HOMESICK

I keep thinking about penknife marks in a tree. My initials, and those of my boyhood friends, up there in the thick grey sinews where the wind breathes and green leaves shiver.

I see those trees in my mind. At night when I’m in bed. Branches rustling out of the murk of my subconscious, shaking up the pond of sleep.

I see two trees in particular, the limbs low enough for us to climb with ease. And I keep thinking, I must go back there. Go back and see if my name is still in the branches, if the names of the others are still there too. But I never do. It’s a case of one day I will, next time, I must remember, don’t feel stupid about it, just do it …

The weird thing is I drive by those trees every time I visit home (which isn’t nearly as often as I should). Jammed as they are into a little park butted up against the side of a highway intersection. One of those motorway-excised playgrounds that gets bigger and bigger in the imagination all the while it shrinks into a cosmetic municipal reality.

It’d make quite a sight for passing motorists, a 41-year-old man monkeying around ‘up there’. How would I explain it to concerned locals, the police, a psychiatric nurse sped to the scene? It’d be embarrassing, that’s for sure.

Just the same way I’m embarrassed by the questions this tree-climbing urge raises in me now. Which is why I am tempted to edit such questions out of this story as immature or undeveloped thoughts. Things to be hidden away.

But I do think, or feel these questions, half-formed as they might be. Like why do we stop climbing up trees to sit and talk for a while? At what point do we break such playful habits? How do we decide this is no longer a valid or useful or interesting way to behave? How does it become a part of growing up? Does a native closeness between us die when these ‘habits’ die? Something in us?

I guess there is a strange but compelling atavism at the heart of these thoughts. Even a respect.

Maybe that’s why I empathised with Barry Lopez’s essay ‘Apologia’, from his book About This Life (Vintage/Random House). In it he describes stopping for roadkill, carrying various dead animals and birds off the road to lay beneath trees or rest in long grasses. ‘I nod before I go, a ridiculous gesture, out of simple grief,’ he writes. Then Lopez hops back into his car, trying to avoid the bemused gaze of other drivers on the road.

What Lopez touches on deals with our secret yearnings—and shame—in relation to nature. Our desire to respect life-forces, to commune with more transcendent possibilities in a casually desensitised world. And our clumsy, secular lack of ritual, the way we don’t know how to react or listen to something instinctual within us when it calls. Lopez grieves for our broken partnership with the natural world and the spiritual ways it can feed us.

It’s easy to be frightened of the sentimentality in these thoughts. And bury that sentimentality accordingly. Not to react at all. Quite often these instinctual responses are things we would do as children rather than adults.

With regard to my tree-climbing urges, I’m also aware of the nostalgia involved—the way nostalgia can act as a cancer that devalues and simplifies the past, commodifying it for easy rationalisations, sales-speak, anthems, TV shows. How memory becomes a retreat, not a guide.

But this childish trace in me is more than a nostalgic hook, a retreat. The image of trees shivering in the wind, the sense of watching where I once was as a boy, the detachment, feels colder than that. The way an onlooker feels cold at an accident.

This divorce, this coldness, is why these trees and penknife carvings have pulled me out of bed tonight. From sleep into writing. They’ve set me thinking again about the homesickness that somehow still plagues me even though I have arrived home after a year spent travelling the world.

Iran, India, Nepal and Turkey. Paris, London, Edinburgh and New York. It’s been a huge 12 months. From coming upon a body of a boy at the foothills of the Annapurna Himalayas to underground bazaars in Iran and Calvin Klein’s runway show in New York. After a year away, with so many extreme moments, the experiences begin to extinguish each other, and you start to feel like the grotesque consumer of a life you are not really a part of any more.

At some point during such a long journey you are also likely to find that a restlessness has been cut into you. Most deeply at the journey’s end.

There is of course a reaction to this. I have only been home a month to the day exactly, and already I want to set my roots down so totally and completely there is something violent about it.

It’s an impatient desire. I don’t want to go through any processes, least of all the grind of pulling possessions out of storage, the endless unpacking of cardboard boxes, the dust, the hayfever, the need to prune away all those things that I couldn’t throw away before I left. I just want it to be done. To be over with.

The flipside of this is a desire to burn it all down.

Like that scene in Betty Blue where Beatrice Dalle starts throwing everything—everything—out of the house—‘very Zen,’ a deadpan neighbour observes—before the couple decides to be truly free and set fire to the place altogether. What a scene: home is burning, and the lovers are walking off happily down the highway into the night.

It’s a romantic view. Fun to do for a while. But you do get tired. Desperately tired. Even Jack Kerouac had to observe within the hungry poetry of On the Road that ‘I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer people but my own confusion.’

The great modern travel writer Bruce Chatwin suggests that we are somehow, intrinsically, nomadic at heart. That this is our primal calling. And we are always grappling with that. He almost turns this into a moral position—aesthetically, spiritually, genetically—throughout much of his writing. But we’re cave dwellers too. People who love a good fire, warmth, a safe place from the endless night, the abyss of limitlessness. Even Chatwin admits there is a contradiction.

He implies that our journeys have lost the migratory structure and territorial meaning of our nomadic past. A sense of quest in travel or some reconciliation with the experiences might compensate for that. But these mission statements and reflections cannot entirely settle the contradiction. We need more than just movement, you see, we need an awareness of place.

This is the irony of ‘the global village’, where jet travel increasingly transforms our lifestyle and instant worldwide communication affects our headspace. We are careering through borders more than ever, faster than ever. It’s no surprise people get a little lost, a touch disoriented. It’s why we get so fascinated by indigenous people and their ‘groundedness’.

In his book The Songlines, Chatwin looks at the spiritual beliefs of Aboriginal people, an intensely complex task. His semi-fictional work involves a set of journeys through Central Australia, and is pivoted around a central section that collates scraps of wisdom and anecdotes from his travel diaries (all pushing his theory of nomadic essentialism). Mostly though it’s a dialogue between the narrator and a character called Arkady:

“It was during his time as a school-teacher that Arkady learned of a labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as ‘Dreaming-tracks’ or ‘Songlines’; to the Aboriginals as the ‘Footprints of the Ancestors’ or the ‘Way of the Law’…”

He went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the lines of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as ‘ways’ of communication between the most far-flung tribes.

‘A song’, he said, ‘was both a map and a direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across the country.’”

It was and remains the duty of Aboriginal people to keep singing these songs. In this way they ‘care’ for the land and keep it ‘well’. Chatwin was naturally fascinated by this, as any writer and traveller would be. In a world of global movement and digital communications, this kind of belief and understanding virtually deifies the writer.

The Songlines was a masterful effort, but it did not win him friends in Central Australia’s Alice Springs. Chatwin used many real people as characters, often cruelly or carelessly. He bent the truth. He suffered too from a tone of voice that suggested an Englishman who had breezed in to see things that all the locals who had been there for years couldn’t. Go to Alice Springs and you’ll find this book on everyone’s shelf, where sooner or later people will tell you they don’t like it very much. And yet it is the book that has done more than any other to introduce Australian Aborigines and their beliefs to the world.

In his new book, Chatwin (Harville Press/Jonathan Cape), biographer Nicholas Shakespeare quotes Nin Dutton, who traveled with Chatwin while he was researching The Songlines. She says that ‘he [Chatwin] knew the mystery was there and he didn’t get it. In The Songlines he was desperately trying to go to the centre. It was the most important thing for him and he realised halfway through he wasn’t going to be able to do it. He was excluded. You have to earn mystery. It’s only lovers who get there.’

It was the central tragedy of his life.

In an article called ‘A Literature of Place’ for the Australian quarterly HEAT (#2), Barry Lopez tried to get at the root of a contemporary renaissance in what he calls ‘nature writing’ or ‘landscape writing’.

Certainly something is happening out there in the publishing world that suggests a hunger for more than just the usual travel guides, adventure stories and journalistic analyses. People aren’t just looking for maps and background detail and easy wit, they are wanting experiential guides to living, deep journeys.

Lopez draws a line from Melville’s Moby Dick and Thoreau through to John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, to the more recent expressions of people like Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen and himself when discussing this ‘landscape writing’.

One might well add works as varied as Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy’ (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain) and Michael Ondaatje’s Running In The Family—let alone the renewed interest that the Chatwin biography inspired in that writer’s work. You might even include musical figures like Tom Waits, with his textural fascination for farmhouse recordings and what he calls ‘surrulism’ (rural surrealism) in the lyrics to his CD, Mule Variations, or the enduring iconic survival of a rustic rock ’n’ roll figure like Neil Young. A director like The Thin Red Line’s Terrence Malick similarly taps into a natural mysticism.

People are looking for some kind of ground.

In ‘A Literature of Place’, Lopez specifically notes three qualities that indigenous peoples have passed on to him in his travels as a writer:

“Over time I have come to think of these three qualities—paying intimate attention [to a place]; a storied relation to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place … as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.”

This is what travel should teach us, how to find home, how to respect it. All the while it can also displace you from it—sometimes forever. For a writer this tension is deepened by the need to explicate such perceptions and emotions.

You begin to question where your voice is coming from. In my year’s journey I felt all the dilemmas of a Western mind sliding across the surface of other cultures and places, not quite penetrating them, yet somehow influenced: ‘travel’ as a way of getting lost in the world to rediscover oneself again.

I was aware of the colonial taint beneath this adventure. And strangely affected by the greater culture shock I experienced in the Western cities where things were familiar, yet subtly different from what I knew as an Australian. I was not English, I was not American. And yet a part of me was mediated and shaped by both these countries.

Not too long before arriving home in Australia, I had a wild night out on the town in New York. A Chelsea Hotel kinda night.

I won’t say how I managed it, but I ended up dancing around tables in one of the rooms with Abel Ferrara, the director of Bad Lieutenant, and Peta Wilson, the Australian star of TV’s Le Femme Nikita. Ferrara played very bad air guitar to Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile, while Wilson and about a dozen other people went berserk. Gotta tell you, I was enjoying myself.

Later on, at dawn, I crawled up out of the downtown subway. I felt hungover, vulnerable, easily permeated, but I was lucky. I caught the faintest smell of wet stone warmed by the underground trainline. It made me think of summer in Australia, this rained-on pavement and the evaporating moisture, the gritty, sweet warmth of it in a light breeze in midwinter New York.

I realised then and there that I needed to go home for a while. The same way I later walked through Central Park and the smell of cut grass reminded me of being eight year’s old and mowing my grandmother’s lawns. Time to go home, the cut grass and the wet pavement seemed to be telling me, time to go home.

So I leave New York for a while to try and reorient myself back in Australia. To experience where I’ve come from and resettle somehow within myself. That’s the real issue: to settle within.

As human beings, we are made up of curious roots. Elemental things. A collection of qualities it is easy to overlook when one lives in a city as big as New York. Citizens of ‘the Big Apple’ might get it, though, from the smell of coffee or the sound of ice under their feet, the wet feeling of snow and how it tastes on their lips, a bad pizza on 8th Avenue, the warm air of a subway descent: New York, winter, home. September 11 has not unwritten this day-to-day reality. Indeed the rhythms and sensuality of it will eventually move in like a tide to submerge the singular event, soften it into the history of living and passing on.

I can’t really speak at that depth. New York is not my home. But now that I am away from it in Australia, winter New York has written itself into my skin, my sense of smell, my tongue. It makes me want to go back.

Travel has done this to me. Made me question what home is.

I want to get back to the penknife cuts in the tree. I want to go back to New York and taste snow as it falls. I want to accept who I am and find a place in the world, from an initial in wood to a footprint in ice and some words on a page. I’m homesick for who I am. Writing my way into the new me out of all the pieces I’ve become and all the places I’ve been.

So I think about those trees that shake my imagination from childhood. And something an old Aboriginal man once told me when we were up in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. He explained to me the way the limbs of the trees grew towards the sun, and how if you really looked at them, you could work out what direction to walk in, where you were headed if you ever got lost.

He then tested me, and I said every direction under the compass as he pointed at the limbs. I was hopelessly wrong each time, and he laughed and laughed. Remembering that incident now, I realize he was less concerned with my abilities at applied ‘bush knowledge’. And more interested to give me a story which explained how all things grow into a pattern.

- Mark Mordue

* Story first published in Madison magazine, New York USA, 1999

= Pen drawing of a tree by Vincent Van Gogh.
= Aboriginal artwork used as cover for first edition copy of Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines.
= Colour image of New York subway vents by Brett Foley sourced over net at http://www.bugbitten.com/photos/North_America/Axel/New_York/33673-6878-1128156.html

Opium Poem

Just listen to the conversation in a room:
drum 'n' bass, hawkwind, palace-
musical names and drugs
like hashish and opium.
The candle burns
and the gatherers suck half
a plastic bottle full of smoke.
Spines disappear, skin warms,
techniques get developed.
Stories of the self
can now begin:

The first one is pulled from a river
after an escape through toys
pursued by police in a supermarket.
Another crawls in the dirt
for a committee of childhood
in a secret place among the bushes.
She remembers her hair
in the black world
and bones that held it high.
While the boy wants Nirvana,
a band not a place,
pale and young
on his last cigarette outta here.
All this while the leathermaker
repairs a money belt
and recalls vegetable names
from the farm of his experience.

This is a room in Shiraz,
a travellers' place.
Familiarity is a light cord
around each voice.
Some shared slowness
to the evening's tales
enveloping them all.
Just listen to the conversation
Listen, listen to it disappear.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip (Allen & Unwin Publishers, Sydney Australia 2001; Hawthorne Books, Portland USA 2004).

= Photo of opium set by Steve Martin, web sourced.

Towards Love: another vision of The Road

It feels strange to say I do not want to leave The Road behind me, but find myself yearning to stay with it in some agonized way even as my best male efforts to resist tears lingers on at the end. It is, most unexpectedly, a masterpiece. That rarest of things, a superb and true adaptation of a great novel, the likes of which I find myself comparing with To Kill a Mockingbird and its translation into film almost half a century before.

This might seem like an odd parallel to make. The author Harper Lee’s child’s eye view of small town life in Alabama, and her heroic depiction of a widowed father confronting Southern racism – along with the 1962 black-and-white film which starred Gregory Peck as the supremely noble embodiment of that figure, the attorney-at-law Atticus Finch – have an idealistic 1950s sheen to them. So much so that every Father’s Day Gregory Peck is still recalled in various polls and magazine articles as our iconic image of fatherhood: modest, upright, warm, he suggests a man’s finest hours have little to do with machismo and much to do with tenderness.

Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic vision of our future in The Road would appear a world away from this reassuring feminine ideal (based in fact on Harper Lee’s own childhood). In it an unnamed father and his son trudge south across a waste-land towards the coast. They push a shopping trolley full of scavenged supplies as they flee the onset of what seems to be a nuclear winter, though we are never sure what brought our civilization down into its ashes. McCarthy prefers to concentrate on the journey the father and son make, dispensing with any back-story in a few Spartan sentences: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.”

The film similarly elides explanations, using precisely the same words in a voice-over by a wolfishly lean Viggo Mortensen as the father. More than anything it’s Mortensen’s vaguely hyper-thyroidic eyes that capture you with their imagined depths, a physical attribute that has made the Danish-American actor a standout in projects as varied as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Eastern Promises and Indian Runner. As The Road begins a screen door bangs shut on a life of humid colour and we are jolted awake, out of his dream of the past and into a shadowy present where the father clutches at his son with a mix of animal fear and ferocious affection, “each the other’s world entire”. The son is played by the 11 year old Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, who last tore our hearts out as the boy who bore witness to adultery, madness and self-destruction in Romulus, My Father. Charlize Theron appears in flashbacks as the mother: languidly beautiful and lost as a summer of love; then increasingly sallow and wrought till she gives birth at home while a destroyed world waits outside her door. There in memory she will stay.

Father and son must make their pilgrimage to survive through a charred landscape veiled by rain and snow, past poisoned rivers and dead forests vertiginously shaken by earthquakes, through the monochrome misery of deserted cities and on towards hollow-feeling skies split by far-off lightning. An environmental apocalypse as much as any man-made explosion is heavily implied. This rupture to the natural order has the stage pitch of Shakespearian tragedy, with close-ups by lamp and fire light sketched by Samuel Beckett – as well as an authenticity that might give even the most ardent climate-change doubter pause for thought. Cynics will see it another way, as nothing but a downer, and yet another art experience capitalizing on the zeitgeist of fear around us now prompting a rash of anxiety disorders among our children about the state of the environment.

Ironically much of the film is indeed ‘genuine’. Australian director John Hillcoat and his production crew used Google Earth to discover eight miles of abandoned freeway in Pennsylvania, along with run-down soulless suburbs in Pittsburgh, abandoned coalfields and a burnt out amusement park. The goal was to avoid CGI effects, and with additional shooting in the snows of Oregon and the use of New Orleans in the wake of a Hurricane Katrina’s ravages, much of the scenery is drawn from a real-life America naturally traumatized and economically depressed.

As a science fiction film set in the near-future this gives The Road a sobriety and believability that is unsettling. That the pluming smoke in one scene was taken from September 11 and grafted into the background only adds to the film’s claustrophobic tethers on the collective unconscious, though some of these post-production techniques, including the de-colourizing of the natural landscape for heightened bleakness, have subtracted from this emphatic realism and created a synthetic, photo-realist quality. This may well be intentional, creating an iconic look that is quasi-medieval and fable-like at times, qualities reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Swedish film about “the silence of God”, The Seventh Seal.

On the road father and son endure starvation, elemental deprivation, and the threat of ragged gangs reduced to robbery, rape and cannibalism. This is a world where starvation and brutality are the facts of life; where everyone is ‘homeless’, worn-out shoes and soiled clothing lined with plastic bags for protection. The father’s greatest gift in this existential horror story – and the story is best seen as a frontier Gothic horror tale rather than a sci-fi experience – would appear to be a gun with two bullets.

One of the first ‘sharing’ moments is a scene where the father explains to the boy how to cock this gun, place it in his mouth, tilt it upwards and blow his own brains out. “Like this. See?” Deep down the father knows the boy is incapable of suicide. But he does his best to prepare him all the while he must be willing to do the deed himself. We hear Mortensen’s thoughts again in voice-over, a God-said-to-Abraham voice where there is no God above, and no consoling or compelling faith to support the sacrifice of his son into oblivion: “Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?”

That anybody should be surprised this material might form difficult subject matter for a film defies common sense. The problems of translating the myriad nuances of event and character and thought patterns that a novel can embrace, let alone the mysterious enchantments of language itself – in McCarthy’s case a chant-like undertow to his story-teller’s voice that is either prayerfully hypnotic or overbearingly portentious depending on whether you enjoyed reading the The Road or not – creates a whole other strata of difficulties that could kill even the best intentions.


A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2007, McCarthy’s novel crossed over into the mainstream to become a literary best-seller. In doing so it gained the imprimatur of no less a house-hold icon than Oprah Winfrey, whose attachment to the cadences of McCarthy’s Biblical language reflects her own church upbringing in the South and the ringing power of what might be termed pulpit oratory. It’s no great coincidence that she and McCarthy are both Tennessee raised – and that two years earlier her Book Club had revived interest in three classic novels in a row by William Faulkner, the author to whom McCarthy is most often compared.

But The Road was not just ‘popular’; it penetrated in the deepest, word-of-mouth ways. People, particularly men, felt shaken to the core by its reflections on fatherhood, love, family and the future of the planet for our children in this time of terror, war and ecological dysfunction. The book was duly heralded as the most important American novel of the last hundred years, even as an end note to American and perhaps Western civilization itself. At the most raw level it had the power to frighten those who read it into loving better, to remind us that love is both an act and a responsibility rather than some fuzzy romantic feeling we can allow to drift about us. To read the novel was to renew one’s vows as a parent, to being in the world and caring, and to recognize the need to do something with and about that love, or risk losing it.

Repeated delays in the release date of the adaptation, and with it whispers that it might not receive a cinema outing at all (that dreaded yoke around its neck: “a straight to DVD release”), hinted at not only the obvious darkness of the story itself, but a deeper flaw: an indulgence in that darkness, an immersion in all the worst horrors of McCarthy’s novelistic vision without the pay-off of those final cathartic, run-to-your-children-and-love-them emotions.

The construction of a deceptive preview trailer that has sought to hide this darkness by promoting it as one of those end-of-the-world nightmare spectaculars in the vein of films like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, utilizing panicky news-reel footage and explosive snippets that are not actually seen in the film – with shots of Charlize Theron looking beautiful and scared – did not assuage concerns. A dog’s breakfast seemed the inevitable outcome of these competing ambitions and pressures.

Instead the film is neither a fetishistic art-house indulgence of McCarthy’s most miserable extremes, or an entertainment-on-steroids compromise that bastardizes the original work. No, against all the odds it strikes towards the deepest core of the book’s appeal, and emerges as a grand cinematic poem about love, about what we give and what we teach and how this is carried on between generations. Any father, mother, or ‘child’ knows this territory. And like the book, the film’s ultimate reverberations are restorative precisely because it pushes us towards love – and sacrifice. The outcome in the film then is the same as that of the novel: hope, not decimation.


Those bright powers observed it would be deceptive not to warn people of the film’s more confronting scenes. A basement with half-alive, partially dismembered, naked figures recalls the Holocaust in writhing miniature, though it is the sounds from this same house later at night rather than anything you witness that curdles the stomach. But then who would go see a story like this without expecting a shadow or five? One might say the poor fools who get sucked in by the trailer, which may be just as well, and in its way a brilliant marketing ploy, however compromised its motives. For it is certainly true we are too easily entertained by those things that should trouble us, by what Saul Bellow once described as “the ecstasies of destruction” inherent in our shallower entertainment past-times. These days even what troubles us is mere grist for the entertainment mill as video game manufacturers market extreme war-game violence with pop songs like Tears for Fears ‘Mad World’, as if romanticized depression and nihilistic inertia might serve for a conscience to excuse your pleasure in slaughtering whoever whenever any time you like.

As an author, McCarthy has hardly been immune from criticisms of unnecessary violence, and of relishing it in his work. In fact it’s hard to think of a more violent author in the history of American letters. Prior to The Road the book on which his critical reputation most powerfully rested was Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985), a spectacular and endless succession of nightmare scenes depicting a teenage boy’s involvement with a hunting party collecting Indian scalps in the American West. Here McCarthy’s language spewed off the page with Old Testament power, long declarative sentences joined by one ‘and’ after another, no quotation marks, and a seeming resentment of commas into the bargain.

His greatest commercial success is now No Country for Old Men, which stripped back the engine, paring down the archaic language and long, coagulating scenes into something ready-made and revved-up for cinematic adaptation. Fans saw it as McCarthy-lite; the old devil going soft and cleaning up his style. But the same bitter messages dominated both the book and the film it spawned: evil and violence win; the world is savage and sad. My feeling is this message hollows out both that novel and the Coen Brothers adaptation, and makes them lower experiences, even if the spare, vicious momentum of No Country for Old Men cleared the way for the prayerful, rhythmic simplicity and power of The Road.

It’s interesting to note that McCarthy’s favourite novel is Moby Dick. When Herman Melville wrote it he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as a lamb.” McCarthy has enjoyed similar sins over his startling novelistic career. If Blood Meridian was indeed McCarthy’s wicked book, The Road might well be said to be his blessed one. The difference is one of both content and intention. McCarthy dedicated The Road to his own then 7 year old son John Francis. It may be that The Road is the first book McCarthy ever truly wrote for someone apart from himself, the first he ever wrote for the world rather than against it (or at best grieving whatever innocence it could have had). McCarthy’s sense of mortality as an old man in his 70s may have also increased the urgency with which he delivered it to us, spare as a book of hymns about forgiveness for our sins and maybe his.


A look at the director John Hillcoat’s earlier work on The Proposition meanwhile makes it obvious why he has been the perfect choice to direct The Road. Apart from the fact Hillcoat cited Blood Median as an inspiration for The Proposition, there are similar lyrical qualities to the way he has people emerge out of a primal landscape, qualities that drew from singer Nick Cave’s script and were enhanced by the latter’s accompanying soundtrack work with Warren Ellis. A closing scene in The Proposition, where two brothers sit, side by side, one bleeding to death from the other’s gun shot wounds, recalls nothing less than the unleashing of of Bob Dylan's ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ in Sam Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It’s a moment that brings a genuine poetic majesty to The Proposition after so much violence and bloodshed.

Hillcoat has wisely chosen Cave and Ellis again as the composers for The Road and they deliver a stirring soundtrack. Even so I did not think the director was capable of what he has achieved here. I had assumed that like McCarthy in his most pessimistic incarnations, Hillcoat would be too caught up in his passions for melodrama and baroque flourishes of brutality to produce something this spiritual and warm. I was very wrong. In tune with the great old man of American literature, John Hillcoat has created a masterpiece in The Road that transcends his dark materials and takes us on into something pure and possible. Like the father who loves his son, like the extreme nature of the novel itself, the experience will reassure you of cinema’s capacity to stoke “the fire inside you”.

- Mark Mordue

* An edited version of this essay appeared in The Australian Literary Review under the heading "Towards love" on December 1st, 2009.

Cold, Black Style: The John Cale Interview

The Welsh composer and rock ‘n’ roll musician John Cale is not someone you take lightly. Having witnessed his solo concerts, as well as interviewed him on occasion, I’m all too aware of how Cale’s mountainous, crystalline presence can turn as withering as a trudge across the sub-arctic tundra.

And yet my fondest memory of him dates back to our first encounter at Sydney’s then post-punk venue of choice, the Trade Union Club in the mid ‘80s. After a press conference to a quivering mass of rock journalists, Cale’s publicist allowed 5 minutes each for one-on-one conversations, an absurd amount of time but I stood in line like everyone else. All I could think when my turn came was to ask if he ever went back to Wales? The saturnine titan of the press conference dissolved into a gentle reverie.

I was reminded of this again recently while reading his 1999 biography, What’s Welsh for Zen. In it Cale speaks of everything from the dourness of life in a mining village to being molested as a child at the local church, to the presence of Arthurian legends in the region and rumours Merlin was born not far from where he lived in Garnant. “Out on the mountains,” he writes, “I had an ever present feeling I was running on the bones of ancient people.”

Reading those words I could still remember his coal-dark eyes studying me back at the Trade Union Club. “Eventually you learn that being vicious is a weakness,” he told me then, “that it’s just a way of hiding – and not a sign of strength at all.” This comment seemed aimed at someone off-stage, most obviously his old Velvet Underground songwriting partner, Lou Reed. It was also a reference to Cale’s former self, and the severe cocaine addiction he had just overcome.


That night Cale would play an interpretation of Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ which remains one of the most chilling performances I’ve ever seen on a Sydney stage. It has since become a calling card of his or, more precisely, a coup de grace whenever I’ve seen him play: “Since my baby left me, I found a new place to dwell, down the end of lonely street…”

Ten years after our meeting at the Trade Union Club the Zen Welshman would shit on me like cold snow in a phone interview. So cold I swore I’d never speak with him again. It’s that Walt Whitman thing, I guess, containing multitudes, contradicting himself, so what?

Today he’s in a kinder, more expansive, even amusing frame of mind. But I’m always aware of being on my mettle. It does not help, however, that I have assumed he will be performing his entire 1973 album, Paris 1919, as part of the Sydney Festival. A pastoral and baroque suite of songs inspired by the Treaty of Versailles and the novels of Graham Greene, the record is often cited as one of Cale’s best and most approachable works. Unfortunately my line of enquiry is entirely wrong. Yes, he’s performed that record in full recently at other festivals overseas, but he is launching a far more wide-ranging concert in Sydney under the aegis of ‘Signal to Noise’, a theme that matches the keynote address he is also giving at the Festival.

“It’s that John Cage idea, that there’s no such thing as silence,” he explains. “Wherever you go you carry in your ears the sound of blood rushing through your veins. You can never be pure about listening to Brahms. There’s always traffic in the background, or someone in the audience coughing, your own breathing...”

Cale’s concert and talk, he says, will be dedicated to work of his that has influenced, or was later inspired, by the punk movement of the ‘70s: a musical culture driven by elements of anarchist and left wing politics, a passion for experimentation and a wipe-the-slate-clean, DIY aesthetic that could be highly aggressive.

With half my interview vaporized before me it’s helpful to have done additional research. So you’ll be focusing on Sabotage/Live (1979) era material, I ask, bouncing back as best I can. “Yes, songs like ‘Gun’, ‘Fear is a Man’s Best Friend’, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’...”

Cale’s voice has a barrel-chested, baritone rumble to it like faraway thunder – as well as a rasp that hints at an older man’s waning physical power. He is now 67 years of age. Three marriages down; one daughter. Across his career he emerges as a shape-shifter, restlessly moving through neo-classical, pastoral, stormy rock n roll and electronic influences. When I call him an explorer he doesn’t exactly agree, emphasizing instead that “the songs are about characters talking about things, so you can make it very different each time you do it depending on the ecology of the character in each song.” He nonetheless enjoys my troubled visions of having seen him do ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ as a solo artist so long ago.

“Oh the version with band and me now, that’s pretty much a gargoyle,” he brags, beginning to laugh. “The song has room for that. It has room for a very creepy side. The lyrics support it. It was always important for me to emancipate it from the original. But it was a really hard nut to crack. It’s written in a major key, and it took me a while to get out of that, years. When I [finally] put it in a minor key that made it much creepier. It got me out of the ditch I was in. I wanted to do it as a resurrected song with my band [again now]. I was a big fan of the band Free – they played so slow and sexy. I wanted to be in that same groove with it.”


Imagining an avant-rock composer like Cale banging his head to Free is not the first image that comes to mind. But then neither is his interest in using samples from Sammy Davis Jnr tracks in his recent music – “the old stuff has a really nice swing to it” – or for that matter a fascination with Pharell and Snoop Dog, both of whom he loves.

These sampling and hip hop influences have been filtering into Cale’s work for some time, reaching their height on his last release in 2005, blackAcetate, and what almost qualifies as doom rap in the song ‘Brotherman’. “We tried,” he laughs, “we tried,” but Cale feels the hip hop leanings came far too late, incorporated mostly at the production rather than the songwriting process on blackAcetate. He nonetheless enjoys the use of sampling live, “just having a good thump underlining everything. The problem is to avoid it becoming cold and vicious, to give it that swing.”

Cale goes into an involved explanation of sampling and playing that reveals his artisan nature, and the heavy classical training that gives him such a vice-like intellectual grip on how he approaches rock ‘n’ roll despite his passion for improvisation and ‘noise’. In What’s Welsh for Zen Cale described his group of the punk era as “a very good band that had a cold black style to it and was poised to do something.” To me this is a definitive description of everything about Cale, good and bad: a cold, black style poised to do something. When it happens, look out. When it doesn’t, run.

As a founding member of the Velvet Underground, Cale undoubtedly developed a thick layer of permafrost while slugging it out with his creative nemesis, Lou Reed. The latter would finally oust him from that band. In doing so the group kissed goodbye to the European avant-garde influences (a passion for drones, feedback, repetition and improvisation) that had marked Cale’s viola, bass and organ contributions to Reed’s droll, strangely romantic tales of sado-masochism and drugged identity within the Warhol Factory social scene on songs like ‘Venus in Furs’, ‘Heroin’, ‘Sister Ray’ and ‘Waiting for the Man’.

The rejection by Reed was a bruising experience for a brilliant and innovative musician. Cale had previously distinguished himself in the classical arena after being singled out as a prodigy by the likes of Aaron Copeland and John Cage. As a teenager he was almost prematurely determined to be “a living composer not a cataloguer of the dead”. It would reputedly lead to his being given “the Most Hateful Student Award” by teachers at Goldsmith’s College in London after performing a La Monte Young piece for piano with his elbows, then developing another composition of his own that required screaming at a plant until it died.

Inevitably he defected to rock ‘n’ roll. First with the Velvet Underground then across a multitude of roles as a solo artist, producer and A&R man for record companies, signing up artists and expanding new technologies like quadraphonic’s. As a producer Cale would steer pioneering debut albums by Nico, The Stooges, The Modern Lovers and Patti Smith, who tried to punch him out when he sought to exert excessive control over her band.

Having indulged heavily in most drugs, Cale would blitz himself with cocaine across the 70s and 80s. Paranoia and agoraphobia were the by-products, hall-marked by songs like ‘Fear is a Man’s Best Friend’ and creepy stage appearances wearing a hockey mask, as well as a notorious incident where he took a meat cleaver a live chicken and threw it’s head into the audience. After celebrating the birth of his daughter Eden in 1985 with a bottle of wine and a gram of cocaine he decided he’d reached the end of the proverbial line.

This annihilating tendency in his background draws me to a quote of Cale’s that all of Andy Warhol’s work was about death. Would he say the same thing about his own work? “Absolutely,” he replies. “And that was made very clear to me after 9/11. I lived about a block away from the World Trade Centre. Everybody was trying to get out.” Cale’s voice drifts off to the moment like he’s seeing it happen again, the office paper that rained down from the exploded offices and over the streets. “It was like Christmas out there. Like snow.”

“Two days later I had to leave for a concert in a Philadelphia. The problem was how to get out. There no flights, bridges were closed… it seemed impossible to go. No one told you what was going on. Eventually I got a limo with three musicians, we found a bridge open, and we drove to Philly. I’d been indoors all that time, walking up and down. I hadn’t been rehearsing. And suddenly there I was on stage in my ‘normal’ role. It was certainly made clear to me then, that night, how much my work was about death.”

For such an iconic and influential figure Cale has remained the cold outsider really, a loner all the way. It’s fascinating to discover that Cale spoke no English till he was seven years old; while his father spoke no Welsh. Ironically his miner father was also an amateur musician, and music bridged some of the huge gulf between them – as much as it later came to embody what was also lost.

This history might explain why Cale almost seethes when I mention the warmth that underlined a 1990 memorial project like Songs for Drella, where a re-united Reed and Cale put together a narrative song cycle in the wake of Andy Warhol’s death. It had seemed to me a re-assertion of Warhol’s more humane personality, a counterpoint to the chill blandness of the Pop Art image with which he is so widely associated. Cale suddenly burns in my ear: “It’s perfectly possible to be sympathetic and emotional without having to talk to anybody, or walk around shaking hands like your friends with everybody. It’s perfectly possible to feel everything going on, perhaps more so than those who seem to be involved.”

- Mark Mordue

* An edited version of this story appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum on January 2-3, 2010.