The York Crucifixion and the West Australian Dullsville

“If you don't call Perth a dull city you lack the scope for comparison”

“When you live there you can’t relax because you are so depressed because you know you are living in the most boring city in the world. Thats why it has the highest home burglary rate in the country, because people are bored!”

“perth is not dullsville , the pope is not catholic”

- excerpts from a Yahoo Message Board discussion

You know something is seriously wrong with the city you live in when Yahoo’s search assist mode auto-completes ‘perth d’ as ‘perth dullsville’, or when my making statements like ‘Perth is Texas without the manners’ gets knowing nods without a single outburst of protest. While I’m sure the young frequenters of Perth’s club scene probably find our city to be at least satisfactory given the almost ritualistic frequency of their patronage, for people like myself who are more interested in the art scene, the problem of Dullsville is a very real, very frustrating state of affairs. The issue is of course of great complexity - and Perth’s decidedly conservative political outlook seems to have carried over into its aesthetic outlook - but our state’s dominant daily newspaper the West Australian has a lot to answer for in terms of maintaining a climate of artistic stagnation and right wing hegemony in the arts.

While it is nominally known as a populist paper, the generally right wing tone of the paper’s articles suggests it should be more accurately labeled a conservative journal. Given that West Australian Newspapers Group is the largest media group in the state, it occupies a position of virtual monopoly in setting the agenda for the state’s social, political and economic climate. There is a serious question to be asked here; is the reportage of the West Australian shaped by the conservative leanings of the people, or does it move to actively shape the attitudes and beliefs of Western Australians via editorial bias? Its well documented (and often factually inaccurate) attacks on the (justifiably) embattled state Labor Government aside, the paper has consistently put forth an anti-art agenda, especially in regards to art that pushes the boundaries of accepted aesthetics. Perhaps no case is more blatant than the recent vilification of the Happy Dagger Theatre Company’s controversial production of The York Crucifixion.

The cover page article about the play is a remarkable exercise in spin. Featuring a photograph of actress Renee McIntosh topless as Christ on the crucifix, the article’s lead in paragraph states: “A local theatre production which portrays Jesus as a semi-naked female on the cross has received almost $28,000 in State Government funding.” The paragraph makes no explicit point in favor or against the play – and there is nothing false about it – but with a little logical reasoning it becomes clear that there is an obvious implicit agenda being put forth. Since the majority of the West Australian’s cover articles are political, related to sensationalist portrayals of crime and/or features on sports or sporting personalities, the appearance of this article on the front page is a clear indication that the West Australian wants readers to see this article and that its accompanying illustration was a worthy cover photograph to draw the attention of potential buyers. Perth is a city of such prudish sensibilities that the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s promotional use of Annie Leibovitz’s celebrated photograph of a naked John Lennon hugging a fully clothed Yoko Ono caused outrage in spite of no visible representation of first or secondary sexual characteristics. Thus, it doesn’t take a giant leap in logic to guess what the obvious reaction the public would have to a photograph that depicted the uncensored breasts and nipples of a woman (‘pornography!’) who was furthermore playing the role of Christ in a play (‘blasphemy!’). But this is not outrageous enough; no, the article also plays the ‘waste of taxpayer’s money’ card by highlighting that the play was given almost $28,000 is grants money. The combination of the three paints a picture of ineffective politicians providing poor economic management by funding socially unacceptable acts of blasphemy; The West Australian brilliantly combining the social, political and the economic in a three pronged attack on progressive culture.

But hold on; in the spirit of fair and balanced reportage there has to be some reasonable explanation for the creative decision to cast a woman as Jesus, right? Based on the article, the only information we are given about the creative decision is director Andrew Hale saying: “When I first read the script I really loved the language but I found the whole story really inaccessible and boring,” and, “In every way possible we tried to shake up the story. In my point of view that’s what theatre should be doing.” On face value, even an open-minded reader would have to concede that this sounds a lot like sexploitation and shock-for-shock’s-sake, but the article leaves out several key facts. First is the origin of the source material. The York Crucifixion is a play that was written by an anonymous literary artist and is dated from the period 1463-77. The play was originally performed on a pageant wagon and used broad physical humor as a means of mainstream entertainment for the people of York. Working with a popular text of such antiquity gives credence to Hale’s attestation that the story was ‘really inaccessible and boring’ – at least in terms of the short attention span of contemporary culture - and attempts to shake up the story to return it to a certain level of popular entertainment would seem justified given the circumstances. Shakespeare – a producer of popular entertainment in his day - has been fair game for re-imagining and interpretation, so why not any other playwright?

While the ‘semi-naked female on the cross’ part of the equation seems to have been the focus of the West Australian’s article, it glosses over the other creative decisions by the director and company. The pageant wagon of its original incarnation ingeniously returns as a transmogrified set piece which is slowly disassembled during the course of the play and reassembled into the site of the crucifixion. Another clever element of the production is how director Andrew Hale utilizes grotesque, malformed and ugly costumes to turn the soldiers/buffoons of the text into Bouffons - originally the most excessively ugly people of France who would entertain the masses via satirical attacks on mainstream culture and the ‘beautiful people’. Given that in the original play the intention was to use physical comedy and buffoonery to make the audience complicit in the mockery and in turn the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the mockery of this most beautiful of human beings only intensifies the elements of the original play.

In fairness to the West Australian, the Arts Section of the paper had a mostly positive review of the play (under the less than flattering title ‘Buffoons Resurrect Easter play’) and in all fairness to a critical reading of the play, I will say that I did find the production to be far from perfect in execution. While I wasn’t totally impressed by the silly pop culture references and overly slapstick approach to acting, I can excuse these as being an attempt at making the production a mainstream entertainment, but the actors playing the four soldiers sped through their lines at such a rate it was almost as if they were only interested in the form of the presentation, and this was at the great expense of the content of the text. It’s certainly not the Bard, but the charm of listening to a temporally outdated vernacular was lost in the flow – a major error given that it renders the whole idea of bringing back such a play as irrelevant.

But these things aside, the issue of the female Jesus is the critical sticking point for the article in terms of the artistic validity of the work, seen by Anglican Archbishop Roger Herft as ‘a distortion of historical fact’ and by Liberal Shadow Arts Minister Barbara Scott as ‘ridiculing the Christian belief’. In terms of a distortion of historical fact, the play never once suggests that the historical Jesus was a woman, and I’m sure if the actors had been more diligent in clearly reading their lines I would have caught a slew of masculine pronouns in reference to the Jesus character of the play. What really surprised me given that Archbishop Herft is a learned doctor of the Church is that no mention was made of the more contentious issue of canon. If one were to accept that the Gospels were absolute historical fact, then any Passion narrative that is outside of the four synoptic Gospels of biblical canon, not based on firsthand historical accounts or not an adaptation of accounts from the Gospels would be a ‘distortion of historical fact’, right? The simple fact is that The York Crucifixion is not a canonical text at all, and there are a plethora of similar texts that have popped up through the ages that have been condoned by the Church in spite of the fact of their historical inaccuracy. Yet the West Australian article simply states ‘The York Crucifixion tells the story of the four soldiers who crucify Christ’, conveniently leaving out that it is a fictional story to begin with. For someone who is quite aware of issues of canon I would think if anything was going to be a problem, it would be the corruption of scripture that the source material represents. But no complaints were aimed at the text itself, and I would hazard a guess that if Jesus had been played by a man this play would have gone to the stage without a single complaint from the clergy of any of the major denominations (and most of the minor ones as well). And really: if you want to talk about ‘distortion of historical fact’ how about the customary portrayal of Jesus as an Aryan poster boy instead of a Jew?

With such variation in Christian belief, it is only natural that some groups and some individuals will find a feminine representation of Jesus to contradict their beliefs, but to suggest a female Jesus ridicules Christianity myopically ignores the symbolic properties of a feminine portrayal of Christ in relation to the beliefs and practices of Christian mysticism and Gnosticism. In some such traditions - which include sections of Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant mysticism - the wisdom of God exists in the form of the feminine Sophia, whom in Gnostic tradition is seen to be in unity with Christ, and is the Holy Spirit of the Trinity. From a Gnostic perspective, Andrew Hale’s casting of Renee McIntosh as Jesus can be read as a representation of Jesus as one with the divine wisdom of Sophia, a symbolic representation of hidden knowledge or gnosis. Obviously such ideas are unconventional when compared to mainstream Christianity, but there is a long standing (if esoteric) tradition of a feminine manifestation of God in Christian faith. This is not a ridiculing of mainstream Christianity or a suggestion that Jesus was a woman, but simply a way of expressing complex idea figuratively, just a Jesus used parables to do the same.

So if a female Jesus is accepted, what about the issue of semi-nakedness? While there are strong attitudes against nudity of any form (the aforementioned furor over the naked John Lennon for example), one need only to go their local newsagent to find that there are plenty of photographic examples of nudity, and I’m not just talking about the items kept in brown paper bags. Pick up a men’s magazine like FHM or a women’s magazine like Elle and it’s quite likely that you’re going to see at least an exposed breast amongst the pages, or a nipple seen through a transparent outfit. Given that at least partial nudity in such publications is quite commonplace, the issue then is not so much nudity per se, but that sexual characteristics – in this case breasts - are being exposed in a representation of the crucifixion of Jesus. The truth is that the loincloth-wearing Jesus we all know from a thousand churches, statues, necklaces and rosaries is actually a distortion of historical fact that came about as a way of maintaining Christ’s modesty. Crucifixion as a means of execution was one of extreme punishment and humiliation, and the crucified were almost always stripped naked – Jesus included. If you don’t believe me, you’ll find all four Gospels feature the story of the soldiers gambling for his clothes. And if you’re thinking; ‘No, that’s just his robes… they may have left the loincloth on’, do you really think after spitting on, beating, flogging, crowning with thorns and forcing to carry a massively heavy wooden crossbeam, they would care enough about how he might feel to make an exception and leave him with a single shred of modesty? It follows then that a historically truthful depiction of the crucifixion would include a totally naked Christ, and as he was a man this means a full-frontal view of his penis and all. This is far more a display of sexual characteristics than Renee McIntosh’s breasts being exposed during the play, especially given she maintained the use of a loincloth to maintain a level of modesty anyway. The display of breasts in public is considered taboo because in Western Culture they are associated with sexual arousal, but there is nothing particularly sexually arousing about the straight-faced presentation of semi-nakedness in the play. And truthfully, if you’re watching a play about a person being crucified simply as a means of titillation, it says more about you than it does the play.

What this all boils down to is sensationalism on the part of the West Australian. While not openly attacking the play, their cover article plays up the controversial elements of Happy Dagger Theatre’s The York Crucifixion and only engages with the production in terms of face-value. By doing this the West Australian discredits the artistic value of the play and by extension discredits State Government arts funding system. This is not the first time they’ve done this, nor will it be the last. Considering the amount of festivals and art-related activities Perth puts on during the year, it’s obvious that we’re trying, we’re really trying very hard to break free of the Dullsville moniker, but we’re not going to get far if every idea that strays just a little away from the norm is shot down as a waste of taxpayer’s money, and it’s a sad state of affairs when gallery owners specifically advise me to not answer questions posed by reporters from the West Australian as ‘they will twist everything you say as a means to discredit you’. In closing, I will say that I agree with people who say that it is fortunate we live in a country that doesn’t a put a person in prison for a production like this, and I agree that Mohammad should be as open to interpretation as Jesus. An artist limited to the subject matter that is safe is virtually an artist in chains, and we should celebrate this freedom instead of squander it.

Lovin' You

I told myself I wasn't going to use this blog to post links to clips on the net, but this performance really blew me away. Anyone who has tried to sing a Minnie Riperton song - or at the very least knows who she is - will know there are high notes, and then there are Minnie Riperton high notes. This girl hits them effortlessly. I'm rather envious.

Stan Brakhage and the Newer Laocoon of Film

This is an essay I wrote a year ago on film aesthetics, arguing for Stan Brakhage's films as the Newer Laocoon of Film. I disagree with a few points of my argument, but it is a framework that I still find influential to my way of thinking about films and filmmaking.

Stan Brakhage and the Newer Laocoon of Film
In his famous 1940 essay Towards a Newer Laocoon, art historian Clement Greenberg argued for the aesthetics of abstraction in the plastic arts as ‘an inexorable historical tendency’ that avoided the dominance of literature; preserving the purity of the plastic arts by communicating in terms of pure sensation and on their own terms instead of that of literature. The body of work produced by the great American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) and the theoretical framework of Closed Eye Vision he proposed stand as an important response to Greenberg’s argument. On the one hand many of his films are works that communicate meaning to the viewer in terms of pure sensation, yet his filmmaking practice was greatly influenced by poetry - one of the main tributaries of the literary tradition. By examining Brakhage’s films in terms of the aesthetic frameworks of Closed Eye Vision and Greenberg’s Newer Laocoon it becomes apparent that while Brakhage was influenced by works of other artistic media - primarily literature (specifically poetry) the peculiar qualities of film allow for the overlap with this medium because of the shared characteristic of temporality in film and literature. Therefore, in comparison with films that utilize conventional narrative and structural-materialist approaches to filmmaking it can be seen that Stan Brakhage’s Closed Eye Vision and the later handmade films produced under its aesthetic framework are the closest response to the filmmaking process that resemble the aesthetics of Greenberg’s thesis.

The Newer Laocoon of Film
While Greenberg’s writings were principally concerned with modernist painting (in particular endorsing the work of the Abstract Expressionists), it is possible to construct a ‘newer Laocoon’ of film based on the overarching points of his argument for the purity of media. In Towards a Newer Laocoon, Greenberg suggests that literature, having become the dominant art of the 17th century became the prototype for all art and that the other media shed their ‘proper’ characteristics and nature in ‘an attempt to attain the effects of the dominant art’ . He then argues that abstraction as “art of ‘pure form’” is a return to the true nature of the medium (which in painting is simply paint and canvas); avoiding the illusions of the subject matter of literature and the three-dimensionality that is the ‘true’ domain of sculpture. Extrapolating this argument, the ‘newer Laocoon’ of film would be an art that did not attempt to attain the effects of the dominant art (or other media for that matter) and instead returned film to its true nature - through the art of ‘pure form’ produced by the sensorial experience of abstraction - and displayed the qualities unique to the film medium. Therefore, the model for a ‘newer Laocoon’ of film would be an abstract, sensorial art that draws attention to what film essentially is; movement in time.

The Narrative Film and Structural-Material Film Options: Newer Laocoons?
Several filmmaking models exist that have been considered as ‘art’, though very few have the characteristics of the avant-garde art Greenberg is advocating. The French New Wave is considered one of the most important film movements in cinema’s history, teaching ‘an entire generation [of filmmakers] to experiment with the rules of storytelling’ . Yet, as experimental as the films were, they are films that are arguably attempting to mimic the properties of literature instead of communicating in terms of pure sensation. Perhaps this can be best illustrated with the films of New Waver Eric Rohmer. His films such as My Night at Maud’s (1969) are often described as being ‘literary’ in quality and dialogue heavy. In his essay ‘For A Talking Cinema’ Rohmer tellingly writes:

If talking film is an art, speech must play a role in conformity with its character as a sign and not appear only as a sound element, which, though privileged as compared with others, is but of secondary importance as compared with the visual element.

Therefore, Rohmer is suggesting that language not play a simply sensorial element in film; rather it should play an important cognitive role ‘as a revelation of world and character’ . This predominance of language –the domain of literature – marks these films as oppositional to Greenberg. While it should be noted that not all French New Wave films are quite as literary as Rohmer, the influence of American crime fiction on such seminal films of the movement as Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959), Shoot the Piano Player (Francois Truffaut, 1960) and Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1957) as well as the predominance of story in these films, the films of the French New Wave are works that certainly are attempting to take as their own the characteristics of the art of literature and are not truly avant-garde in the sense Greenberg suggests art should be.

The films of structural-materialists are closer to Greenberg’s aesthetics as they are films that draw attention to their essential nature, yet even they do not propose a model that consistently can be described as a cinematic ‘Newer Laocoon’. The material exploration of ‘film as film itself’ being the key area of exploration, structural-materialist films explore the ‘pure form’ of film as movement in time. For example, the filmmaker Peter Kubelka takes ‘the individual still frame as the essence of cinema’ and explores the idea of movement in time at its most abstract. His film Arnulf Rainer (1960) strips cinema to its bare essentials; black and white leader cut into rhythmic patterns of dark and light. In its use of an abstraction of imagery to create a sensory experience in a way that only film can, Arnulf Rainer is a film that fits Greenberg’s model. Yet, not all of the structural-materialist films are quite as sensory as Arnulf Rainer and often utilize no abstraction at all. Nostalgia (1973) by Hollis Frampton experiments with time displacement, but it does so with figurative representations of photography and the mini-narratives of the temporally displaced voice-overs. Even though the narrative in Michael Snow’s landmark Wavelength (1967) ‘exists only to reinforce the film's emphasis on the camera's ability to simultaneously represent and alter space’ , the imagery in the film is still figurative and not sensory. Furthermore, these (even Arnulf Rainer) are presenting the material qualities in a way that can be read as philosophical and psychological experiments in cognition; they are revealing the ways we ‘read’ the basic elements of film form and movement in time rather than just being purely about sensation. In this manner, the structural/materialist project does not fully provide a cinematic model for Greenberg’s ideas; lacking the abstraction and predominance of the sensory he advocated.

Film’s Newer Laocoon Realized: Closed Eye Vision & Handmade Film
It is in the idea of Brakhage’s Closed Eye Vision and the handmade films that the model for film’s ‘newer Laocoon’ is realized. In his Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage wrote:

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic. An eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through the adventure of perception….before the “beginning was the word”

Though he goes on to suggest that a true return to childlike perception is impossible, in this statement Brakhage is advocating a cinema of ‘the adventure of perception’; a cinema which drew attention to the sensory act of simply seeing. Greenberg writes; ‘Literature’s corrupting influence is only felt when the senses are neglected’ ; in the predominance of sensory stimulation Brakhage is supporting Greenberg’s ideas as a model for film as art. It is in the handmade films of Brakhage’s mid-to-late period that the application of Closed Eye Vision reaches it Greenbergian best. Working with found objects, paint and even simply just scratching into the film, Brakhage sees film not simply as an extension of the photographic medium. Instead of simply capturing images with a camera he reduces the film medium to its bare essentials of a moving surface. In creating abstract patterns directly to that surface that when viewed through a projector appear as rapidly changing flashes of moving shapes and color, Brakhage uses the mechanizations of animation to produce a purely sensory experience of movement in time; the Newer Laocoon of film realized.

Problems in Brakhage
There are however some seeming discrepancies between Brakhage’s films and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ that must be discussed if his model is to be accept as the Newer Laocoon. Brakhage admitted to have been very influenced by poetry, which would seemingly render his films ‘impure’ by Greenberg’s standards. Rosalind Krauss notes that ‘for Greenberg the literary is temporal’ and it is for that reason that it was to be excluded from painting. Film however as movement in time is temporal and thus would naturally be closer to the affects of poetry; both media overlap into the that same characteristic. Perhaps most importantly it should be noted that while the influence of poetry can be found in his films, his films move increasingly away from this influence. His epic Dog Star Man (1962-64) uses superimpositions and handmade film techniques to create imagery that is abstract and sensory, yet there is still the narrative of the man climbing the mountain to cut down the tree. Furthermore, an assortment of thematic elements such as the passing of the seasons, the astronomical footage throughout the series and the birth of the child in Part 2 of the film suggest poetically that the climb is symbolic of ‘all human endeavor’ . By the time of his later films however – even those with literary allusions in their titles – the focus is squarely on the sensory experience, and the overt, literal poetic imagery of Dog Star Man that can be easily reduced to language is no longer present. This shift is confirmed by Brakhage himself:

I began, I think quite naturally, to want film to get free of even its closest kinship, to grow, up in a way, so we could know what a film can be in itself, not film as theatre. That is not a film as poetry, not film as literature, not film as illustration, moving picture illustrations of literature or all the things that it mostly is as you see when you turn on the TV

One could also argue that the titling of the works based on allusions to other works of art – whether musical (Love Song, 2001), literary (The Dante Quartet, 1987) or painting (Garden of Earthly Delights, 1981) – is a sign of the ‘corrupting influence’ of other media. While these titles may give the viewer a point of reference when encountering the work, the films resist any clear representation of the other media. Take for example The Dante Quartet. The hand-painted film, while drawing on Dante’s Inferno in name, does not make any other literary allusion outside of its title and the title of its subsections. The imagery is purely abstract; Brakhage intentionally avoids attempts at creating a figurative visual landscape on the screen with the paint. Talking about a section of hand painted film that was made as part of The Dante Quartet but ultimately rejected by him, Brakhage explains its exclusion; ‘the reason that this hunk is framed and doesn’t exist within The Dante Quartet – which is what it was originally made for – is its an outtake because its too close to the nameable’ . Therefore by this stage, Brakhage is resisting the poeticism of his earlier films and is creating works of pure, abstract visual sensation.

Another charge that can perhaps be leveled at Brakhage is the influence of Abstract Expressionism in his work, in the sense that the use of abstract painting marks Brakhage’s films as impure by Greenberg’s standards. The problem of the film medium is that it has generally has only three options of creating the visuals; either filming an object, collaging objects or creating animations. The first renders film as corrupted by photography, the second by collage and the last by painting and drawing. Brakhage then highlights the problem of the media’s ambiguity of a truly essential production technique by not relying solely on one method of creating visuals. Instead, he uses all of them to produce abstraction in film. Films like the aforementioned Dante Quartet use hand painted dyes, Garden of Earthly Delights utilizes ‘montane zone vegetation’ placed onto the film surface itself, and the late career photographed film Commingled Containers (1997) uses distorted lenses and refractions of light through water to produce an abstract effect.. While The Dante Quartet utilizes painting and The Garden of Earthly Delights collaging, Brakhage is not using these techniques in making films that ‘pretend’ they are these other media. If he were then he would negate the movement aspect of film and render the film as a still image; he simply would paint the one frame and repeat it again and again for the length of the film. Rather, the movements of the films produce the effect of a sensory experience quite different to abstraction in painting. Limited by the stillness of canvas painting, Jackson Pollock used large, sprawling canvases to immerse the viewer in a field of abstraction. Brakhage works on the smaller scale of 16mm film and even when projected does not immerse the viewer in quite the same way. Instead the movement of the film animates the imagery; the abstract forms bubbling and shifting in color across the surface of the film. The eye cannot fix onto one single frame and study it intensely as one is able to with a Jackson Pollock painting like Lavender Mist (1950). Rather, the effect of the rapid changes of the wash of color on screen produces an ‘adventure of perception’ that can only be experienced in film. Therefore while it is perhaps similar to Abstract Expressionism in its use of painting, the handmade films of Brakhage do not attempt to mimic the same effects and instead utilize abstraction in a way that highlights the film medium instead of reducing it the stillness of the painting medium proper.

Conclusions
Thus by examining the principles of Clement Greenberg’s ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, it is possible to extrapolate from it a model for art production that focuses on the purity of the essential nature of a medium and the sensory experience of abstraction, and that the essential nature of the film medium is movement in time. Looking at the narrative films of the French New Wave, the reliance on narrative and language – the domain of literature – render them as following a model of film production that does not fit with Greenberg’s ideas. The structural-materialists meanwhile do utilize film as movement in time, yet with the exception of films like Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer, the use of abstraction in films produced by the movement is not as an essential part of their practice as the cognitive qualities that the often figurative films explore. Brakhage’s later handmade films on the other hand, produced under his theory of Closed Eye Vision, are films that treat film as a medium of movement in time and utilize abstraction in a manner that produces an ‘adventure in perception’. Furthermore, by debating the issues of the influence of literature and other media on Brakhage as well as the obvious visual similarities to Abstract Expressionism, it becomes clear that the model Brakhage proposes in Closed Eye Vision is very much in keeping with Greenberg’s ideas. Therefore the handmade films of Stan Brakhage can be seen to be the ‘Newer Laocoons’ of the film medium, with Closed Eye Vision as the theoretical framework by which Greenberg’s ideas are translated into a model for filmmaking.

The Minute Hands, Part One - a short story by Donovan de Souza

This very short story is an idea that I have been playing around with for the last 8 years or so, and comes directly from my own life. It is the sort of idea that I would love to include in a feature film, but given that I lack the budget and crew to make such a film, I felt it was important that I wrote it down while I still was able to remember it. I feel very much that this short should be the start of something bigger, but here it is, my first entry and the story for which this blog got its title - The Minute Hands.

The Minute Hands

by Donovan de Souza

In my mind, I often return to The Tree. It wasn’t a grand tree; not a karri, or a mighty redwood or an Ent or even Yggdrasil itself. It was just a simple...I don’t know. Something eucalypt surely. ‘Gum tree’ you could call it I suppose. Certainly not remotely old growth and, though towering to a 12-year old boy, diminutive compared to the elders that lived towards the end of that rectangular field colloquially dubbed ‘The Oval’. To its left: the grey of a cement lid obscuring the school water mains, to its right: a rust-speckled blue cage filled with compacted aluminium cylinders still reeking from the remnants of half-drunk beverages and the feasting of microorganisms. Behind it stood the perimeter of the grounds, on the other side of which walked older people - usually young men – carrying water skis under their arms and muttering larrikinisms in native Ocker, punctuated with the frequent “fuckin’” and the occasional “cunt”. And before it stood the gnarled and peeling skeleton of a cricket pitch that had obviously gone out of favor when basketball courts and play grounds stole its usual clientele.
The tree was the locus of activity in the area. Well, it wasn’t really I suppose, but for all intents and purposes, to us it was. Small, childish hands clung to its trunk and branches, their owners squealing in yet-to-be-cracked voices as they stealthily avoided being tagged. Tornado was the game; little more than a machismo-drenched (and violent) variation on the perennial classic Chasey, where ‘home’ was only safe if you were able to latch onto the four holes of the water main lid, or someone was kind enough to hold a linking hand out to you. As a teacher walked pass, the game would slyly take on a more sedate tone, only to return to its original intensity when surveillance was finally averted. We lived for this, and the midday classes were but a recess to this Most Important Game that we played.
There were five of us or ten of us… hell, some would say there were even twenty of us depending on the power plays in playground politics, and depending on whom you ask and how they reckon it. Perhaps it was like Mile’s band in the early 60s: Davis the constant in the trumpet chair with a metamorphosing roster of rotating players filling out the remaining cast. Or perhaps it was more a cline; with the key figures forming a loose core blending out into the nearly-theres and the hangers-on, fading into a periphery of occasional players for whom this nostalgia would have little or no meaning. I guess at the end of the day the number doesn’t matter; what was important was the tree was ours, and there was a feeling that we were somehow tied to that tree, and that its fate would be our fate too.

Summer and graduation came, and it brought with it the grand narrative of progress, armed with chainsaws and bulldozers and building planners. A bigger and better school hall, they said. Weakly but with an earnestness that would fade as our voices deepened and our hearts hardened, we spoke of saving the tree entirely or gathering cuttings so our friend could live in some way as a seedling in our respective gardens. Parents smiled at such idealism, before tactfully declining while we, fledgling teens standing on the brink, lacked neither the organization nor the drive to save that part of ourselves that was firmly rooted into the soil of that land. So as the playgrounds fell silent and as the saws whirred into life, our childhood story was cut down and us, its branches, were scattered into the wind with the sawdust of our tree’s fatal wound.