The Unseen Sea

This is a still from a batch of footage found in a basement in Australia. It was filmed sometime in the 1930s, by a Sydney dermatologist named Ewan Murray-Wills, and forgotten about. The footage shows dancers in The Ballet Russes picnicking and cavorting on Bungen Beach on their off days. Some seventy years later filmmaker Gillian Lacey and musician Alexander Balanescu used the footage to create a performance piece called Play.

Writing this, I realise, how much I long to see the ocean again. Most nights I walk along the sports grounds where Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile--there's a high fence that runs along the pavement, and for some unexplainable reason, I always imagine an unseen sea on the other side. 

Another year, another play. To be performed at London's The Old Red Lion Theatre as part of RedFest, from April 16-21. It is a vignette called For All We Know and it involves a blind man listening to the ghost of his dead wife. At one point she reads aloud to him:

We were in the parks one morning, you remember. You had... (Turns page.) Slept in my living room the night before and, uncomfortable, you rose early and suggested we go for a walk before you caught your morning train. You made tea and we took these with us, in mugs. I can still remember the cold of the ceramic and the heat of the tea inside. Also my imagining your feeling the same simultaneous hot-cold feeling on your lips. It had been a cold night and there were heavy mists resting over the field, along the river. The parks were empty. The sun was burning through. Your glasses had steamed up and you took them off, and I can remember you looking at me, somehow more freely than you ever had before, squinting my direction. I could see your breath. I could see your hands were shaking. (Pause.) Then, coming to the riverbank, we stopped, we stopped talking. (She stops reading.) I took your tea from you and threw it in the river. I threw it in the river with mine and you looked at me. I looked back. I tore open your collar, you lifted my dress. With your hand you felt along the inner-seam of me: the same simultaneous hot and cold...

My Parents

Born in 1947. Born in 1954. Started living under an assumed name five years before I was born. Inherited three different surnames from three different men. Married twice. Never married.  Has lived abroad since his youth. Still lives where she grew up. Left school at 15 to work in a glass factory. Left home at 18 and got married. Told his parents he was going on an archeological dig and ended up in Greece. Didn't talk with her parents for years. Sees her mother, now, almost every day. Saw his mother face-to-face three times in thirty years. Has eight brothers and sisters. Has two sisters and a brother who died. Lives on the coast. Lives in the suburbs. 

Met, once, thirty two years ago, in the lobby of Western Pest Control.

The Day's Divinity

 Brando in Cannes, 1950s

OLD MAN (CONT’D)

In her bare feet she would come to me. She would fold herself against me, like that, her shape to mine, under the sheets. And I felt her there...Yes, and then I realised: she’d been out, at some point, out in the morning light. Blue morning twilight, that haze before dawn. Bright, but blue in the shade, that frail and fragile blue. That sheen of...not frost or dew, nothing so romantic as that--but simple condensation, darkening, dampening things. The shadows, all wet...And, somehow, yes, I could tell all this from the way that she felt against me, the way that she smelled. It was on her, her skin. Proof that she’d been out, you see. I could tell that she’d gone and then come back again to me...She was a very light sleeper, of course, and she would often wake at ungodly hours. Out of bed at five or six a.m., depending on the light. Maybe making herself a slice of toast, cups of tea.

 Florence Peterson, 1909

OLD MAN (CONT’D)

But the extraordinary thing...the miraculous thing...I realised...was that these weren’t my sensations...No, they weren’t mine...As I lay there with her: I was only half-awake, my face buried in the pillows and the crumpled bedding, but I suddenly felt that morning out there, the whole wide world, just as she must have felt it...moments before...outside in the open air...It was hers, you see. All hers. The prickling wet of the lawn, the sun miraculously rising, the day gradually warming. Yet, I could somehow feel it, in the arches of her feet, at the small of her back...I had pulled her close by this point, and I remember thinking to myself, guiltily, holding my breath: I don’t deserve this--any of this, this life that she was sharing. With me, for god’s sake. Me. (Pause.) Lying there, lying there with her lying next to me, I naturally said nothing. But, god, how I felt. Everything. Everything I was not.

Silence.

Correction

 Ravi Shankar in a paisley scarf

Read this in the NYT and thought it was funny (I have a strange sense of humour maybe...)
"Correction: October 29, 2011

The Books of The Times review on Tuesday recounted an anecdote in Ms. Tomalin’s book in which Dostoyevsky told of meeting Dickens. While others have also written of such a meeting and of a letter in which Dostoyevsky was said to have described it, some scholars have questioned the authenticity of the letter and whether the meeting ever occurred."

 

A picture I took forever ago in Devon...maybe. 

Addressing the Infinite

There used to be a television programme I used to watch as a boy, called Read, Write, and Draw. Vincent Price was the host, and he must have been over eighty at the time. I couldn’t have been more than twelve. 

I watched it religiously. Not that it was on at any particular time. I would catch it, when flipping channels in the afternoon, or mid-morning if I stayed home sick from school. 

The set of Read, Write, and Draw was dressed to look like a kitchen for some reason, and old Vincent Price would be standing there in an apron, or a smock. The premise of the show was always obscure to me, other than the fact it did involve reading, writing, and drawing. Vincent would read stories aloud, in that familiar, haunting voice of his; he would then ask children to send in more stories for him to read—and after every story he would assign whoever was watching to draw him a picture, using the story he had just read as the inspiration, and to please send it in. Once every episode he would take time to present these drawings, holding them up to the camera and describing what he saw in the scrawls of crayon and magic marker: here is a cat, and here is George Washington and the cherry tree, and here is a firetruck. His hands would shake. He would always read out the children’s names and their ages too, before unveiling a drawing. Tobias, age 6. Bridget, age 10. And his hands would shake.

I would always wonder at this point whether I was the only one watching. I would always wonder if Vincent Price himself hadn’t made these drawings alone, with his shaky hands, shortly before the cameras began to roll.  

At the end of every episode he would read out a Florida address where this was all apparently filmed, and where his audience were meant to send in their pictures. And he would read the address very purposefully, taking almost dramatic pauses after every word, then each number of the zip code. The assumption being, I thought, that children everywhere were in front of their TV screens, crayon or magic marker in hand, taking this address down. 

I never did. I never took down the address or sent a drawing for Vincent to hold up to the camera. But I watched the show religiously. Meaning that I would watch and listen to the very end, always to the very end, every time I caught Vincent Price standing alone in that kitchen. Feeling guilty if I didn’t bear witness, feeling that I needed to understand, feeling that this was important but not quite understanding why.

All Things

Just a nice little image I found while on my current George Harrison binge...Everything at the moment seems to make me crave (along with cigarettes, coffee, love, rain, river-swimming, conversations in the park, books, beaches, beautiful skies, a little peace, a little visible breath) chilled-out domesticity...

Isn't it a pity?
Now, isn't it a shame?
How we break each other's hearts
And cause each other pain?
How we take each other's love
Without thinking anymore?
Forgetting to give back
Isn't it a pity?

Some things take so long
But how do I explain?
When not too many people
Can see we're all the same
And because of all their tears
Their eyes can't hope to see
The beauty that surrounds them
Isn't it a pity?

Museums and Women and Other Stories

Something about the cooling down of early Autumn has me not only remembering, sensually, newly sharpened pencils and eraser rinds and the eucalyptus leaves that used to shush me on my way to school--it also recalls the invariably foggy days I would be taken to Golden Gate Park as a boy. Specifically, if the September weather happens to be on the cusp of rain, it brings to mind wandering aimlessly through labyrinthine halls in the Academy of Sciences. The moody light and the cool, quiet corridors with their carpeted floors. The place has since been redeveloped, marble-floors put in, and most of the displays modernized. I've tried finding a picture of the way I remember the Simson African Hall looking back in the Eighties--dark, like a long abandoned airport lobby. At the far end, there was a Saharan scene that gradually, almost imperceptibly, would change from daylight to night, the sounds of the wildlife changing with it. But no pictures exist. It seems they've all be erased...But the stuffed animals remain, frozen in time.

MARY (CONT’D)

...It’s funny, because I myself did it for a time. For a time, you know, I assisted in a museum, as a kind of internship for things to come. Waiting for the kingdom. In my official looking uniform. Black, with pleats in the skirt, and with Mary Janes....This was before Oxford...And the museum: it was very--What’s the word, now? Such a lovely, lovely, spacious word. What is it? Like a maze. (Pause, then with a soft-I) Labyrinthine. (Hard-I this time) Labyrinthine. A labyrinthine museum, with labyrinthine galleries. Floors, upper and lower. And always, I’d be stationed in the basement. All the way down. Out of sight, out of...you know. Surrounded by all these forgotten relics, belongings and old bones nobody ever, ever came to visit...

She waits. She looks around for more visitors.
 

MARY (CONT’D)
Once in awhile we might get the missing link of an alligator chain down there: children who’d gone missing, strays wandering around, all holding hands, or linked arm in arm, and I would have to pretend. To look after them, I mean. Like I was their tour guide and these were my, you know, my charges...

She stands

.

VOICE (O.S.)
Mary.

Long pause. Again she awaits interruption, a voice from above.

MARY (CONT’D)

And I remember they used to forget, some nights, about me. Some nights, the people at the museum would just...leave me behind. Forgetting....The lights would go black and then I’d hear the locks...With my torch, I would wander around alone, waiting for something, I know not what, to just happen....And I soon found this big luxurious bed down there on the basement floor with me. An old four-poster, I’m talking about, built for kings and queens. And it was this that finally proved my undoing....I used to fall asleep there whenever I got left behind, you know, pulling the big thick heavy curtains all around me. Shutting out the world that had shut me out. Promising myself I’d somehow be renewed in the night, restorated. Dreaming, maybe, that I might awake, yes awake in some other place and time when I opened those velvet curtains again. But one morning I managed to oversleep and that was that. They found me. I ran away. I got sacked...(Pause.) I wasn’t even being paid, so what did it matter? I was just passing the time before I was due at Oxford. I didn’t really care, not really. This was only just the beginning, this stint of mine at the museum. Haven’t thought about it in years...  
  
(This is from an 'experimental' play I just finished... with apologies to Mrs Basil E. Frankenweiler)