4 Years Later

My Facebook page has a message for me … “4 Years Later”.

It throws up a poster for Intuition Kingdom. And an offer to add a partner image to match the day’s anniversary. That was then; where you are now?

I forget all the events and nights I have been involved with, sometimes curating, other times a guest... literary festivals, talks, poetry readings. It’s a little like the theatre: all kinds of magic in the moment, some wonderful camaraderie. But a sense, too, of things dissolving quickly and some paradoxical need to do even more – as well as do other things that have a more solid presence, illusory as that may be.

Intuition Kingdom was a combined night of poetry, music and reflection that I created four years ago at Addi Road in Marrickville, bringing together Ali Whitelock, Felicity Plunkett, DC Cross and myself.

We held it in an old military barracks that is now being slowly renovated, disguising the raw space and holes in the floor with sculptures given to us at the last minute by the brilliant Adam Laerkesen. Shafts of coloured light – lamps set at floor level or aimed at the corrugated iron roof – did the rest. It turned into a special night.

The more recent image that I chose to match the Intuition Kingdom poster was a photo of me in my hometown of Newcastle, set against a winter blue sky and billboard roughly stripped of whatever was there being promoted before.

I had spent the previous day at a family funeral, all these memories revived, things forgotten that nonetheless had continued to be in me, just waiting for the right moment or encounter to exist again.

As I headed out of town, I passed by places where I had lived. Familiar tracks, a couple of former homes, old dreamings. I got that peculiar dizziness that happens when you’re in a vehicle going forwards and another vehicle beside you is reversing. A mix of disorientation and vertigo that requires gathering your centre again to work out where you are and what you are doing.

I was listening to Paul McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane through a UE Boom on the passenger seat. The album did not seem nostalgic so much as highly present with memory. It’s so modern sounding and periodically experimental or sonically daring – along with McCartney’s scratched voice – you can’t miss the ‘now’ in it. And yet, of course, heavy, and light too, with memory.

I felt like I was in a rocket ship travelling through time, my car climbing the hill and launching me away from a childhood suburb on the edges of Newcastle. Soon I’d be on the highway south, listening to other music …. The Durutti Column’s Renascent, The Lemon Twigs’ Look for Your Mind!, Ed O’Brien’s Blue Morpho.

By the time I hit Sydney I had on Husker Du’s magnificent and speedily melodic live album, 1985: The Miracle Year. It was as if I were crossing the Harbour Bridge as I did when I first moved to Sydney in the early 1980s. Some accidental reenactment or ritual calling to my youth, to people I had known and who I had been.

Once again I thought about presence. About art as a towering and loving revelation of our best, and the living moment where a chemistry of spirit and great intentions somehow comes together.

I felt a pang of sorrow for Husker Du’s Grant Hart and his struggles with addiction all the while he knocked out scrappy masterpieces of the heart-in-isolation.

Other ghosts came to me, dead and lost friends, the ghost too of my past self, my auntie who had passed away so recently and the books she had given me (Camus’ The Plague, TS Eliot’s Selected Poems), all of them way above my 15-year-old head and taking decades to detonate in me right up to this day.

My thoughts involved me with the loss and transience we all feel and fear … the fast evaporation that takes us from this world. The way things linger and hide and resurface, and how much poetry and music and gathering together with people revives all that we are.

M