Richard Wastell

Not far from here

Devonport Regional Gallery - 28 January to 6 March 2005
Bett Gallery Hobart - 9 to 23 March 2005

I go to the forests – not far from here – and I enter worlds within worlds and worlds, and these worlds swim and wheel in each other, past each other, across each other, bleeding through boundaries, plunging down worm-holed tunnels of welling, intricate life. All is infinite here; each its own boundless, shape-shifting cosmos. It is so with colours, patterns, with process, with life itself, life as it plops and snarks in the leafmould, as it winds and moles within snowgum bark. I know it random, chaotic, worlds of rioting spontaneity. I know it severe in its programmed constraint, ordered, gridded, an implausible geometry. Who’d have thought?
Such springing exuberance should be proof against destruction; too resilient. But we come, we do not see the small wheeling stars, the glorious reverence-commanding worlds, stretching down and away forever. We see a double-digit return to shareholders. We bring blades, chains, arc-lights, obliterating fires…

In the mountains
post-noon
night enters day.
The air is a winding sheet
for shamed
wind-beaten peaks.
The air is a rampant beast
blackly rearing, huge,
sun-blotting.

I seek a hinge – a link from this vast, ashed armageddon, its poisons and its charred grotesqueries, across to those lost, quick worlds, the tangled, fluid, living wonder that was here before the charrings, and before the programmed desert of nitens. I wander here, lost in spirit, alien in law – for this is what the circumscribed human world decrees ‘trespass’.

I regard warped torsos of Dixonia antarctica, stripped, black pillars of salt, as void of feature as the shadows of Hiroshima. I reach from here to the redstreak bark of the snowgum, that blood-river that is the force of its life, and the forest’s. That is my need.
To my mind comes the luminosity of lichen – Old Man’s Beard – this concentrator, ramifier, of light within bush dark. It is my mind’s hinge to the colours, the patterns, the pizzazz of endlessly sunspotting life. Old Man’s Beard.

The firestorm pends, is pent
with light sucked from ligneous veins.
And a marvel is here:
these yellow scrags of lichen,
scruffed entwined body hair
of the wind-twisted upland forest,
these scrags restore the light.
Old Man’s Beard trims a lamp within too-early gloom.
Here are crimped, soft strands,
tangled finger-twists.
They tease forth a fey and wondering light,
the luminous calm of a gaze that falls upon the flawed nobility
of the acts of men,
and the unimpeached dignity of the world on which they scrawl.
Lichen is the forest’s ancient enlightenment,
and the planet’s –
and it reaches through the very fields of space
to infuse the cosmic winds,
a swirl of principle
to spark a universe.
And it swirls within, too,
to tap my animal soul,
to scatter firewalled fear,
to welcome me,
one of its elements, not alien,
a dancer in this clamorous, consuming moment,
this epic play of the world, of worlds.

I am thinking of some of these old bearded men with their ‘crimped, soft strands’ – of the old Philosopher Smith, say – or their ‘tangled finger-twists’ – of the old Walt Whitman, say. I am thinking of the hinge between the thoughts of human animals and the fate of the bush. One dreams thus, and this happens; and one dreams a different dream and the bush, too, dreams on, merely dreams on… I am thinking of the whirling arc of space and how it links to hard, precise mountain rock. Of colour hinged to dark. Of rampaging swirls of life hooked to grey wastes of death. Of the cosmos in the scale of a lake-caught trout or a red twist in a snowgum’s bark grappled to the panoramic sweep of a monochromed hell. And I need to know the point at which I am hooked in – not only to the yin of the surging life of the bush, but also to the yang of its visited death.

In the mountains
post-noon light enters gloom,
warms, is of,
informs
the soul of a world.
I have my small share in it,
world, light,
idea,
the old androgyne
of the universe,
its serum of wisdom,
its principles of light,
of dark,
its finger-twists of lichen.

The forest comes back. Every other writer of Letters-To-The-Editor tells me this. ‘The forest grows back.’ No it doesn’t. Whatever comes back is not the forest that has gone. It may be in descent from that forest, but this has not been a continuous evolving. There has been a rupture of the fabric. At best, now, there is a seam where once there was not. But nothing can be the same after rupture; certainly not after rupture as emphatic as this, and is it the painfulness of this realisation that leads me to seek solace in grand principle, in the broad currents of change that transcend any given clearfell?
It may be. Thanks to the Old Man’s Beard for its expansionary comfort, but it comes finally to this – there is no escaping the real, the tangible, the particular, and there is, then, no escaping the death of those myriad small worlds. Not far from here.

Pete Hay
Hobart, 7 January 2005

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