THE EARTHRISE DIARY (July 2013)
Don
Diespecker
© Text 2013, Don Diespecker
As we know, there are known knowns; there are
things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say
we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown
unknowns--the ones we don't know we don't know.
Donald Rumsfeld (February 12
2002 Department of Defense news briefing).
The days of man are but as grass: for he
flourisheth as a flower of the field.
For as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is
gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
Psalm
58. The Book of Common Prayer
The two quotations above might provide a
philosophical hint to some of what follows below (code for the Earthrise
incumbent very much taking refuge inside his head, at least for a few
thoughtful pars). A third quote, below, is from a compelling novel by James
Salter: the story’s unidentified narrator is travelling in a train in France
and experiencing what he sees: the story that follows is a fiction ‘imagined’
by the traveller/narrator. This month whilst being in the middle of everything
(like editing a second collection of my essays intended as another eBook, “Here
and There. Essays from Home and Away”), I’m also flitting between chores, some
of the new notions arising while editing recent essays about times past,
pondering other places of long ago, fantasising the plot of another novel,
brainstorming how we store and access memory, dreamily reflecting on present
perceptions, and documenting for want
of a better word, a little of what wanders through my mind from day to day
especially while I sit seeing what can be seen in my riverside garden. None of
what follows is at all complex; I’m simply be sharing some of my experience
with you.
Of these tasks and reflections the
experience of sitting in my sunny winter garden and not doing anything more
strenuous than staying awake and aware, is pleasantly exciting. Falling asleep
in the riverside garden is never safe or wise because of the many branches
(including weighty deadwood) that will kill one with ease merely by breaking
and falling 40- or 50-m. Gravity in this garden may be an unexpectedly lethal
weapon and the flooded gum, eucalyptus grandis,
is also known as the widow-maker. As
magnificent as they are, some gum trees shed leaves, barks and branches when it
suits them to. The reflective garden sitter is wise to look around before
sitting and to decide on where to run should he or she hear the gunshot CRACK
of a breaking branch high above the ground: there is always a chance that the
pensive sitter will be sufficiently speedy to outrun the down-coming missile.
Alas, such a chance is always going to be very slim. Breaking branches,
especially deadwood branches, habitually fall when least expected: it is as if
branches will themselves to break and
fall in otherwise idle moments, those moments when the thinker or meditating
sitter is between thoughts,
near-blank moments that beg to be utilised. I have been puzzling about the
availability of such hypothetical between
spaces: how empty or blank is such a space and how does one know when blankness
occurs? If you are a story-teller then no matter how hard you try to keep gaps
and spaces filled with narrative so that the teller and the reader or listener
are simultaneously at the same point and on the same page, there are moments
when the images in the two minds will be very different and perhaps have little
or nothing whatever to do with the story. Such wayward moments seem likely to
be filled to bursting: both minds will have to be flying on the story autopilot
whilst each mind simultaneously is stunt-flying along two other trajectories.
See what I mean? My cousin Jill has sent me a copy of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and I’ve been reading
the last section first: it’s about that writer as passenger flying with a
stunt-flier. Not only is her prose very good writing but the text implies
consciousness being crowded for each of the two people in the plane and despite
the ‘sharing’ of the flying experience, that content, I suspect, will be
markedly different for each person (at least it seems so to me).
Inspired by the structure and form of
Salter’s novel (A Sport And A Pastime)
I recently borrowed the notion of the unnamed narrator being not a passenger in
a moving train, but being the pilot in a moving aircraft: writing those parts
was sheer pleasure (see my recent novel, an eBook, The Overview). The writer need not be, also, a pilot; having flown either as pilot or as passenger will be
sufficient for the reader to experience memories of flying in a plane. –Now I’m remembering having been a frequent passenger
on DC3 flights, the old Douglas Dakotas that flew domestic routes in Iran
before the Revolution: some of the more hair-raising of those flights were
descents through mountainous gaps with sheep grazing at either wingtip:
whatever the pilot was experiencing in those in-between moments, I’m sure it
was very different to what I was feeling as a passenger (to have arrived safely
and in one piece on the ground at Isfahan, for example, was then like arriving
in paradise).
My suggestion for busy readers is to skim
lightly through the text and stop to read more closely only if there is
something that attracts your attention. If you speed-read at a good pace, this
little exercise will last scarcely five minutes (perhaps less if you’re really speedy). And bear in mind too, please,
that blogging, whatever else it might be, is a healthy exercise for the blogger
to provide text for ambitious speed-readers to become Masters of reading
speedily. Bloggers offer scope for fast readers to become accomplished, if not
omniscient: the speed-reader will for example acquire a necessary credential
for reading detailed engineering drawings, for studying historical data and
probably for espionage moments when reading documents extremely speedily is
essential for survival or for success.
Green, bourgeoise France. We are
going at tremendous speed. We cross bridges, the sound short and drumming. The
country is opening up. We are on our way to towns where no one goes. There are
long, wheat-coloured stretches and then green, level land, recumbent and rich.
The farms are built of stone. The wisdom of generations knows that land is the
only real wealth, a knowledge that need not question itself, need not change.
Open country flat as playing fields. Stands of trees.
James
Salter, A Sport And A Pastime.
Between
DD
I’m one of those people who sleep less than the average. There are
times when I wish that I slept more but I’m learning late that most of what
interests me is more or less available when I’m awake. To sleep altogether for
about a third of one’s life seems absurd: much time would be wasted as time
lost, time squandered that could have been used creatively, more productively.
I write every day: writing is what I enjoy doing, often for long hours. That
does not mean that I write incessantly when I might be doing something either
different or more desirable. There are useful gaps, spaces, pauses between
bouts of writing and washing the dishes or raking leaves or driving the car or
shopping. It’s currently the spaces
between activities that I ponder and the physical spaces between brain technologies, if I may call them that, such as
remembering or planning. Neither remembering nor planning is a steadily
continuous enterprise until completed: there are surely spaces between
thoughts, however minute. Are these spaces fuzzy or big or small and where
might they reside in the brain and how do we experience these in between phenomena in consciousness?
Consider how in between some car driving seems: the driver drives
‘automatically’ remembering nothing, sometimes, of having travelled from one
place to another? How do we manage that and where was the mind during that
time? If these available spaces are ‘empty’ are we able to visualise them? And
so on.
Sleeping is a huge space that is probably anything but empty. What
enables the sleeper’s mind to tick on in neutral or partly shut down during
sleep? How does that work? The
‘sleeping’ brain contrives cooperation with the rest of one’s self when
dreaming: the Gestalt Approach to dreams and to dreaming is that the dream and every part thereof is the dreamer.
The dreamer writes the script, provides all of the required ‘material’ to
enable a ‘screening’ in the mind. There
are opportunities in the off-duty brain for maintenance and improved planning;
might there be also opportunities for up-dating systems, for storing memories
and for improving memory storage? Could ‘being off duty’ all too easily become
‘being out to lunch)? Or should I give the attended brain and its enabled mind
a break and leave it to these remarkable facilities to do what they do best
without too much interceding or interference from me, the inquisitive
chairperson?
I know that sleep is a valuable process that not only will reduce wear
and tear: it contributes bountifully to that state of general good health that
I usually enjoy. I have therefore to broker an agreement with myself most
nights when the matter of sleep features itself. The agreement goes something
like this: I won’t lie awake worrying unduly about mistakes made this day or
take more than a few seconds to run through my list of enemies, particularly
those hopelessly deranged or intent on murder. In those several seconds I will
reflect on what can best be learned from mistakes and also allow the brief
resurgence of a few dark yet positive thoughts regarding enemies. ‘Enemies,’
whatever that might mean in this day and age, invariably are a nuisance.
Enemies and generally negative persons whose images intrude at sleep time in my
mind are imaginatively invited to wrench open a fantasised trapdoor in a dark
recess of my mind that enables instant disposal: all the bad guys fall
gracelessly through the trap and as they vanish from view in the general
direction of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (particularly
toward the very dark part of the triptych appearing most hellish), I dust off
my managerial hands and turn to something more creative: ideas and images more
positive and rewarding. I may then, for example, dwell on ‘my’ characters in a
current fiction that I’m crafting by cheerfully inventing their next moves,
their next lines and speeches, or I imagine my own wingless soaring and flying
along the serpentine Bellinger River at an enlightening altitude or brushing in
midair the canopies of great forest giants. Sometimes I don’t get very far in
these epic encounters and flights and without any further ado I shunt from wake
into sleep with minimal fuss. To my surprise I generally am able to remember
these inspirational and sometimes spiritual jaunts when I awake and am ready to
write again. These remembered images and thoughts as words gleaned are new possibilities
that will inform my writings or further my experience in the world: experiment with this next, and then do that… I don’t recommend this for anybody
other than for myself (but try it if it holds possibility for you). It seems
often to be effective for me and is certainly more interesting than not. And
there are times too when I become aware in the semi conscious state, that I
would like to understand more about how the sleeping mind goes about its
business. At such times I ponder memory, how it works, where it resides, how
easily it makes available to me in images places and people and events as
ideas, thoughts, or imagined words that often seem accompanied by a soundtrack.
On reflection, unexpectedly strange characteristics and qualities of people and
of fictive characters seem to come directly to me either from the distant past
or from the contemporary imagination. So far, my imagination seems forever
teeming. Our imaginations are the
most potent forces in the world. What could be more important than the
imagination? To be deprived of my imagination would be devastating: how could
anybody live without imagination?
Mental processes are so intriguing! When awake I always carry a small
notebook and a pen: if I’m away from the house and in the garden or walking
along the road and an idea arrives, I can jot it down and I do so
frequently.
I often remember (when fully awake, as I currently feel myself to be) I
recall yet again, with startling awareness that we remember, for instance, a
time when we last saw a particular person or a time when we last went swimming
or a time when this or that person did this or said that and in each of these
possibilities I can also see in this almost immediate show of imagery myself as if seen by another. I have
become used to this odd phenomenon but I was amazed when I first realized the
truth of this habituated experience: it was when I read Julian Jaynes’s
surprising book, The Origin Of
Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind. If you, dear reader,
now will kindly remember the last time you went swimming (for example), you are
most likely to see yourself in the imagery, swimming. As Jaynes reminds us, seeing yourself (as if by another or as
if in a photograph) is an experience we cannot in fact have or actually
experience except when remembering. Our minds know how to imagine that. Is that not awesome?
I frequently take a break during the day, usually at lunchtime, to sit
in the garden, often sitting and reading, sitting and writing or making notes,
and sometimes just sitting seeing. Most of my computer time these days is
devoted to long hours of editing writings that I intend to self publish and I’m
not reading enough when I allow myself time to read. Rather, I’ve been sitting
and seeing where I am. Passers by who see me thus, idly sitting (and possibly
also seeing what there is to be seen) will probably assume I am idling. Not
that there’s anything wrong with idling for relaxation, but sitting and seeing
sometimes inspires discoveries one might not otherwise easily have enjoyed. Seeing is also a great power. Vision is
so remarkable that it seems almost impossible to convey that wonder in words.
The experienced idler (myself sitting seeing in the garden), will see amazing
things as I have recently done, at almost any time of the day between dawn and
dusk. Also, everything that can be seen from one position will change
profoundly with only slight movements of one’s head.
I was sitting and looking at the old clumps of white begonias next to
the considerably old white cedar on the belvedere. The sun was low at 12:30,
this being mid-winter, and because it was declining toward the forested slopes
and a shortened afternoon, it was shining across
and through the plants at the
foot of the cedar tree and the light was perfectly illuminating the old white
begonia plants as well as many strands of very fine silk and small webs. But
for the strong sunlight and had I been restless or hasty I might never have
dwelt on the myriad small webs that drew my attention. I got up and went to
examine them more closely: the hunting lines were well strung between the
begonia stems, like vines in a forest, and the tiny webs well located and
sheltered and the spiders responsible were so miniscule I had to kneel to see
them. None of this would have been perceptible but for the brilliant light of
the sun illuminating the small scene as if it were a BIG Hollywood epic.
Surprised at the abundance of fine silk made by almost microscopic spiders I
walked around the tree to approximately its north side, a couple of meters
away, and studied the white begonia clump there: no silk, no webs, no spiders:
not one.
All of the spider/silk action is on the south side of the old tree.
Last February, only five months ago, the begonias close to my chair were
covered by more than 3-m of the flooding river (the begonias have never been
displaced in almost 30 years: they collect without any great difficulty,
impressive amounts of flotsam and loam whilst the flood falls).
I can still see the silky relatively new images that arise when I want
to remember them from wherever they are usually archived (a notion that implies
elaborate brain technologies for storing Old Stuff and considerable storage
space in which to keep it all). We have very, very sophisticated equipment between the ears and until someone
demonstrates that our mental capacity and our cognitive abilities are inferior
to something higher or deeper or whatever, we may be accommodating the smartest
brains or the best neural apparatus ever and
not only here on the Blue Planet, perhaps in the cosmos. That seems immensely
awesome when I think about it.
But that’s not what I’m presently struggling with because validation of
our brain’s capabilities beyond the planet is presently not possible; rather, it
is this: when I become aware of having accessed an idea and I then dwell on
that idea it is as if it occupies a very tiny space or even a speck in an
infinite space.
Lost
DD
Earlier this year, on the day now
known as Black Saturday, when the worst wildfires in modern Australian history
incinerated more than a million acres of the state of Victoria and killed 173
people, Bruce Ackerman left his house in Marysville to meet up with his regular
Saturday lunch group. Marysville, a small town some 60 miles northeast of
Melbourne, sprang up in the 1860s as a stopover for miners on their way to the
gold-rush towns farther north. Situated in a cool valley of the Great Dividing
Range, the mountainous spine that dominates eastern Australia, the town is a
popular tourist destination. Ackerman, a bluff fifty-year-old, is proud of
being a fourth-generation inhabitant, and told me that his work as a plumber
had taken him inside every house there except one. Over the years, he had
served on the water board, the cemetery trust, the school council, the
ambulance service, and the volunteer fire brigade.
Christine Kenneally, “The Inferno,” in The Best Australian Essays, 2010.
The old photos recently reviewed left behind afterglow notions that
made me think again of that 1935 camp scene in the woods somewhere on Vancouver
Island, near Englishman’s River, perhaps and Grace standing relaxed her hands
behind her back calmly regarding the photographer and I think myself as well
sitting in front of her by the campfire, the old tent in the background and the
woods all around, also the upright form rectangular or box-like almost of our
old motor car a Paige—and whatever became of it, that car? And what became of
the forest and the river: can they still be there? And there was an earlier
car, older, a Model T Ford I think it was? Was that the family car with a
hand-levered throttle mounted next to the steering wheel? Whatever happened to
that car and how easily did running boards disappear from motorcars; the Paige
had them I’m sure? Some 1920s and 1930s cars with running boards had also an
added secured box or container for the family dog. And in those far-off times
we weren’t able to see ahead this far and into this century unless we read
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comics.
I remember too that my sister Deirdre when I was a toddler would
sometimes take me to the stone beach not far from our house in Oxford Street
and she’d show me the tidal pools in the bedrock filled with vey small
creatures in and under the water: anemones and crab, seaweed that seemed to
wave; bright pebbles. She used to search for amber close to the waves; she had
two small pieces that glowed like jewellery. What became of our cameras? What
became of items in that old house: a Venetian glass scent bottle on my mother’s
dressing table, the decorative small concave bowls like delicate ashtrays with
butterfly wings glassed in? And the cardboard box filled with glass baubles and
fragile glass balls and shimmering decorations that were the Christmas tree
decorations, and my tricycle and the four-wheeled wooden wagon and my two cap
pistols? Are any of those in museums now?
Found
DD
The g’s slammed me into my seat
like thugs and pinned me while my heart pounded and the plane turned over
slowly and compacted each organ in turn. My eyeballs were newly spherical and
full of heartbeats. I seemed to hear a crescendo; the wing rolled shuddering
down the last ninety degrees and settled on the flat. There were the islands,
admirably below us, and the clouds, admirably above. When I could breathe, I
asked if we could do it again, and we did. He rolled the other way. The
brilliant line of the sea slid up the side window bearing its heavy islands.
Through the shriek of my blood and the plane’s shakes I glimpsed the line of
the sea over the windshield, thin as a spear.
Annie
Dillard: The Writing Life.
At Earthrise the sun would keep moving with its brilliance on the
bright winter day. Shadowgraphs of nearby foliage, cast on the pale cream of
flooded-gum trunks, would move too, orchestrated. The pictures would change
continually, slowly, and you would have to adjust to that change, that slow
movement because the shadows moved imperceptibly yet changed the images so
hugely: imaged fuzzy leaves, imaged blurred branches, all projected as if in a
theatre on a high narrow screen. Like an exquisitely slow exposition settling
you for an afternoon’s viewing in the galleried forest. Nobody else would
arrive privately for such a public show changed to a private showing. The
viewer would be privileged and there was a second chair available. Shadowgraphs
on the flooded-gums trunks are both old and new and may always be seen whilst
forever changing. Different flooded-gums screen different pictures. One tree
looms over the shadowed house we built 30 years ago, the house show 40- to 50-m
high over the lawn. And after sunset darkness would arrive and there would be
no further shadowgraphs until the moon’s rising and then the viewer could see
shows more velvety, softer on the night-time trunks.
In this part of the garden butterflies were frequent, even in winter
and they put on air shows of their own. The garden views were seldom silent or
empty: the air when looked at from behind a shading hand encouraged the sun to
reveal squadrons of winged insects flying, possibly sometimes for pleasure.
Tiny insects airborne were white and bright in strong sunlight; they hung
forcefully in any breeze that tried to disrupt and move them around. Some
butterflies navigated bobbing and bouncing at speed, often upward at acute
angles and through foliage without accidents.
And gallery-goers could find nearby sunny patterns of the river’s
surface projected through the running river’s shallows and those images free
for all as enlarged pictures at an exhibition of minute ripples and swirls and
froth. And these would be underwater shows screened on the surfaces of stones
or the river’s sandy bottom. Movement of sunlight and shadows made fine art.
In 1991 when I stood on the small stone beach and looked back across
the Cowichan at the footbridge and the steps down the crumbling far ban and the
rails on one side to assist going down and up ant the woods looming over the
cabin, I was astonished to find it all so apparently unchanged since the 1930s.
It was eerie. Does the river there not flood? And similarly in downtown
Victoria the city library in the Provincial Capital had unchanged steps outside
the building, steps that seemed huge when I was a small boy and in 1991 seemed
toy-like. The same steps were perceived in two different eras and seemed so
changed in the 1990s.
In the 1930s Mom used to cook plain boiled white rice and a mutton stew
that we’d take in two pots to the car and drive down Cook Street to the stone
beach on summer eves and eating that simple food on the beach in those far-off
Depression days was a splendid experience for the family and I remember those
times so well that they seem more like four years ago rather than 84 years ago.
Everything changes: and you have to keep your eye on everything that moves.
About my eBooks: For
those readers who browse for eBooks, here again are the first of those that
I’ve begun self-publishing:
1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
with some magical realism. A
scene-stealing child prodigy keeps the characters in order (novel, about 150-k
words).
5. 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).
6. 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).
7. The Overview is an Australian novella set at Earthrise
(about 32-k words) and is also a sequel to The
Summer River.
8. Scribbles from Earthrise is a selection
of 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.
9. Here and There is a selection of Home
and Away essays.
With best wishes from
Don.
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