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Vincent van Gogh (as a yoof): a hero to many – imagine being able to meet him.
It is a big adventure, this writing life. There’s the adventure in the stories: characters experiencing things, discovering things, learning things; overcoming and becoming.
Then there’s the adventure of conceiving stories, writing stories, redrafting stories (repeat ad infinitum if necessary), before sending them out until an editor takes a shine to a particular piece and puts it amongst his or her pages. Then there’s the adventure of feedback. Who will like what? Or will no-one like any of it? Or will there be no feedback at all?
But there’s more: the places writing has taken me, as in real places. A homestead out of Braidwood. A gatekeeper’s cottage in Launceston. The writers’ house at Bundanon beside the Shoalhaven River. The monastic Varuna in the Blue Mountains. And, most recently, the Australian Defence Force Academy, courtesy of UNSW Canberra.
Then there are the people I’ve met, other writers, artists of all kinds. The conversations over coffees, lunches, glasses of wine, dinners even! It doesn’t take me long to be enthralled by those who are far ahead in this game; I become besotted. It is, to tell you the truth, one of the most exciting things: to spend time with extraordinarily creative souls.
I have been so fortunate. A highlight?
In January 2011, as part of a piece for the Canberra Times, I found myself in the Sydney home of eminent contemporary – or ‘pop’ – artist Martin Sharp. All morning we talked about the things that mattered to him: his great love of Vincent van Gogh, Tiny Tim, and, a little surprisingly, UK talent-show contestant Susan Boyle; about how he thought the best art came from school children; about how his thinking has evolved, his relatively newfound religiosity. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘conservative thinking is radical.’ This from the man who was once involved with Oz Magazine, whose London editors would end up being jailed as part of the infamous ‘Obscenity Trials’.
At midday, after he farewelled me, as I walked up his driveway, I thought – and I distinctly remember it – that this would be go down as one of my favourite days. Here was a great artist, but one without a skerrick of pretension. It was as though I’d just spent the morning with a slightly kooky but utterly charming uncle (who chain-smoked).
So, dear writing, thank you for the adventures thus far.
And, dear Martin Sharp, thank you for everything you gave us.
(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 14 December 2013.)
Martin Sharp circa 2011 (Image credit: The Sydney Morning Herald)
Summer is odd, especially in Australia.
The first dose of decent weather – as in clear blue skies, no wind, 35-degree temperatures, and, where I live, 50% humidity (or less) – brings a sense of optimism: finally we’re through the winter and can now go outdoors without worrying about being frozen to death or being blown off the face of the Earth. This week we at last had that feeling, because we had two days in a row of good summery weather. So, yes, optimism.
But this week has also brought sadness. The passing away of Nelson Mandela. Closer to home, we’ve had the death of eminent Australian contemporary artist Martin Sharp at the age of 71. It might be just a little strange to put these two names in the same paragraph, but I think it’s apt, not because of these two men having made similar contributions to the world – they didn’t – but because both lived such genuine and genuinely inspiring lives.
Martin Sharp was – and no doubt will continue to be for some time – Australia’s answer to Andy Warhol. There’s plenty written about him, and there’s certainly been quite a few thoughtful and informed obituaries, including this one from his colleague and friend Richard Neville. To many, Sharp will be remembered for being a founding member of Oz, a radical and irreverent magazine – today we’d call it a zine – that lampooned authority and tradition, particularly the church, including conservative attitudes to sexuality. He also designed some of the most iconic rock-music album covers from the 1960s/70s. Later, he’d become an obsessed champion of Tiny Tim, Ginger Meggs, and Sydney’s site-of-thrills-and-fun Luna Park. He continued to practice for the rest of his life, though became fond of spending years, if not decades, touching up his earlier work.
A cover of Oz by Martin Sharp featuring Bob Dylan, 1967
Amazingly, through sheer luck, in early 2011 I interviewed Martin Sharp in his Sydney home for the Canberra Times. He was warm, generous with his time, thoughtful, always choosing his words carefully, not because he was guarded (though he might have been), but, I think, he just wanted to be clear. He chain-smoked through the entire morning, constantly rolling homemade cigarettes, the tobacco in a bowl in the table as though it was merely just some kind of herb that he was about to use for cooking. I found him to be utterly unpretentious, and during the interview we spoke about his great love of Tiny Tim, Vincent Van Gogh (his life’s great inspiration), and that he thought the best art was being done by school children. He’d become religious in his old age, though in the broad, somewhat mystical sense that artists can become religious (I doubt he went to church), and I remember how he said that in certain contexts conservative thinking can be radical.
I asked him if he had any modern-day heroes, and without blinking an eye he said, ‘Susan Boyle.’ I knew only a little of Boyle, but when I got back home made sure to learn more about her. What was it about this UK talent-show contestant that had intrigued Sharp so? I remember how he said that she’d given her all, everything, put her whole being on the line, words to that affect. So I googled her and was amazed to find myself getting goose-bumps. When I could drag my way from Youtube I wrote up the interview and the resultant feature article – it wasn’t so much about Martin Sharp but about a new (at the time) gallery and arts facility in Goulburn called South Hill, of which Sharp was the patron – and I also wrote a short piece on how Sharp had given me goose-bumps while telling me about his love for Boyle.
Just before I left Martin Sharp’s house that January day, he gave me a copy of a Tiny Tim album that he’d produced (at considerable expense). For some reason I’ve never listened to it; perhaps I just didn’t want to take it out of its resolutely plastic-wrapped sleeve. Maybe I just wanted to keep it as perfect as it had been when it was given to me. Every time I saw the CD in my collection I thought to myself, Wow, what an amazing day that was.
But I’m listening to it now. It’s hilarious. But also important: Tiny Tim, just like Susan Boyle, gives every fibre of his being to his performances.
Thanks, Martin, for your time, your wise words, and, above all else, your art.
If I make it to 71 I’ll be sure to remember that morning with you.
A place that looks like this could well be predisposed to melancholia. With any luck.
I always look forward to it, through the high dry heat of summer and much of autumn. As the days shorten and shadow, once daylight-saving has finished its run and darkness comes before dinner, it’s one of the things I love most about being alive. And it’s this: at 6pm each night I scrunch up newspaper pages into balls, carefully craft a tee-pee of kindling, and, like placing a cherry on a dollop of ice-cream, I top it all off with a pine-cone, before, with the strike of a match, fire takes hold in the hearth. But wait, there’s more. There’s the pouring of a glass of semillon or ‘sav blonk’, and then, the piece de resistance, the playing of the most deliciously maudlin music I can find – Max Richter is a favourite (his reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is heartbreaking, in a good way), as is anything by Johan Johansson or those Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Ros.
When everything is in its place like this, I’m as happy as a humble scribe can be. Except, of course, happy isn’t right, because it’s misery that I’m after, or, at the very least, a no-holes-barred melancholy.
Melancholy: it’s a word to be adored. Acquiesce is another, so is panacea, but melancholy is the king or queen of the lexicon; but in these wild days of ours where gender is the be all and end all, let’s just say that melancholy rules the roost. Because it sounds good, and it looks good – as if it’s something that could be diced up and steamed – but it also feels good, no, it feels sublime. Melancholy means, of course, pensive sadness, or the constitutional tendency for said sadness. But it has troubling roots, being derived from the Greek word melas meaning black and khole meaning bile, which puts me off, just a smidgeon. Quick, throw another log on the fire, pour another dash of the white, and turn up the music!
However, there’s no escaping the out-and-out danger of what we’re talking about. It’s widely acknowledged that melancholia refers to a mental disorder marked by depression and ill-formed fears. Please step forward Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway and, um, Moses; Vincent van Gogh is also a member of the club but you already knew that. Interesting that my trusty Roget’s Thesaurus Everyman Edition (1972) jumps from melancholy to ‘distressing’ and ‘dejection’, but for melancholia it cuts to the chase by taking us straight to ‘insanity’, which sounds rough to me, but you can’t argue with Roget.
Could it be that the ACT region, in which I include the Southern Tablelands to the north and the Monaro district to the south, might be devilishly fond of putting melancholy on its people? It’s highly likely. Because we have the harshest winters: fog, frost, freezing nights, as well as wind and rain and sleet, and snow if we’re lucky. Because during the day we have a frighteningly blue sky, the sort that can send the best of us into an abyss of existential angst. And because during the night we have a perilously black sky, one that can pinch our breath. The tropics we are not; our winters can kill.
‘Blue Notebooks’ by Max Richter. For those who like to be blue, we salute you. Well, I salute you.
This particular winter, with all the dreadful mess that’s currently oozing out of Capital Hill (or Camp Hill as it was once called, and as some still refer to it, which is divine), could well be sending even the most buoyant amongst our number into a pit of despair. Or into the cult of busyness. And it’s here that I’m reluctantly reminded of what Gunter Grass wrote in From the Diary of a Snail (also first published in 1972): ‘If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle – absolute busyness – then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy – and without consciousness.’ No doubt our representatives in parliament house will ensure that over the next three long, slow, sinister months we’ll be fully supplied with conflict, between the future and the past, between fact and fiction, between elevation and condemnation, and – oh it seems absurd but regrettably it’s the case – between male and female*, and many of us may well indeed want to slip into unconsciousness. Which ultimately, irony of ironies, could be a lifesaver.
Virginia Woolf, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), is a bit more positive about us melancholic types, especially, I think, those who’ve fallen into the black hole of social media but are trying to make the most of it: ‘If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy?’
Amen to that, sister.
So, until mid-September, until spring with its colours that go beyond black and blue, and the lengthening, lightening days that are to come, I will ensure that the woodpile is fully stocked, overstocked if my back and bank-account can manage it, that there are enough bottles of cheap white plonk ready and waiting along the bottom drawer of the fridge, and that the most miserable CDs I own (and I have quite a few) are stacked beside me. But despite all this intentional – and, let’s be frank, gratuitous – desolation, there is hope. Because as winter knows best, particularly the sort of winters we have around these parts, especially the 2013 version, a true melancholic isn’t sick at heart, and a true melancholic doesn’t let cheap political tricks suck the marrow out of his or her bones. A true melancholic is simply realistic, and just a little brave.
*
First published in The Canberra Times on 22 June 2013. Thanks to Cameron Ross. *Written before Wednesday 26 July 2013, when Australian politics went arse-up. Now insert ‘between male ego and male ego’.
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 