Sunday, March 28, 2010

Earthrise Diary (March 2010)


Earthrise Diary (March 2010)
Don Diespecker
Saturday, March 13 2010. Today, when I reflected on yesterday’s events, only hours behind me, I encouraged my mind to sift and to quickly sort so that I could satisfy my curiosity as to the most compelling event, the most vivid experience of the day. This is never easy. My mind is old and many items clamour for attention, not the least of those being remembered occasions, startling experiences and hours-old memories and those memories from Years Ago that persuasively persist.
I’m going to begin with Carol Bly. I have an unerring talent for being drawn to second hand bookshops and therein finding magnetizing books: their covers, the titles and the names of authors I’ve not yet (knowingly) read. The Bellinger Book Nook has copies of old Penguins and in that always interesting and rewarding cramped space I espied Letters from the country. The cover photo by Lawrence Frank depicts a wintry scene: a building (surely a barn) with a steeply pitched snow roof, and I well remember such buildings if only because I was born in Canada. Carol Bly, an American, is notably absent from my reference books, but her work has appeared in The New Yorker and American Review. I live in the country; this looked to be my kind of book. It is, indeed.
Carol Bly’s first essay, ‘From the Lost Swede Towns,’ also serves as introduction or preface to the essays that follow. Here are some of her words, picked because they look good: ‘This is the prairie country of the Louisiana Purchase, the endless, fainting fields, with the dusty rivers hooded by cottonwoods. As your eye sweeps this landscape you can see five or six farmers’ “groves” (windbreaks around the farmhouses). At dawn and dusk the groves look like the silent, major ships of someone else’s navy, standing well spaced, well out to sea’ (p1). Doesn’t that make you feel you want to read on? It does me.
Another old book I picked up there is Henry Miller’s: The colossus of Maroussi, This is an old favourite of mine, not least because I once owned a copy, had given that away, and wanted to replace the book (and also because it’s the account of travels in Greece with Miller’s good friend, the then young Lawrence Durrell—and because Pam and I once spent a winter in the Greek islands—a time and place when we also learned of Durrell’s books). This morning, and still in reflective mood, I stopped to read the handwritten message on the inside cover, that was written by a previous owner to her mother. The message referred to a quote from Miller’s book, ‘It is the morning of the first day of the great peace, the peace of the heart, which comes with surrender. I never knew the meaning of peace until I arrived at Epidaurus.’
And prior to the Book Nook I’d visited Bellingen’s other (second hand) bookshop- café and found, for the first time, an old book by Gilbert Frankau. My mother used to read novels by Gilbert and by Pamela Frankau—I always look out for old copies of those books—also, the Frankau’s hailed from the same part of the world as did some of my ancestors at or near Diespeck, a small town near Neustadt and Nürnberg in Bavaria.
In case you may be wondering about ‘yesterday’s events’ I had necessarily to remain a full day in Bellingen while a new windscreen was fitted to the poor old Honda. It would be easy for me to say how boring that was, but it wasn’t boring at all: it was tiring because 80-year olds tend to tire (or even to fall down) more easily than 20- or 40- or even 60-year olds. If you haven’t yet reached the ninth decade I can advise that you don’t rush in to it. A newspaper helps and coffee in a café, and chatting with strangers, acquaintances and an occasional friend. Persistent rain makes it all more difficult. I won’t bore you with the details except to say that I learned some interesting things and got home, eventually, exhausted and pleased with myself because the entire day had seemed like a trial. One of the best of these experiences came from sitting chatting with David on a public bench in the main street—the traffic barging by, rain falling. Another was sitting and seeing in a café. Another was in the new Bellingen Library—and so on. I was well out of my rural or rustic comfort zone, but by remaining more or less fully conscious in the hustle and bustle of the busy market place and by using my eyes and ears, I was able to observe, to learn and to ponder some ideas about my interrupted writing.
From ‘At the Library’:
“The new library closes for lunch on Fridays. I sit on the leaf-strewn surrounding steps. A mother with two children (one in a perambulator, one walking) arrives. I point out the bird droppings adjacent to where the pram stops. The baby has shoes with Canadian maple leaf emblems. We chat briefly, the mother and I. Inside the library I meet someone I know. We chat. I sit to rest with the prestigious Coetzee, but his writing begins with an accident and serious injury and doesn’t appeal. I exchange the Prize Winner for Alan Furst. I like the return to an old Europe in the year of 1938. The library is far from quiet. The librarian had said, ‘You can talk and even eat in here.’ This is unsettling for me. Cautiously I listen for sounds of eating. Before leaving and as an afterthought, I look for and find a copy of my book and am gratified to see that it has been borrowed (and, I hope, read) a number of times. When I leave the precinct I reflect on my reviving ego.”
From ‘At the Bookshop Café’:
“The proprietor is chatting with visitors/customers. At the counter I enquire about gluten-free foods. I’m a little out of luck but choose a Greek salad. This is a curious (for me) bookshop because associated eating and drinking and chatting is implied and encouraged. After browsing and finding the Frankau book I see the salad arriving and unwisely choose a table in the centre of everything, an in medias res location that reminds me of shyness experienced in public. The social swirl goes on around me. I eat carefully. No olive seeds slip or fly about the shop. Nobody falls over my shopping bag. I chew carefully and without making undue grazing sounds. People are chatting close by. Nobody is reading or browsing. I finish my meal, pay and slip away into the rain. The next second hand bookshop across the park beckons.”
I was thinking of birthdays in May and the draft of a story I’d just written. I have the bad habit of writing unfashionably long stories of about 20-k words, thus handicapping myself mercilessly from the viewpoints of editors and publishers. Perhaps with several such lengthy pieces I may be able to offer a small collection of longer stories to the world. Anyway. I had given the story the provisional title “One morning in May” and then realised I was again glimpsing images of childhood friends who, like me, had May birthdays. In the 1930s there were the two Leonard’s in Pilgrims Rest1: Leonard Franck and Leonard Frankish, May 3 and May 6, as best I can remember. Both of those family names now suggest to me that my friends will have had ancestors in Franconia—like mine who were more or less from the same region, now more generally known as Bavaria in modern Germany. And there was Richard Scott, too. Each of us had been born in 1929 and I carelessly thought, how carefree we were in those days, and although that was true, it was only partly true: childhood had its junior moments, some of them fraught.
The more I thought about those far-off days, the more I remembered that childhood had both good and not so good days; I could write a book about that, but that would now be a digression. These days I know of other May birthdays, but it’s the childhood remembered ones that are presently in my mind.
When we remember, as imagery, friends and family that we care about, sometimes we may glimpse an image of a particular person and sometimes, too we may be (just) aware of the imaged self as well, in the frame, so to say: there I am with my pals, or there I am, also; or there I am in this good or this bad situation again (one that was significant at the time and that now seems in danger of not surviving as a memory).
Sometimes, and especially when we carefully remember childhood, we glimpse somebody that we remember clearly but have never known personally—famous and infamous people, celebrities and villains alike—and so we tend to not include the person we deserve to care about: one’s self. I’ll mention a particular celebrity shortly, but before I do that, I’ll offer a quotation that may surprise many.
Or, introspect on when you last went swimming: I suspect you have an image of a seashore, lake, or pool which is largely a retrospection, but when it comes to yourself swimming, lo! Like Nijinsky in his dance, you are seeing yourself swim, something that you have never observed at all!”2
Each time we remember something from the past and glimpse it as an image, our remarkable brains somehow contrive to access an old memory, to freshen it and show us a new image of a remembered event and of course, of people (rather like a renewed or replacement photographic print, perhaps). Here’s another rich quote (for me, I mean):
“Such [photographic] images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all 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.”3
When I remembered childhood friends and Pilgrims Rest I also remembered myself as a child and, as Jaynes has explained, I again glimpsed an ‘old’ image of myself—and then I remembered an associated image from the 1938 film, The Great Waltz: a black and white ‘picture’ of the coloratura soprano, Miliza Korjus. In that image, a medium close-up shot, she was looking up at the camera, her eyes shining, and she was singing the song, “One day when we were young, that wonderful morning in May…” Movie prints were generally black and white in the 1930s (a few, like the Robin Hood films were in Technicolor) and all such motion pictures reached South Africa by sea, were distributed in, I think, Johannesburg, and eventually arrived in Pilgrims after a train journey to nearby Graskop and a final 9 or 10 miles journey by one of the motor vehicles from the Paul Ahlers Garage. We would not always have seen a 1938 picture in 1938, so the screenings in Pilgrims were probably in 1939. Miliza singing (she was not unlike Mae West in appearance) made a gigantic impression on me and I can still see that marvellous image of the singer in my mind, as if the experience had been yesterday. I’ve been surprised to learn that some of my friends have had similar Miliza Korjus memories.
1. Pilgrims Rest is (geographically) in the ‘Middleveld’ of the (old) Transvaal, gloriously enfolded by the Drakensberg. My paternal grandfather, who was a first-era prospector and digger along Pilgrims Creek in the 1870s, described the area as ‘the jewel of Africa.’ I entirely agree; I’m unable to remember the place without experiencing deep feelings. Pilgrims, as we used to refer to the village not quite a town, was a ‘Company Town’ (part of The Transvaal Gold Mining Estates) and was the oldest continuously mined goldfield in South Africa. Gold is no longer produced, the reduction works no longer function, the Blyde, the happy river, runs clean and sweet once more and Pilgrims is listed as a historical/heritage centre. And I care deeply for the place. In the era when I lived there nobody bothered about the apostrophe s in ‘Pilgrims’.
2. Jaynes, Julian (1976). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, p 29.
3. Sontag, Susan (1971). On photography. London: Penguin, p 154.
And that’s how I came to call my story, ‘One morning in May’ and should you be wondering, it is an Australian story set in the area where I live although paradoxically most of the scenes are set in Canberra, Paris and Lisbon.
The year 1938 is also a reminder that I recently saw a newspaper reference to the first issue of the old Superman comic: it was allegedly sold at auction for $1M. In Pilgrims Rest in that year, as I recall, Harry Meyer and, I think, Mervyn Steckel may have been the first to acquire copies. The cost in those days was, I think, 6d (sixpence or 5 cents, more or less, which was also my total weekly pocket money). I was later enabled to buy a British comic/story tabloid, but am now uncertain of the name—anyway—one of these ‘boys papers’ then contained serial yarns about ‘Rockfist Rogan’ and also ‘Mad Carew’. Mad Carew was a fighter pilot ace who had flown biplanes in WW1 (as did my uncle, Louis Diespecker, who, as a member of the Royal Flying Corps (the RFC was the forerunner or precursor to the RAF) flew a Sopwith Camel in the Defence of London, his job was to attack German Zeppelins). Mad Carew, being a fictitious hero, later flew with the Finns against the Russians, but was superseded (if that’s the way to put it) by Rockfist Rogan when WW 11 began. I wonder if any of my old school mates might have copies of those old comics and papers in some dusty garage or attic (particularly the first Superman comic). Strangely, I’ve been reading the beginning of Koch’s The memory room and have been surprised to see that that author has also discussed some of the characters in the old comics (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy and of course, Superman).
In those distant times, the 1930s, kids in the UK went to ‘the pictures,’ and in the US and Canada, they went to ‘the movies.’ In South Africa we used to go to ‘the Bio,’ bio being the accepted South African abbreviation of ‘biograph.’ The original Biograph Cinema was more or less across the road from us when Pam and I lived in Vauxhall Bridge Road, near Victoria Station in London. I wonder if that has survived? The (Saturday) Bio in Pilgrims Rest cost, I think, 6d (six pence) for matinee shows and about a shilling at night. I always went to the matinees (as did my parents, so I had to behave because I was part of the mob of kids who generally sat at the back).
I’d intended writing much more about my day in rainy Bellingen on Friday March 12, but that will have to wait: I’m in the middle of a bad experience: changing to Broadband. Staggering around Bellingen in the rain while waiting for repairs to my car compares in magnitude and emotions to the difficulties surrounding The Internet Access via a Wet String Phone Line. Now there’s another difficulty to overcome: the necessity of having to provide a medical report certifying that I’m fit to drive a motorcar. Old age offers a variety of emotional excitements; it is also a time when reading and writing can be a therapy.
The rain and showers have ended…for now, and the days have been sunny and bright. The relatively simple acts of lawn mowing, raking and seeding new lawn grass are a pleasure when the weather is fine. It is as though summer has returned. There is nothing quite so refreshing as sunny mornings early at Earthrise: the air is like crystal and the sun shines through leaves and makes the garden glow with a holy light. The river sparkles as it rolls by. Cormorants demonstrate how much joy we might have if we could fly as they do.
More later. Best from Don.