~ titus andronicus

Yes, I live on. My pale yellow bones still tread the Earth. My time has been fully allotted – an equal split between productive periods, recuperative periods and periods spent in bewilderment and disorientation. The school holidays have been and gone And, of course, there’s been the Grand Final and the nerve-wracking weeks preceding, which consumed and then bitterly spat out all my emotional energy. There’s nothing to say St Kilda can’t win next year, but we came so close, so close … and blew it.

I wonder to what extent cuticle condition is an indicator of mental health? Just now my bitten down nails and knurled, nibbled-at cuticles are returning to a semblance of health. In the bad times I might wear two, three or more band-aids on those fingertips where I have gnawed too far …

I’ve been rehearsing for a production of The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, which opens on Wednesday. It’s become a bit of an annual event for me, doing these plays at RMIT with Lynne (Ellis). Last year it was Under Milk Wood, before that The Tempest and The Bible. It’s always an agreeable time. I like the students: sweet, sparkling with enthusiasm and growing younger every year (I’m older than a lot of their parents now). Above all, I find it pleasing to leach their health-giving youthful energies and employ them towards my own questionable ends.

Doing the play also helps keep me in focus; inevitably I have a huge amount of lines and blocking to recall - and my brain does respond, though sluggishly, to the challenge. And with so many unfamiliar individuals about, I get plenty of practice acting normal, which is a talent I begin to lose if I spend too much time in my cloud castle. On stage, however, Lynne gives me license to ham it up to my heart’s content. Last year I channeled Peter Lorre; in Titus, as the outrageously wicked villain Aaron –a green-fleshed alien from the Sculptor Galaxy (at least in this production) - I’m trying to draw inspiration from Bill Nighy’s Viktor in Underworld.

Oh, and I also like coming home late at night from the city by train, too – it almost feels like I have a real job.

If it piques your interest, Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare’s Festival of Gore), runs for four night - Wednesday through Saturday (7-10 Oct) at the Kaleide Theatre at RMIT in Swanston St, Melbourne. It is part of the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival. Tickets are $5/$10 and it starts at 7.30. To suit modern attention-spans, it’s been edited down a fair bit and features excepts from Christopher Dunne’s bizarre film adaptation. The two female leads are composite beings, each played, at all times, by five girls.

Titus is thought to be Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy and brims with murder, rape, villainy, revenge, general barbarity, a complex web of deceit and evil deeds of every ilk. (Note well that my character is progenitor of most of these.) It’s ‘by far his bloodiest work’. Indeed, this bloodthirstiness caused the play to remain out of favour for long periods of its history, regardless of its literary quality which, though not of the level of his greatest works, is outstanding.

~ underground rivers

What an unusual, extraordinary month. By chance and queer circumstance, it proved to be an authentic festival of the early eighties. Now that the floodtide from the past has ebbed away, I’m shaking my head in astonishment.

And to think … that something so wonderful was spawned in an effort to address my little [big] problem and the financial boa constrictor which travels in its wake.

It feels a like a dream. An incursion on the general ordinariness of life from the luminous underground rivers of memory. I imagine it will be the last time I have the chance to revisit the mayhem of my youth in so comprehensive a fashion. Any effort to recapture the particular feeling at the Corner on the gloomy, wet afternoon of The Ears gig would be only to risk disappointment. And to belabour what was expressed in 'Livin' in DogFood' would be sheer pointlessness.

From this point on memories will degrade at a faster rate, people will die more often. The tall figures will withdraw into the mists…

Now I must begin learning lines for my part in Lynne Ellis’s production of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty Titus Andronicus. And there is my drug-related presentation at the ANEX conference next month. There is a piece I’m preparing for The Last Tuesday Society. There is my monthly confabulation with a philosopher-psychologist. And my secret obsession with a certainAnd my vow not to let music slide away this time. There are the finals. There is my family. And there is, of course, my little [big] problem...

~ dream diary

I travel in a Brobdingnagian ark of Theatre from an ancient time; housing a enormous troupe of the Comedia dell’arte – or something of a similar period. Huge chambers, decrepit, creaking, filled with slaving technicians and hunched actors. A script appears, very thick, filled with images and useful background material. It is a work by Shakespeare. It has been prepared by Lynne Ellis, who is the director of this vast concern. A huge drawbridge is lowered, opening the cavernous hold of the ark to a dim, windy climate. Workers begin to spew forth.

I overhear a discussion. Talk of Three Judges, who preside over the troupe’s product. I hear Lynne. Things are going to change, she says. From now on, it is the Director who has final say. No ‘Judges’ are going to stand in the way of her artistic verdicts …

*

Neville, a neighbour from my childhood, is living in a farmhouse near a cool river stained with tannin, the edges choked with tangled blackberries. I am living nearby. I never see Neville, though I know he is there, in a weatherboard house built upon the side of the river valley. He is isolated and bad-tempered.

At night I wander the edges of his property, following lines of stones in the grass. I see a light in the window, which each night seems dimmer. I worry for him. He is fading. I travel nearer the house, but he does not notice. The layout of the grounds is similar to that of my first school in Mt Waverley, Holy Family.

Then, at last, there is no light. I sense that Neville’s spirit has ebbed to near nothing. I call Robert, who, it seems, is Neville’s brother. Robert comes to the river. We speak of gunpowder and dynamite. He tells me that the walls of Neville’s house – which are now of brick – were pumped full of black powder at the time of construction…

I shudder, remembering that I had swum down the river with a stick of dynamite between my teeth, fetching it like a dog from where it had been thrown among the blackberries. I imagine it detonating in my mouth …

There seems to be a chance that Neville’s house will detonate too. We run. We come to a railway station in the open fields – slabs of white concrete bordering the rails, nothing more. It is my favourite railway station in the world.

I run and run. Faster and for longer than I have ever run before. I worry that my body will not hold. I am following Robert down the single rail track, among the gentle hills and greenish yellow farmlands …

Soon, we are following the sandy bed of a dried out creek. The banks are sheer and ten feet high, edged by thick tangles of blackberries. Robert slows. He has encountered a large, disarticulated kangaroo. He looks up. there are two expectant faces peering over the bank. A man and his son. Robert inspects the dismembered animal and scowls. Parts are badly decayed, yet somehow it lives. He warns it in a gentle voice, as he begins to rip the section with the forearms from the section with the head …

I am appalled. I retreat some metres back down the creek bed, looking for another break in the wall of blackberries. Having found one, I use my surprising physical prowess to leap sufficiently high to scale it. I see the open fields. I follow the creek towards the man and his boy. They are farmers. They are deeply interested in sheep. They wish to be indistinguishable from sheep. The man is leaning over the bank, speaking with Robert. He is bedecked with sheep fur … and sheep parts … now the kangaroo in the creek bed is also a sheep. The pair are eager for it and Robert is making a deal … The boy is intensely suspicious of me; he regards me with an evil stare. I am fascinated by his ears. They are elven and edged with ribbons of sheep skin. Elsewhere on his body he wears the hooves and ears and genitalia of sheep …

*

I had these dreams last night. Strange how a particular night will be filled with fantastic visions, when most are barren. Perhaps it because the house is at peace. Jenny is happier than she has been in a long while and, of course, Polly is following suit …

I’m sure my anti-depressives play a part too. Prozac and Zoloft, I have found, tend to be generators of wild dreams.

Curiously, within my dreams I sometimes recall other dreams which I had forgotten. Landscapes and atmospheres recur. In those paramnesic moments between wakefulness and sleep, while I struggle to remember what I have seen, sometimes a completely different dream will come to mind, one that had left my mind completely …

Railton, the tiny town in Tasmania where my mother grew up, transferred into the wilderness and stifling heat of mainland Australia. The region, once fertile is utterly bereft of life. A thick carpet of soft dust has settled on everything. I feel a deep existential horror of this dust; it is choking and poisonous. It is the dust of long ages and utter neglect. I have seen it in vacuum cleaner bags and in derelict houses that have been closed for decades. It hides sharp objects that if stepped upon can penetrate the toughest of soles… If you push down into it, your fingers may pass through ripe decaying flesh …

It is not the light, fertile dust of nature; it is an unnatural dust, a product of humanity, the remains of our works eroded by time. It has settled upon Railton, where a few hunched grey individuals still live, for want of choice.

I come to the fence of a horse paddock where a girl is standing. She is excited to see someone from the outside world. I explain that I have comer with my mother to revisit her birth place … The girl indicates a kind of barrow or roadside shop … It is disused and covered with dust; there is nothing for sale, nor has there been in living memory. it speaks of a time when there was still life in this place. I find in it an almost infinite melancholy …

This nightmare dust recurs in other dreams too. In a dream Melbourne, which has a wholly different layout to reality. A layout which remains similar, but is built on by each successive dream. There is a suburb of derelict workers’ cottages close to a rail line, bordering the central city. Here I sometimes explore, in abandoned rooms suffocated by the slow rain of dust…

~ Bursting with Vile Fluids

It is opening night and my brains are boiled within my skull. You see, the lizard-like Slammerkin are swarming behind the walls at RMIT, transmitting their jabbering voices into my head. Unfortunately, Lynne has purchased a fat old wine cask, bursting with vile fluids, for Stephano to heft on stage in place of a hogshead - and very little telepathic effort was required by the Slammerkin to force me to the teat of that poisonous bladder.

I speak of the Spores and their dire evil, but during the comfortable intervals, when their influence is marginal, often the Slammerkin will come forth with insidious mind speech, creeping red miasmas and invisible beams of dehydrating orgones. Perhaps I will wear a defensive foil cap tonight. I need to do something, as this miserable lexia hangover has all but incapacitated me.

Jenny and Polly are home and we are a family again. Jenny is bubbling, sleepless and proud of her war efforts - as she deserves to be.

Also, I am becoming increasing concerned for the welfare of Posh Spice. Yesterday I saw her image in the MX, posing as stiff and as inhumanly thin as a barbie doll beside the other Spice Girls, who seemed mature, womanly and who were smiling, rather than pouting. Posh is an enigma. Can a human being truly be as devoid of personality as this woman seems to be? I wonder if there is some fragile nugget of character confined somewhere in there, behind the expensively maintained skull?

Could she have a conversation that stretched beyond furniture, beauty products and money? Or is she - as the evidence suggests - a replicant - your basic pleasure model - who has somehow made her way to earth from the Outer Colonies?

I was told an astonishing story this morning. Apparently Posh was photographed from above at one of her poor husband's soccer matches and a bald patch was noticed [and magnified, and scrutinised] at the back of her head. This is a sure sign of anorexia, I believe, but Posh's response was to fly swiftly to Switzerland, or somewhere equivalent, and have some kind of hair piece put in place. This astounds me. The woman is nothing but an image. An ambulatory manniquin. One tiny imperfection and she whips into emergency mode, calling up her strike team and burning carbon across the Atlantic. No matter that it is a symptom of illness. No concern at resources wasted on a thing that, in essence, is of absolutely no significance whatsoever.

The Grey Creek

I am doing all the right things; I am taking long walks along the Grey Creek; I am swallowing fish oil and regulating my intake of red wine; daily, I vitamize many wholesome ingredients into a nutritious drink - yet the workings of my mind remain sluggish and without direction.

In nine days time I am performing the role of Prospero in a production of The Tempest and I have a massive quantity of lines, few of which I have by heart. As quickly as I learn them, my mind releases them. It's like handling a slimy fish. There's no traction there. Yet, learn them I must. I cannot disappoint Lynne, the director, nor the others involved. No matter that it is a small student production. No matter that its standards are not quite professional and that there's no payment. I must yet prevail. I urge myself with the image of my wonderful costume - the shimmering silver jumpsuit, the towering silver boots... I shall be the cynosure! All shall cower at my majesty!

So, as I follow the meanderings of the Grey Creek, I mumble to myself, concentrating on my task. The creek exists in the buffer zone between a howling motorway and the dormitory suburb of Mt Waverley. I have known this creek all my life. I knew it before it was landscaped, formed into wetlands and filtration ponds, before it hosted at least five species of water-birds. When I was a child it was a pungent sudsy vein transporting vile substances through poisoned quagmires, bestrewn with blackberries and rusted machinery, to the Yarra and thence to the Bay. When I dream of the Grey Creek and its surrounds, they are always in this original state.

Soon, my wife will be home and I must show, not only strength, but compassion. She has been labouring desperately against the Spores, and has found the will to form a battle plan. It is a poor one, I think, for it relies on strengths I doubt she has - but some independent will remains and that is something to be thankful for. I'll wind up fifty and looking like one of your old girlfriends, she said today. A wise observance. Many of my dearest friends, both male and female, have been slowly mutilated in long and strenuous conflict with the Deadly Spores. The Spores treat their enemies and their slaves with an equal lack of pity - and it is not just the flesh they sour ...

>As with age their bodies uglier grow, so their minds canker ...

Then there are those who will never live to suffer old age.