Succour for the Spirit – Issue 12
Sunday reading with author
Nicholas Jose
Talking about Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, Dinu Lipatti, the Chinese art of bapo, ‘Signposts: Stories for our Fragile Times’ with Professor Alexis Wright, and more.
#SuccourfortheSpirit #SilentDialogueEvents
Photograph of Nick by Roberto Finocchiaro.
Press the play icon to listen to Nick in interview with Ivor Indyk, 2014. Produced by Giramondo Publishing with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts.
‘I sit under cover over coffee waiting for the rain to stop, wet from being caught without umbrella. I have ventured out, hell-bent on my plan. The itinerary allows only today for this garden. My body clock is out of phase. My sense of season, winter at home and summer here, says it should not have rained today. Unexpected, extraordinary rain. With the feel of this rain on my head, on my skin, and under the collar, I am happier somehow, less isolated than usual, back in the enveloping world, drifting from the zone of helpless anger into a comfortable steam of contemplation that rises into a balloon of cloud and lifts me away. Small islands, tall islands pointing at the sky, islands on top of islands, islands like mothers with baby islands on their backs, islands cradling islands in the bay.’
Nicholas Jose, ‘Angled Wheels of Fortune’, Bapo (Giramondo Publishing 2014)
“The image of islands here at the opening of one of the pieces in my book of short fiction says something about the isolation that all of us have experienced in our different ways this year. Isolation has always been a theme in my writing and a condition for it—though we are never entirely alone, and that is also what writing does.”
In Conversation
with Nicholas Jose (NJ) & correspondences’ Emma Thomson (ET).
Nature, food or art?
Nature / Place
All-time favourite place
Tanzhesi, the Temple of the Pond and Mulberry
Tanzhesi, the Temple of the Pond and Mulberry © Neil Noland
NJ—Gardens, parks and historic buildings always appeal to me and when they come together in temple compounds, as they do in China, it is usually worth a visit. Ancient trees, thick bamboo, rocks, water and a sense of moving through space in an ordained way as I walk reflectively on well-worn paths from courtyard to courtyard. I have many favourites but the one I remember at this moment is Tanzhesi, the Temple of the Pond and Mulberry in the Western Hills outside Beijing. That’s where I first became aware of the ginkgo. On an autumn day many years ago I rode my bicycle out there. The temple is older than Beijing itself. It was in disrepair and not open to tourism then but its two famous ginkgo trees, said to have been planted a thousand years ago, had survived. They are mighty hunks of timber and on this particular sunny afternoon their leaves were shimmering gold. I have never forgotten it.
Favourite place near home
Nelumbo (Lotus) Pond, Adelaide Botanic Garden
NJ—Nearer to home, the lotus pond in the Adelaide Botanic Garden is another favourite place, in all seasons. Lotus are beautiful as they turn brown and papery and go back into the mud in winter. They’re lovely as buds and pods in spring and autumn, and in full bloom in summer they’re sublime. Their dancing leaves just make me happy, when a lot of jostling is going on.
Place you're dreaming of going
NJ—Ernabella in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands of far northwest South Australia is one place I have been dreaming about for a long time. The people of the Anangu Pukatja community there produce incredible artworks that express their feelings about their country. It is the Musgrave Ranges, desert country, rich and textured, dry and subtle. Ernabella Arts is said to be the oldest continuously running Indigenous Art Centre. I’ve met some of those artists in Adelaide. I’d love to visit their home place one day.
ET—Ernabella Arts' paintings and ceramics are exhibited widely across Australia and internationally. One of Nick’s favourite works by Ernabella Arts is the beautiful textile work Length of fabric 2005 by Renita (Nyalapantja) Stanley Pitjantjatjara people (b 1962-) and Josephine Mick Pitjantjatjara people (b 1955-). The work now resides as part of the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. To learn more about Ernabella Arts, watch this wonderful video created by the centre.
What are you writing about?
NJ—In recent months I’ve been writing about riding my bike along the linear park which runs from the hills to the sea in Adelaide. It’s a prose piece, half essay, half story, which compresses the experiences of a year and a repeated route into a very short space. It comes to read like the experience of a life too, beginning, middle and a sense of an end. I call it ‘Are we here just for saying…?’ It’s a quote from Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Near the start of my piece I write: ‘I ride the linear path in the linear park as if it’s a way through life. It’s not a straight line.’
All-time favourite musician?
NJ—An all-time favourite musician. I can’t not say Mozart for all the joy and wisdom his music has communicated to me over the years, and right now I’ll go for the piano and Dinu Lipatti whose playing of Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor K310 in his last recital before his death aged 33 is affirmation of spirit like nothing else. Amazing how you can learn life’s lessons in music.
ET—To listen to Dinu Lipatti’s performances and other musicians selected by our SD participants, head to the playlist below. Mobile readers —Press ‘Listen in browser’ to avoid being re-directed to Soundcloud.
Tell us about one of your creations
Cover art Chen Erzhi, Fan painting (dated 1825 or 1885), ink and colours on silk. Image courtesy Nancy Berliner. Design by Harry Williamson. © the artist and designer.
The title of the work that Nick has selected for us to talk about is Bapo, a book of short fiction published in 2014 by Giramondo Publishing.
Why did you choose this particular work?
NJ—I chose this particular work of mine because it is about things being broken, which seems to resonate with the year we’re in. It is a book of fictional pieces, some stories with a plot, others more like sketches, connected one way or another with China and the movement of people and ideas, including aesthetic ideas, between China and Australia. The title of the collection is a Chinese term for a kind of art which uses the illusion of collage to assemble broken, torn, burnt pieces into a whole.
A detail of one such bapo painting on a fan from late imperial China is shown on the cover.
What was the starting point?
NJ—Bapo literally means ‘eight broken’, where eight is a Chinese lucky number and broken (damaged, worn) suggests that luck has run out, and if it has, that there’s another kind of luck in simply surviving, less glorious maybe, but not so bad in the long run. It is an aesthetic of seeming and salvage. That gave me a starting point.
What were you striving to explore?
NJ—Bapo appreciates incompleteness, the fragment that can be known only in part. Questions of origin and authorship recede into enigma. What looks like it came from something damaged becomes part of something new in the illusion of cut and paste. This is the art of catching a partial likeness in a broken mirror, a clouded act of recollection, a teasing glimpse. That’s what I am trying to do in this book.
What are you working on now that we can learn more about?
NJ—I’ve been writing new stories that are more like compressed novels, usually bringing together events or memories from over a long period of years and changes of place. Some of the works of fiction I’ve been reading lately take the form of connected short stories—loosely yet intricately connected, if that is possible at the same time. Carol Lefevre’s Murmurations (Spinifex 2020) and Jo Lennan’s In the Time of Foxes (Scribner 2020, an imprint of Simon & Schuster) are two spellbinding examples from this year. Islands that are not islands.
ET— Nick also recently joined Professor Alexis Wright in connection with 'Signposts: Stories for our Fragile Times'. The authors discussed the history of the poem 'Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone', the English adaptation of a traditional Yolŋu Wangurri manikay (song poem). At the start of the discussion is an essential introduction and singing by Yolŋu Wangurri clan leader and artist, Buwathay Munyarryun, the senior custodian of the manikay. During the last five minutes, Yolŋu woman, writer Siena Mayutu Wurmarri Stubbs reads from the cycle.
After you have listened, we recommend reading Nick’s essay ‘The Story of the Moon-Bone’ which was published in July 2020 by Westerley (accessed here). This wonderful, scholarly essay delves more deeply into the story —told from the start of Nick’s discovery of Buwathay Munyarryun’s powerful, contemporary painting of his peoples’ story Wirrmu ga Djurrpun, ‘Moon and Evening Star’ at Tarnanthi, the Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
What else can supporters do?
Pre-purchase our book for Silent Dialogue. Featuring Jose’s piece and ten other original pieces of writing by some of the country's finest writers alongside beautiful imagery from our participating visual artists, it is going to be special. Purchase before 31/10 and you will be invited to join us for the exhibition launch next year.
Keep your eye out for Jose’s next book of short stories. Meanwhile, purchase your copy of Bapo here. Check out Giramondo’s wonderful ‘Nicholas Jose: Online Archive’ which includes reviews, articles, audio/visual media and links to academic essays and other resources to complement your reading of Jose’s work.
Also by the author are the following wonderful books we heartily recommend: Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola; Avenue of Eternal Peace; and. Paper Nautilus.
Jose also recently co-edited Everything Changes: Australian Writers and China, a Transcultural Anthology with Xianlin Song), published by UWA Publishing in 2019.
Share our news via email & social media via i: silent_dialogue & f: silentdialogueevents.
Biography
Contributing essayist Nicholas Jose is an award-winning Australian author best-known for his fiction and cultural essays. His seven novels and two collections of short stories include Paper Nautilus, The Red Thread and Original Face. His acclaimed memoir Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola appeared in 2002. He was general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009) and has written widely on contemporary Australian and Asian art and literature. In 2002-05 he was President of Sydney PEN. He was Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, 2009-10, and is an adjunct professor with the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. He was Chair of Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide 2005-08, where he is now Professor of English and Creative Writing. To find out more, visit Nicholas' website.
Image credit (banner): Tanzhesi, the Temple of the Pond and Mulberry © Neil Noland
