Chris Mooney-Singh
  • Home
  • Newsletter
  • Bio
    • Sikh Arts Revival
  • Publications
    • Launch Speeches
    • Reviews: The Bearded Chameleon (Asian Cha)
    • Review Essay: The Bearded Chameleon
    • Reviews: The Laughing Buddha Cab Company
    • Interview in Ceylon Today 8 June 2014
  • Fiction
    • Shadow Play in Singapore
    • The Lakshmi Plot
  • Poems
    • Natural World
    • Prose Poems
    • Excerpts from Foreign Madam and the White Yogi
    • Ghazals >
      • Ghazal of the Ghazal Notes
      • Ghazal Info
  • Journal
    • Foreign Madam and the White Yogi Audio Story
    • Untitled
  • Contact

The Emperor's New Clothes Poetry Club (Revisited)

7/31/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
Dear Poet,
I believe you do know how to write with subtle clarity without losing your inner abstract, your core, your tap root. Don't make your poem a tree without the leaves. Don't go out into the world dressed in the Emperor's New Clothes. What does that mean? Let's investigate.
Hair-splitting explicitness is the way of philosophers. Follow Lorca who has said a poet must be a "professor of the bodily senses". Poetry is the whole seed, whereas philosophy has had the sensory nourishment polished away. The poem embodies an experience that speaks to the reader through a visceral sweep of intense sense-charged language. The philosopher delivers interesting but dry intellectual propositions.
If you are new at the poet's game you may confuse the two because your abstract feelings are your paradox, your heart-story. Such emotions need to be born into the world of earth, air, fire and water as breathing objects that carry your unseen essence. What you write comes out like vapour because you have yet to connect inner and outer matter, space and time together. You are the medium, the translator, the sensory bridge. You feel the need to transform chimeras of consciousness into cups of poetry that can hold and pass on pure water. 
Why bother? Because it is the poet's nature to clarify what is difficult and in doing so you fulfill a function for others who may read, hear and understand. This only works if you have studied the arts of comparisons, the science of sonics and the grammar of the poetic line. Then you can be like Leonardo who put all his journal thoughts down in back-to-front mirror language so that one day the right people would understand them. Like him you must become a forensic observer of the nature world. Through design engineering and art, he wanted to reveal the relationships between things, just as Fibbonaci read the same natural world as a code of numbers. Poetry is that back-to-front mirror talk and its poetic form is a set of Fibbonaci relationships. And it is not detached. It has utility and weight and purpose.
Even if we believe writing poetry is akin to the arcane art of incantation and magic one still aims to be understood by the being a shaman is incanting to so that it will rain on time, or the baby is born without complication. It's all  specfic and goal-oriented. There is a target audience big or small. Surely there is no dispute about this. That is why I don't believe we write for ourselves only. I have a poet friend shy of publication who nevertheless wants to leave a body of work for her family members. Though a modest person she still she wants others to understand what she felt but never expressed openly. The best poetry encapsulates/inshrines this more so than any other linguistic medium. It is direct as a split-tailed hawk and meandering as cornflower butterfly, yet always reaches its destination.
Of course there are many species of poetry on the spectrum -- from the most didactically explicit to the gnomically obscure. This is different from the imprecise utterance that has not been properly born. Most new poets struggle to ground their inner abstract in a common speech. They react to their inside story and present their gestating thoughts in an ill-formed manner.
On another note, I think much so-called experimental poetry bares little correlation to the common world as well. It has forgotten its Fibbonaci code and subverts the 'indirect clarity' of back-to-front mirror-poetry with conscious road blocks of meaning by turning experimentation into a fetish. Lacking life-content, it hides this fact through a screen of clever obfuscation. Such technique-driven writers are suffering under the delusion of the Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome, where courtiers fool audiences with a received belief that their emperor-poet is not naked and instead dressed in gold finery. I have seen and heard a lot of this, visiting from time to time my university department and much is written by those occupying high positions and are winners of prestigious awards. They keep on amassing more power and authority by supporting each other through reviewing and peer acknowledgment as paid up members of The Emperor's New Clothes Poetry Club. That is what I call it. This is because poets live in a polemically poisoned pond of their own making that has been isolated from the main river dis/course. Poets did this to themselves. Now hermetically-sealed poets dialogue with other poets in the name of experimental amusement. It has become a game of over-educated creative minds without real audiences. They even look down on such and fulfill their own belief in the beauty of obscurantism. That is why page poets can't get on with poetry slammers. And vice versa. They are two ends of the same spectrum. That's all. Extreme sensibilities. Today's poet slammers fall back position is a hip and topical form of rhetorical didacticism, whereas the poets who write without an ear for public-speak choose distorted discourse only they can understand. This is not Leonardo mirror-reversal. His writing has perfect clarity once the convention is understood. That convention is an understanding of metaphor as a mirror device to say one thing and mean another and its target audience is a common world, not an overly specialist one. 
I say there has to be a bridge built from the pond back to the river. Or are we just to remain unseen and unheard? Frog-croaking to ourselves?  Emily Dickinson might say otherwise:

I’m Nobody! Who are you? 
   Are you – Nobody – too? 
Then there’s a pair of us! 
   Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know! 

How dreary – to be – Somebody! 
   How public – like a Frog –  
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –  
   To an admiring Bog!

I think her case is genuinely different. She never sought attention in her lifetime. Her discourse was with her self, although the fact that her poetry survives is perhaps a testament to the desire to be read and appreciated in the long run. If that was not the case she would have burned each page of manuscript as she wrote it. 'Experimental' poetry is designed to be read and taken seriously by a like-minded coterie. This best has always tried to challenge accepted norms of writing. This is a true function, however much has descended into copycat repetition of past modernist/post-modernist advances and pretends to be the Emperor's new clothes still. My view is use all of poetry's technical abilities - formal and free where appropriate. But form as a subject needs to be welded to content. It must say something to others who share a common language.

One last thing. To name the frog is to own the frog. Frog power! Naming is incantation. Naming has nothing to do with abstraction and everything to do with concrete crystallisation of forms - bringing the arcane and obscure into the light. Isn't that what we do? Isn't that poetry?


Post Script
Geoff Page points to this problem endemic to contemporary poetry while reviewing a new book in The Australian (26/7/14) The Shapes of Light by Ian McFarlane. In the poem Playing Safe, he has written: 

The two great certainties of postmodernism/ are adoration of the obscure,/ and contempt for coherence. Some poets fear clarity as a politician fears honesty.” 

According to Page "By the poem’s end Macfarlane is even more angry: 

It’s easy to sound clever / when no one — least of all yourself — / knows what the f..k you’re on about.”


As Page also reflects, these are hardly very poetically-wrought lines, yet they do express one end of the spectrum of the problem described above.

Ian McFarlane answers:

"I usually don't bother with the internet and have only just noticed this website. The book, The Shapes of Light, is mine, and the Oz review by Geoff Page was a cruel and calculated "slap down" - a payback for my "Emperor's New Clothes" doubts about contemporary poetry expressed over many years in my work as a critic, essayist and award winning fiction and non-fiction writer. The poem you quoted from above is only one of over 120 contained in the book, and I suggest you read a few more, including the Preface (based on an ALR essay). Of course, Geoff Page deliberately ignores the Preface to suit his own purposes, since it contains my true "position" on poetry, rather than the one Geoff presumes me to have. My poems on clinical depression, politics, social justice and the environment, have won wide-ranging praise, but Geoff side-steps them in a condescendingly, and offensively, snide manner, as he "plays the man rather than the ball" by reviewing my supposed "position" on poetry, rather than my poetry."

email to Chris Mooney-Singh, 28 8 14





1 Comment

Reflections on Literary Festivals and Conferences - the Caravanserai Phenomenom

7/18/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture















I have been a guest at many writers festivals and conferences over the years. What strikes me is how the idea of a professional guild or craft meeting for the sharing of knowledge and latest literary innovations among peers has been turned into a marketplace, the literary bazaar. The 'pure' inward art of the writing business becomes a networking opportunity to project oneself and sell wares. This leads to the masked desire to out-perform others with a witty panel presence and show pony readings etc. The writer must perform.  Perhaps this is not totally a bad thing. To read one's work aloud without boring one's audience to death requires skills that any poet in particular should pay attention to, given that oral delivery is a kind of form of publication.

Nevertheless, a festival is a temporary event, a caravanserai that lasts only a week or a weekend and its dynamics are strange -- a bunch of writers are no longer talking to themselves, they are projecting themselves competitively in front of large audiences not necessarily to find out new things to elevate their art form  but to appear to be smart sources of knowledge before prospective book buyers. 

A festival then is indeed a weird business fair with many over-earnest handshakes, false expressions of gushy interest in other people's brilliant works, rapid passing of business cards and over eager pressure-cooked promises to 'stay in touch' etc. All of this is born out of dubious ambition for one's own positioning for that next invitation on the next leg of the seasonal festival/conference circuit. Yes, it's a Silk Road, or s-bend racetrack loop that goes around and around, but to where? A prize, a job overseas?  The jealous feelings about those who got top billing on the main day in the main room or tent etc are not edifying feelings. The writer's inward nature has been forced outside itself to perform like the seal, jabber like the monkey, or do the clever dance.

In such a world one rarely makes friends. Instead one make contacts. (Someone will have a use one day).  It is a world of stall sellers, competitors seeking attention from the the non-writer audiences. This is especially the case among poets, due to the sad fact that they are really their own small band of left-outs and leftovers from the world of 'real books'. This esoteric set is a sub-culture within a literary festival and often the feeling of being the poor seller in the caravanserai bazaar bonds this group of word merchants together in a weirdly passive-aggressive way. The poets too, are often the 'light entertainment' the performative diversions from the sessions that discuss real ideas not just poet craft. 


This world of practitioners without real readers relies upon a dubious contract of bonded partnership, while the constituents secretly despise each other. Well, I may have become a bit over cynical over the years.  When I get an invitation to attend a festival I genuinely start out with a hope that this one will not be like the last, that the first day will yield more sincere meetings with respected peers. After dutifully attending one panel presentation or reading after another that feeling of overload sets in and suddenly you sense that old deja vu. Yes, this is indeed another caravanserai moment. You have met all these colleagues many times before in strange new glittering cities for a week or a weekend and again that same spirit of competitive rivalry emerges. This is rarely openly stated. We are far too well-heeled for that. We nod our heads and clap with appreciation and by the end of the festival sessions we feel that sense of return to the old condition of boredom.  Even the small consolation of sightseeing in a new locality and perhaps gift-shopping doesn't last for long. 

Needless to say, I attend less of them these days realising I am no better than my peers. Yes, that desire to run back to the writing cave hits hard and so I return to the desk, the computer, the long solitary hours of musing and punching out words until the next festival invitation arises. To break the monotony (Yes, this too has its boring aspect) you agree to go. As the days get closer you start thinking again, this one will be better. I will be able to catch up with such and such and the whole cycle. The caravanserai is calling and again you must go.


Picture
0 Comments

"A Shadow Play in Singapore" - New Fiction by Chris Mooney-Singh

9/29/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
A Shadow Play in Singapore

The audience spread out on grass mats. Then, the Balinese announcer addressed the crowd in English to explain how first the dalang, the puppet master would be reciting mantras, warming up his voice with gamelan players there behind the screen lit, enclosed by walls of black cloth. "Go behind and look. It's our tradition."  Or, the audience could get up, go for coffee, snooze. Yes, they should relax, he emphasised.  

Margot remembered her Brisbane days studying anthropology and Murri dialects. She had attended a corroboree staged in the Concert Hall -- how the audience came formal and politically correct and politely sat through the indigenous show of jabiru and kangaroo dancers doing a song-cycle chant with sticks and didgeridoo until the singer stopped abruptly, pointing. "Hey youse blokes," addressing Brisbane's best in evening gowns and shirts with pert bow-ties. "What s'matter? Yer not enjoyin yer selves, why yer not gettin up fer yer drinks n smokes?" Relief had become a flood of clapping laughter. Then they loosened up and did what they were told.

“Can we go and look behind?” asked Pauline to Margot who was tired. “The man said so.”

Here was a chance to help the two girls bond with their new stepfather. They still had so much travelling to do and this was just the first stopover on their world trip. By chance they had read of the Balinese shadow play performance at the Singapore Asian Puppetry Festival and had brought the girls. But their clingy-ness was wearying. So Margot put her no-negotiation terms to reinforce their new husband's position. “Perhaps. Ask Simon.” 

Pauline looked to Adele. Neither were happy. Why was she pushing them away to him? “With you Mum,” she said, just audibly through tight lips, darting a glance at Stepdad, who heard all, but bit his lip and waited. 

“I’m staying put,” said Margot. “I need a break. Look, Simon knows all about these things.” Her compassionate eyes looked at him while speaking to the girls, trying to take back the blows her daughters dealt.

“But Mum!” she whined mosquito-like and showed her downturned mouth. Adele was also pouting now. Pierre's undermining influence and new stepmother’s seductions had spoiled a lot of things. Such was the collateral damage of broken marriages. After a custody struggle and court appearance to take them out of the country Margaret had them solely for the next three months and hoped during this trip to retrieve the better part of her darlings from toy bribery, new home swimming pool and KFC's dumb tastebud love. Youth selects badly as she had also done with Ben, with Pierre attracted to brawn rather than brain. Her ex-husbands were still looming brutes in the shadows.

“Mummy, we want you, not...” 

Such defiance! Pauline’s outburst was a warning, highly-strung with flawed behaviour.

“Don’t push it, Paul. I have the peg right here inside my pocket!” Both had grown too old for baby threats to heal bad attitude; but her tone still made Pauline hesitate. Her will was younger. “You can’t go by yourselves. It’s simple as that,” Margot concluded.

Boundaries reasserted, Paul gave in. “Alright,” she snarled. Then they got up with Simon to see the back side of the shadow world. He suddenly sighed relief, release, or love.


*

After intoning mantras to call the spirits coaxing them to sit upon his tongue, the puppet-master got things ready for the story with his puppet sticks chosen for tonight, pronged into the horizontal length of something soft and wet and yellow-green placed underneath the cotton screen. 

"What's that?" asked Adele. At first he didn't know, then remembered seeing the same, but standing upright when he went fruit picking near  Coffs Harbour.

"It's a banana log," he answered her.

They got it, nodding, not wanting to acknowledge him too much, until curiosity spoke when the puppet man un-pronged a figure from the squishy stem, a lace-fine painted thing, filagree, lit by coconut-oil lamp.

"Why’s he waving his fan about?” she asked again, while Paul still in a pout, said nothing.

"It’s not a fan," he whispered with backstage etiquette.  All were working hard behind the dalang - the four gamelan players gonging with soft hammers hypnotically on xylophonic bronze.

Looking closer, there was much more here. "It's a mountain with a tree inside." he said. “See? A tiger and wild boar are below the trunk, plus monkeys sitting on the branches.”

"But what's it for?" asked dying-to-know Adele, noticing the mountain-tree thing was centre screen. She was the more objective of the two. He had more chance of bonding with the younger; but like a roly poly clown on a rocking base she was always being buffeted by big sister.

"I think it starts the show," said Simon, digging, remembering epics begin with invocation, just as Ganesh is called to be the scribe in Indian poems. Here, the Mountain, or Tree of Life must be the root and cause of things planted in the centre for the introduction, while the shadow world's dramatis personae from the old Balinese Mahabharata paraded one after another. Tonight, it was the Pandavas and enemies about to steal the epic micro stage, aided by gamelan and dalang’s toe-rattle, hitting against the wooden puppet box. Soon the puppet maestro would give voice to some of his hundred characters or more. This is superb. How lucky to have caught this show, Simon thought. He looked around the screen and snatched a glimpse of Margo seated inscrutably there. Pauline noticed his eye was on her mum. Jealousy was quick. "Oh, they’re just cartoons,” she shot out arrow-sharp, unconscious of her rudeness. Eyes turned. The announcer sitting parallel to the side of the white screen to keep an eye on both front of house and back edged in closer.

“Sorry,” whispered Simon. The man and troupe-manager raised a calming palm and smiled, patient through good time spent with youngsters.

“They’ve got noses long as witches,” Paul provoked. 

“And skinny necks,” Adele scoffed, following, their eyes of judgement on the flat-faced figures held up by the dalang. 

“They’re weird,” Paul said. 

Little Western eyes would not accept. Why were they like this? Simon, wondered. They had flipped from angels into she-devils. Because of me? Or their Papa? It was the wall between them. “Look,” he tried, “See how nicely they’re painted.” 

They would not buy in. And fidgeted.  

Reading the situation the announcer, who had travelled with the troupe to England, Europe and America, tried a rescue. “Girls, its hard work, cutting  and patterning leather, painting a nose so noble. That’s Arjuna. A hero.” He quietly explained how earth and plants were used to colour rawhide, and next how shoulder and elbow hinges, slivered from buffalo horn were jiggled by sticks, also of water buffalo; how they had to be boiled down and moulded.

“Yuck! That’s gross,” Paul said. Eyes turned again. He had misjudged. He had seen so many of these disturbed, hard-to-please spoilt types from a culture too rich and jumpy.

“Fiddle-sticks!” said Pauline, aping her mother.

“Sticks and stones,” said Dele, the copy-cat.

“Bones and phones and witchety crones”, Paul chorused.

They had veered off topic into silliness like sidewinder rockets. Nothing could be salvaged. The girls were bored. Simon felt awkward. Another tale of failure. “Perhaps we’ll go back now and sit with Mum.”

The announcer forced a smile, a bit relieved. He had to keep his programme on the rails. Victory achieved, the little demonesses jumped up and ran off straight away to join her.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Simon. “They’re not my girls. They’re my wife’s.” 

The announcer shook his finger. He understood, but had another view. “No, my friend. They are yours now. They are your karma.” 

Simon had been disloyal. The truth pierced him like one of the puppet sticks gouging straight into his green and squishy vulnerability. “Sorry. I’d better go.”

A big commotion started on the other side of the screen. Banging his rattle against the puppet box, the dalang sang to a dramatic standstill. The Tree in the Mountain was twirled away to Heaven, the tale of black leapt on to the sheet of white and the audience was in the dalang’s grasp. 


*

Yudhisthira spoke in the Kawi tongue, a word from Sanskrit -- Kavi, meaning ‘poet’ the noble king of character and dharma, while two pot-bellied servants attending court, turning up between each scene to crack their jokes filled in the gaps. It was a practical comic device. Father and son messed about as interpreters in Bali Bahasa or Bali English, depending upon the audience. 

"Wow! Look at that."

"What's that, Dad?" They would say again each time. Tonight they told the story of the good rajah, wanting the maha yagya, the fire blessing for Indraprastha City and his people. God Indra said that he and his Pandava

brothers should first humbly enter the forest to meditate and purify themselves.

Next, gamelan gongs helped to shift the scene with upthrust bullrush scenery making a pond. Behind the screen the dalang brought up his fish on the buffalo horn stick, wiggling its tail with a sing-song voice yo-yo, yo-yo, this way and that, yo-yo, yo-yo, until the other hand brought next a stalking heron to fill its belly, moving the preening neck with a second stick. On the audience side, it loomed up large, then pecked down hard with pointed hammer blows with the help of rising gamelan's percussion - the special effects. A little boy in the audience rushed up to touch the screen, crying No! until his mother gently seated him. "It's ok, Darling." Aroused by gongs and clash of leather puppets with the dalang doing all the funny sounds, Pauline and Adele, who had now switched off were roused from dozy boredom.

"What happened?" Pauline asked. Before she could say much the screen went white and blank, and then a monkey popped up from below to become fast food. A tiger puppet arrived and crouched stage left, then leapt upon the simian. Again the gamelan went crazy with the dalang’s tiger-growling and monkey wails, a one man animation studio. Again, the boy jumped up and was restrained a second time. 

"So cute," said sentimental Paul. Her better side was coming to the fore, forgetting Stepdad -- the tiger crouching in her life right next to Mum. The funny puppets cast their cut-out shadows.


*

"Wow, Son!" Said the pot-bellied commentator between scenes. 

"What's that, Dad?" 

It was a cue for Yudhisthira and entourage to enter. The fish came back, now pleading in dialect to the royal Person for safety, being pregnant.

"Wow!"

"Yes Dad, what?" 

"The fish knows Kawi. She is lady. Got babies in her belly."

This was more to the girls' taste and they laughed.

The heron turns up pleading, too, a case -- having to feed her young as well. It was an impasse and an ethical dilemma.

“Who will you help now, Lord - the fish or the bird?” Old Pot-belly asked. Yudhisthira offered himself instead of the pregnant fish swimming around his ankles. But the heron like all the other animals could not eat a Lord of Dharma, and thus backed off to bow. With sleight of hand the dalang pulled back the puppet, blurring and growing its shadow magnifying it in the coconut lamp switching his leather cut out -- first, one person for the heron and next for the fish, another. Both flanked the king and moved him off stage right. The gamelan and toe-rattle added sound drama.

“What happened Dad?”

“Wow! A trick from the Heaven. The bird become god Vishnu and fish is Brahma. The gods tried to trick our good Lord. Wow! Yudhisthira, you always for the people. You really great King!”

And so the gods rewarded the King of Dharma with a lotus flask.

“What’s that Dad?

“It’s ambrosia, Son, blessed water. It can heal peoples and bring the dead to life.” 

“Oh that’s good, Dad!”

“Good brew,” Simon nodded to Margot. He was trying to compensate for what had gone haywire earlier, when the girls had come flying back to her cross-legged lap. She smiled and nodded with a finger put to lips to gently silence him, because the looming storm of little girls was calm now, and four of them had made a family.


Next, the gods instructed Yudhisthira in Kawi. All cleared the stage

except for father and son. 

“What they saying, Dad?”

All along, he has been the modern fellow, who, like his generation has lost interest in the antique Balinese language. Then, Indra the god spoke himself in English, a dalang ploy to add some gravitas, but came out comical.

“Yudhisthira, be careful. This special water. It’s ambrosia. You look after it.”

Yudhisthira handed the precious liquid over to Bhima his brother for safer keeping, still sloshing in its lotus flask. He, in turn, passed it to his half-demon son Gatotkatcha, the super-wrestling giant rakshasa who was also unpredictable and wild. The story whisked ahead to the mountains. Flying high above the frozen snow-line Gatotkatcha drops the lotus bottle bringing to life the demons inside the mountain. Soon, the land of snow was boiling, threatening the earth.

“Ah, global warming. A good comment,” Simon said. “The melting of glaciers. This puppet man lives in the real world.” 

Interesting, she also thought. Some insight there.



*


Of course, a tale must turn bad some time to turn out good. Yudhisthira and the Pandavas arrive to handle with care the bad boy, hothead demons.

The ways of Balinese trolls was introduced in turn by two new pot-bellies, demonic brothers through jokes and jigs. 

“Our rakshasa brothers after a thousand years are free at last. See them shooting fire missiles. Good! Arrows ping! ping! ping! at the Pandavas.”

They did a silly dance, and, in conclusion, clonked their demon heads together, knocking each other out. Soon they recovered, roaring with belly laughter. Then, the demon commentator by name of Lam started doing his push-ups, working hard. Reaching his eleventh, Lam slow-leaked a fart. Pauline and Adele thought this hilarious and squealed with pleasure. “Shoosh you two,” Margot said, smiling.

“Sorry for my perfume, everybody,” Lam said, breaking the fourth wall, worthy of Artaud and Brecht. The audience also tittered, some guffawed. Now the chubby demons were endearing, not stock-in-trade bad-asses -- 

Lam and his sidekick, the irascible, funny ogres.

To and fro, the battle raged with earthy interludes and dances by the duo.

Next, Boss rakshasa launched a fire arrow, and Yudhisthira put it out with water warfare. Arjuna challenged a rakshasa to the death sending an arrow through the demon’s heart. The battle came to a Balinese standoff

but then the demon conjured up a dragon, but Yudhisthira found a way to stop it too. Then Pot-belly made a fresh appearance.

“Wow!” he said and “Wow!” then one more “Wow!" Then, "Nno, nno, ne-nno, nno”, he sing-songed, taunting.

Pauline imitated, and Dele copied her but got a glare from Margot. She looked to her simple Simon for support, but then thought the better of enlisting his aid. She longed to share the burden of parenting, hoping he would grow into the role sooner than later. He was younger than her and still was inexperienced handling children, despite his earnestness. Plus, this was her third marriage. Two husbands had left her ignominiously for other women. Thus she carried in her the demons of self-failure and the sting of wagging tongues, having rushed into another marriage with someone seven years her junior.

“Now, what did I say?” She snapped at the girls, feeling pressure.



*


The demon headman’s name was Prashchinti who prepared to finish off the Pandavas assuming into his body a thousand demons. He grew immense, filling the shadow screen then went to battle, pushing back the Pandavas, until Yudhisthira, sad, knew all too well should the brothers be killed, the ceremonies for Indraprastha City and his people would not proceed.

“You call Shiva, Lord.” Old Pot-belly counselled. Then young Pot-belly

came out of hiding.

“What happened, Dad?”

“Prashchinti demon swallowed all the rakshasas. Our Lord has lost his heart. He must pray Shiva.”

Yudhisthira intoned and Shiva came speaking in Kawi. 

Old Pot-belly translated. “Yudhisthira, I know what is your problem. This is not the gods’ fault, this is your fault. So why you give Gatotgacha special water? Gatotgacha is very young, Yudhisthira. These young guys can’t hold the sacred things which are like the tigress milk, too strong. It melts through any dish, even gold one.” Yudhisthira was getting more depressed.

Shiva spoke again.

“What happened, Dad?”

“He’s telling Yudhisthira: ‘“Ok, don’t worry. God will help you. God will give you the Way. This weapon come from the Hell. Yes, Yama was keep the weapon.”

And so he handed it over.

The hellish thing in his hands, the good king of Dharma stood before Praschinti Demon.They charged each other, again and again. Atomically-armed by Shiva, God of Destruction, Yudhisthira now had the power of ten thousand storms at his disposal. With every lunge the mountain ranges shifted, with every thrust the three worlds shook and quivered,

with every clash a rakshasa fell down dead split off from Prashchinti like a shard. Yudhisthira shoots, until each dead rakshasa piles up and the field of battle was silent.

“Wow!” said Pot-belly.Yes, the demon body in turn become a mountain again, “Wow!”

“I think our ceremony will be save, Son.”

“Yes, Dad. I think our story stop, Dad.” 

The characters left and now the Tree of Life in the Mountain returned to centre stage, closing the play. The dalang sought customary forgiveness just in case he had hurt or got things wrong, an insurance policy to ensure good karma. The gamelan played on in the background and the audience whooped and clapped. 


 *                        
 



“Wow!” mimicked Simon. “I think the story done, Mum.”

"Well, this one at least," she murmured.

"What do you mean?" He asked naively. Margot kept a lot to herself. He was still getting used to that.

Oh dear, she thought, not explaining herself. The tropical heat in this outdoor park seemed suddenly oppressive and she did not want to risk further disjuncture. Instead, Margot smiled, hiding her apprehensions in the darkness and snuggled up close. At least, the girls were the only puppets nodding in her lap now, subdued by travel tiredness, droned to sleep by the gamelan. 

Their little event had arrived at its moment of calm. She relaxed a throbbing head against her husband’s heartbeat, not knowing if she could endure more stopover standoffs like this staged by sour children. She inwardly begged the god of honeymoons to re-write the script, if not with a happy ending, then at least with a fresh-start chapter for her broken family saga. 



0 Comments

My Home Paddock Goes to Leeds, UK

9/27/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Khadijah Ibrahiim, courtesy: http://pickupyourpensfestival.blogspot.com.au
Some years ago, I had the good fortune to visit Leeds, teach from performance workshops with young talent from Leeds Young Authors guided by the good hand of Khadijah Ibrahiim and perform as a guest in their night showcase at the Seven Arts Club.  Here in the video below I am doing a blues version of “The Home Paddock” one of my standards. 

This poem has clocked a lot of mileage, literally travelling to many countries and back to Australia, Singapore, or India - all places I call home.  I wrote and published it back in the 1980s and yes, there was a little paddock next to a stone cottage in the country near Bathurst, NSW, Australia where I once stayed alone for many days and nights. And yes, there was a particular night I got undressed and wandered around in the darkening light of sunset. There was nothing sexual in it. Just the exhilaration of cool air on the skin and not having to be accountable to anyone or anything. Being outside with the grass, the trees, the breeze, the buzzing cicadas and the overwhelming feeling of comfort that the natural world was my true home. It was probably some playing out of the old desire I had as a suburban kid to want to go live on a farm when I was ‘grown up.’ A promise I was stupid enough to believe that my father would or could fulfill. 


He was a country town lad, but drifted to the city. Perhaps if he was rich enough to own land it would have been very different. Whatever restless wanderlust there is in me probably started with him leaving his NSW country town roots behind. It’s Interesting to speculate what we carry in our genes and conditioning and how far it takes us. My father fought in World War II (New Guinea, the Pacific Islands) and then Korea. Apart from R & R in Japan. After leaving the army he never  travelled far from Canberra where he settled and struggled and failed and struggled and failed to make it in business. We were never close, but I have come to realise I carry of lot of him traits as well as this weird desire to be elsewhere. When in the city you think of the country, right? Or shifting houses, or countries. That restlessness. I guess I am not alone.

Anyway, over the years the home paddock (yes, that means ‘farm field' in international English) has taken on a more inward significance for me, rather being a literal Australian place.  My symbolic home base keeps shifting and is probably now more an idea incorporated in this weird travelling poem-paddock I carry around in my memory. It’s a wild, free, inner space where you can wander naked of any restrictions and limitations and enjoy a certain calm state (of mind). We all need one, I guess, whatever you choose to call it. Hope you find yours.
0 Comments

To Blog or Not to Blog

9/8/2013

1 Comment

 
Picture
I guess it's time to launch.  I have some issues with the nature of blogging - the private moan made public. 
So, this journal will aim to be of interest and not just be a daily weather-report of my dubious emotions.  How boring. You want more, right?

1 Comment
Forward>>

    Chris Mooney-Singh

    Australian-born I live and write between Australia, Singapore and India.

    Archives

    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    September 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed