Laziness is its Own Seduction
Friday 18 December 2009
There are rosellas in the jacaranda tree just outside my office window. I sit at my desk with a pen between my teeth and my computer drifting asleep, wondering if they are Pale-faces driven south of their range because of the weather or Easterns on the verge of adulthood. If I don’t do this, then I will have to work, and I don’t want to.
They are not feeding, just sitting. Parrots really get procrastination. There’s a lot you can learn from them.
I am supposed to be assembling an anthology of sayings and fragments that I can record as a soundtrack to the various ‘regions’ of the site. Although most of what I use will be my own writing (and I haven’t written it yet), at this stage I am picking the eyes out of The Bible and other books - looking for useful tags. This is like accountancy - except that accountants apparently like what they do.
I should by now have a sense of how I want these little fragments to sound, but I don’t. The weather is hot and stormy and my inner ear will not open; it is like a lizard too sleepy to stir from a wall.
My outer ear is hungry for ruckus. I should be calming it by listening to whale-song, bird-song and Gregorian Chant. Instead, I am obsessed with Guns N Roses, Tool, Nine Inch Nails and Patti Smith.
I have a disc of bush sounds from the box-ironbark forests in Victoria and I played it all through the writing of Tooborac. I could listen to it again now, but won't. I could open the windows and listen to the real birds and insects and frogs that live around me, and a very little homunculus that lives in my head is eager to do that - but the larger homunculus that is my whole body will not stir from the chair.
On the surface of my brain, well above where the wrinkles start, so far up on the surface that even ‘shallow’ would seem deep, somewhere up there I already do know the sound I want. I have heard it while listening in the dark, I have been listening to early ambient music and reading through Brian Eno’s production processes, and playing with equalisers and compressors and echo-sources because I really do know what I want. But even the surface of the brain is too far away for me today.
I am going to use the opening from The Pilgrim’s Progress: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted upon a certain place, where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a man clothed with rags standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his own back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled.”
This is one of the best openings I know, and is pure Australian in its pace and functionality. Bunyan may have spent his life in a Bedfordshire jail, but his spirit was longing all that time to be Australian; either that, or Australian traditions are based on English traditions shared by Bunyan before us. My first theory is the most appealing. (Rex Ingamells wrote a wonderful, and now largely forgotten, epic poem in which the entirety of civilisation was called forth by the spirits of the Dreaming to bring Australia into a great destiny. It was only printed once. Until recently, people threw it away; now it costs a fortune if you can ever find it.)
The pulse of it - marked out by those commas - will roll in the common Australian treatment like the crashing of surf, but can also be become gentle, like winds that turn rather than toss the sands upon a desert. People forget that the Australian voice has a multitude of registers.
The other piece I will use is The Lord’s Prayer in its older, Anglican version. This is one of the great mini-dramas in the language and always feels to me as though it has come from one of those huge Jacobean melodramas, from something by Jonson or Webster. In fact, it belongs to a time of real melodrama, of genuine blood and guts and desolation and piety: from the tearing apart of the English nation from its Catholic genius into the spoliation of the Reformation. It is dramatic because it has in it the victory of tranquility, yet utters urgency and blood and need as well: the best poetry, and the most performable, is as though it is a human heart - hot with blood, yet the seat also of our tenderness and hope.
It can be spoken through such a range of moods and anxieties, such an enormity of tempers and repose that it should be among the warm-up pieces of all actors, not merely the half forgotten relic of a church ever desperate every day to make itself more and more redundant and ever more ridiculous. And knowing this is proof that I know all that I need to know to get on and to do my job. I only need to hear sounds from the real world to remind me of the sounds I want to make.
Before that, however, I need to listen to the frogs because they know that it’s going to rain, and that I’ve left open all the windows of the ute.
Noël Christian
homestead:Theatre of Words
http://www.facebook.com/pages/homestead-Theatre-of-Words/195922452014?ref=ts
http://www.myspace.com/homesteadtheatre
They are not feeding, just sitting. Parrots really get procrastination. There’s a lot you can learn from them.
I am supposed to be assembling an anthology of sayings and fragments that I can record as a soundtrack to the various ‘regions’ of the site. Although most of what I use will be my own writing (and I haven’t written it yet), at this stage I am picking the eyes out of The Bible and other books - looking for useful tags. This is like accountancy - except that accountants apparently like what they do.
I should by now have a sense of how I want these little fragments to sound, but I don’t. The weather is hot and stormy and my inner ear will not open; it is like a lizard too sleepy to stir from a wall.
My outer ear is hungry for ruckus. I should be calming it by listening to whale-song, bird-song and Gregorian Chant. Instead, I am obsessed with Guns N Roses, Tool, Nine Inch Nails and Patti Smith.
I have a disc of bush sounds from the box-ironbark forests in Victoria and I played it all through the writing of Tooborac. I could listen to it again now, but won't. I could open the windows and listen to the real birds and insects and frogs that live around me, and a very little homunculus that lives in my head is eager to do that - but the larger homunculus that is my whole body will not stir from the chair.
On the surface of my brain, well above where the wrinkles start, so far up on the surface that even ‘shallow’ would seem deep, somewhere up there I already do know the sound I want. I have heard it while listening in the dark, I have been listening to early ambient music and reading through Brian Eno’s production processes, and playing with equalisers and compressors and echo-sources because I really do know what I want. But even the surface of the brain is too far away for me today.
I am going to use the opening from The Pilgrim’s Progress: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted upon a certain place, where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a man clothed with rags standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his own back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled.”
This is one of the best openings I know, and is pure Australian in its pace and functionality. Bunyan may have spent his life in a Bedfordshire jail, but his spirit was longing all that time to be Australian; either that, or Australian traditions are based on English traditions shared by Bunyan before us. My first theory is the most appealing. (Rex Ingamells wrote a wonderful, and now largely forgotten, epic poem in which the entirety of civilisation was called forth by the spirits of the Dreaming to bring Australia into a great destiny. It was only printed once. Until recently, people threw it away; now it costs a fortune if you can ever find it.)
The pulse of it - marked out by those commas - will roll in the common Australian treatment like the crashing of surf, but can also be become gentle, like winds that turn rather than toss the sands upon a desert. People forget that the Australian voice has a multitude of registers.
The other piece I will use is The Lord’s Prayer in its older, Anglican version. This is one of the great mini-dramas in the language and always feels to me as though it has come from one of those huge Jacobean melodramas, from something by Jonson or Webster. In fact, it belongs to a time of real melodrama, of genuine blood and guts and desolation and piety: from the tearing apart of the English nation from its Catholic genius into the spoliation of the Reformation. It is dramatic because it has in it the victory of tranquility, yet utters urgency and blood and need as well: the best poetry, and the most performable, is as though it is a human heart - hot with blood, yet the seat also of our tenderness and hope.
It can be spoken through such a range of moods and anxieties, such an enormity of tempers and repose that it should be among the warm-up pieces of all actors, not merely the half forgotten relic of a church ever desperate every day to make itself more and more redundant and ever more ridiculous. And knowing this is proof that I know all that I need to know to get on and to do my job. I only need to hear sounds from the real world to remind me of the sounds I want to make.
Before that, however, I need to listen to the frogs because they know that it’s going to rain, and that I’ve left open all the windows of the ute.
Noël Christian
homestead:Theatre of Words
http://www.facebook.com/pages/homestead-Theatre-of-Words/195922452014?ref=ts
http://www.myspace.com/homesteadtheatre
More by Noel Christian
- A Wallaby, a Dingo and a Wild Pig All Walked On a Stage11 Jan 2010
- Apples Under the Earth5 Jan 2010
- Earning Wages Just to Put Them in a Bagful of Holes29 Dec 2009