The Earthrise Diary 2-10
Don Diespecker
Fern Hill
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heyday of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-1952
February 20 2010. Rain in the dark, a shower, really. I’ve been busy inside and out: writing stories inside, ‘gardening’ if that’s the word, outside. Skip this if you want to avoid details. I was up at 04:15 because that’s when I was more or less awake and because it’s just the best time, certainly a wonderful time in which to write. Today I wanted first to check for email (it’s a long story). Checking for mail is never a good idea when there’s a story running in my head and my favourite characters are urging me to attend to them. There were important mails and I read them and thought about them and turned up late, as it were, to read/redraft/edit my current fiction from the beginning and to change the first and second parts around (again). If you have ever written a story that’s trying to run its scenes in serial order you’ll know what I mean because, really, all stories have to start somewhere and keep going smoothly (or flashback) and starting somewhere often means we start in medias res, in the middle of things, unless or until we find the best place for the start of the narrative and then keep going, comfortably. I rearranged my beginning while the undertones of emails competed for more space in The Stream. Much of the current story is written in free indirect style and interior monologue: stream of consciousness writing, if you like, one way of hitching rides in the minds of the characters, or of being artistically parasitic. We’re always within the stream of consciousness (see William James), bobbing along, bumping into this and that, or avoiding, and the lives of others (particularly their and my interior lives). In other words, if you’re in a story right now, can you see where it begins, chronologically?
At 06:00 I switched on the ABC News. The first item: Tiger Woods saying Sorry around the world. Item 2: Mary MacKillop is declared a saint. Item 3: the PM will take legal action against Japanese whaling. After the news: the Country program which started with The Drought and it’s breaking: lots of rain in many places and flooding, too. The thing about floods, when you’re in one, is when will it peak, when will the rain stop? In parts of NSW there are many on properties now isolated and the property owners don’t mind being isolated too much because they’re joyous: the Earth is drinking again and the grass grows and the animals will be OK again, at least for a while. This is a long-winded way of suggesting that The Drought is in medias res too, because it appears (at least to me) to be an aspect of a bigger cycle, a larger process: climate change, global warming. (By 08:00 Mary MacKillop was the main story and Woods had slipped to second place. Is that news or is that news?).
February 23 2010. I heard on the ABC News that certain eucalypts in Tasmania seem to be the source of river toxicity. That made me blink. In the evening I saw the relevant ABC doco on TV and it became clearer that plantation eucalypts seem to be the problem, plantations of a single species being an example of monoculture. I’ll have to check this further because I didn’t catch the name of the particular eucalypt. As I pondered that I remembered the plantations of ‘bluegums’ grown especially to be used to make props and other timbering in the local gold mines at Pilgrims Rest (as mentioned last month). I was remembering back to 1937. The family had returned to South Africa from British Columbia. The ‘remembered’ image was, in fact, a new image (see Julian Jaynes). The greatest of the trees that grow at Earthrise are so-called flooded gums (e. grandis) and their hybrids (even locals and folks associated with the sawmill at Thora refer to trees like these as ‘bluegums,’ so what’s in a name?). The flooded gums at Earthrise hardly constitute a plantation, of course, but you’ll appreciate the new directions in thinking of and about local trees: froth on the river’s surface, white deposits on stones (even after floods), algae in droughty summers with the river low. Everything is connected to everything.
It was hot and ‘close’ or ‘muggy’ (old words my mother used to use) when I was in Bellingen and there were great clouds: the towering stacks of cumulonimbus and a mix of others. On the way in to town I stopped to let a quail and her chicks cross Darkwood Road (fortunately, I was free of other motorists at the time). The birds are so tiny; luxuriant roadside grasses must be a jungle to them. And I was certain there would be a storm, later. There was, after I’d returned home, but the storm made more sounds than fury. As I dozed following some showers there was yet another crack and it was loud enough and alarming enough to suggest a big tree crashing close by and I held my breath. Yet I could not find the fallen tree or branch when I went outside. History repeats, sometimes. After wandering about and viewing from all angles, including upwards I decided that the fall could only have been (again) on the slopes above and behind the house. Eerie.
The Tasmanian plantation trees are not, it seems, grandis eucalypts.
It often occurs to me that we (many of us) don’t sit quietly to see and to think because we’re all so busy. And when we’re not all that busy we might very well avoid pondering and ruminating and speculating in favour of engaging with others: talking, discussing, or we might abandon the reality of such engagements altogether and switch into alternate realities: radio, TV. And watching the almost-live TV footage of politicians being obnoxious, in Parliament and out, makes us aware of that kind of reality: one that we each chose to include in our personal streams of consciousness.
On Sunday night (Feb 21) I watched again ‘The Genius of Photography’ and was even more impressed the second time around. I like the notion of the photograph as document. In Susan Sontag’s fine book (On Photography), for example, this: …a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
In the TV doco there was despair in the faces of persons photographed in the aftermath of WW-1 (I’m thinking particularly of imaged German faces during the time of the Weimar Republic). Despair shows around the eyes; it’s unmistakable, and there are other words that are associated: hopelessness, fear, a quiet and contained desperation. Pictures of some Americans, especially poor people, photographed during the Great Depression, similarly showed the disturbed and disturbing expressions. I mention this because I remember the 1930s era: growing up in such times means that being a tiny part of societal change can’t be seen and certainly not experienced, objectively (objectivity comes much later). To have been present, as a minute aspect of a troubled era, is simply the experience of being there, however awkwardly, in the reality of the 1930s.
The television program also again reminded me of fascinating details to be found in photographs when we allow ourselves to comprehensively see them. The work of Eugène Atget (1857-1927) was featured (he was a French photographer who took up photography at the age of 40, and for 30 years documented urban Paris). He left behind 10,000 photos. He was ‘the photographer’s photographer’ (and, I think, the same photographer who was later also known as ‘the Mozart of photography’). His pictures of buildings, courtyards, street scenes and shop windows compel us to slow down and to see the detail. There’s always so much more to see when we take the time and trouble.
When a tree (or dangerously big branches) falls here I try to spot its location. Finding the tree is often difficult because being partly in a forest means I’m so close to the trees that I can’t see them properly. The aerial view or the overhead view may well be the best means to see what is otherwise so well contained as to be invisible. That implies imagination linked to walking around while looking up—a lot.
On Feb 25 I was speaking on the telephone when a deadwood branch speared through the roof close by, about 2.5-m from me. The structural integrity of steel (‘corrugated iron’) seems no greater than that of a damp newspaper when a hefty branch falls from a high tree. The force of a big branch falling from a great height makes a hole having a certain configuration, depending on the angle of falling: this time the steel was neatly curled inwards and around and it had to be straightened cautiously with pliers. Which reminds me: a very large branch from an old eucalypt (‘mine’) dropped in the road beyond my gate and I failed to notice it when I left early (about the 15th, I think). Some motorists had cleared a way through and shoved the big pieces to the side. Later, I cleared the small debris and progressively cut it up near the river and Frank kindly moved the large pieces with the deer park tractor and then chain-sawed them. My re-cycling of the smaller branches added 8 hours (over three days) to my ‘gardening’ activities. Good exercise, though.
February has been a month of crashing trees and branches, periodic showers, sunshine occasionally and the phenomenal growth of everything able to grow: especially those plants whose virtues we have yet to discover, weeds. Ragweed (sometimes called Bible weed) is 2-m high in places and the ‘tropical wide-leafed grass that grows in clumps is 2-3-m high. I’ve been trying to clear the latter in different locations but have made little inroad; this determined grass is also the home, when it suits them, of bull ants—jumpers that hurt when they attack and they love attacking hands. Four separate ‘bites’ or ‘stings’ on my left hand had me hopping about yelling (yes, I know gloves are sensible, but my hands are clumsy inside gloves). Cedar Grove was the setting of that dark drama and not much more has been achieved there because the weather has been consistently wet for so long.
Big Lawn is producing its autumn mosses in a particular area, native violets are happily flowering in the grass, and seeds dumped by the floods a year ago are producing strange new ‘weeds’ that I don’t recognise. Where have they come from? This has also been a month of unusual sightings: two lots of feathers, no other parts, where a fox perhaps has had dinner: two avian crime scenes. The new grasses (kikuyu and Japanese millet) are appearing in the top-dressed peripheries of the re-establishing river lawn. As I dash outside between showers to remove weeds and unwanted grasses (there’s no better time to weed than when the soils are wonderfully wet) I spot many new seedlings of the bleeding heart tree between the house and the riverbank. Most, I suspect, have lain dormant in soils densely covered by the big grass clumps I’ve removed. That particular grass has been sun-blasted, turned and mowed, carried from the flats up to the carport and entrance, re-mown and re-spread. Yet it still sprouts in places. I’ve been trying to eliminate it for years and it always seeds at this time (every March, without fail). If the feral deer marauders will give us a break some of the seedlings will grow to maturity and attract the brown pigeons again. The Wet has collapsed the taller dahlias and cannas that weren’t staked, alas, but the dahlias have flowered lying down, including some older tubers, very well watered, that hadn’t flowered properly for years.
The drongos have quietly withdrawn until next September. The cicadas have slipped away with a few plaintiff curtain calls, but are now silent. Thanks to my several correspondents for your Midgeworld comments. Sorry I don’t have a new yarn this month (I’ve been composing other non-midge fictions and nonfictions).
Didn’t February go quickly?
