Fish never smelled so sweet

Just finished reading an amazing novel, Gould's Book of Fish by the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan. It's so good, so boldly imagined and thoroughly realized, that it's hard to say anything about it. You can sort of articulate what it's about, I suppose: It's about a penal colony in Tasmania in the 1820s, it's about colonialism and the illusions of enlightenment and science and civilization and their cruel byproducts. It's about the slaughterhouse that is history and the countless lives erased by official histories. It's about storytelling - the luminously crude and often gorgeous language is an uninterrupted romp, though at times you want to hide in the language to avoid the mad savageries described. It's about imagination, about art, about the powers and seductions of language, and the mystery of love.

And it's about fish, a book of fish painted by a convict: I've included the pics of the silver dory, the striped cowfish, the stargazer, and the weedy seadragon. The convict was a forger named, among other things, William Buelow Gould. (The forger seems a common character in Australian fiction about the convict settlements, understandably enough, but this fellow takes the cake. Besides, he really existed, or at least the book of paintings does, in the Tasmanian State Library!) The fish start to take over Billy Gould's mind, their bizarre but beautiful shapes becoming metaphors for the characters he describes, the distorted grotesques of humanity (if it is still humanity) produced in as ultimately antihuman a system as the colonial with its delusions of finally facilitating the birth of a true human civilization. Is it easier for a man to live his life as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human?" But that makes it sound like a sermon, which it isn't: it's too angry, and too intoxicated by the thrill of imagining. Billy Gould is clearly mad - or is it that he transforms what he reimagines with such a mad clarity that it reveals a truth deeper than the truth, a truth more terrifying than truth dares face?

More skilled critics than I are made to grope for words by this book, too ("a work of significant genius" said a tongue-tied critic for the Chicago Tribune, whatever that means, and yet I feel the critic's pain), and note affinities with Rabelais, Smollett, Sterne, Melville, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Garcia Marquez, Jim Crace, Toni Morrison, Jeannette Winterson. A pretty terrifying roster - don't let it put you off. I've read quite a lot of Australian literature by now; this is in a league of its own. Not light reading, but brilliant.

It's not just that it ends, with an improbability that is entirely convincing (not the very end, and also not a spoiler for novel):

So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary -- how am I to resolve them? ...

For I am not reconciled to this world.

I wished to be & I was not & so I tried to write this world as a book of fish & set it to rights in the only manner I knew how.

But my way was meaningless, my cries unheard, my pictures spat on before they were lost for all eternity. Now I just watch & think the ridiculous, the improbable: the world is good, I think, & the world is good & the world is good.

...

Starstruck

Spent the day in Shepparton with my nephews, as my sister and brother in law checked out possible new homes - he's found a new job nearer Melbourne, so they'll be moving closer to the city. Excellent news!

But Shepparton's putting up a good fight. The cute little towns along the outer edge of Melbourne which they're looking at are, for all their charms, little towns compared to Shepparton, the closest thing to a city in these parts. As I noted a while back, it's quite an international place, too.

Tonight was the Twilight Festival, a lovely outdoor festival with booths selling not just the inevitable sausages and beer but local wines, home-made Turkish food, Congolese hair-braiding... An Australian approximation of the Gypsy Kings played (well) until the fireworks, which were splendid! Either fireworks have gotten a lot cheaper or a lot better since I was young, or the sponsor of the fireworks, SPC Ardmona, the company which harvests and cans most of the fruit around here, splashed out a lot of money.

And then we headed home to find the sky full to bursting with the Milky Way. Not that you can't see the southern Milky Way anywhere in Australia, indeed anywhere in the world. But I don't think I've ever seen it this bright before. Gotta get out into the bush and sleep under the stars before I leave Australia...

(The pic is from the web, taken in Bolivia by a Fred Espenak.)

Childing autumn

The childing autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,

By their increase, now knows not which is which.


When Titania spoke these words last night, describing the havoc wreaked by her discord with Oberon, it might have been global warming she was describing. I was thinking how incongruous it was to be seeing A Midsummer Night's Dream in the chill of an early autumn evening in the Melbourne Botanical Garden, something like midway between the midsummers of the two hemispheres between which I find myself bouncing this year.

But then I forgot all about it and had a grand time - the first time, I must confess, that I have actually enjoyed this play. Perhaps you need to see it in a park with night falling just as you enter act II. The flying foxes circling overhead - big owl-sized bats - added to the magic of it. The Australian Shakespeare Company was brilliant, too. Leavening it with smart contemporary references and fantastic comic timing (oh Pyramus and Thisbe...!!!), they let the play's poetry and the genius of its structure shine forth. The apparently imprecise overlapping of worlds produces an ending pleasing for its challenge - would you have fairies have power over men's destinies or no? in neither case would you have this happy outcome.

It's a nice thing, isn't it, to finally understand what all the fuss is about concerning something you've not before had eye to hear or ear to see, hand to taste, tongue to conceive nor heart to report.

Embedding

To make finishing this darn manuscript my main activity without entirely giving up on Melbourne's pleasures, I'm trying a new schedule to embed the one within the other: walk or tram into the city and get a morning flat white at one of the city's myriad coffee shops (present faves include De Graves and the Café au Soleil, but I'm committed to trying many more), then park myself in the State Library for the day, a network of spacious reading rooms full of people from all walks of life. Lots of inexpensive Asian restaurants nearby should I get hungry. Then tram or walk back to Lygon Street. Sometimes, like today, I might nip down to St. Paul's cathedral for choral evensong at 5:15, and I suspect I might get in the habit of checking out what's happening at Fed Square, too...

Ahh, Melbourne

This is a very pretty place, this Melbourne! This morning I took the tram a bit farther than the State Library to see what was happening at the National Gallery of Victoria International across the river (the long grey block at left in the picture above). A fantastic futuristic participatory Lego cityscape was my destination, but the NGV International is closed Tuesdays. No worries, I got the time for a free screening of "Salaam Namaste," a Bollywood film shot here in Melbourne, and had an excuse to walk back across the Yarra in the clear autumn light, and up through Fed Square, which I've now decided I don't just really like but love. How the light plays on the undulating pink cobblestones, and dances along the glass surfaces of the buildings!

In the atrium I found an exhibit of photos of the city taken from a hot air balloon by a Cecilia Mugica and available also on her website. The pic above is one of hers, taken in the early morning a bit farther along in autumn, but nicely shows how you'd make your way from the NGV International past the futuristic Arts Center and across the river into the CBD (Central Business District = downtown). Fed Square, atop the railroad tracks, is the first thing on the right.

Back to the books

I'm at a new stage of post-India withdrawal, the sense that I skimmed the surface so superficially as to have really seen nothing. This is doubtless untrue in one sense, since I wouldn't have needed to go through the last phase, if true in another: it was just three weeks, after all, when most people seem to spend months and years there, not to say lifetimes!

The somewhat less demanding pleasures of this life here, in Melbourne, now, as summer yields to a new school year, are nicely characterized in the Leunig calendar for this month. If he doesn't mention the happiness of returning to your manuscript and finding it just as you left it, perhaps that's because it's not an entirely happy occasion. While I've been out and about, it's just been sitting here, sulking. And now it's punishing me with "you don't really care about me at all, do you?" and "do you even remember who I am?"

We'll work it out, I'm sure.

India pics complete!!

Okay folks, it's taken a week but here they are - as many of my India pics as I dare inflict on you! They're organized by places (with some spillover between posts and more or less commentary depending on my state of mind). You can follow these links directly to the pics from Delhi, Agra, Chanderi and the Ken River, Orchha, Khajuraho, Allahabad and Varanasi, the Durga temple near Ramnagar, Jaipur, Amber, Ajmer and Pushkar, or just keep scrolling down. Some of the pictures are quite pretty!

This post is for pics left over which I can't resist posting anyway. The picture at top is part of a wall-painting in Samode, an 18th-century palace-turned-luxury hotel I peeked into on my way back from Rajasthan.
The monkeys playing at the painting's upper left are the same kind I saw atop a dome near the Brahma mandir - and lots of other places too!

Three scenes from my very first day in Delhi:
• one of the lovely marble grilles which interlace the chambers at Humayun's tomb and fill it with dappled light and cool breezes
• a little chipmunk-like squirrel, the first of many many animals I encountered everywhere we went, and

• some of the exquisite calligraphy which encircles the great tower of Qutb Minar - notice how the sculptors have made blooming branches out of the letters of the calligraphy!

This gentleman selling necklaces and string for soaking in the sangam at Allahabad has been waiting sullenly for me to post this picture for weeks.
This solitary brahmin performed a puja in the sacred city of Chitrakoot, a place the Intrepid tour stopped on its way from the Ken River to Allahabad. It was mysterious and moving and nothing like the Las Vegas version of a similar puja we saw in Varanasi, performed by twice five young Brahmins under bright lights!

At right is a picture of my driver through Rajasthan (the one who almost got me killed) with his mother and young son. Until we decided to take a picture his mother, who'd just brought us glasses of fresh steaming hot milk, was bathing me in the warmest smile I've probably ever seen. Was it naughty of me to include two other kids - not introduced to me but clearly very interested - in my picture?

I leave you with these pilgrims processing to some temple near Samode. These were but some of the hundreds we saw, walking and accompanying floats pulled by tractors or in truck-beds. The roads were lined with marchers for miles and miles and miles. Next time I'll know enough, or have a driver who knows enough English, to find out what's going on!

India pics: Pushkar

I spent my last two days in the the little holy city of Pushkar, little more than a few hundred temples in various styles around a sacred lake until the tourists showed up. The holiest temples were off limits to non-Hindus (unless, I was told later, the non-Hindus are bearing baksheesh) so my pictures are only from the gates, except for the Brahma mandir (the red one), my visits to which I described at the time.
These are all pretty grand, but after a while you notice that practically every building houses a temple of some kind, grand or shabby (or shabby-grand, an Indian specialty), spilling well beyond the 52 ghats (one built by each maharaja of Rajasthan) and up into the surrounding hills. It would have been more representative to have shown you one of the unassuming temples, but I foolishly forgot to take a picture of one of them - how would you decide which one to choose? None of them stands out...! Most of the buildings - even the grand ones - are not very old, since Aurangzeb, the last and most iconoclastic of the Mughal emperors, took the occasion of a visit to the Dargah in Ajmer to pop over to Pushkar to smash some idols.
The lake is especially nice at sunset and at sunrise. The place to got for sunset, however, is the temple of Savitri.
From it (even if you don't make it to the summit...!) you get a nice view of Pushkar
and can see why this little spot of clear blue in the midst of a dry rugged landscape will have demanded supernatural explanation and celebration.
To close, here's a picture of the water on the lake just as the sun rises above the mountains to the east, taken just after the one I posted at the time.

India pics: Ajmer

After Jaipur and Ajmer I headed further southwest to two very holy places: Ajmer, home of the most important Sufi tomb in the Subcontinent, and Pushkar, home of the world's only Brahma temple. These are some of the fragrant (and tasty!) flowers offered to the saint.This is pretty much the only picture I felt comfortable taking within the Dargah, the tomb of Khwaja Muin-ud-din Chishti. The center of the action is beneath the gold and marble dome, a tight space around which crowds circle, making offerings of flowers and getting blessings under scarves - and money to the men who help you do this.
It's a busy old Muslim city seldom visited by tourists.
What really thrilled me was the Adhai-din- ka-jhonpra or Two-and-a-half Day Mosque, supposedly reconstructed at the end of the 12th century CE from the rubble of a Hindu palace or Jain temple (depending what source you consult) in 2.5 days.

It seemed like the elder brother of my favorite site in Delhi: the ruined Quwwat-ul-Islam, India's oldest mosque, at Qutb Minar (of which I've just realized I've posted no pictures). It too was assembled from the rubble of earlier structures - Jain and Hindu temples - and its concertedly jumbled use of these earlier materials put me in mind of one of my very favorite places in the whole world: the Mezquita in Cordoba, another Islamic structure built of pieces of pre-Islamic structures (though itself colonized, more or less successfully, by a platteresque cathedral). I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm so fond of spolia.

Anyway, the Jhonpra is twice as tall as the Quwwat-ul-Islam, intact - and still used as a mosque. I was in heaven. Once the midday namaz was over I wandered around as if in an enchanted forest.
As I took pictures a very cute little schoolboy followed me around, and then posed for a photo with his younger brother - outfitted with all the Dargah gear! (I got one of those red and yellow necklaces, too, from my driver.) Not to be outdone, a bevvy of beauties - led by the littlest one! - demanded a picture of them, too!

India pics: Amber

Not far from Jaipur lies the place where Jaipur's maharajas lived before they planned the pink city. It's a very grand palace complex indeed; I was all oohs and ahhs.
I walked up (indeed you'll notice from the picture at the top that I went well beyond the palace to the fort above), but many tourists make their way up on elephants. Here they are coming back down.
The inside of the palace is very grand, although most of the buildings stand empty.
The crown jewel is the Sheesh Mahal, a pavilion encrusted with mirrored mosaic (which couldn't be carted off!). Here's a small detail; it wasn't easy getting pictures in which light was reflected without the mirrors also reflecting tourists!

As I was looking around the palace, before I fled the tours for the stillness of Jaigar fort above, Amber was pulsing with snatches of music fit for a discotheque: a dance sequence for a Bollywood film was being rehearsed in the main courtyard!

India pics: Jaipur and Galta

After returning to Delhi and Gurgaon at the end of the Intrepid tour, I set off for five days in Rajasthan. The first stop was in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan although only created in the 18th century. Jaipur is known as the pink city but this has to be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, it was only all daubed this color for the first time a little over a century ago for the visit of a British crown prince. For another, it ain't pink, but more a sort of burnt siena. But it is beautiful if crumbling.
It used to be this yellowish color.
Its most famous building, the palace of the winds, allowed Jaipur's ladies - who were enclosed as much by their Rajput men as Muslim women were by the Mughals - to see what was going on on the street without being seen.
Jaipur's coolest views are of the Jantar Mantar, one of five observatories set up around India to make precise astronomical (and astrological) measurements. This one, the largest, looks like a de Chirico!
Jaipur's funnest building is probably the museum designed by a Brit in the Indo-Saracenic style.

Above Jaipur, as above most Rajasthani cities, are a series of forts.
Here's the view of Jaipur from the Temple of the Sun, which I reached from the other side, from a wonderfully still place called Galta - a natural spring (holy too) and a temple carved into the rock around it, and populated by ten thousand monkeys!
This is just the top of it, as seen from the Temple of the Sun looking away from town.

India pics: Durga temple

I described how relieved I was to find that, just across the Ganges from Varanasi, India life went on untroubled and undistorted by tourism.

But I don't think I mentioned that my friend and I went past Ramnagar fort and palace, with its wonky museum, to see an 18th century Durga temple. Here's what it looked like. I also didn't mention that when we crossed back over the river we saw some interesting birds - in the sky and on a post by the shore (a kingfisher!).