Negative Capability

I’ve been escaping to Blackheath on week-ends for a little peace and solitude from the city, with its vicissitudes of cultural monopoly… more about that some other fine day. Here is the view from the cabin where I stay. Time slows down here; when it rains there are colourful finches and parrots splashing  about through the trees, on hot days blow flies risk my impatience and orange banded butterflies tango, and tease the eye.

I’ve been reading a marvellous book by Tabish Khair, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness, Ghosts from Elsewhere which provides new readings of how the colonial/racial Other is negotiated through Gothic tropes in the work of Conrad, Kipling, Melville, the Brontes, Erna Brodber, Jean Rhys and others. But the book also re-examines the theories of subjectivity and difference, emotion and identity with an erudition that never falls short of clarity.

I had to temporarily leave my part-time abode for the launch of Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s Possession, which lyrically reimagines the colonial perspectives of James Cook’s great southern encounter.  It’s an ambitious, daring, nuanced, at times tense collection of poems. Each title, taking its inspiration from the poetries of Michael Ondaatje, Peter Boyle, James McAuley, Charles Wright and others, bears a tenderness that measures the tandem journey of the poet-explorer. I’m not sure as yet how this book might speak to the Indigenous reader, the non-European, the postcolonial subject, but I find it metaphorically impassioned and strikingly detailed.  It captures the current mood of our colonial archival psyche, with all her vested and competing canons.

Here is an aspect of the view, at twilight … and some music by the Alister Spence trio, who played for my wedding reception.  I particularly love the first track “Caught In Light”

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/musicdeli/stories/2010/2809109.htm