NOIR
L’ooking
back, I see myself as an intersection,
a meeting point of a million things.’ - Alberto Moravia
Or a light soft as yellow smoke playing about the silvery ruins,
running over the archways,
where the archway might have been a ‘sooty shadow’ and the
barn owl looking for a barn
makes a
curtain rustling sound under the western wall and those scraps of
night all quiet is a rubble
of old movies
and the anonymous blond who disappeared into the cellar to
hurriedly search amongst
brick
cavities for a cloth-wrapped object (never identified) found herself
a scuffled death, silent
or muted,
recalls a walk-off part her character left laid low, mortally coiled.
Unreachable age,
where the smart kid sidles up to the car and gabs with the reporter
‘Got two-bob, mister?’
is a role that you were alive to play in way back then although
never remembered,
which qualifies as dream uncomfortable as a consciousness that
has outgrown life lived
as spectacle under the mottled light beam to applaud 20th century
Fox amongst the palms and
arc lights
‘O Californian mysteries’. Meanwhile, the Studebaker cushions
the corner and turns
faster than the dolly tracking this scene and passes low down along
the front row seats and
idles sweetly,
segues the curb at last, comfortable as a cliché, and that pair of
legs
you’re left to hope against
hope
for again step out to savvy the sidewalk. Intellect takes a holiday,
senses settle down to view
bleak perspectives over unfulfilled hours by which one means where
one is, the old familiar
address of self,
‘when the melancholy bout from heaven falls, glut it on a rose’
over the Spanish Steps the
wraith of
John Keats sells gewgaws to open-mouthed tourists whose empty
exclamations like ticker-tape
rise into the air as plain-song. And yet, tradition still holds the
secret or sacred alliance
within the twin abstract conceits of ‘gentleman’ and ‘art’ when one
considers (say) Dirk Bogarde
in
The Singer Not The Song who might have played the imperfect
Lord Byron so perfectly
but didn’t.
The is the Age of Opportunists that values cunning over grace as
all the dreaded cards foretold,
is a ruination greater than any loss borne - a declining sun enlarges
the lengthening shadows
as
sunset falls off to the right (regular as clockwork) and plays out
like an endless, last supper.
In the beginning globalization and the world was one: O pray then
a return to city-safe pollution,
quarantined away from cringing forests the floating contours of
limestone hills
where bats straggle starlight mobile as any species-hopping virus
to
brush chicken farm and piggery
over the Malaysia countryside hung bright as tropical tapestry.
To late for prophecy
in the crowded currents, the tortured city intersections, electronic
highways, genetic engineering,
and in the extirpation of allegory, where the unicorn has turned
to obsidian in the corporate
laboratories, and to date the scientific legislators have found that
‘there ain’t no cure for
love’
and no matter who you ask directions of the journey back to Eden
begins tomorrow.
The search is on for new creation myths in the light of the earlier,
overly researched ones as
the hot issue under discussion in cabinets and war rooms revolves
around whether the quotient
on
Good & Evil since the beginning of time has increased / decreased
in the proud light or remains
A Constant: is unanswerable in the studio warehouses of Foxtel
by Sydney’s revolving soundstage
or at the spooky boardrooms via Bill Gate’s compound bluely squat
on the Seattle harbour hills.
St. Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, St. John of the Cross, in
the
back lot playing petanque;
O Meister Eckhart, dream me a dream, Meister Eckhart, you from
whom God hid nothing –
does the true visionary stare down the endless tunnel of futility
toward
His Light or the Will’s
supremacy?
King Cormac sharpens his sword on a granite outcrop at the palace
of Tara on the morning of
December 5,
240 and thinks on his progeny and I stepping aboard a train city-bound
at this millennium close
see him,
foot braced against rock and hear the Gadhelic blade sing in sunlight,
‘be a listener in woods,
a gazer at stars’
knows a bitter wind in the night will toss the ocean’s white hair
bring the fierce warriors
of Norway;
and William Carlos Williams who makes a storm out at sea makes
it bloom and hears it fade,
a flowery thing, rain-scented, throughout the whole wide sea,
and in all its petalled
gardens æ
oompah goes old Europe under used-up cigarette smoke oompah,
sorrow, subtlety, love,
loss
three euro-dollars in a fountain and a brass band plays public gardens
as soft grey stones prop
up old stories
and cloud pulls its cloth cap down over the brow of a farmyard moon
by a pitchfork stand of
elm.
Eternal blackness, the God in the director’s chair shouted ‘action!’
then a billion lights came
on,
the circuitry of the God’s anger blew and lit a warehouse of galaxies
" oh, what a feeling!
"
opening night in paradise a story line for every bad marriage to come
laid out from play-pen to
military
campaign through watery ravines to tableland and far desert plateaux
in banquet hall and daub
and wattle huts
family slaughter is history shadow-play back lit before a backdrop
of burning city or blackened
palisade æ
Eden, the ultimate Green Room, ante-chamber to the God’s high seat
as Godless poets called
on God O.
Extinction or out-take, the director’s cut on species / rushes thrown
to the cutting room floor,
a recall to the factory though the flaw lay in the original design
and not the bright prototype,
while damage control dictates that one sea horse put in a breeding
tank
does not a species make
/ re-make:
today we have naming of parts, yesterday we had biological safari,
but today we have naming
of parts as
coral glistens bleached white and imperial in all the neighbouring
oceans,
that point of balance we
have not got.
Don’t trust the ‘90s man who whistles in the dark whistling up the
wind is stalker or psychopath
no longer the friendly bobby of Dockside Green, nor the ploughman
homeward plodding his weary
way,
but the late night suited android outside in the Galleria or parking
lot by the dumpsters, the
oily
dark of the freeway flexing out of the city into lurid billboards
homey
as motels down off ramps
moving
parallel brushing by his shoulder cruising vacant as a Jeffrey Smart
urban scape and suddenly
is there
looming dead still, dead quiet, fixedly stands before you the breathy
whistler, the suited android.
In your mind you are the kid again back by the bus-stop waiting
on your father (responsible
yet) to
collect you from the green dental building with rows of globed lights
numbered and nursed
the stranger threatening with a bag of sweets to whisk you away in
his
car hidden close by and
you unsafe on
Willis street that is by far too wide, open to hide your fear in where
the lolly-pop sun melts
down
and you crinkle your face up hopefully into a protective tough mask
older kids wear against
their own because
the surprised, wide-eyed approach fell back to likely encouragement
as the man with sweets cruised
by again.
Can you remember what you felt then? loss of confidence in dealing
with authority and a later
life,
here you first suspected corruption without knowing its true name;
a bogus kindness, trick,
or vulnerability.
Can you remember what you saw then? the regular Saturday matinee
echoing footsteps at the
core of light
into the darkened room steps the villain invisible with unhurrying
chase, and unperturbèd pace –
you followed the perils of the man who walked the shaft of light faded
into an immovable, black
space.
Newsreel footage: crowds, trees struck in surprise of autumn, flags;
parachutists blister sky
over Normandy;
match-flare on horizon from Missouri; atom bomb uncorks a cloud;
camera flashes cup winner;
God Saved the Queen save us every Saturday arvo with Loony Tunes
flicks at the Brooklyn ‘flea-house’
Clint Walker looming large in buckskin through mountain torrent
and conifer slopes in Grizzly;
Jeff Chandler, steel-grey-haired on the bridge of the battleship doing
it tough under Jap zeros;
ghost of Doris Day (bright as a haystack) Elvis, gangsters and Apaches,
an iris opening on mesa
country.
Old curled, black and white beach shots, the shore line rocks blurred,
an opaque sea and one young
parent,
you out of shot (in memory) long before puberty had landed with its
civilizing, cinematic angst –
Save the little Angel in the arch, that marble lintel fallen into
the alley
(say) a small collapse in
Venice
a daily event important as prayer or washing hung out on balconies
where floods rise in drains
over
St Mark’s Square, that you wonder if Venice will blur, Turner-esque
to memory? golden city of
the lagoons
its foundations sunk 12 to 25cm since 1900 still within view of the
oil
refinery and tankers that
ply
mainland channels and giant cruise ships tower above San Marco ever
deeper channels and draughts
open the city to Adriatic flood-tides as authorities debate lock-structures
or mobile barriers and the
Italia Nostra weeps
not for Visconti’s but another environmental death threatening Venice
a plague of speed boats
and oil tankers
the slow disintegration of the platonic ideal into age, death and
decay
styled as sensuality –
O applaud again Dirk Bogarde’s poise (repeated in The Night Porter)
a childhood turned nightmare
garish as fever or the devil’s harlequin laughing madly at the hotel
guests,
he saw the demon floating
out of his body the condemned man embracing a barren, last yearning
in the last days of that
century,
in the last wash of light, the impossibly sad flow of Mahler’s farewell
at
the borderless regions of
dream.
Dawn, no hasty orisons nor nom de guerre for tribes out of Africa,
from first light to campfire
lit
over unacknowledged distances, quicker than continental drift, arose
the technomadic culture
the ‘hunters & gatherers’ v the ‘fitters & turners’ guided
by the noetic
compass, under ridged brows
that served as caves of thought, they paused, and man who paused
long enough to reflect on
his
going hence as his coming hither, made of stars an inkling unto history
writ in every print (since
made
or observed) later preserved in magnetic circle and the runic signal,
while every leave-taking
became a yearning, simple as a hut, safe as houses, heard solid as
speech;
still later æ ritual fixed
its bayonet
and fire that bounced off the wall of dark, twined and interlocked
demons,
and it was demons made speech –
the castle instructed found the city as the river encircled became
a moat,
thinking man walked and
made the road.
As through a telescope (winkle of light at the bottom of the well)
by
day you recalled children’s
voices
off the island loud as gulls, here it is a nightly wind brings grandeur
to the least of cities,
and enlarges æ high up on rock strewn ground monks pass under flared
stars, welts of light in
the sky’s arc,
to the Byzantine chapel overlooking the sea, a glistening darkness,
to this small, high interior,
soft lit
that is memory of all caves that gathered diverging tribes over time
and before time when roaring
dissensions from out every era closed, passed, and dimmed, heard in
chants rubbed vocally by
antiphon;
echoes departing into whispering that leave in single file once more
out across the mountain
pathways.
At the height of the Winter Solstice, the sun’s longest rays between
the trilithon in low shimmering,
golden planks fall to the stone altars of the dead laid deep in barrows;
the soul is grown wise in
the dark,
yearns to return to the light, again to enliven all growing things.
Generosity of Infinity
is a question of silence moved and steadied by the layers of night
on
this Winter Solstice, here
contained
within the stone’s ribcage, allows spirit and breath to brighten blood-red,
remembered as the
dizzying motes of stars at Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain encircled.
Annex or vestibule
serve as always, departure points of the compass, a corridor placed
parallel to our time, waiting
room,
lit chamber at New Grange no longer vox stellarum of ancestral spirits
who never looked back
as we do to a belonging (at once the simultaneous defeat of time)
when
every way lay open –
texture of stone, sacred and upright, arranged through us by them
stands
attendant upon our seeing
and our dreams, knowing that is an unknowing, eternally present,
played out over the ruined
senses.
Winter Solstice / 21 December, 1999
©
Stephen Oliver 2002