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Bird-Gods. By Gregory Day

As well as the glints and grassy strands in the landscape that we pick up to use in our fictions we also, invariably, have voices in our head: voices of our characters and also voices of other writers and birds, nest-builders, their phrases and warbles and cadences guiding and providing the aerial standards by which we measure our success or failure. Roberto Calasso, the incredibly brainy and poetic Italian polymath, has described all this as a process of triangulation, in that there are three actors working together with us as we make our imaginative word-field –

‘the hand that writes, the voice that speaks, the god who watches over and compels’.

I read this as being ‘god’ in the 18^th century sense, that enervating substance that can be found under no microscope but that fuels no vainglory or war, the god or spirit that nevertheless ticks the little birdheart of creation over and over to the next fluttering beat. In my case it could be a little blue wren god or a brolga god or a powerhouse gannet god of the sea, they being three of my companions in the landscape here, but whatever they are I believe that the great Calasso bird is right. Long may he fly. He also said that to make art is ‘to fashion a cow from the cowhide’, ie: to take a found thing, a scrap, a nesty remnant that has some tenuous vestige left of the world we want to live in, and to somehow make that world anew. Well of course that’s a high falutin’ thing to achieve, a true magic act, a real rabbit out of the hat, and for those of us who attempt it the trick is to surrender to the hop of the rabbit and, yes, at the same time to hold onto your hat.

Artist, Sian Marlow

Receivers & Transmitters. By Gregory Day

There’s a great line from a Mickey Newbury song, which was recently covered by Bonnie Prince Billy:

Did God make time to keep it all from happening at once?

 We can only cope with so much illumination. Each generation thinks of itself as newly minted but we will never transcend the individual vulnerabilities and foibles that make us human and that drive our history. The Grand Hotel is a place where Newbury’s lyric resounds, where the mistakes of the past emerge from the coastal fogs of Mangowak, only to repeat in the supposedly clear air of its twenty first century future.

Since his dear wife Mary died, Kooka has endured by soaking himself in the history of the town and amassing a voluminous archive of what he’s found. Now, having taken to the lumpy upstairs bed with his bottles of Finnish wine, that history finds its predestined pathway, like a river of time coursing through him. Kooka’s story is a sloughing off of grief and guilt, a metaphor for they way we are all receivers and transmitters of the world, depending on how alert or otherwise our organic antennae may be. Can we clear enough of our personal dross in the course of our lifespan to truly perceive things beyond our own defences? Kooka can, and in this sense he is the true hero of The Grand Hotel, and, of course, one of the greatest piss-artists the town of Mangowak has ever seen.

Artist: Sian Marlow

Birth Of The Hotel’s Riverflat. By Gregory Day

 

The riverflat where The Grand Hotel sits is about 45 hectares in extent, with ridges running either side of it to the sea. In the beginning the whole sky was down upon it, down upon it flat, like a powerful seal between the heavens & earth. Think of it as a clasp, an oyster shell, a mussel, a whole world living inside, a pulsing heart, in a closed womb of the utterly local, here and forever after.

There was nothing diurnal, naught circadian, except through implication until…

One ghost of a raining dawn in the universal memory, the frogs began to beat and harp and bonk, and from somewhere deep in the clasp & seal the idea of a kookaburra strove and succeeded to sing.

Artist: Sian Marlow

The song rose and fell, laughing and crying, like a real life story, the sound in the pact becoming deafening with destiny until the sweet apotheosis of the magpie, its poly-pitched warbling, barroworn barroworn, released the sky and earth from their embrace.

 Lovers parted, the seal was broken, voluminous amounts of fresh air emerged. The sky rose up like the birds themselves, the earth resounding and vibrating, a sated lover giving birth to the stories of the world.

Book Nest. By Gregory Day

Even this late in the day, birds must build their nests, often enough on pine boughs overarching water. And so too it seems that some of us must write, sing, tell stories, or whatever you want to call the confounded but all-consuming task that is writing a novel.

A book often does feel like a nest to me, a place to be, a nook in which to gather strength, food for the mind and spirit, as the wild world wheels about around us.

Artist: Sian Marlow

We gather materials. To create a form from the chaos. Things catch our eye as we fly around: something glinting in the sun, the shape of another thing unregarded, the way a waterfall laughs all the way to the pool at the bottom, and how that laughter sounds like a kookaburra.

There is a kookaburra in The Grand Hotel. But he is a person, an old man with a storehouse of local history in his bulbous head. He has spent years gathering facts and stories, twigs and strands, from his local environment, just like a bird. But now he rests, in an upstairs room of the hotel. In a big lumpy bed. The kind of bed you could write a novel in. A bed like a nest for the imagination.