Saturday, August 31, 2013

The Earthrise Diary (August 2013)



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?”  
“I was just picking up the phone to call you”, she said. “I’VE FOUND YOUR SON.”
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.


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