In which the fish discerns her friend in the darkness

I'm not sure when it became usual to have endless stretches of dull grey weather in summer. Today is yet another one: flat light, mean grey skies and churned water. The wind and the sea endlessly bickering and throwing themselves against each other in an ugly way.

The surf runs out, taking sand and froth with it, in a half hearted tantrum, and I catch the rip out to the point, noting that the rhythm is uneven and fast. Not the time signature of human breathing today but short sharp gasps. Hanks of weed hang suspended from the surface and eddies of sand drift up from beneath. It's hard to get a rhythm here today, it's all chin tucked in and exaggerated body roll so that every few seconds I am gaping up at the dull sky.

In the pale olive dimness I think I see something move, though I can't be sure. Whatever it is, it moves quickly away from me, decisively spooked. As I peer into the murk I run into a huge clump of weed and am startled, shifting my focus from far to near. I continue on, and again a shadow. I look hard, and make out the familiar shape of a shark, barely visible against the sand.
There you are, my friend, I say. 

My pale-eyed friend fades into the shadows, causing me to wonder what else might be nearby, unseen. In the deepest part of the bay,  the waves are colliding from different directions, so that as I raise my arm I am tipped right over, spinning like a fishing lure. Below is just opaque darkness.
I muse that Great White Sharks don't approach shallow enclosed areas, whereas this place was deep enough that mother whale once came to safely hide her calf. 
I think about that whale, and wish she would come back.
I am still waiting for her to return.


There are humpbacks in my ocean, travelling home. Last week on a long journey swim along the coast, past headlands and cliffs, I could hear them. Just off the Freshwater Headland, where the water was luminous and deep and the colour of pale aquamarine, I suddenly sensed that there were humpbacks around. Right at that moment my friend bumped into me, and I pretended we were humpbacks. 
Later from home I saw the whale watch boat heading out, so I had not been mistaken.

I swam across the bay and turned around with my head down against the rolling chop. Back across the darkness, back through the bouncing waves a sole kingfish swam around like an overconfident bully, not flinching one bit as I swam over it. Having the urge to scare it, whispering hey Hiramasa, what do you think of sashimi?  It merely rolled its eyes and waved its yellow tail, resolute in its efforts to ignore me.

Heading for the point, I finally saw the shark just a metre below me. 
Its large pectoral fins like cat's ears, its pale gaze fixed firmly ahead. I followed it quietly, watching it sway back and forth. 
Where have you been? I asked. Where are the rest of you?
I wished to wrap my arms around her and rest my face on her rough skin and let her carry me to the darkest part of the ocean.

Between myself and the shore an expanse of white water, chopped and ripped. Hordes of small children in their nipper hats were running, marching and swimming distantly on the sand. Following the shark until it faded into  sandy opacity, it occurred to me that were my shark friend not so well hidden by impenetrable water, all hell may well break loose on shore. Sirens would wail, parents would scream.

Stay hidden, friend. I said. Stay safe.
She disappeared then, and I tucked my chin in, swam hard, in battle against a sea trying to do  its best to drag me backwards and outwards, but today that was not to be. 
Emerging from the water the silence vanished, and all the noise roared in.

In Which The Fish Regards the Sea in Spring

My first Winter here has just ended, but Spring seems not to know what is expected, and lets the cold come creeping in. 

Deep, dark, bonefreezing cold. 

You see, it isn't the rolling Southerlies from the Antarctic one has to worry about, but the irresponsible rudeness of the Nor'easter: bickering with the surface of the sea with no grace whatever. Slapping coldness, stirring up the quiet deepness, chilling me. My fingers act of their own accord and I find my hands are less like fins and more like claws: so troublesome when one needs to glide through the water.

The solitary experience of swimming in a trance is over these days. There are lots of us, to and fro across the bay. The early lap is quiet, almost soundless: the later lap a party of arms and caps and trails of kicked froth. Banter and chatter, we are a school of fish.

Each day I swim with the usual silver fish, assembled quietly on the bottom, or soaring along just beneath the surface canopy. The Luderick with their small smiles, the Whiting with their anxious eyes. 

The Morwong with its painted face, the yellowtail scad in a cloud of a thousand, all moving about, catching the light in the green water of the bay.

I count the days until the sharks return...is it seven days, or more? One day I will look down and the mothers will be there, and tiny miniature sharks will pace around just above the wrinkled sand far below. In the meantime, I take stock...

Beneath the calm surface of the icy sea today, 

I see

               Six pipefish like a pile of pencils dropped

        

Port Jacksons hiding under ledges

Still in their pyjamas.

The usual rabble 

       

of long nosed Whiting and the other silver friends,

And Big Blue, poking at the urchins with his bony blue lips. 

I wish one time

Big Blue might come and bite me

with his little peg teeth

just so I can look into the impossible meniscus

of his 

big blue eye.

Memory in an Earthen shell

Edmund de Waal at the Sydney Writers' Festival

Sydney Opera House, May 20, 2012

 I know it was the Sydney Writers Festival, but as Edmund de Waal has repeatedly stated, he is ‘a potter who writes.’ So I arrived with the expectation that some conversation might be had about objects, their making and their presence. In some ways this was so, but I feel that any artists' dialogue was overtaken by a discussion of cultural history and religion. It was, however, a wonderful experience, as was reading his most recent book, The Hare with Amber Eyes, in which he traces the history of his family's ownership of the 264 Japanese netsuke of which he finds himself custodian. 

I have long been fascinated by this man, the creator of such quiet forms, of  installations of  objects possessing a measure of silence almost defiant of their own materiality.  But it is their materiality which holds our gaze, and reveals these hidden connections and threads of memory. In his work, in the spaces reside both the silences of loss, and the notion of empty space as potentiality rather than nothingness.

It has been said that the handmade holds memory in a stable shell. 
The very tactility and presence of such objects and the way they demand to be held asserts a particular force within our increasingly screen based, un-present existence. This is what has prompted Edmund De Waal's great journey into his own family history: a sense of touch, of connecting, of feeling. 
Of making visible the unseen through the material presence of the netsuke, holding them within the palm of his hand. It is the object itself which has made the connections for him.

He appeared on stage at the Opera House before a packed house. In the middle of the stage was a small table, a cosy table lamp, a rug, two chairs.  The backdrop was black, but the speakers were flanked by the vermilion banners of the Sydney Writers' Festival, two bright vertical shapes bracketing the figures within the dark void. Edmund de Waal wore a dark grey suit, black shoes and a white shirt, so that he was almost invisible  against the darkness: just his luminous face and his hands caught the light. His face. A  vertical slash of white shirt. His hands.

And what hands they were: they were singularly the most extraordinary hands I may have ever seen. He sat, and shifted his long limbs in his seat in that self-deprecating English way, at times almost curling his back to the overwhelming sight of the audience, then  knock-kneed and sitting on his hands like a schoolboy.  He was of the most interesting proportion: elongated, lithe.  And his hands were just enormous. Made for surrounding and enveloping around the growing sides of a ceramic form.

   

                    

As he sat, and spoke so beautifully, his hands gestured like two rather large pale birds. His knees jutted out, his long spine curved over. And all I could  see was a man sitting throwing pots on the wheel, his long straight arms  firm and balanced, his face poised above, coaxing, with these  uncommonly large hands, forms of great beauty from wet earth. Regarding with a zen fixedness the appearance of a vessel. A shape.

So I was,  somewhat disturbed by the way the discussion proceeded. Caroline Baum, competently leading the dialogue, seemed (to me) to be on the wrong track. I know that people will own a story, that they will receive it as if it has been written just for them.  A book will become the property of the reader, and once a text or a work has been released into the world it becomes, in a sense, an  audiences’ thing, to do with what they wish.  But I could not help thinking that Caroline, and the audience who were asking questions,  had missed the point.

It became about Jewishness. It became about everybody else’s family history and connection with the Jewish diaspora. It became about history. It became about everybody else’s sense of faith, and at least the audience groaned in solidarity when the  ubiquitous (catholic) stepped up to the microphone wanting a discussion on faith, presumably to shore up or affirm her own.

But it should have been about things: the feel of them, the tactility, the making, the holding, the drawing out of formlessness to form. About fingers, palms. About the scent of wet earth, about sculpting and pinching and creating a thing. About the way the sensation of that object prompts feeling and thought. About the way history and memory will come to reside within.

De Waal answered this question beautifully,  saying his faith manifested in a  jewish-zen-quaker-protestant way….which is perfectly evident if you actually look at his work.  His work is peaceful, silent, contemplative. It exists, within the context of the  florid, almost baroque family history of which he writes as a pause,  a caesura,  an almost-absence. 
An immaterial materiality, so to speak, a  pause in the concerto, a breath between arias.  The collections, the vast castles, the pattern, colour and gold of  the culture, experience and possessions of which he speaks and his family owned and lost is transcended by the purity and quiet of his own practice.

There was a point when Edmund de Waal lost his composure and commenced weeping. Naturally, I was compelled to weep along with him,  as he explained about finding that the records of his Viennese ancestors had literally been erased by some SS minion. It was this that undid him, and he had to curl his body into a shape which excluded the sight of hundreds of people watching on.  Tears poured from my eyes.

I had not been expecting this emotion, although I should have. Edmund de Waal spoke in such a kindly affirming way, despite his evident emotional fragility and his jet-lagged state.  I felt sad that this man had been separated from his clay, his wheel, his pots, his family, his house, yet  he continued to share his thoughts for an hour and a half with grace.

He left the stage and finally allowed himself to look at the audience, most of whom were standing, applauding. He paused for a millisecond, taking it in, raised his luminous hand, and suddenly waved, like a child getting on the  schoolbus, before being hustled through the darkened corridors to the signing table. It is this sudden, guileless waving which provides the punctum to the picture,  the thorn that pierces my heart. Still.

I joined the long, long line, and waited my turn, clutching my copy of his book, The Hare with Amber Eyes. Not The Pot Book, which I had considered bringing. I hadn’t actually brought it to be signed, but just to flick through on the ferry, and to look at the pictures, but I stood nonetheless on the end of the vast line of people, feeling like a groupie. Feeling that I was in fact utterly different to all the other people on the queue, when in fact I was not, all of us feeling that he had spoken particularly to each of us. A professorial kindness, politeness couched in a genuine sense of giving.

When It came my turn I was struck by the effort Edmund de Waal was making, in his tired and jet lagged state. I considered for a moment whether I could reach out and feel the tips of his fingers, but I straightened up, smiled, and handed him my book. Your hands...
 I began
must be tired 
 He sat up, looked me in the eyes, and spoke. 
Oh, yes, they are! Thank you  for coming, glad you enjoyed it. 


And he smiled then, leaned forward, committing his entire body to the gesture

and using his great big hand, crossed out the printed version of his name in my book, and signed his own.

Postscript.

Later that night, after I had journeyed home in the late evening light, eaten my dinner and spoken to friends, I stood at the basin in the bathroom to wash my face for bed, and there on my face were black crusty tearmarks, fanned down my cheeks like the Nile Delta. So I wonder if Edmund de Waal wondered who the chimney sweep with the wild hair and blackened face was at the Sydney Opera House, proffering her book.

In which the fish returns to the sea

 I had a think about it, and I could not remember a time for over two decades when I did not swim. Every day, wind, rain or shine.

 For a few years, it was at 4pm when the shadows began to lengthen and the light lay obliquely on the surface of the sea. 

Gradually, necessity dictated that I rise at dawn and greet the ocean as the sun rose. 

Life is like that, always changing the rules of engagement.

 For most of my life, the idea of not swimming was unthinkable, and at times the thought of doing without it was something  incomprehensible and distressing.

 I would feel physically ill at the prospect of a day with no swim. 

Everything in life has the potential to become an addiction, I suppose. 

Swimming was mine.

Thankfully, it was legal.

 Like all addictions, one will go to great lengths to obtain a hit. 

I once swam 2km in 10C water one winter by tricking myself that I was about to get out. I just kept going, saying I'd just do another few meters...

and another...

and another.

 I began to realise a kind of useful philosophy. 

when people asked with horror how I managed to swim so far in the cold at that hour,

 I would try and explain that it is all a matter of the mind: that  actual sensation of being so cold, and the burning on the skin is all transient. It disappears in minutes and your skin tingles and burns, so that you don't feel the cold at all. 

And at dawn there is no warm sun to feel on your body, so the water seems a lovely prospect since it is often warmer than the air anyway.

  I began to think of this idea in relation to things that made me anxious: 

it will pass, it will change, these things are transient.

 But this winter, because of reasons, it became harder to swim. 

The ocean pool was demolished to be renovated, which  ruled out dawn swims among the predators having their breakfast in the wine dark sea.

Work interfered with daytime swims, and my lovely sojourn in golden-hot Venice seemed to render me vulnerable to the cold. The sea spent the southern winter in a state of fury, waves lashing and rolling and thundering, making it particularly hard for the ocean swimmer to make any headway at all. I did my best, but I almost had my pelt flayed off by rushing columns of sand.

 I was indeed a smelly and rotting dried up old fish out of water.

 Until one day someone suggested I join her swim group, two beaches away.

 Everybody is very loyal to their own territory, and at first I declined. But I began to think I might just have a try. I hadnt quite known where and when this bunch actually swam, so she ordered me to meet up and come along. 

So,

 I did.

We swim across a marine reserve, out to a headland which shelters the bay from the heavier waves rolling in from the sea. 

Creatures breed in this bay. They are all protected: 

Sharks, Rays, Eastern Blue gropers, Wrasse, Luderick,

 Whiting, Squid, Cuttlefish, 

Old Wives, Silver Bream. 

and last spring, I am told (and have seen pictures)

a baby humpback whale joined in. 

 So the fish has migrated, and now swims in the bay in a shoal.

and every day now, 

 says hello to the Gropers, the Rays and the Sharks, 

the Wrasse and the Luderick, 

the Spotty Catfish, the Old Wives, 

the Sand Whiting and the Silver Bream, 

and the salt soaks into her gills, enlivens her scales, illuminates her big fish eyes

and she says to herself when she thinks of the woes in the world:

this too will pass

and swims boldly across the bay: into the ocean, 

home at last.

North and South: Strange times in the Life of the Fish

 So.

I become a salted fish head in a box, 

all staring eyes and hard scales sticking out every which way, 

fins hard and encrusted. Smelling like some rotten piece of flotsam, 

of marine life too long in the air, a rank and briny stink.

The winter has whipped the ocean into a frenzy, and the pool is boarded up. 

Look at me, a salty fish head in a box. Nowhere to swim! Too much to do! I may as well be dead!

Too much going on in the world,  thinks the fish brain in its limited and smelly way. 

Too much in the world! 

The sea says nothing for quite some time, because it is occupied having the mother of all seizures,

always seems to be  mid-convulsion. 

The fish, rolling out of its box, tosses to and fro at the edge of the howling sea, all staring eyes and stiff 

fins, all clouded scales poking every way. The silver of its cheeks is worn dull, and it gathers a crusting 

of sand, small barnacles, and the dried fronds of seaweed.

The sea, in a small moment between fits, reaches out a frilled and creamy wave, and rolls the stiff-finned creature swiftly into the deep.

you had better wake up, 

said the sea, as it worked its way into the cracks.

Things float vast distances in the ocean,

strange currents circle and pull.

The outgoing tide pulls you under, where the sunlight is a mere green whisper,

submerges you in shadows.

When the waves lift up at last, you get to see the view. Who knows where you will be?

I opened my eyes,

 and was back in the city of water.

And so the tidal pull takes me back to Venice, 

where the sun breaks into a million pieces and reflects onto the palazzo walls,

where a hundred boats make their ways this way and that, weaving webs upon the malachite waters,

 here, look at this one: lights strung across the deck, 

or that one, carrying a little crane, 

or this one, bigger than every island of Venice put together...

This fish from the south finds itself in the summer of the north, 

in a summer hot and bright,

where the water is benign and silent,

and all around is colour: shifting with the fluid light.

And the salty fish leaps into the air, 

all silver and lithe,

and lives awhile in the city of water,

taking deep breaths,

and looking with great round fish eyes,

happy as can be. 

Am I dreaming? asks the fish.

No, no

says the sea.

You are not.

In which the fish greets Easter Sunday

We were all there, on Easter Sunday.  

The sea, warm as my blood, rocked and danced quietly 

under an immense and luminous dome of blue.

I slipped out on the current and watched the heads of my offspring, sleek and shining with light, darting and bobbing over and under the waves.  The seagrass below waved

 like a field of green, a forgotten world.

I swam past them, and drifted awhile in the calm of the open water, breathing in and out slowly, drawing saltness and blueness deep into the heart of me. Folks sat on boards and chatted quietly waiting for waves, or dipped cupped hands along the surface, going here and there, looking for the best place. 

The ocean was soft and green out here, far from the tangle and thrust of life. I floated with my hair down like tentacles.

 I wondered what I might snare.

After some time I raised my head, and saw the horizon tilt. 

For Me?

I asked the sea.

I flipped my fins and the sea picked me up on its wavering lip. 

I stretched out my hand, holding the heel of my palm against the surface of the wave which had turned to glass as the sea rolled forward.

I was so high that I raised my head and watched the water speed beneath my hand, the froth and foam rushing, spitting out onto the dark green of itself.

I flew in like  some strange heraldic sea creature all the way to the sand, where I stood up, flicked my hair from my face,  and breathed once more

the salt of the sea, 

into every small corner of my heart.

fish on good friday

Yesterday

I did not want to leave to go to work. 

I wanted to stay home, 

sit on the red chair with the cat, 

then go to the sea.

Today

I can.

Happy Easter everyone.

the fish in the phone

Having contracted myself this semester to an unseemly number of classes, I have found little time to do much else, and thankfully I am now more than  half way through the semester.

As can be expected when one works nine hour days, the family chooses to all have simultaneous breakdowns and issues, which contributes to all the excitement. There is not a lot of time to do much else at the moment: when I am not teaching, I am reading up for the two postgraduate classes I was breaking my neck to have. This week I am reading up on Bourdieu, Elliot Eisner,  and pictorial conventions in Venetian portraiture.  I am very thankful for this, as some of the other things I have had to read were very annoying. 

Interestingly I looked at the photos on my iphone and found it had become a little journal of sorts, a record of my life in phone photos.

Classes

They are many classes. Lots and lots, so it is fortunate I actually like them.

Here are  some students drawing a few weeks ago.

At the moment they are painting. All 180 of them...

thankfully not all at once.

Driving

I spend a lot of time in my car thinking about things. I look at the sky a lot because I go up and down a few big hills. This was on my way home.

Some days are of course nicer than others. This is Sydney,  City of four seasons in one day.

The band

The Husbands band plays quite a bit, and here they were playing down the coast a bit and I drove down to watch.

I drove home in a rather melancholic state, because of reasons, and played Einaudi all the way home, looking at the scenery. It is an emotionally-laden landscape, full of nostalgia, change, and remembered other lives that I have led.

 

In contrast, they played at an inner city pub, which was fun even though I think that day I was fretting over some reading for that week, which was not Bourdieu but something very tedious if I remember correctly. It was good to get out and watch. the proprietor said it was his biggest crowd ever.

The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes Opening Night at the AGNSW

Here I am with My friend Ben in front of his artwork. That room resembled, as Ben described it, a zoo.

As you can see I remembered to take my favourite bling (in the form of silver coral) to work, but NOT my hairbrush. 

Pity.

Here is Lucy Culliton's painting of Ray Hughes. She is a great girl, and I have a few of her paintings here in the house, one is of cakes.

Here is the winning Ben (Quilty),  with whom I have had the pleasure of speaking a number of times and  been impressed by the depth of his feelings on various issues such as indigenous rights, australian history and identity, and the way young men in the outer suburbs enact various suburban rituals. 

He seems a very generous guy, and before he moved to the southern highlands from Sydney, was happy to accomodate my painting students, and give them talks on his work and ideas for nothing. 

In his speech at the opening, he gave a pasting to sportspeople who dont pay their HECS debts. Culture, he said, is the glue that sticks us together, and in hard economic times it was culture which provided social cohesion. He then questioned the legitimacy of famous swimmers who did not have to pay university fees, whereas others who made important contributions to life, still had to. He included in this equation his own brother who had just attained a doctorate in soil rehabilitation, rather than just swimming up and down a pool. It was interesting.

Peace and Quiet

The boys of the family spent some time on a surf trip. This meant that after I cleaned the house, it stayed that way. 

Sadly, they have decided to return and fill my life with chaos.

Weather

Some days commence in spectacular fashion

and finish with a tsunami of sorts, right above my house.

And such is the life of the fish, whio ha managed only fragments of time in the water, and is hoping very soon to be spending far more time in the salty deep.