Quentin Bega

SQ 11 The Mark of Cain

Entry 11: The Mark of Cain- The first crime recorded in Genesis is homicide or, more specifically, fratricide. But this is not the first sin: that preceded the crime. Milton puts it most memorably in the opening lines of the great Paradise Lost:

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed In the beginning how the heavens and earth rose out of Chaos.

The mortal taste of the forbidden fruit results in the expulsion from Eden and we find Adam and Eve wandering east of Eden dressed in garments of skin. God places an angel with a flaming sword at the entrance to the garden to prevent the pair, who now have knowledge of good and evil, from returning to eat from the tree of life and thus become immortal. God had cursed the deceiving serpent and also the ground so that humanity would have to struggle against weeds and blight to bring forth sustenance: as the King James version puts it:

…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;Thorns also

and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Interesting, from the point of view of a contemporary audience, is the paucity of detail surrounding the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. We are used to printed and visual texts going into minute detail about motivation and the process leading up to the act of murder itself. Basically all we are told is that God accepted Abel’s offering over Cain’s. Cain gets in a snit. Then they go out into the field where, in the words of the King James Bible, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and slew him.

That’s it. Nothing more. The aftermath is more detailed, of course. When God enquires after Abel, Cain replies with the famous line: Am I my brother’s keeper? God then condemns Cain to roam the earth as a fugitive and a vagabond, unable to till the ground as it has drunk the blood of his brother. When Cain complains that he will be a marked man (and here we need not examine too closely where the other people who would harm Cain might have come from) God replies: Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

So, originally the mark of Cain was divine protection! Fratricide has been a feature of legend, history and society from this time: In The Antigone, by Sophocles, Eteocles and Polyneices kill each other by stabbing one another through the heart; Romulus kills Remus and founds the city of Rome- setting the stage for lots of family killings down through the centuries. In Hamlet, Claudius kills his brother, the king to grab the throne and Queen Gertrude.

At about the same time as the composition of Hamlet, it was not a recipe for long life to be the brother of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. In the reign of Mehmet III, upon the birth

of a male heir to the throne, nineteen of his brothers were strangled with silk cords and buried with their father. In contemporary popular culture, Michael Coreleone kills his brother in The Godfather, Part Two and, in Disney’s The Lion King, Scar kills his brother Mufasa.

In the mid-1980s, I had been successful in writing a TV and a radio drama for the Irish broadcaster, RTE, both of which incorporated music as part of the drama. I then started to write a TV show for Ulster TV called The Last Country Band in Ireland, and as a preparation for this I had listened to countless hours of country music from Ireland and the US. The show was to open with a showdown using the cliché of two gunslingers facing one another in a western setting- saloon bar, horse stables, goods store, sheriff’s office and frontier damsels with handkerchiefs raised in horror to their faces.

The song would play over the opening sequence leading to the shoot-out, when the camera would pan back and we would see the backdrop to be a contemporary Ulster setting. I had a lunchtime meeting with one of the station’s producers and everything seemed promising.

Then, the opportunity to return to Australia fell in my lap and, with only six months to avail myself of this prospect, I did not have time to complete the script and the process and make the arrangements for the move back to Australia. But I did have the time to write a few songs in the genre. I had chosen this song to open the show, which, like too many other ideas, lies stillborn in a file somewhere in the loft or garage. But here’s the song:

The Mark of Cain

SQ 12 Surprised by Joy

Elegy_Peele_Castle_in_a_Storm_by_Sir_George_Beaumont

Entry 12: Surprised by Joy– Elegiac song and verse have long exerted a fascination over me. Even before my life was touched by personal tragedy, I was drawn to artistic works that explored eschatological themes. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the word, I do not mean to be unduly obscurantist, nor should you confuse the term with scatological which deals with excremental matters; although, when I reflect upon it, there may be a connection.

Can you remember the film, Full Metal Jacket, at the very end, when Private Joker, surviving the horrors of Vietnam, says, “I’m in a world of shit”? So many traumatised people would echo his words: military men and women returned from conflict zones, paramedics, police officers, firies and emergency responders as well as those benighted individuals who do not have the excuse of having served in such capacities but who just have encountered the black dog in their lives and can’t get rid of it.

The four last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell are the territory of eschatology and

really only an issue for believers who profess that there is meaning in this universe. Others would simply say it’s random and there’s nothing else. This view I respect even though I do not share it. For me, I have been surprised by joy too many times to feel otherwise. A formation of clouds, a smile, a kindly word, an unexpected compliment, a breath of fresh air, a hug from a child- on and on I could go, perhaps writing the hit lyrics of a saccharine country song.

But, instead, I turn to one of my literary heroes, William Wordsworth, to give these thoughts proper context when he reflects on what it is that is important in the larger

scheme of things. He talks about, that best portion of a good man’s life, / His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. What a dreadful proposition this would be to the players in today’s media circus. Good deeds unreported!

I cannot open a newspaper or magazine, switch on a current affairs or lifestyle show without being bombarded with a barrage of overwhelming acts of charity as homes are refurbished, holidays provided, reunions facilitated and medical miracles accomplished in the glare of publicity and attendant advertising.

Not that I begrudge, in any way, the recipients of this largesse. I do feel for the numberless and nameless who will never benefit. Name, fame, the celebrity game is just so much blather. We are all used to yet another icon exposed on the breakfast news as venal or sad or pathetic- just like us really. I remember when the great cynic of English poetry in the previous, century, Philip Larkin was taken off in one of those ships with black sails.

Almost before the vessel had vanished around a misty bend of the River Styx we were breathlessly informed that the poet had a collection of what was described as repulsive pornography, and as for the content of his diaries…well! But I will always think softly of him, not only because of his life and works but an anecdote concerning him. He was, as I

recall, driving back towards his home in Hull along the motorway, listening to the radio and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the windshield wipers when he had to pull onto the hard shoulder, blinded by tears, because, on the radio, someone had begun reciting a sonnet by Wordsworth:

Surprised by joy- impatient as the Wind/I turned to share the transport- Oh! With whom/ But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, / that spot which no vicissitudes can find? / Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind-/But how could I forget thee? Through what power, / Even for the least division of an hour, /Have I been so beguiled as to be blind/to my most grievous loss! – That thought’s return/Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,/Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,/Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;/That neither present time, nor years unborn/Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

The song was performed only once in public, at the newly opened Penrith Gaels club in Sydney in 1997. Unfortunately, I had neglected to tell my wife about this song, which had

just been written. Indeed, the decision to sing it was spur-of-the-moment. As she listened to the lyrics, she realised the context and left the venue in tears.

When she asked me later if the dream detailed in the song, Surprised by Joy, had been a real dream, I admitted that, no, it was just an idea I had for writing a song- but true, just the same- truer, perhaps, because it was not dredged from the unconscious sludge of my mind but that I dreamed the whole thing consciously as I beat the red-hot iron in the smithy of my waking imagination, feeling with each blow, the pain of loss but persevering nonetheless to produce an elegy that would serve:

Surprised by Joy

SQ 13 Starting Over Again

Entry 13: Starting Over Again- Why we ever think about a new start must be hard-wired into the genome. The eternal optimists among us come up with phrases such as, This is the first day of the rest of your life and Every cloud has a silver lining. Which is as valid a philosophical

point of view as any, I suppose. But, if there are causal connections linking every aspect of existence then this view is nonsensical.

To illustrate- let’s reduce the universe to your bare foot resting on the ground and a house brick poised thirty-two feet above it. Now, let the brick accelerate downwards subject to the earth’s normal gravitational force. In about one second you will be screaming in pain. Quantum mechanics, however, will rush into the fray to assure you that indeterminism is woven into the fabric of the universe, so, perhaps, that brick, which, when last we saw it, was hurtling towards your unprotected toes, gathering momentum and kinetic energy on its way, will transform into a shower of rose-petals just before impact.

In which case, you may, and with some justice, feel inclined to take the time to smell the flowery fragments. Better this, than shelling out hard-won cash on diet books and self-help courses which sell in huge quantities as a testimonial to the optimistic hard-wiring of most of the human species.

Let us, then, turn to literature to expand on these matters. Professor Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide is definitely a glass-half-full kind of guy. He is the learned tutor to the eponymous hero. They live a blissful life until Candide makes the mistake of kissing, Cunegonde, the beautiful and desirable daughter of the owner of their luxurious castle and surrounding garden. In the time between their expulsion from their paradisial abode at the novella’s start and the garden in which they find themselves at the conclusion, Pangloss and, separately, his naïve charge, Candide, undergo a series of improbable adventures including a scene in Lisbon Harbour where the one-eyed-one-eared-syphilitic tutor, now reunited with his erstwhile pupil (didn’t I mention a series of improbable adventures?) assures Candide that the tragic drowning of a friend, Jacques, who had saved him from being lynched, was quite in keeping with the Panglossian world view, which is summed up in the words: we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Pangloss goes on to state authoritatively that Lisbon Harbour was, in fact, created in order that Jacques could drown therein. Now I don’t want to place too many spoilers in the way of those who may wish to peruse the original work either in French or in translation but here are a few titbits to whet your appetite. Cunegonde and Candide are re-united where he learns she has survived rape and disembowelment (need I say “improbably”, again?). She incautiously whinges about this to an old woman who retorts that she had to suffer loss of a buttock to feed some starving men. Candide, separated a second time from his love, finds himself in El Dorado where a life of fulfilment and riches are on offer. But Candide, pining for Cunegonde, sets out in search of her with lots of loot which, of course, he mostly loses along the way.

Learning of her location in Turkey where she is enslaved and hideously ugly because of the privations she has endured along the way, he proceeds there and purchases her freedom. With the last of his money, he buys a plot of land after seeking guidance from a Turkish farmer who tells him,“I have no more than twenty acres of ground, the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labour keeps off from us three great evils — idleness, vice, and want.”

The Age of Enlightenment precedes the Romantic Era, but here we find a situation that would have appealed to Wordsworth. The last sight we have of Candide and his companions finds that they are tending their garden, leaving the concerns of the wider world to someone else.

However, the final word goes to another author, one Arnold Bennett, the author of the

magnificently titled, The Grand Babylon Hotel. He has this to say about the nature of time:

The chief beauty about time/is that you cannot waste it in advance. /The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,/as perfect, as unspoiled,/as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life./ You can turn over a new leaf every hour/if you choose.

I admit to being attracted to his views on life. He gives his writing formula, which also appeals, without demur: I put in genuine quantities of wealth, luxury, feminine beauty, surprise, catastrophe and genial incurable optimism. And, as to why he wrote so much: Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I can do better myself?

Starting Over Again

SQ 14 All the Women

Entry 14: All the Women- A circle with a small equilateral cross underneath, a stylised representation of the goddess Venus’s hand-mirror, is widely known as the symbol for woman. There is also another association: with the element copper. Alchemists, or, at least, some among their number, represented this element by constructing the symbol from a circle (representing spirit) above an equilateral cross (representing matter). Spirit and matter: that covers all the bases, I would think.

The symbol for Man is not so interesting: the circle represents the shield of Mars, the god of war, with a spear pointing to the top-right quadrant typifies the male of the species. Men are associated, alchemically, with the element iron. Is this, I wonder, the origin of the saying Men are from Mars and Women from Venus? Such a citation may lead one to expect a dissertation on the battle of the sexes: sorry, ain’t happening. Furthermore, because this entry is entitled “All the Women”, the listener may be expecting a learned explication on the topic. Alas, my expertise, knowledgeability and experience of the gender is lamentably narrow and, therefore, such expectations will be disappointed.

My store of info on men is not much better but I do have the advantage of decades inhabiting the skin of one knowing what it means to grow through the feverish throes of adolescence into adulthood, trapped, as some theorists would assert, in the patriarchal paradigm. But this socio-babble is making me queasy so I’ll cease and desist, as the saying goes and retreat to the sane embrace of the Bard- Bill Shakes.

In the bloodiest and briefest of the great tragedies, the tyrant, Macbeth, mocks the manhood of the two murderers he has engaged to slay the most immediate threat to his ignobly obtained crown- his best friend, Banquo and Banquo’s son, Fleance. The first murderer tells Macbeth We are men, my liege./ Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; Macbeth replies As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,/ Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept/ All by the name of dogs. Macbeth asks if they are true men and the second murderer replies I am one, my liege, /Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world/ Have so incensed that I am reckless what/ I do to spite the world. The first murderer agrees with his homicidal buddy, And I another/So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune, /That I would set my life on any chance, / To mend it, or be rid on’t. So, in the catalogue, to use Shakespeare’s phrase, I am a man. But of what sort?

My innate pusillanimity would prevent me from putting myself forward as the sort of person to undertake Macbeth’s fell purpose. Let’s be frank, and to wind the clock forward to the 21^st Century- the tasks in the contemporary world that men are expected to

accomplish as a matter of course: fixing a leaking tap; changing a flat tire or clearing the gutters, stretch me more than somewhat. And much as I would like to bask in the reflected glory of men such as Leonardo, Albert and Amadeus by claiming shared species-hood, I retain enough self-awareness to reject such hubris and repeat the question: what sort of man am I?

Lacking a hand-mirror and left with only a shield and spear, I move forward in the phalanx of my sex (gender, I suppose is the more fashionable term nowadays) …I move forward, unreflecting and ready for conflict, if only of the most metaphorical and non-physically threatening kind

The only respite I can imagine is if I come across a pair of copulating snakes and hit them with the wooden shaft of my spear in the hope of angering Hera the wife of Zeus. To be like Tiresias, transformed into a woman and having to live thus has been recorded in myth and literature from ancient times right down to the present where the redoubtable Carol Ann Duffy has sardonically traced the hapless transformation in her wonderful poem, Mrs Tiresias, I’ll read a few extracts- but get to it yourself for the full impact.

All I know is this:/ he went out for his walk a man/ and came home female…Then he started his period./one week in bed./two doctors in/three painkillers four times a day…/ I see him now,/ his selfish pale face peering at the moon/ through the bathroom window.

Less scathing about the male of the species is Lucian of Samosata who lived and wrote in the 2^nd Century AD. He is, incidentally, one of the earliest commentators on the fledgling Christian movement, regarding them as misguided creatures who believed they would live for all time- hence their contempt for death and disdain for worldly goods. In his work Necyomantia, he places Tiresias in Hades responding to the question: What is the best way of life? His answer? The life of the ordinary man: forget about philosophers and their

metaphysical junk.

url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/275548876″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

All the Women

SQ 15 Looked at my Stars

Entry 15: Looked at my Stars- The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, /But in ourselves, that weare underlings. Speaking, is the lean and envious Cassius as he urges Brutus to join the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar. The remarkable Helena from All’s Well That Ends Well asserts, Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven and the bastard Edmund from King Lear sneers This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars.

So, then, why do most of us sneak a peek at our stars as we sit in a waiting-room idly flipping through the paper or magazine lying there? The yearning for meaning and connection tugs at us from the depths of our being- especially as we await the painful ministrations of the dentist- and no amount of logical argument will persuade us that randomness and meaninglessness are the foundations of our existence: a blindly spinning wheel elevating one while crushing another, dealing pleasure and pain without approbation or blame.

I think of Boethius the author of The Consolation of Philosophy, which has influenced the great and the good, the venal and the humble across millennia. He stands balanced between the East and the West, the Platonists and the Christians, the Free and the Imprisoned, the Blissful and the Tortured. I think, next, of the protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces, Ignatius J Reilly, who is both a subversive, medievalist Don Quixote railing against the absurdities of the modern world and a fat, indolent slob, too timid to venture outside the confines of 1960s New Orleans.

And lastly, I think of the author of that wonderful novel: John Kennedy Toole, who committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 31, depressed at the rejection of his comic manuscript by those who should have known better. I wonder what he would have made of our world today had he not run a garden hose from the exhaust of his car into the cabin of his car in Biloxi, Mississippi, and I wonder what title he would have given to a 21^st Century A Confederacy of Dunces- for he would have only been in his mid-sixties at the turn of the millennium.

So here we are in the tangled thorn-bush of the What Ifs. Like our itch to read what our stars reveal, we revel in the scratching of the What Ifs. “What if I had… what if I hadn’t…” haven’t we all been there? I have been careful, hitherto, about commenting too directly on the songs associated with particular entries, but here, with some trepidation, I’ll make an exception. In the early 1980s I submitted a script to RTE in Dublin-which was accepted. I had returned to Ireland from Australia at the beginning of 1979 and was dismayed to learn that the “Troubles” which had vexed Irish history for hundreds of years was still “alive and well” or should I say “suppurating and spreading”.

The script centred on a teacher who had been in Germany and returned to Northern Ireland to teach in a private school. I wrote a number of songs to accompany the script and one of them was a shorter version of this song. As a British soldier looked under my car and searched me, during one of my trips within Northern Ireland at that time, I recalled an earlier incident, more than a decade previously, when I had been walking up a back lane to the rented house of our first abode as a family, located in a side street off the Whiterock Road, lost in thought and dreaming of a future life, when a harsh, alien accent shattered my reverie: I’ll kill you, you Irish bastard, if you don’t stop now! I stopped. I looked.

There was a young guy, a British squaddie, my age if not younger, holding an SLR pointed at my head, shaking. I knew I was within a whisker of being shot dead. So, what do you do? I raised my hands and waited for further instructions. I survived that encounter with the emissary of Death, knowing that there would be a reckoning somewhere further on down the track, but I was relieved to know that the time was not just yet.

Which brings me to the present: I have, since the time I first wrote the lyrics of the original and shorter song, been swimming in the pond of a post-modern stew where bubbling up is the mephitic revelation of so much that was denied to an earlier, more innocent conception of what the world is really like. When it came the time to re-cast and elaborate on those more innocent words, I found myself inhabiting a darker space where the protagonist of the song has now become a malevolent entity rather than the pitiable person who sings the first part of the song. The coda, I added much later, when the song needed some expansion as it was, originally, less than two minutes long. Here, I cloak a nightmare in a sweet-sounding conclusion.

Looked At My Stars

SQ 16 Open Your Eyes

Entry 16: Open Your Eyes- Sometime in the early 1990s, I pitched a tent at a music festival in North Queensland at a place called Pangola Park, south of Townsville. You know, I keep getting it confused with another place we camped at around the same time called Paronella Park near Meena Creek, a bit further north. My eyes were not particularly open

at either venue in those years. However, as a forty-something aspirational counter-cultural fellow-traveller, I lugged my second-best guitar in a canvas case with me along with my kids and my wife, as I re-imagined, in however desultory a fashion, the day-glo dream of the sixties.

By this stage, there were no illusions as to the realities facing all of us. Remember, this was a decade before the twin towers- but we knew something was happening, that there were tectonic shifts readying themselves under our feet. You did not need to consult with one of the many crystal-gazing seers at the fair-tents set up around these festivals in order to know that something was happening. You didn’t even have to know the lyrics of “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan to understand that a new dispensation was forming somewhere out there beyond our knowing.

But the day after I pitched the tent… in the smoky dawn, a pleasant chill to the tropical morning, I heard a didgeridoo sounding among the palms and rain-forest remnants around us. It made me forget the images of the first Gulf War: American jets screaming off carriers, a seemingly endless line of oil wells burning, wrecked vehicles on the road back to Basra, the Highway of Death, torn apart by 20mm M61 Vulcan Gatling guns firing 6,000

rounds a minute, mounted on lumbering Lockheed AC-130s as they performed pylon turns in the desert sky. It made me forget gung-ho reports of Coalition valour such as when those giant military bulldozers buried tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts in their trenches.

For a while, I could believe I was somewhere in Eden, listening to the earth sing. And as I walked through the grove I came upon the young man playing that ancient aboriginal instrument in front of his tepee. But, before too long, the site started to stir; from a Kombi van behind me came the crackle of a radio, a 4WD rattled and roared along the grassy,

rutted track leading to the venue and a couple of happy, shrieking kids ran past. I walked back to our tent, grabbed my guitar, a notebook and pen and wandered in through the trees to find a quiet spot to compose. (Oh, here I go again, getting all autobiographical: it must be a lingering effect from the last entry.)

There was a song-writing competition and the organisers were looking for entries. I knew, even as I sat there under a tree, that I would not bother entering the comp but that I would try to write something worthy- or even better, worthwhile. But how does inspiration

come, I mused (ha!)? The first image to flit through my mind- and this might have been provoked by the sight and sound of the didge player earlier- was that of flute-carrying Euterpe who inspires music, song and lyrical poetry. Next, unfathomably, the ouroboros-a snake spinning in mid-air and eating its own tail.

Later, I tracked the image down: was it Kekule’s discovery of the benzene ring in a dream which unlocked the formula on which the oil industry is based that was the source of the spinning image under that tree? But such fleeting images did not result in the furor poeticus so beloved of Renaissance artists and I sat noodling away on the guitar hoping that the random chords and notes would give rise to something, anything. But, no…nothing, nada, zilch. Not for the first time, I wondered how it could be that even in the farthest reaches of interstellar space, there wasn’t “nothing”: Nature abhors a vacuum as we all know, and it will create fundamental particles rather than allow “nothing” to persist anywhere in vastness of the universe.

So, how to explain writer’s block? The human mind is definitely more mysterious than the physical universe. And don’t get me started on the soul! At any rate, my self-pitying interlude was interrupted by the two kids I had seen earlier. A boy and a girl aged about eight or nine -brother and sister by the look of them- walked up to me and started to chat- mostly an innocent inquisition- Who are you? What are you doing? Is that a good guitar?

Presently, their mother sauntered over and we had a pleasant chat about the festival venue, the acts, and the bastardry of the local politicians. Inter alia, I commented on the coolness of her kids’ shirts- brightly embroidered affairs that looked bespoke and, consequently, expensive. Nah, cheap as chips at the market, the Mum replied- and then the furor poeticus struck and I knew precisely why clothing in Australia was so modestly priced.

Open Your Eyes

SQ 17 Is it a Dream?

Entry 17: Is It a Dream? – I love Megastructures and all those other wonderful programs on The Discovery Channel and Nat Geo that explore the worlds of engineering, science and exploration. I have to watch these media offerings at times when my wife is not in the room. Just as she has to watch her favourite lifestyle and reality programs when I am otherwise engaged. There is no animosity attached to this for we have a range of shared favourites at prime-time. (Although, in the splintering media landscape- if a landscape can be said to splinter- such a term as media landscape may seem as quaint as quilting before too long.)

Now, I have referred to the patriarchal paradigm before in this series, and I would not be surprised if there is something in the idea that men and women are hard-wired to respond to differing ways of engaging with the world- but I am puzzled by the undoubted fact that I am, and always have been, a complete klutz when it comes to the more sophisticated operations in the area of fabrication, manufacture and the manipulation of the physical world. By more sophisticated, I refer to anything beyond replacing a light-bulb or putting up a shelf.

And yet, here you will find me, a 19-year old student on vacation back at home in the Glens of Antrim in Northern Ireland watching enthralled as the live pictures of the Moon Landing on July 20, 1969 are relayed in glorious black and white to televisions around the world. Michael Collins, the command module pilot, had designed the insignia for the mission: an eagle holding an olive branch in its talons to signify the wish for peace to be a part of the symbolism of this historic event.

Oh! It was so good to get away from the tensions in Belfast where something wicked was building inexorably. Not much more than three weeks after what I consider the greatest achievement of human endeavour, a mob smashed through Bombay Street in West Belfast and the pogrom started: to quote from Belfast Galleries.com- on Saturday August 14 there were 65 occupied houses on Bombay Street, by Sunday night that figure was down to 20. Within weeks the impromptu barricades dividing the protestant Shankill from the catholic Falls had been replaced by corrugated iron peace walls. At the time Sir Ian Freeland, the British Army General in charge of operations, remarked that these barriers would be ‘a temporary affair’. Over 40 years on they have proved far more durable than that!

Now, you can take tours of the peace walls of Belfast, take selfies in front of graffiti and never think at all that there is something weird about the fact that these walls have outlasted that icon of division in the Western world- the Berlin Wall. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall wrote Robert Frost in his widely anthologised poem, Mending Wall, published back in 1914. But his spirits didn’t have to reckon with the intractability of Irish hatreds.

Back in 1969, I responded to a call which went out over the radio for boarding students at my college to return early to help the refugees from the burnt-out streets. We hastily set up a reception centre in the college hall and had a crash course in how to be bureaucrats as we helped the bewildered victims fill in emergency relief forms. As I walked down the Falls and Donegall Roads of an evening to visit my girlfriend I could see the corrugated iron barricades going up on the side streets. There was fear in the air and I could feel the prickles on the back of my neck as I imagined being tracked through gunsights from the murky alley-ways I passed.

I listened to Radio Free Belfast at night and wondered what I was doing here. I remembered a schoolboy pact I had made with a friend, that we would visit Australia and watch the cane-fields burn as we worked our way across the exotic continent seemingly as distant as the moon. It wouldn’t be with my school buddy but my girlfriend who became my wife, with whom I would clamber aboard a QANTAS jet in September of 1972, our daughter of three months in our arms, and set off for Sydney.

Over forty years later, now retired, I sit on our back veranda in the winter sunshine and wonder whether ideas have the same solidity as steel, whether the imagery and imagination holding together my songs have the integrity of the International Space Station which journeyed past Venus and Jupiter between 5:31pm and 5:34pm on Wednesday last, another reminder of the astounding achievements possible when human beings work together and set aside ancient grudges to reach for the stars. But maybe we’ll end up like the oysters in this poem:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, /”To talk of many things:/Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax/Of cabbages and kings/And why the sea is boiling hot/And whether pigs have wings.”

Is It A Dream?

SQ 18 Diving for Pennies

Entry 18: Diving for Pennies- Most people know the trope: I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when…(Here you can supply your own memorable event) Well, I can remember two such instances from my own life: the first is the assassination of JFK on November 22^nd 1963. I was in Junior High at Seroe Colorado High School in Aruba, a small island in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela. Its claim to fame was that, at one time, it was the largest oil refinery in the world. It was afternoon and a girl came screaming from the student parking lot “They’ve killed Kennedy, they’ve killed Kennedy”. As you might imagine, the routine of the school-day was shattered- as was everybody, staff and students.

The other event was the destruction of the twin towers by terrorists on September 11^th 2001. I was lying in bed preparing for sleep and listening to the radio when the first reports came through. I was tired, rather puzzled at how a pilot could fail to see such prominent edifices, and drifted off as the radio droned on. The next morning there was nothing on TV but reports of the atrocities involving those aircraft and I sat transfixed, watching the coverage all morning. That afternoon, I remember driving to Sydney airport in a daze to collect my brother-in-law and his wife who were returning from a holiday in Ireland.

It wasn’t until the February of 2002 that I was able to write a song connected with these events. I later put this song with others into a collection I entitled Letdowns: after the millennium. I wrote a post-apocalyptic message to accompany the collection. Like so much else of my oeuvre, I put the idea in a drawer and forgot about it until I decided to write these journal entries. Here follows the overly-pessimistic text I wrote then and a song about letdowns from the collection:

“Letdowns should be more poetic. But they’re not. Letdowns, if they are really doing their job, should let you down in every department or else they’re not really… Letdowns. Which leaves songwriters like me in a real quandary- why even bother? Are the songs Letdowns, too? In which case, why this gloss? In this the fifth, and (I would think, on the medical evidence available to me) final album (what a quaint word this is, don’t you think?) that I am likely to write to, perhaps, no one but a distant descendant eager for family-tree minutiae, what can I say? Like a poem carved upon an ancient bone. So then, to the eye that may not ever be there to see, and the ear that may never be there to hear- Greetings! I don’t know if your age will be one that is keen on pinning down time; nevertheless, let me give you a point of reference. It is now my birthday- 10:30 p.m. on the 31st of October, 2001 A.D. (if such an hour-and-date nomenclature has meaning in your time). I am living in an outer-western suburb of Sydney, Australia called Werrrington (if such a geographical reference means anything to you). And I have been drinking (I’m sure, however straitened your circumstances, some form of potable liquor still has a place at your tables or around the fires at your campsites.)- I have been drinking Scotch whisky mixed with Cola– a syrupy and fizzy soft drink popular at one time. As an anthropological aside may I say that many considered such a combination to be a barbarism in our era. To those arbiters of taste around me who made such disparaging references to my imbibing predilection, I answered, only, that, having lost sight of any civility around me, I couldn’t fail but to agree with them. Such was my attachment to the ironic voice. An antique relic of the 20th Century, alas. But this lapse in taste on my part was eclipsed by other departures from civility by others… so, unfortunately, this barbarism didn’t hold a candle to the sorts of atrocity that enveloped the world in the first year or two of the new millennium. Read your history books. If any exist. Of course, songs need no explanation. If they are sung they live. The words are only ash- smudges that are merely remnants of the real thing. However, if your era is anything like ours, we need the crutches of explication- if only to impress by our borrowed erudition. This process was miscalled education while I was alive. I leave, instead, a poem for your contemplation.

Explication: Like a poem carved upon an ancient bone/Dug out of an ash-pit,/An outline of a heart in bog-oak/Dragged up and in to the open air,/The remnants of an ancient tune/Whistling through the shaking leaves/Of the last stand of native trees/Left on a fissured plain,/Let my voice, telling of love/And letdowns, carry across/ The fields of time spread/ To the shimmering edges/Of eternity fringed with/A sparkling circlet of stars/Before they wink out/One by one,/Swallowed by the incurious/Blankness beyond.” Dive with me.

SQ 19 The Goodtimes of Doris and Ronnie

Entry 19: The Goodtimes of Doris and Ronnie- In my mid-teens I dated a witch, briefly. She was from Barrow-in-Furness, just across the Irish Sea from Douglas in the Isle of Man where I met her at a holiday camp at which I worked during the summer break of 1966. No Emos or Goths in those days; I was dressed like a Mod but spouting the verse of Lord Byron and waxing lyrical about the black magic novels of Dennis Wheatley made me a forerunner of the type.

So, we got talking and she revealed her interest in the occult confiding that she was a witch. Intrigued, I accepted an invitation to visit her in her home-town the next weekend. Catching the Douglas to Heysham ferry, that Friday, I made my way via rail and bus to that Cumbrian town stuck at the end of the Furness peninsula. We saw The Small Faces perform at a municipal hall and agreed that they were “Fab”.

Turns out I was bored by the semi-literate stuff she showed me and that was the start of my disengagement with matters magical and the world of Wicca. Still loved Byron, though: an affection that has persisted over the decades. I used the poem, Darkness, in a unit on Romantic Poetry featuring, among other works, My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade in 2009. (FYI: neither the poem nor the CD were part of the increasingly irksome curriculum prescription of recommended texts to be duly recorded in the college’s computer.)

Byron’s apocalyptic picture of the end of the world was inspired by the year without a summer in 1816, a couple of hundred years ago, which was caused by the eruption of Mt Tambora: the most massive volcanic event of the 19^th Century which killed tens of thousands of people and wiped out for all time the island culture of Sumbawa in the Indonesian archipelago.

This was in the era before the telegraph and the later eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 has hogged the limelight: who now remembers Mt Tambora when its effects dumped snow in New England in June and famine in various parts of the world. An Italian so-called scientist’s prediction that the sun would go out on July 18^thcaused riots, suicides, and religious fervour all over Europe according to Jeffery Vail in “‘the Bright Sun was Extinguis’d’: The Bologna Prophecy and Byron’s ‘Darkness’.”

The poem deals with the sun going out and the chaos that inevitably ensues. Two foes survive at the end of the world and they meet beside /The dying embers of an altar-place/ Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things /For an unholy usage;

They blow on the embers and then, they lifted up/Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld/Each other’s aspects–saw, and shriek’d, and died /Even of their mutual hideousness they died,/Unknowing who he was upon whose brow/Famine had written Fiend. /The world was void/ Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless/The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,/And nothing stirred within their silent depths; /The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,/The moon their mistress had expir’d before;/ The winds were withered in the stagnant air,/And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need /Of aid from them-She was the Universe.

Pretty grim stuff, but youth have always been avid consumers of horror, death and destruction. Which brings me to another pop band the Mods were mad about- The Who. I saw them in concert that same summer in the Palace Ballroom, Douglas. At the end, Pete Townsend smashed his guitar and amp to the outrage of some among the crowd; indeed, it got a few boos and I must admit that I looked on in anguish as an electric guitar splintered onstage- I would have given my eye-teeth to have had one like it.

That year, The Rolling Stones, too, were drawing from the well of dark Romanticism when they wrote Paint It Black which charted at number one for ten weeks that spring and summer. But it would be a mistake to represent that time as one unrelievedly drenched in gloom- it was shot through with a happy vibe that, when you are 16, just goes on and on as you listen to The Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon or The Hollies’ Bus-stop or The Beatles’ Paperback Writer.

The Seekers, Australia’s super group, sang bright, up-tempo folk-rock while back home Robin Askin, Premier of NSW, exhorted his driver to “Run the bastards over”, as Vietnam War protesters chanted at his august guest, “Hey, Hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today!” I’ll conclude, though, with lines from what must be one of the quirkiest songs Pete Townsend ever wrote but which captures how I was feeling that wonderful summer:

Happy Jack wasn’t old, but he was a man/He lived in the sand at the Isle of Man/The kids couldn’t hurt Jack/They tried, tried, tried…/But they couldn’t stop Jack, or the waters lapping/And they couldn’t prevent Jack from feeling happy.

The Goodtimes of Doris and Ronnie

SQ 20 Straight and True

Entry 20: Straight and True- It’s tough being a hero. Not that I claim this honorific for myself, I hasten to add. I think of poor old Heracles, whose name means “the glory of Hera”. Heracles, according to Wikipedia, was the product of what is known as heteroparental superfecundation- where a woman carries twins sired by two different fathers. Randy old Zeus, the husband of the fanatically jealous Hera, disguised himself as the husband, impregnating Alcmene with Heracles before the real husband, Amphitryon, returned later that night to sire Heracles’ mortal twin, Iphicles.

Hera made Heracles’ life miserable in spite of the name change from Alcides to placate her. She attempted to prevent his birth and, failing that, successfully connived to rob him of his high kingship. When he was only eight months of age she sent two giant serpents into the nursery, which he duly strangled. Astonished, Amphitryon sent for the seer, Tiresias, who prophesied an unusual future for the boy. What a surprise! Perhaps more surprising is that Heracles, when presented with a choice between a life of indolent hedonism or severe but glorious virtue, chose the latter.

Most of us would choose the former- or is that just me? His exploits live in legend and he remains the gold standard of the type. If demi-gods such as Heracles find the hero business so fraught, what hope for mere mortals? We need our heroes but are uncomfortable with templates from the past. The democratic spirit in western countries generally, but more particularly in Australia, values the self-deprecating-aw-shucks-anyone-would’ve-done-what-I-did schtick adopted by those men and women who perform acts of heroism few of us could ever contemplate doing.

Every time I look at the Australian of the Year site with its categories-one even called “local hero”- I feel proud, on the one hand, that we have so many great role-models among us; but on the other hand (and there’s always that other hand, isn’t there?) I feel more than a bit inadequate that I can’t really measure up. Except to our kids- at least for a while.

When I read South Australian poet Ian Mudie’s, My father began as a god the shock of recognition was immediate: I saw myself as the persona of the poem, first; that young boy thinking his father’s laws were as immutable/as if brought down from Sinai; then through the prism of adolescence his father becomes a foolish small old man/with silly and outmoded views; next, with life’s experience shifting the perspective, the flaws scaled away into the past,/ revealing virtues/ such as honesty, generosity, integrity. Finally, and strangest of all, the persona admits that the older he gets the more the image of the father re-asserts its heroic former stature while the son is left just one more of all the little men/who creep through life/not knee-high to this long-dead god.

As I sit on the back veranda, again soaking up the evening winter sun, I reflect that I am now the same age as Ian Mudie was when he died in London. It is heartening to read that his ashes were brought back to Australia and scattered on the Murray River.

One of the decisions I made fairly early on was that that I would not seek the pedestal position some parents want; that yes, I would be as good a Dad as I could be to my kids but that I would let them see my feet of clay. Some would say that, in this, at least, I was an over-achiever. The phrase, feet of clay, comes from the Book of Daniel in the Bible and I now realise that I should have chosen another metaphor to puncture childish idolatry because we are in the presence of yet another hero. Judaic rather than Greco-Roman, a seer and a prophet rather than a strong-man, Daniel divines and interprets the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar where a statue with a gold head, silver arms and breast, copper belly and thighs, iron legs and mixed iron and clay feet is destroyed by a rock.

The Babylonian seers were unable to achieve this and were put to death: Daniel, is raised to power. His companions Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego survive the fiery furnace. He is able to decipher the mysterious writing on the wall after Nebuchadnezzar’s son and successor Belshazzar has drunk from Jewish temple cups at his feast. The words, Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, Daniel explains to Belshazzar, means that God has numbered his days, he has been weighed and found wanting, and his kingdom will be given to his enemies.

My favourite Daniel story, though, is that of Susanna and the Elders. Two lecherous oldies, spying the naked woman bathing say they will accuse her of meeting with a lover unless she has sex with them. She refuses, is about to be put to death for promiscuity, when Daniel interrupts proceedings and by skilful cross-examination exposes the fraud. The lechers get their comeuppance. Virtue triumphs.

Straight and true (demo version)