all hope for John’s survival had been given up.” An uncle I didn’t even know I had. Then I found another small clipping, yellowed and fragile. It was dated a year later. About a bizarre murder. Have you ever had that awful, inevitable sliding feeling where everything you know just falls away and in its place there’s something else entirely, something that was there all the time but you couldn’t see it? I picked up the file. There were doctors’ notes, some court records, more newspaper clippings. My dad. My beautiful, gentle dad had killed his own brother. Just little boys, both of them. And then years in institutions, alone, drugged, undergoing shock therapy. He was finally released into the guardianship of his grandmother shortly before his seventeenth birthday. I knew that dad had gone to sea on merchant ships when he was seventeen. Now I know he was running.

As I looked through everything in the box, a cold feeling began to spread through my belly. The exercise books were scribbles, diary notes about things ‘it’ had done, references from books read, strange bits and pieces that at first made no sense. They were all about the same thing, stories of children stolen by Fairies, notes on how to escape, how to tell a changeling from a real child, what to do and not do if you meet a fairy. Fairies for God’s sake! But fear nagged at me. I couldn’t believe my dad had done that. I found an envelope with several sheets of paper folded neatly inside it. It was labelled Mike and Jenny. Please Read. Dad’s familiar neat hand describing in detail the day he and his little brother were lost. I read and nausea welled up my throat. Two small details made all the difference. I wanted to be able to hug dad and tell him I believed him, and yet part of me wanted to believe he had killed Jack, because the alternative was worse. But the news report the day before had been clear.

*       *       *

While bushwalking in Earl Brook Conservation Park yesterday, a local resident discovered bones in what appeared to be a grave and alerted authorities. Police confirmed they were human, those of a small child though male or female it was impossible to tell. The bones were found curled in a foetal position in a shallow grave below a large granite boulder. Recent rains had undermined the rock and soil had been washed away beneath it. The body appeared to be naked, and no clothing was found in the area. From the state of decomposition, forensic scientists estimate the body to have been in the earth about eight years. A small boy was lost in the area at the estimated time of death, however he was later found alive. There are no other reports of children missing in the area in recent times, though two boys went missing for several days in the area in 1949. Both were found alive. Police are searching missing persons records from the previous ten years in the hope of discovering the identity of the child. They are hoping dental records may reveal more information, but currently, the only identifying features on the body are an old, well-healed fracture in the left arm, and a small blue glass marble clutched in the fingers of the right hand. Anyone with any information is asked to please contact police immediately. 

© Christina Cairns 2013

The failure of language part 2: transparency

Just before you read Part 2 (if I haven't completely lost you already!), I wanted to share this because it seemed so pertinent to Part 1.  I began watching it, and even before the 'voice' of the snail was heard, it dawned on me that showing the snail up that close, focussing on it as if it was the most important thing to look at, made me a) aware of how beautiful it was, and b) how awful I'd feel if the next bit of footage showed someone casually stepping on it.  I've done that myself, I'm sure we all have, especially when I find them munching on my baby lettuce plants.  But suddenly, just looking really closely made me see the snail properly, as a fellow creature, an individual, worthy of kinship in some way.

The transparent transferal of knowledge...or not!

Colonial history shows us that one of the best ways of destroying a people is to destroy their language, because with it you destroy their culture: their stories, their history, their connection to each other and their connection to the land. In the colonial past, we gave the colonized people our language in return (believing it would have some kind of ‘civilising’ influence), which often did not have the words that they needed to describe their way of living, and so, their way of living, their way of perceiving/experiencing the world, dies. I'm sure we've all heard the cliche of the Inuit people having fifty words for snow. It’s not strictly true, but if a language that has words for concepts familiar and known to the people who speak it dies out, and there are no words that exactly match in any other language, then isn't it inevitable that those concepts will either disappear completely, or be changed and corrupted by using words that can never quite fit? We think that we create culture, that we create language to be a tool of our culture, but the truth is it’s often the other way around. Our culture shapes us, how we think and how we behave. And so does the language we speak. My eight year old said to me the other day, “imagine if there was no word ‘it’, mummy, what would we use instead?” Without really stopping to think I replied that there would probably just be another word that meant the same thing. But then I thought, what if there wasn’t? Imagine a language with no word for ‘it’?! How would that shape a culture, a people? And then I thought, imagine if there was no word for ‘hate.’ Can you hold a concept without a word to name it?  It's a bit of a 'chicken and egg' problem, but I don't believe that it all goes one way.  I do believe that language 'frames' our view of the world.  And I wonder sometimes what's outside the frame.

I remember reading years ago that early missionaries to the pacific islands had some trouble translating the notion of ‘the lamb of god’ to the islanders they were trying to convert, as these people had never seen sheep. So they settled for ‘a small woolly pig’ in the local language. On the surface it might seem close enough, but it cannot possibly hold all the centuries of information, the layer upon layer built up like an archeological site of interpretation, of experiences, of meanings. What on earth would the islander people have made of a 'saviour god' who is described simply as an animal you eat.  Language is not a transparent medium through which ideas can pass unchanged from one person to another. In terms of translating from one language to another, what do you do when you encounter idioms, slang, metaphors, culturally specific jokes or references to things that are well known within the original, but not in the new language? You really have two choices, and both are flawed. You either translate literally, and leave readers bewildered, unable to access the meaning. Or you find a similar(ish) metaphor or idiom your readers will be familiar with and use that instead. And something is lost. Sometimes it’s difficult even within the same language. If I say, “a couple of tinnies short of a six-pack,” or “too many roos loose in the top paddock”, do you understand immediately what I’m saying?

When I was studying literature at Uni, I became fascinated with what I was learning about communication, culture and language. I know there is theory upon theory upon theory, and perhaps sometimes academics are in danger of disappearing up their own arses in search of the ‘truth’, whatever that might be. But so much of it rang true for me. I was taught the ‘postmodern’ idea that each of us is an individual shaped by our unique experiences, and that we therefore bring our past experiences to everything we see/hear/experience now. Remember what I said about the brain interpreting new data depending on context and past experience. So while we might all share lots of the same information about a given thing, and the closer we are in terms of age, upbringing, sex, socio-economic status, religious beliefs, education and so on, the closer that info will be, there will always, always be a layer of experience that is ours alone, that will influence and inform whatever we see/hear/experience, so in a sense, we can never truly share the exact same experience. It will be different and unique for each of us. If I haven’t said that very well (this is a post about the failure of language, after all!), I’ll try and explain. Take the word…

…tree. It’s a pretty simple word in the English language, only four letters, and we all know what it means. Don’t we? But if someone says ‘tree’ to me, will I see/feel/remember the same tree that you do? Tree to me is, obviously, a tall thing with bark and branches, it grows out of the ground, it has green leaves, it creates shade. Sure, we all know that. But tree is also…the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, the tree Adam and Eve are supposed to have eaten the fruit of. If you come from a Judeo-Christian western culture, you’re probably familiar with all that. It's the trees of the Amazon basin that are being cut down at a terrifying rate. The trees that breathe out the oxygen we all need to live. The family tree. Tree is also the thing that moves some to tears of joy (if you’ve read the poem by William Blake), the thing that breathes largely the luminous breeze (if you’ve read D.H. Lawrence’s poem). Tree is Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse mythology, that Odin hung from in return for knowledge. Tree is the link between upper, middle and underworld in some shamanic traditions. Tree is where the mad king Suibhne of Irish legend spends his days. Tree is the home of Robin Hood, and the Secret Seven (at least in one book!) Tree is the mighty oak of European legend, the Druid tree where the sacred Mistletoe could be found. The evergreen holly tree that promises the return of spring. The weeping willow overhanging the banks of rivers where who knows how many ‘murder ballads’ have set their scene. The Magic Faraway Tree, “all shall find the light at last, silver on the tree”, “tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree”, the old man of the apple tree who must be left the last apple or there’ll be no harvest next year. Ents. The majestic Karri Trees that grow down south, tall and utterly awe inspiring, like being in a green cathedral.  The beautiful jarrah trees, their warm red (and very hard) wood cut down and turned into blocks to pave roads in London (or so I believe) and are still being cut down.  I could go on...and on (!), but I won’t. I’m sure many of you will recognize some, most, even all these trees. These are just a few of the ones I can think of off the top of my head. And there are many, many more that I’ve never come across, from other cultures, places, times. But then, there are my trees. There is the liquid amber tree that grew in my grandmother’s backyard, shedding red gold all over the lawn and the rose garden every autumn, and the Jacaranda I used to climb, though I wasn’t supposed to. There were the red gums I climbed in the bush behind our house when I was a child, the pear tree and the greengage by the washing line. The big willow out the front of a house we rented for a while, with the swing on it.  Do you know these trees? Or the giant pine at the bottom of my friend’s garden, the trees down in Whistlepipe Gully that I gave names and called the Guardians? There is my oak tree too, only a memory now, where I was married and where I said goodbye to my little one. There is the tree in the courtyard here, that my girls climb and sit in to sing. The weeping mulberry that every year promises blue stained fingers and tongues and feet too, the baby oaks in their pots, children of my memory oak, waiting for the day we can find our place in the country and they can be planted out to grow tall. All this and more lies at the heart of the word ‘tree’ for me. All these meanings intersect and weave together in utterly unique ways.  Even mistakes; things misheard, misread or misunderstood, and then reheard, reread or re-understood correctly, add to these intertwining layers.  And each one of us carries this kind of vast store of layered meaning...for almost every word in our language. It’s why I love poetry, it’s what makes poetry happen. All those shared meanings…and yet it’s also what makes the poem I read just a bit different to the one you read, even when it’s the same poem. 

These layers upon layers of meaning, the ambiguity between message sent and message received are some of the things I love about language, that make it such a marvelous medium. The discrepancies, the double/triple/infinite meanings of individual words, the gradual sliding of definition between generations, these are what make poetry and song and story so powerful, so redolent with meanings built up over aeons. It can be a marvelous tool, a beautiful flawed thing. If you understand it is not transparent.

Language is, at best, a translucent medium. It is impossible for an idea, an experience, to be passed from one person to another entirely intact, without any loss or change in meaning. If we are similar people of similar backgrounds and beliefs, it will pass more fully. But there will always, always be a certain amount of ‘energy’ dissipated, or transformed into something else in this exchange. There will always be the core of meaning, the seed, that remains utterly incommunicable, that remains ours alone. A secret that can never be shared.

The failure of language part 1: forgetting

'Babel-On'  an attempt to communicate the failure of communication (how post-modern is that?!)

There is something utterly contrary, I'm sure, about writing a blog post about the failure of language. Add to that the fact that I have a degree in Literature and a life-long love affair with language, and it seems positively mad. I'm an artist and a scribbler, a poet-in-training, a closet writer. I'd like to be able to communicate my ideas, my thoughts, to others and see what they make of them. Heck, that's why I write a blog! But therein lies the rub.

Often I find myself wanting to write, to grab hold of those ideas floating around in my mind, to put them out there so that perhaps others can make sense of them. But I find myself stymied over and over again by the inability to find words that can in any way communicate what I'm feeling. Right now, this moment, my fingers have been hovering ineffectually over the keyboard because I cannot begin to sort out the whirling mass of pictures, impressions, feelings, snippets of heard/read/seen/smelt/touched experiences. That the books I've been reading, the blog posts, the music I've listened to (and created), the smell of rain, and the sound of wind, the art I've seen (and created), my daughter telling me this morning that she couldn’t tell the difference between the birds singing in the garden and the birds on the relaxation CD playing in our family room...all this collides and coalesces into something of meaning. But I can't explain what. I feel it, but I can't put it into words, even for myself. Even when I do find some words that seem to work, I inevitably discover that the simple act of fitting to the words somehow limits and diminishes the thought behind them. Rather like trying to capture a rainbow in a quick sketch with a black ballpoint pen. Something is lost. And if we can't pin it down with words...we have a tendency to dismiss it. A lived experience that cannot be turned into words and 'communicated' somehow, in this society, has no validity. In fact we've almost gone beyond that, to the point where an experience has more validity if you watch it on your mobile phone while recording it and then post it on Facebook, than if you actually just watch it.

I mentioned in my previous post that I've just finished reading David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous. I cannot give you a quick three sentence summary, all I can do is say, read it. But it's got me thinking about language. About how we use language, what we expect it to do (and what we think it does), and how we elevate it (especially the written word) beyond the wordless, felt experience. How we decide what is language, and what is not, how we assign status accordingly. And how, ultimately, it so often fails us.  Abram's book dares to suggest that maybe humans aren't the only ones with language, and it's our definition of language as being the sole realm of humans that has, at least in part, led to the way we view the world as being inanimate, dumb, silent and devoid of meaning, and therefore, easy to exploit and easy to destroy. We even do it to each other. How often have Colonial overlords dismissed the rich and redolent tongues of native peoples as being "babble", and done everything they could to stamp them out?

We use language to explain the world and what cannot be communicated (or communicated to) in words is dismissed.  We trust it to communicate transparently ideas and experiences from one person to another.  And we believe that language is a tool we are in control of. We created it, it serves us. And yet, I think we are wrong.  I think that human language fails on all counts. I won’t try to explain all three in one blog post…so this is part one. 

As David Abram’s suggests, we have taken written human language (particularly the language/s of the Western World) and put it on a pedestal, and in doing so, we have dismissed the languages of the other citizens of the earth, where once we understood and even ‘spoke’ them. It might seem stupidly romantic or daftly ‘new age’ to talk about the language of trees, or rivers, or conversing with magpies or wallabies. But Abram doesn’t mean it in the sense of carrying on a conversation as we know it…’so how’s your day been? Boss getting on your nerves again?’ He means rather, that allowing ourselves the time and space (and the silence) to listen, really listen, to other animals or rivers or oceans or trees, will allow us to understand them, to bring them back into our lives from which they have been missing for too long.  Time spent patiently listening to the songs of a particular bird will inevitably bestow enormous understanding of that bird’s life. Different songs will become discernible, subtle differences depending on season and lifecycle will become clear. Furthermore, how that bird’s life interacts with the other creatures in the area, with you, will also be understood. You may find yourself thinking, ‘the birds are singing their autumn song’ and even though you yourself haven’t felt the coming of the cooler season, you know, because the birds told you. In a documentary I once saw about the pacific islands, a Samoan elder was featured, a man who could navigate vast distances (like his ancestors before him) across the ocean simply by ‘reading’ the waves and the winds. By understanding the language of wind and water and stars and fish, he always knew exactly where he was and how far from land. It would seem mumbo jumbo to modern westerners to say he could understand the language of the waves, but really, that’s what he was doing. It just depends on your definition of language. Indigenous peoples with an intimate understanding of their surroundings, of their place within the greater community of beings, and a relationship with those beings, have sometimes seemed to westerners to have almost ‘mystical’ abilities to track, or find food, or predict weather, or see things and hear things invisible and inaudible. It’s led to rather patronizing notions like the ‘noble savage’, or the idea that native peoples are closer to nature and therefore more like native fauna than people in their own right. And also to the ‘well, if I can’t see/hear it, it must just be superstitious nonsense,’ attitude.

What was so interesting about Abram’s writing, is that he describes how he, a westerner brought up in cities and used to the western way of thinking/experiencing, found that his perceptions shifted after he began living among the wise ones of the cultures he was studying. That he began to experience the world in a very different way, seeing and hearing things he’d never noticed before. As if his eyes began to see properly and his ears became unblocked, and a whole unimagined world opened up. It’s not that he started seeing spirits or ghosts, but he started to notice, to see and hear the whole of what was going on around him, not just the human part. More telling though, is his description of how he tried to hold on to this new and heightened perception when he returned to the US, but eventually found it being muffled and drowned out by the noise, the constant onslaught of human created communication. That eventually he found himself becoming blind and deaf to the voices and experiences of the non-human world. That eventually, he went back to the way he had been before, the way the rest of us are. The way we presume is normal. And he experienced an intense sense of grief for this loss, having known there is so much more.

We like to think we experience ‘reality’ objectively. But even science tells us now that what we think is real is actually a perceived construct. Our brain doesn’t tell us what our eyes see. It tells us what it thinks they see. Our ears send data to the brain, and the brain interprets what we are hearing according to what it already knows. It makes decisions depending on context and past experience. It also prioritises information. Which means, anything it doesn’t think is important, gets pushed aside. So if you don’t hear the bird singing it’s not because it isn’t there. You don’t hear it because your brain has learnt that it doesn’t need to pay any attention to it. So you don’t hear the difference between two bird calls, you don’t hear the subtle change in a river’s babble, you don’t hear the swing of direction in the wind blowing the leaves of the tree. You don’t see the change in ripple patterns on the water’s surface that signals the fish below arcing away. Often now, we don’t even notice where the sun is coming up and going down. So, in Abram’s argument, there is in fact a vast wealth of communication, conversation, information that we are utterly cut off from, and we are much, much poorer for it. We only see and hear a tiny fraction of what is actually out there. And if we can’t see or hear it, we won’t value it, we won’t care for it, we don’t notice the impact we’re having on it. And we won’t notice when it’s gone. Somehow, in a terrible irony, we have used language, the medium through which we communicate, to build a wall between ourselves and all the rest of creation. And having built that wall, we’ve forgotten there’s something beyond it. Something we used to be a part of. Our language has made us deaf. 

(And speaking of the failure of language, I wanted this post to be so much more...beautiful, poetic, than it is.  Unfortunately, sometimes the craftsman cannot blame his tools, it is his own lack of skill that is the problem.  Once again the words just don't match the cloud of thoughts in my head!)

Being still...

It's an enforced stillness...somehow I managed to twist a muscle in my back (doing something as utterly inane as cleaning the bathroom basin), and have been doing not very much at all since Monday, apart from sitting propped up with cushions.  It's temporary I know, nothing seriously damaged, just painful and will take time to heal.  I'm certainly not the most go-getting, active, out there person, but enforced stillness is hard even for me.  It's made me aware of how little we ever allow ourselves to be still.  To listen.  To notice.  I like to think I am a fairly observant person, but there is something about not choosing the time or place to be still that seems to make you more acutely aware of...the squeaking of the tree branches on the roof of the courtyard, the sound of the wind in the tall palm in the backyard a few blocks down from mine, the sound of the wind chimes, a plane going over right now, the pattern of shadow falling across the couch I'm sitting on.  A bird chirping (not a dove this time, though there are plenty of them around now it's Spring).  On Monday I watched and listened, and wrote a short poem, not very good, but a true response.

This morning

I watched.

As the wind chimes turned slowly, silently

evidence of something I cannot see

nor hear. 

The leaves gently bowed and shadows

moved

to a breath of warm air, slow and

soft.

And I marvel as if at something 

I have not seen

or heard 

before.

For indeed, I think that I

have not.

The other thing I have done is to finally finish a book I started reading almost two years ago.  "The Spell of the Sensuous" by David Abram.  It's a difficult book to summarise, but it is profound and thought provoking.  It offers an alternate way of seeing and experiencing the world.  Not as some kind of new age spirituality, rather more as an extremely old way of experiencing the world. Simply that, the world around us is not inanimate and silent, but rather that we humans have become deaf to the conversations going on all around us, because we have forgotten how to listen, how to hear, and how to speak to, the rest of creation.  And that this forgetting, this terrible loss, is what has led us to be able to treat not only the natural world and other species with contempt, but even other humans.  We no longer know intimately the changes of the seasons, we don't understand the birdsong we hear (if we hear it at all) so we have no idea what kind of birds might be making it, or why, so we don't know that the songs they are singing would tell us they are nesting and bringing up young so we go ahead and cut down the tree they are living in without a second thought, without understanding of the impact we are having.  And that this knowledge and understanding is something our ancestors took for granted.  It's not that we can speak the same language as a bird, it's that an intimate knowledge of our place, and all the creatures we share it with, teaches us what different birdsong means.  And we've lost this completely.  This is just one small example.  It is everywhere and permeates everything we do.  I've had conversations with people who do not know which direction the moon rises in.  People who are utterly unaware of the fact that the the position of the sun (well, the earth actually!) changes with the seasons.  How can we be so divorced from reality?  And yet, I think so many of us feel a deep, deep sense of yearning, of loss, for this knowledge.  Yet so cut off are we, that we don't even understand what it is we are grieving for.

Just after I started reading the book, I found myself watching "Narnia: Prince Caspian" with my girls one evening, and as often happens, the two collided and created a question, a thought.  I scribbled it on the inside cover so I wouldn't forget.  

"It's the 14 Jan 2011 and I'm on page 95.  But I wanted to write this down while I'm still thinking about it.  We all watched "Narnia: Prince Caspian" last night, and watching it after reading this was fascinating...I must go back and re-read the book to see how much of it is original.  The four Pevensie children come back to Narnia, but hundreds of years have passed.  Cair Paravel is in ruins, and Narnia has been invaded and taken over by a warlike race of humans who attempted to (and believed they had) 'eradicated' all the Narnian 'savages'.  The world of Narnia has changed dramatically.  Where previously all the animals spoke, the trees were inhabited by animate spirits, dryads, and could move and speak, the land itself was in many ways, SENTIENT; now the trees, according to DLF (the dwarf the children rescue), have retreated so far into the earth they no longer CAN move or speak, they are 'just trees', and many (if not most) animals have forgotten how to speak and 'gone wild'.  As DLF says, "get treated like a dumb animal long enough, and that's what you become.". The children are perplexed when a bear attacks Lucy, they don't understand why it wouldn't talk to her.  Lucy is saddened to find the trees silent and unresponsive.  Narnia has become like our world.  When Aslan comes, he reawakens the land, calling the trees up from their sleep, and summoning the river spirit to destroy the invading army.  Watching the movie after reading this, it's like a vision of how our world might once have been (well, slightly less 'Disney'!).  As if we have a memory of how things once were, how they SHOULD BE, and though we might think it's just imagination, the longing for that is there deep within us.  I can't remember how much, how obvious this might have been in C.S. Lewis' original vision, but it doesn't actually matter, that yearning is tangible in this modern re-telling, retold for OUR time.  When we envision Utopia, it is a SENTIENT Utopia, where we live in harmony with plants and animals, rivers and rocks, and can speak to them."

If we think a little further along these lines, we have the Ents in Lord of the Rings, we have Avatar.  We have Harry Potter showing us there is magic all around us, but we are too blind to see the mermaids in the lake.  There is much more I could write, but this is awfully long already.  I'll leave you with a couple of links to other blogs that have informed and influenced my thinking on this.

Terri Windling, of course.  So many of her posts are utterly inspiring.  She has lately written several posts that have made me stop and think more and more about this.  And over at the Earthlines blog, Sharon Blackie has written eloquently herself, and included the writings of others, about belonging to a place, learning it's language and coming to an understanding of it that can only come from being a PART of it, not APART from it.