THE EARTHRISE DIARY (January 2014)
© Text, Don Diespecker, 2014; guest writers retain their ©
DON DIESPECKER
Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing,
I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my
mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I
reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning
and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may
have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the
prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.
Flann O’Brien: At Swim-Two-Birds
…I
am in a strange place, really. Yesterday I gave the keys of my car to its new
owner. One week earlier I gave the keys to my home to its new owner. I have two
medium-size suitcases one with winter’s clothes and another with summer’s.
Gifts fill the corners: organic Australian honey, Madura tea and Murray River
pink salt, my staple gifts when traveling…
…And
having said all that I stand on the edge of a sense of freedom I have not felt
since I walked out of school on my last day. I remember that intoxicating surge
of freedom and possibility that filled every cell of my body. ‘I am free;’
that’s what I said. And here I am about to leave Australia with no keys:
nothing to open when I come back, except two medium-size suitcases and my two
arms when I see my children and granddaughter again.
Sharon Snir, prior to
flying to Israel
January 28 2014. I’ve been working indoors for too many long
periods of intense writing, re-writing and pitiless editing. In long breaks of
several seconds I’ve also watched my days slipping by like the movie images of
calendar’s leaves blowing away in the wind. The pile of new and unread books is
still in place: I have managed one and a half reads of only one book, James
Salter’s Last Night (brilliant stories) and a half-way read of Annie Dillard’s
The Writing Life. My worktable,
like much of my house, is cluttered (the house urgently needs the skilled
attentions of the butler, the housekeeper, the cook, the scullery maid, several
footmen and a parlour maid) and I lose pens and my scattered notes written on
the backs of used envelopes and buried beneath books, files and the blessed computer
on my worktable. You would be appalled to see how I write inside my house. The
Inside drama is entirely my fault, my choice and my being driven to complete
set tasks by nobody else but me. The gardens need attention; recalcitrant
fishers need to be deterred from invading my territory (I need another brace of
gamekeepers). I’m not getting enough exercise; I’m entirely at fault and
misguided. There are times when I write longhand sitting outside by the river,
but I have increasing difficulty both in later reading my scribbles and scrawls
and in focusing on the writing in front of me because what is in front of me is
so often compelling that I slip from one reality into another and writing from
(river and forest views), within the river reality and then writing something
unrelated to the views whilst sitting in the outside reality is much too hard.
And it’s summer and the river and riverbanks in this area have been busy with
swimmers, paddlers, drinkers, fishers, picnickers, canoeists and kayakers and those
drifting on air-mattresses: summer holidays are not the best times for
reflection, for thinking, for writing. I do know some secluded places in this
environment, but then the same difficulties would apply: a chinking stream deep
in the forest is a place of beauty and so attention-demanding that any writing
other than Note-taking is out of the question. During this time of hectic
scribbling and editing I’ve also managed to busy the email traffic, too: I stay
in touch with family and special friends and special family friends (those who
write willingly and cheerfully). The good news is that I’ve completed two of my
own (digital) books this month: The Special Intelligence Officer, and The
Letters from Earthrise. The first of these two texts is based on much
historical research: the narrative describes the roles of my late grandfather,
who was a District Commandant during the Guerrilla War (1901-1902) and more
sinisterly, ‘The Special Intelligence Officer’ (so named in Cape newspapers of
the time): it’s a dark story. The Guerrilla War was the last phase of the
Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). The second book is an anthology of most of
my writings published in the Australian
Gestalt Journal (AGJ) between
1997 and 2005 and the reader may be relieved to learn that much of the writing
in that text is laid back and light. The word ‘Letters’ refers to quite lengthy
and regular columns (in the newspaper sense) that were featured in the AGJ and there are additional essays and
articles containing Gestalt notions in some of my fiction and non-fiction. The AGJ is now defunct, alas, but despite
the difficulties of archaeological digs in the computer to recover old files,
it was a great pleasure to again present those ‘old’ writings. There are
literary discussions of now ‘old’ texts and experimental pieces that could
never have been published in other similar Journals of that time: the AGJ was at the cutting edge, one might
say (and not because I was the Consulting Editor for much of that time, but
because the AGJ was progressive and different, rather than ‘academic and
old-fashioned’). As I re-edited my old narratives I became increasingly aware
(as we old Gestalt therapists say) that the world has changed dramatically
since the early issues of the AGJ.
And I’m very pleased to add that the caprice, The Midge
Toccata, now has an attractive new cover: it was designed and painted by my
young cousin (technically my first cousin once removed, but I think of all my
relatives as my cousins), Katie Diespecker, in Agassiz, British Columbia once
removed. Thank you, Katie. This month has been a satisfying writing and
publishing month: The Midge Toccata, and the Special Intelligence Officer are
both in the Kindle store; the 15th eBook, The Letters from Earthrise
(almost novel length at 70,000 words) should be there shortly.
Merely A Monologue
When I’m up and about each morning I generally wander around
the ‘gardens’ while the dew is still on the plants, especially on ‘Big Lawn’: I
put those words in quotes because the gardens were so damaged by last
February’s floods as to be unrecognizable as gardens; the lawn has ground
covers, tropical chickweed, native violets and, also, some varied grasses here
and there. Any lawn at Earthrise is a green sward continually changing: floods
cover parts with mud and loam; the deposits left behind bear gifts of seeds
from far away; some parts of these flighty lawns disappear in floods and are
replaced by new plants… Whatever else a lawn at Earthrise might be, it is also
a nice green reminder of the only constant in the universe: continual flux,
continuing change. Perhaps future scientists, school children and philosophers
will beat a path to Earthrise simply to be able to stand on Big Lawn and to do
that several times a year in order to record, to map the changes, to take
photos. I could sell tickets for ‘Lawn Viewings’ and ‘See Amazing Big Lawn:
Most Changeable Lawn In Universe.’ I could provide scones and strawberry jam
and cream and cups of tea…if I had nothing else to do. And I remind myself that
there are also Hidden Lawns here, lawns that have been colonised by
tradescantia, by bracken, by well-anchored and almost indestructible clumps of
broad-leafed sub-tropical grasses. An ambition is to liberate these lawns from
the past.
In recent times I habitually took brisk walks from here down
to the Richardson’s Bridge, there to use my eyes to see daily changes on the
water: ripples, swirls, tiny bubbles or flotsam on the always dynamic surface
of the river and I would photograph some of what I could see. Richardson’s has
a separated walkway on the downstream side of the bridge’s deck and it’s
relatively safe from passing traffic that might otherwise tip you into the
river or knock you over the trees for six. If you look at the Bellinger’s
surface at sunrise during certain months you may discover interesting phenomena
that have always to be searched for. The rising sun shining obliquely projects
through water in the shallows to reveal colourful shapes and somewhat enlarged
details of the always-undulating surface. This experience is rather like that
of looking down at a ‘screen’ comprised only of river stones on the bottom of
the river, but it is an unforgettable and moving phenomenon, an underwater
movie continually allowing you to see an enlarged
dynamic and colourful view of the surface of the river. The sun also adds
reflections to the surface: those of surrounding trees and nearby tall grasses
and the viewer must necessarily change his or her focus entirely to see those:
the wavering images are ‘static’ if the air is still: they are also distorted
views, as reflections, because the river is wavering, running, sliding,
distorting what your eyes want to understand. In winter there are silken
threads anchored to the exposed river stones, some of them drifting in the air,
loosely. To stand on the walkway at Richardson’s is an education and, like the
best education, the watcher will be encouraged by what s-he sees to also ponder
and to speculate: why is it so; what does this mean; how might I explain that
in simple prose? The river is often an exciting visual mystery. Might I become
a River Guide in old age?
Flooding changes caused unplanned additional work:
particularly the endless clearing of debris consisting of untangling long heavy
logs, branches, uprooted clumps of ‘foreign’ grasses, vines and man-made
fragments and removing these (when possible, and in pieces) by wheelbarrow to
partly repair the Riverside Lawn (where dried flotsam still hangs in branches
on the riverbank and where the defensive stone wall has been breached; and
where the upstream side of the lawn has been savagely eroded by the shifting
river in full flood; and also a place for the ‘extra’ river stones stored for
25 years in an ‘unnecessary’ wall next to the belvedere). There remain a
variety of jobs big and small in the ruined gardens. After last February’s
floods it was essential to nurse the old (1987) Honda in and out of the front
gate and mud-buried driveway, sometimes working with a spade to ensure safely
getting back up the rise to the carport. Driving up the hillier parts of
Darkwood Road where the old verges had been transformed into deep mud (and
praying for traction), was wearing. Filling in the adjacent road ditch at my
front gate with heavy stones was essential just to get on to or up from
Darkwood Road was another time-consuming challenge. These kinds of post-flood
essential chores were enormously time-consuming and all my ‘scheduled times’
were stretched, manipulated, cancelled or abandoned when necessary. There are
still logs (too big to move) jammed or partly suspended between Big Lawn and
the ancient river bank near the carport: my long-handled axe blade bounces
laughingly from these unwanted timbers.
Following decisions to reduce time-consuming chores and to
increase Writing Time I’ve been obliged to re-cast, to modify, and to ensure
that long hours at the keyboard would be preceded by and also followed by
Outside breaks: I have an abundance of 10-minutes or 20-minutes or 30- and
40-minutes breaks available to me for physical work, for necessary exercise. I
take time off at night to read or to watch that interesting educator, TV. In
quieter times and before another flood upsets the apple cart, I hope to resume
my reading (my best experiences of reading, particularly literary fiction and
non-fiction, are always outside near the river). Reading inside is quieter, and
the house is relatively still: reading outside is more exciting because the
river is a big, lively and noisy companion, and birds sing and cicadas beat and
the reader must keep an eye out for falling branches, thus the ‘reading
outside’ experience is always lively.
Meanwhile, my cousin
Jill, in Vancouver, is experiencing some 'Inside Work'. She writes:
I am in the enclosed office that has glassed French doors allowing me to
see into the living room and if I turn my head to the left I can see the dining
area and the open hatch into the kitchen. There are four strong and pleasant
young men ripping out the kitchen and the bathroom off the hallway. This
hallway leads to the bedroom, walk-in closet and 2nd bathroom called an
en-suite bathroom as a door encloses this area. This en-suite area and office
are safe for now from all this renovation activity. The second bathroom will be
done later when the kitchen and small bathroom are finished. Down on the first
floor, John Steel is busy working on their (Gill and John) newly purchased
apartment. John is doing all the painting himself. He is good at this. Gill,
who has a designer’s flair, has been designing their kitchen, as well as
giving us ideas. I must say it is rather fun sharing ideas and time frames on
projects together. At the moment though I would not call this ‘fun!’ We take
off for the cabin in about 1 1/2 hours, so an escape is a good thing. Brian
returns tomorrow night for his various work projects and I stay down two extra
days. Signe will join me on the Wednesday and we will come back together late
on Thursday. Nothing is where it is supposed to be here. I decided I needed
something to eat. As I can’t get into the kitchen, I have made do with an
apple. After I located the apple, I had to locate a knife to cut it. As
everything from the kitchen went into the bedroom, I knew that somewhere a
paring knife was hiding. Finally I found it and am now munching on a juicy Gala
apple.
The cicadas are quieter now, more occasional, as though
they’ve grown tired of the same old same old and are perhaps planning holidays
and leisurely hanging out by the river... I hear their surprisingly
half-hearted bursts and choruses when least expected: sunset, sometimes when
it’s dark and perhaps when a cicada mob is stirred by one of the musicians
enduring a bad dream and they all chorus together for security reasons; who
knows? The drongos, too, are a little quieter: they’ve been flapping about
close to the house, closer to the water this season than I’ve ever seen them
previously: they too may be appreciating the turning of the season and might be
visiting nearby colonies, or taking sabbaticals before heading north again. The
drongo ‘song’ is excruciating, but their sleek plumage is beautiful to glimpse
when they fly close by.
The notion of quiet is one that includes natural sounds such
as birdsong and the river’s ‘song’ and the past two days (except for the cicada
reminders) have been good to hear because we’re at the end of summer’s second
month and the schools have started their new terms and the families have
departed more or less silently, their shiny vehicles filled with sunburned
people, and with a dog or two, with paddles, air mattresses, fishing rods,
hampers, eskies. Those extraneous penetrating sounds (at all hours of the day
and night) from other humans may have
reduced appreciably, but I’ll wait and see, and fill the waiting time with
keyboard work and the background sounds of cicadas and birds more distantly,
and the radio sounds of proper music largely replacing the background noises.
I’ve been especially aware of trees this month. Many of them
seem to have been stressed: they crack, break and sometimes fall (branches fall
more frequently than whole trees). High branches from old trees along the
roadside here have fallen into the road outside this address and that always
seems a responsibility when I discover them and do my best to clear the mess
with either a machete or an axe. A heavy branch on the road is a real hazard.
It takes only a couple of seconds to smash it’s way through other foliage,
ruining nearby trees, threatening traffic and it takes much longer to reduce
the timber to bits and pieces and then to finally remove it all. There have
been several such falls in the gardens and nearby forest and two from the old
bloodwood next to the house: a large branch fell and clipped the edge of the
roof and wrecked a bleeding heart tree; another, less big, hit the roof next to
my bedroom and made me jump: fortunately it struck horizontally and did little
damage. In the garden on recent hot windy days and some of them also cool and
wet, there have been branches big and small to pick up and to remove and an old
White Cedar (they’re unrelated to Australian Red Cedars) has dropped a couple
of major limbs. Yesterday (Jan 28) when I was gathering small sticks and
branches after a windy spell I was so intent on seeing the ground, eyes
downcast, that I almost walked into a metre and a half of goanna. The handsome
goanna stood its ground and looked coldly at me: I did immediately and
effortlessly my High Back-flip With Partial Somersault and so avoided becoming
an afternoon snack for the hunter (for readers unfamiliar with these Australian
creatures, goannas attack, destroy and eat big snakes and as far as I know,
goannas don’t consider live humans a delicacy).
Earlier I’d found the beautiful pink lilies in front of the
house (that always flower in January) were dying and decaying and being consumed
by determined striped caterpillars. What an ugly mess! Will these cleanup
caterpillars become winged butterfly beauties? Yesterday I was surprised to see
that there were two of these peach-smelling flowers on proud stalks: survival
of the fittest! The last of the Christmas orchids has shed its white blooms
along the path to the carport. There are great clumps of flowering wild ginger
plants at the front gate and now, too in the Dogs’ Garden. The red salvia slips
that I planted are all bright red, the cannas have benefited from recent heavy
showers and to my surprise one of the dahlias (Dogs’ Garden) has risen from
beneath the flood mud and debris and begun to flower! It might just be ‘Mrs
Rees’! Behind the determined dahlia there’s big bunch of wild ginger (I think
it’s called): big leafed, long flower stalks with a cluster of pale yellow
flowers having long orange stamens: they look like orchids. This circular
walled garden looks good, but this great clump of impressive orchid-like
flowers is yet another gift of the flooding river: I had nothing to do with it;
the plant simply heaved itself out of the flood debris and arranged itself as
if for a Flower Show. In the nearby trees along the old fence line and high
above the gardens and the roadside, bunches of yellow cassia flowers catch the
eye in the shade. The barks shed by the eucalypts are all down now, dry and
crackly. The front stonewall of the belvedere is clear of the irrepressible
Madeira vine and I’ve just found four snake skins in the clefts of the wall.
The forested slopes continue displaying their flowering bloodwoods although the
flowers have passed their best and are browning. The air has a different feel
to it now and the light is softer despite the temperature being 27 or so. I
very much enjoy the light of February, perfect for Outside Reading, and
February is hurrying on its way.
About my eBooks
For those readers
who browse for eBooks, here again are the first of the online books. 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 a short Australian
novel 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
(meeting Sai Baba in India). ‘Home’ essays are set at Earthrise and include as
topics: the Bellinger River and floods, plus some light-hearted caprices.
(j) The Agreement is a novel set in
Mozambique and Natal during December 1899 and the Second Anglo-Boer War: an
espionage yarn written around the historical Secret Anglo Portuguese Agreement.
Louis Dorman and his brother, Jules, feature together with Drina de Camoens who
helps draft the Agreement for the Portuguese Government. British Intelligence
Officers, Boer spies and the Portuguese Secret Police socialize at the Estrela
Café (about 62-k words).
(k) Lourenço Marques is the sequel to The
Agreement. Mozambique in September 1910. The Estrela café-bar is much
frequented and now provides music: Elvira Tomes returns to LM from Portugal and
is troubled by an old ghost; Drina and her companion return with a new member
of the family; Louis faints. Joshua becomes a marimba player. Ruth Lerner, an
American journalist plans to film a fiesta and hundreds visit from the
Transvaal. Drina plays piano for music lovers and plans the removal of an old
business associate (novel: about 75,000 words).
(l) The Midge Toccata, a caprice about
talking insects (inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories). This book has a
splendid new cover designed by my cousin, Katie Diespecker (fiction, caprice,
about 26,100 words).
(m) Happiness is a short novel set at
Earthrise. The ‘narrator’ is again the very elderly ex-ATA flier who
unexpectedly meets and rescues a bridge engineer requiring urgent
hospitalisation: she gets him safely to hospital in his own plane. She also
‘imagines’ an extension to her own story, one about a small family living
partly in the forest and on the riverbank: the theme is happiness. Principal
protagonist is a 13-years old schoolgirl who seems a prodigy: she befriends a
wounded Army officer and encourages his plans. Her parents are a university
teacher and a retired concert pianist. The family pets can’t resist being
scene-stealers in this happy family (novel, about 65,400 words).
(n) The Special Intelligence Officer is
part family history as well as a military history and describes the roles of my
late grandfather in the Guerrilla War (1901-1902). The Guerrilla War was the
last phase of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). The title of the book is
taken from Cape newspapers of the time: Capt Rudolph Diespecker was a District
Commandant and his responsibilities included intelligence gathering that led to
the capture, trial and execution of a Boer Commandant who was wrongly framed as
a ‘Cape rebel,’ when he was legally a POW (Gideon Scheepers was never a Cape
rebel, having been born in the Transvaal (the South African Republic,) one of
the two Boer Republics (non-fiction, about 33, 270 words).
These eBooks may be
seen on Amazon Kindle websites.
Thank you, Jill and
Sharon, for permission to include your words. Best wishes to all from Don.
