THE EARTHRISE DIARY (August 2013)
© text, Don Diespecker 2013.
Don Diespecker
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One
wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I
furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank
wall, so I could not see from either window.
Annie Dillard: The
Writing Life.
At its best the sensation of writing is that
of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You
search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it
is handed to you.
Annie Dillard: The
Writing Life.
These are partial quotes but they also are the beginnings of those
quotes. It’s my opinion that Annie Dillard is always worth reading—each book,
cover to cover, and if you’re sufficiently attracted or impressed, read the
book all over again.
Most of my days this month have been crowded with writing and editing
details: I’ve been tapping at the keyboard for long hours and doing so at the
expense of all the other chores and tasks: it’s easy to acquire a pain in the
neck and also to feel sluggish unless I have a brisk walk for 45 minutes or so
(and the reward is to pause on a bridge and watch swallows or to watch the
surface patterns of the river magnified by the sun shining brightly through the
water to project the patterns on to the bottom stones, colourfully). Although
I’ve also started to clear and repair the flood-damaged gardens there’s
seemingly endless work ahead and now spring has arrived and the reptiles are
re-emerging. As I walked from the house down to the lawn today I again had the
warm weather intuition that this feels
like a snaky day. No sooner had the thought shuttled through my mind than a
small goanna leaped from ground to tree trunk and bustled up and away on my
blind side of the tree. The computer time is demanding but essential in my
scheme of things and I must necessarily make trips to do shopping, for example,
or to keep appointments in Bellingen or Coffs Harbour. It’s normal for me to do
the chores grudgingly but worst of all, I miss my reading time, particularly
reading time in the sunny winter gardens. All reading time is ‘necessarily’ curtailed
(yes, I know it’s a choice: the writing/editing is top priority). I badly miss
my reading time: radio and TV are readily available and I always pay attention
to news programs after work but resist reading at night (it reminds me vividly
of having been a p/t student studying). There is nothing to stop me from
sitting and reading all day in the garden except my wanting to complete long
editing tasks: editing and re-writing is generally gruelling; writing is
usually a selfish excitement and pleasure.
Much of the editing is a matter of selecting unpublished TSS and
rearranging formatting; there are also MSS not yet accommodated in the
computer. I have become so much focused on the urgency of this editing and
‘refreshing’ stories that I consider deleting large blocks of what seem to be
repetitive text but when recently I noticed my undue haste and then slowed down
I realised that much of the prose was good (by my standards, anyway) and
required only light editing. The prose was good because I soon discovered I’d
been at pains to write carefully enough to ensure I would not later need to
delete great chunks of my writing. (You see how easy it often may be to become
ego-involved).
Some of the longer files (like completed novels) are daunting because
they were first drafted years ago and re-formatting in the computer requires
repair and re-writes. One particular wordy file is about 150,000 words long:
fiction based partly on historical fact that required many hours of research
and planning that often made research seem like an archaeological dig.
Meanwhile spring has sprung; there have been perfect summery days (although officially winter
is unfinished). Yesterday was a perfect winter
day: sunny, like a spring day, mild to warm outside and a day for sitting
and seeing.
While stealing some much needed leisure time at lunchtime and luxuriating in the sunny weather I decided to
continue this monologue, as if chattily writing an email to a friend. I offer
below, a broad description of some of my leisure time this month. I also decided that I’d enjoy, as best
I could, writing in mixed styles
including Earthrise Informal, some tongue in cheek interior monologue, and maybe a par of free indirect style. The reader in a hurry may safely speed-read
her way through the text below; should there be Diary readers wondering about
the last two styles, interior monologue and free indirect style, these are
generally regarded as the principal components/techniques of stream of
consciousness writing, writing that enables readers to ‘access’ something of
the ‘inner life’ of a character in a novel, for instance. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is a novel written almost
entirely in the free indirect style; James Joyce’s Ulysses contains many examples of the styles mentioned here as well
as his ‘versions’ of mixed styles
(styles that contain all of those mentioned here plus, e.g., ‘third person past
tense’ as a conventional style. The adventurous reader, who has not read Ulysses may be emotionally moved by the
last section of that astonishing book (Molly Bloom’s so-called soliloquy,
comprising many pages of unpunctuated prose: a hugely long single sentence that
is itself a fine work of art).
Sitting
and Seeing
The Airy View
Imagine that you’re visiting here and while sitting comfortably on a
chair at my belvedere atop the riverbank you can see the (mostly) downstream
view of the Bellinger. The slope or high ground on this right side of the river
is steep and forested. Most of the trees are eucalypts and some of them are
impressively big. Some of the trees are bloodwood and these often flower
profusely in big bunches at the end of summer, more or less. At this time,
however, the bloodwoods are not flowering and most of this apparently dense
forest is attractively green: the greens range from drab olive to bright green
with touches of yellow in the canopy and the vista looks as bright and as fresh
as a new oil painting. Some of the older trees stand out because of their pale
grey or creamy white trunks and branches and some of these giants are dead or
dying and their bare branches hang broken and forlorn. At the skyline the trees
along the ridge have apparently ‘detached’ clusters of foliage: they seem
detached only because you will be seeing the ends of densely leafed small
branches and twigs. You will need good vision to see these twiggy small
branches, but their leafy ends are easily seen against the blue sky and it is
these end apparently detached ‘bunches’ of greenery that so compel one’s vision
simply because they look unerringly like green daubs on a blue ground. (This
says a lot for the thinness of the eucalypt branches often blowing in the
skyline wind: those twigs and small branches are superbly strong, even in storms and high winds).
Now contemplate the skyline canopy on the downstream slopes from the
shaded parts of the belvedere and you can see those apparently detached dabs of
colour that are the foliage ends of leafy branches. Peering from a modest
distance these leafy tufted foliage ends of the highest branches seem absurdly
unconnected to the rest of the tree; for me, this is a compelling sight. I’m
enabled to sit and relax in clear light, the river flowing past and the varied
greens of the forest looking bright and fresh. If we were all painters, I
imagine, we’d perhaps want to paint the skyline dabs of colour with dry or
almost dry brushes: very light touches of bright green, lots of olive green,
and lots of top-edge ‘suggestions’ of the canopy in yellow, pale yellow) and, if you have
contemplated dreamily enough, those skyline parts, seemingly without their
too-thin-to-see supporting branches, will look like small islands, offshore islands against a densely green
shore and surrounded beyond the shore by a bright blue ocean that we might
otherwise see only as sky. If you look
dreamily enough while lifting sightly your head toward the real skyline you may
then easily see the illusion that is
‘islands’ as if you were in the air, flying, looking down from above at the
islands. (This is somewhat akin to other even more imagined benign hallucinations that are perfectly
normal for most of us most of the time. (Trust me, I’m a psychologist and
psychotherapist J
and benign hallucinations are totally cool, especially before sleeping and
before fully waking). For years I’ve tended to stare at or glance at the
steeply rising forest on the hillside: the high ground, being unlevel, inclines
or rises from the east to the south which means that summer sunrises take
longer to appear at Earthrise because my house is beneath the highest part of the
hill in this area (I tend to think of the hill as almost a mountain). When I
sit and squint at the big trees clearly visible on the eastern part of the
summit those ‘detached’ clumps of green at the tops of the trees can now also
be imagined as a chain of small tropical islands: I get more for my imagination
than I used otherwise to receive. It helps a flight of fancy if one imagine
him- or her-self airborne and looking at this imagined ocean and island view
from ‘directly above’ as if one is
high above rather than below and looking slightly upward from down here…
When you see the foliage as ‘islands,’ I suggest, your inner
writer/storyteller will smile; and it’s not rocket science. Also, when you
imagine yourself sitting here with me and enjoying the view, you will have the
pleasure of knowing, also, what is most obvious about the wonderful downstream
view: it is firstly, clearly a river view such that you will see a densely
forested slope that in and of itself makes seeing the trees as individual trees
largely impossible unless and until, secondly, you remember to study
particularly those very striking-looking skyline trees. Only the skyline trees,
because they are silhouetted, can be seen as whole and if you will give
yourself permission to see those two aspects (referred to above), you, dear
reader and imaginary visitor, now will have as bonus, the
offshore-islands-from-above-imagined-view, too.
In-flight Views
I usually carry my mobile phone in one pocket (camera and video) as
well as a small digital camera in another pocket. The pictures that I like to
take sometimes present themselves during a morning walk along the road,
sometimes while I’m working outside in the gardens (e.g., the first snake of
the season on the road this week, the horses and the two new foals in the
Happenstance paddock, sunlit patterns in the river, swallows in flight)
providing I’m quick enough to get one of my cameras from a pocket and push the
right buttons quickly. Earlier this
week, as I was walking down from the house to the gardens I glanced downstream
and saw a trio of cormorants coming upriver and climbing to altitude. They
stopped me in my tracks (I have a thing about cormorants: they fly so
magnificently). I was only about four or five metres above the river, the birds
about five metres higher than I, climbing steeply and in a brief glimpse I saw
them in line from behind and below and realised how the density of the air near
the bridge made the fliers rock slightly as they went up, somewhat bouncingly,
just like a flight of light aircraft. In that eye-blink moment in quick
succession some fragments of remembered other times arose as reminders and I
thought more of other times, other places that were associated with flying as
passenger in various aircraft: a wet and windy night flight in late 1954 in a
DC3 from Salonika to Athens; Pam and I, the aircraft bumping and swaying; and
in autumn 1956 flying from Paris in a Pan American Super-G Constellation,
passing comfortably over Athens in the big plane, the city still dark and her
lights twinkling while high in the first-class sky the light was coming and we
put down at Beirut for breakfast at the airport, Eric Steger, Brian Willis and
myself heading for Tehran and a series of sight investigations for Iranian
airfields; then flying very high over Damascus in brilliant sunlight and
peering down at the city as if at a colourful map before continuing on to the
heat and dust of Baghdad’s old airport. And so there were old memories of
flying around Iran in DC3s, working on existing airfields and dodging the air
traffic (never warned with time to spare and escaping, just, by the skins of
our teeth as international flights whistled down moments before we cleared the
runway: men, machines, equipment bundled, hurtled, thrown in desperate quick
starts and reckless driving to save our skins.
Do the DC3s still bob and bounce through the gap for Isfahan, shepherds
grazing sheep at each wingtip, dropping sickeningly into hot bumpy airspace and
the haze hiding the beautiful valley far below? I remember the winter runways
at Tehran-Mehrabad airport, all covered in snow and flights through the night,
walking up and down in breaks to keep warm and the guys telling me to please
not to because the wolves were down from the mountains; and there was a time
when Eric and I on our day off sat high on Demavend’s slopes looking down at
the city and saw unbelievingly an international flight attempting to land, well
beyond touch-down, pull up suddenly when almost on the runway, wheels down, and
an Air Force jet trainer swooped down to
a landing on the same runway from
the opposite direction and there was no crash and life went on. No doubt
the Air Force instructor was too speechless to instruct his student and the
trainer landed nicely while the airliner pilot somehow got tonnes of aircraft
up into the air again without tearing apart the airframe, wobbled around on
another circuit and eventually landed the plane and all passengers and crew
without mishap. It was a long time ago.
As I think birds flying, I think
particularly of cormorants: not only are they magnificent fliers, they have
wonderful style. In everything I see them doing, including swimming and
fishing, they seem to me to be a class act.
This week too I watched an eagle (or possibly a hawk) pick up a ride
from the thermal above the forested slopes by simply cruising into this helpful
air with wings held out and be raised up in splendour. I sit seeing this in
admiration: it is as if the bird can see
the thermal or that it somehow knows
where to find this wonderfully lifting air: it is the avian equivalent of
standing at a bus stop, arms extended, and be safely lifted away by the embrace
of the welcoming bus.
And then there are the butterflies one or two of them appearing each
day now in this sunny warm weather. They do so as if from a secret location,
suddenly (almost in the manner of the Iranian Air Force trainer) and compel the
eye to follow because they navigate and fly so jerkily and always near the
branches of one of the riverside trees. Predators such as birds will have
difficulty in swooping on the butterflies here: they will be at risk of
collisions with branches (obstacles the tiny butterfly has perhaps incorporated
into its flight plan). The butterflies move by bobbing about rapidly, so quickly
that they seem never to fly in straight lines; speedily, deceptively;
accurately, and they don’t have collisions.
Also seen this week: a pair of either butterflies, light or pale brown,
or possibly moths, flying very fast either in circles up and down at two or
three metres elevation, or in spirals and they do this so quickly I am unable
to determine what they are or why they’re doing it (‘it’ being a wonderful
spectacle). Swallows might catch the
spiralling pair, but I doubt that. When making recently a video of patterned
underwater stones with the mobile the epic shoot was interrupted by a playful
swallow hurtling through the shot as it came pell-mell beneath the bridge deck
then soared upward (possibly doing barrel rolls whilst climbing like a stunt flier).
They seem to be feeding on the wing or perhaps just fooling around. Who knows?
They go like fighter jets and do it silently. Imagine how they’d sound if they
were jet assisted or had afterburners to boost their accelerations. Swallows do
move amazingly fast. The swallow Air Show is one of my pleasures. I think they
might be catching on, too. They stop and park along the bridge baluster rail in
pairs and sit watching (Hey Fred, it’s
the old guy with the camera phone again!). As carefully as I raise the
phone or the camera the swallows wait for me to get them into the frame then
scatter, laughing, I suspect. Imagine the energy needed to fly like that. They
fly to feed and feed to keep flying.
I wouldn’t mind returning as a swallow. It’s just that I’d find the
high- speed manoeuvring a little trying. Like watching jitterbugging or
jiving. Cormorants move more
slowly. They move grandly. Like tango dancers.
Other Than Flying
All this flying requires some slowing down, landing, relaxing again. I
have the perfect prop for this. If the day you have imagined here is still
sunny and bright and warm then look up at the cream-coloured trunks of the
flooded gums for a suitably slow-moving shadowgraph. I like to watch them
because they’re so relaxing and slow moving and they change in surprising ways.
The sun is shining on and through foliage or canopy and when it does so it
projects the silhouette views of leaves, branches (and the occasional blurred
bird): it is Nature’s movie time.
Even slower: budding leaves. You can always see the effects of warm
sunny spring weather on buds becoming leaves (it’s just a little difficult
watching it happen, live…but it is
relaxing, provided you have the time to spare).
Butterfly sightings are presently about two each day. I’ve seen three
species so far:
Award yourself points if falling used leaves land on you (particularly
on your head): being leafed on the head is worth 50 points. Award yourself 500
points if a butterfly lands on you; and make it 1,000 points if one lands on your
heart (this has happened only once for me, but that single landing was very impressive).
I’ve discovered that although jacarandas always bronze at this time of
the year, some of them are now bronzing faster or more completely and others
seem more yellow (or golden) than their nearby neighbours (I don’t know why).
The scratchy and insignificant flowers of the lomandra plants can now
be seen. I like the way the long blades of these strong plants move in the
breeze and catch the light. I also have a lightly scented native flowering
plant between the begonias and irises that surround the old white cedar next to
the belvedere. Any scented plant smells wonderful. Sweet peas and carnations,
e.g., but I can’t grow either of those here: they attract nocturnal critters
that enjoy eating them. Did I mention the handsome bandicoot that rustled up
behind me and stopped to stare (probably with raised eyebrows)? He or she was
as large as a small dog or a big cat and seemed friendly enough.
August 31 2013. High on
Saturday morning coffee I lightly started down the path from the house. There
are lightened silken strands some taut, others looser or floating. River light
dances in the cheese tree foliage. Reminds me always of other times other
places. Time flies. You can’t; old joke; they fly too fast. The Air Force
trainer pre-empting Tehran-Mehrabad’s main runway in 1956, the wingtip
shepherds above the Isfahan valley, the DC3 flying down to Athens on a wet
winter night in 1954. There was also that fund-raising ball (for those fleeing
the Hungarian Revolution) at the British Embassy in Tehran. Chatted with the
tall Princess who enjoyed dancing whilst chatting. Eric Steger wore a golden
cummerbund that reflected light. We all wore dinner jackets, mine rented. A
snowy night but warm inside. It was like a party anywhere. One of the rooms
where we mingled was where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had their summit
in1943. Only thirteen years before. How long ago 1956, now? Fifty-seven years,
a Heinz ago. During my break I remember watching traffic at the Abadan field,
the Flying Fortress unarmed then, a photo and mapping plane. It flew dove-like
those desert days. There were strong oil smells from the world’s biggest
refinery. It still looked dangerous, the Flying Fort. Will the cormorants
continue flying together here? In Tehran in the winter the cars slid slowly
down the icy road from Shemrun to the city, recklessly almost. The best brakes
were no use. Remembering the
Colonel Commandant at Abadan, always friendly. Remembering too the Commandant
at Yezd how we sat eating pomegranates on the hotel’s flat roof in evening cool
our conversation in broken English, broken French, broken Farsi. The mountains
blue-hazed above the desert. Driving uncomfortably close to the burning well at
Qum. Driving past blue-eyed Luri tribesmen, their families and their flocks and
clouds of dust on the mountain roads. Down to the warm plains in winter. Winter
is still here for a few more hours: this is the last winter day. I dropped a
pebble or two down bottomless ghanats listening for the sound to echo up: s =
ut + ½ gt2. Reduces to 16t2 more or
less and deep, very deep and dangerous to get anywhere near. There are blind
white fish down there in the dark conduits. Speeding along the oil road from
Ahwaz to Abadan, hard and fast for the Land Rovers, the road better than
bitumen. The bottled beer that was frozen in the bottle and you had to wait in
the heat for the beer to thaw. Life. Now I remember that for fun while he was
away elsewhere Eric let me use the Humber for a few days and there was the
chauffeur, Ali the Turk, who addressed us as Excellence at all times. Faultless French he had too.
Here it’s still the last day of winter, just, the river low the temp on
the way to about 26˚. Must remove the dried flood debris from the belvedere red
cedar. Dusty Darkwood Road.
Creative Writing
It is my pleasure to welcome again my cousin Jill, as guest writer, to
the Diary. Her “The Search” is a (non-fiction) short memoir. She writes from
Vancouver, BC:
The Search
Jill
Alexander
I left Jamaica behind after
living there for ten wonderful years, and arrived back home with my two sons,
aged five and nine. I had looked forward to this day of being single and
independent. I felt strong and ready to face the world on my own.
After getting the boys settled
in new schools and finding a job, I knew the time had come to search for my
first son, the son I had never known.
I looked in the phone book under Adoption and found an organization
called Parent Finders. I gave them a call. They suggested as the first step to
write to the BC Government for the profile that they made available on the
first year of his life. This profile would be non-identifying.
The letter arrived in the mail
within the week and I started to read the profile put together by the social
worker at the time of the adoption.
The profile talked about this older couple and their new son and how
thrilled they were to have him in their lives. They spoke of him as a happy and
very bright baby. It mentioned how
the father had set aside Sunday as a special day for mother and baby, a day
when he would make all the meals, attend to all household matters and give his
wife the opportunity to devote every moment to her new son. And there was
more—about how their lives had changed after sixteen years of trying for a
child of their own without success. I can remember just how torn I felt between
knowing that my son was loved and well cared for and yet feeling that some part
of me belonged there with him. The picture of him with his adopted parents and
this new life stayed with me as I continued my search.
The next step through Parent
Finders was to put an ad in the Vancouver Sun and Province on his birthday. I
remember afterwards waiting for months for that phone call that was going to
change my life. Sadly this never happened.
I went to psychics on many
occasions, asking each one if they could tell me about my son and where he
lived. One time stands out for me.
This particular psychic said
that he lived in a country far away where a foreign language was spoken, and
that he had a daughter who looked very much like me. My heart gave a leap at
the news of having a little granddaughter.
After fourteen years of
wondering and dreaming of throwing my arms around him, the search took a turn
in a very positive direction. A notice from the Provincial Government appeared
in the newspaper. The Province had set up an adoption Reunion Registry under
the department of Social Services. A researcher was to be assigned to each
person who applied and a fee of $250 charged to carry out the search. I applied
immediately and received a letter within a week. Due to the fact there were
1200 people who had already applied before me in the short span of two weeks, I
would be put on a waiting list and would be contacted when my name came up for
processing. This was in January 1992. So I waited and waited. It seemed like a
lifetime of waiting. Then in November of that year another letter arrived. My
case was ready to go when they received my $250. I had the cheque in the mail
in less than an hour. Then two days later I received a phone call from a woman
who identified herself as being the researcher assigned to my case. After
introductions and the collecting of relevant information, the researcher said
she would phone me when she had any news. I waited a week that felt like an
eternity and finally gave the researcher a call.
“Do you have any news?”
Jill Diespecker Alexander is a retired nurse and business owner and is
presently writing her life story.
About my eBooks
For those readers who browse
for eBooks, here again are the first of those that I’ve begun self-publishing.
These digital books can be found on Amazon/Kindle sites:
(a) Finding Drina is a light-hearted sequel to my two print novels (not
available as eBooks) published in one volume as The Agreement and it’s sequel, Lourenço
Marques. Finding Drina is
written in three parts and in three different styles that also are intended
homage pieces (to GG Marquez, Ernest Hemingway and Lawrence Durrell); thus this
little book is also meta-fiction (novella, about 30-k words).
(b) The Earthrise Visits is an Australian long story set at Earthrise
(about 20-k words): an old psychologist meets a young literary ghost from the
1920s (his girlfriend meets her too) before a second old literary ghost,
unaware of his spectral state, arrives unexpectedly.
(c) Farewelling Luis Silva is an Australian dystopian long story partly
set in Australia, Portugal and France (about 23-k words). A sniper meets an
Australian Prime Minister, an old lover and a celebrity journalist; three of
them meet a terrorist in Lisbon where there is a bloody assassination.
(d) The Selati Line is an early 20th century Transvaal train
story, road story, flying story, a caper and love story sequel to The Agreement and Lourenço Marques, lightly written and containing some magical
realism. A scene-stealing child
prodigy keeps the characters in order (novel, about 150-k words).
(e) The Summer River is a dystopian novel (about 70-k words) set at
Earthrise. A General, the déjà vu sniper, the Australian Prime Minister and the
celebrity journalist witness the murder of a guerrilla who had also been an
Australian university student; they discuss how best to write an appropriate
book about ‘foreign invasions’ (novel, about 70-k words).
(f) The Annotated “Elizabeth.” I examine and offer
likely explanations as to why my uncle published a mixed prose and verse novel
in which his mother is the principal protagonist and I suggest why the book Elizabeth (published by Dick Diespecker
in 1950) is a novel and not a biography, memoir or history (non-fiction, about
24-k words).
(g) The Overview is an Australian novella set at Earthrise (about 32-k
words) and is also a sequel to The
Summer River.
(h) Scribbles from Earthrise is an anthology of selected essays and
caprice written at Earthrise (about 32-k words). Topics are: family and
friends, history of the Earthrise house, the river, the forest, stream of
consciousness writing and the Earthrise dogs.
(i) Here and There is a selection of Home and Away essays (about 39-k
words). (Away includes Cowichan (Vancouver Island), 1937 (my cabin-boy year),
The Embassy Ball (Iran), At Brindavan (Sai Baba in India). Home essays are set
at Earthrise and include as topics: the Bellinger River and floods, plus some
light-hearted caprices.
Pleas see also, Russell Atkinson’s blog at
Be well, all. Best wishes from Don.
