Tangencies

A reply to Peter Kirkpatrick’s Asterisms

Dear Peter

Your letter came with rain,

A mushroom-cloud of tedium outside,

Hydrangeas bent and buffeted in turn.

But even more precipitate the gloom

Descending indoors, when successive texts

Seem stale, flat and unprofitable.

For instance recently, Dream Story

Schnitzler’s contrivance (unsuccessfully

Transferred by Frederick Raphael to New York

For bearded Kubrick’s hedged bets.)

And on another pile of books, Glenn Gould’s

Resuscitation – yes – of Arnold Schoenberg

Reclaiming him as ‘unknown great composer’

Not mere labyrinthine theorist. Yet

How little of his works are heard. This too

Adds to this raincloud gloom.

So your letter is the more significant

To be re-read several times, each time

With fresh river panning sieves of gold.

Your letter has the title Asterism

And plans somehow to triangulate

– As if all three might be a constellation –

The southern stars, some major works of Brahms

And speculation on the spangled art

Of autobiographic resumé.

This might at first appear a bridge too far

Or (to indulge in specious rhetoric)

A jetty, perilous with broken boards

Projecting on the Hawkesbury where for years

I’d sit amongst duck droppings on its planks.

– Particularly since you had initial doubts

And questioned lingering sentiment in Brahms,

To champion Berlioz and Bruckner first…

I’d go along with Berlioz but Bruckner?

In this I’d tend to side with Brahms.

Outside the rain has cleared, an augury

Confirming sympathetic fallacies…

I wait to see your scalene triangle.

Your lines embody generating place –

Old Newtown as it was too long ago

‘It’s trams, its milk-bars, butchers and greengrocers,

Its women frocked in floral prints, its men

In tailored slacks and winklepicker shoes’

And I was a visitor occasionally

Escaping University to walk

Out into City Road and King Street’s beat

Past Gould’s chaotic bookshop, pressing on

Through shadow in St Stephen’s cemetery

And further to the south where, in a lane,

Someone had left the graffiti on a wall –

Our Dawn, Australia’s Gertrude Stein.

But to address this ancient mystery:

The accident of reputation and opinion

Schoenberg is a primary case in point.

So, first, here are a few enthusiasms:

(I test your patience with an inventory.)

The Petrarch Sonnet in the Serenade;

The Fourth Quartet whose solemn unisons

Stravinsky did not like, the String Trio

Which Charles Rosen eloquently praised

(And now that he and those insights are gone

How many others ever hear its raptures?)

The Gurrelieder and its final part

Composed much later in his freer style –

Magnificent, deserving much acclaim,

Recorded splendidly by Simon Rattle.

The Organ Recitative – mysterious

As is the ‘changing chord’ sustained within

The Five Orchestral Pieces. On and on –

And still we have not touched upon the two

Sublime concertos…

And with this mention comes

The memory of shaking hands backstage

With Alfred Brendel in a daze of thanks

For his Hammerklavier and particularly

The first recording of the Schoenberg concerto.

But here is the paradox of advocacy:

One names the names of long neglected works

Imagining that by some miracle

The reader hears these subtle cadences

Or even seeks them out bent at his screen –

Like the ecstatic in Keats’ Ode to Autumn –

For hours and days of You Tube renderings.

But of course the reader doesn’t. And so it is.

Now in the midst of this, Meat Loaf is dead,

And, glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife,

Is the memory of a party at Bondi

Where someone brought a Videodisc which looped

Repeatedly so that we saw his Hulk

With Carla Devita elegant in white

Synching Paradise by the Dashboard Light.

And even now I keep coming back

To my friend the actor who, alas, takes on

Only the role of Hamlet’s father’s ghost.

It was his pot-sweet Bondi birthday party

At which we saw and heard repeatedly

That hectic Paradise by the Dashboard Light

And (you remember surely) Jim Steinman’s jest,

A baseball game with running between bases

As a metaphor for sensual urgency

Until Devita shouts Hold it right there!

But wait! There’s more. It is the opening line

Of Westering – your book from twenty years,

Speeding west, time lies flattened like the road.

Much can be said in praise of this conceit

And best, the participle knowingly

Falsely attached (since it’s not time speeds west)

And this disjunction is most admirable.

Then add to that the pleasing simile…

So often time is dressed up on the stage

In some ridiculous gee-gaw and is made

To walk the catwalk unconvincingly

In rags to riches glad-rags. This occurs

In slender volumes which at once we put

Back on the yawning shelves. But here your line

Is sent out with a powerful metaphor

Then flattered by the simile. A double!

And there are other excellences here

In Westering on the winding road-kill road

Towards The Suicidal Swagman Motel.

While in Bucolic Plague you stay behind

While friends for no clear reason climb a hill,

To the banksias’ rustic chandelier (your phrase);

Veranda-bound you get your Nature fix

Main-lining Beethoven placid in your chair,

So far from Newtown, blithe in Coleridge shade.

And here I take a moment to declare

My admiration for your consummate

Capacity – deploying frequently

Bloody and fucking as intensifiers.

All this is part of a knowing strategy

In the persona of The Bloke Who’s Seen It All

And perhaps The Bloke Who’s Had His Fair Share

Recalling Leslie Fiedler’s No! In Thunder

(Its method: Reject all and only crap.)

You write of resolutions unresolved –

Uncertainty in celebrating Brahms…

I recently compiled a list of themes

Which stalled and could not leave the barrier.

Amongst these lamentations was this plan,

An opera on Rosa Praed’s romance

Fugitive Anne, for which I had high hopes.

Anne is escaping from a toxic marriage

By leaping from a ship when it returns

To Cooktown where she had been raised – and learned

The Aboriginal language. Pretending to drown

She escapes with Kombo her Aboriginal servant

Into the hinterland. And so begins

A picaresque Lemurian Romance.

Kombo and Anne in fact are westering,

Pursued by Anne’s malevolent husband, who

Has had news of her large inheritance.

The escapees have met again by chance

A Danish explorer she met on the ship.

Together they travel west into the mountains.

Here they meet a strange Lemurian tribe

Descended from some Mayan immigrants

Who in their culture favour priestesses.

Anne becomes one. But there soon emerge

Fierce conflicts on an operatic scale

With one displaced High Priestess who, of course,

Is carnal, lacking all constraint, which Anne,

An Englishwoman must exemplify.

Eventually the cataclysm comes;

Volcanoes kill the Mayans and her husband.

Anne and her Danish man escape and leave

For England.