Essays and Features
Why, Or Why Not, Music?
- From Julian Barnes to Hannah Kent, authors on the role music plays in their writing (2018)
There’s music playing each morning while Irish author Niall Williams writes in his County Clare cottage. It might be Mozart’s Requiem, Bach’s Cello Suites, Van Morrison or The Gloaming. “Music”, he tells me, “sounds out the real world; [it] screens it off and creates a musicscape in which to work.” This aural landscape helps Williams find what he calls “the place of composition”, the place where he edges out the “constant doubt that anything I write is any good”.
He’s not sure how it happens, but it works: Williams, has written many novels, plays and screenplays, and co-written four books with his wife, Christine Breen. His first novel, the poetic and lyrical Four Letters of Love, was an international bestseller, and his ninth, History of the Rain, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2014.
In contrast, Julian Barnes, award-winning novelist, translator and author of many short stories and essays, “never, ever” has music playing while he’s writing. “Prose,” he says, “has its own music, rhythm, pulse, and ‘real’ music cuts across it disastrously”. Barnes briefly tried listening to a Shostakovich Prelude or Fugue each day before working on his novel about the composer’s life and music, The Noise of Time. He thought it might set him up for writing about Shostakovich. But that didn’t work: “It gave me no help with the writing and I abandoned the experiment afterthree sessions,” he says.
I wrote to Niall Williams and Julian Barnes – along with other fiction and nonfiction writers including Hannah Kent and Robert Dessaix – because I was curious about whether they have music playing when they’re writing. I am inclined to have minimalist, ambient music on in the background while I write. Something by Bing & Ruth, Max Richter or Jóhann Jóhannsson plays so softly that I don’t so much listen to it, as let the gentle waves seep into my mind. It shuts out the outside world and leads me inward, allows me to focus on what I’m writing.
How does this work? Is a subtle music infusion a pathway to a writer’s imagination or inspiration? If so, what types of music lend themselves to this? Why does listening to music suit some writers and not others?
What the authors who replied told me reflected Oliver Sacks’ view in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, that we all have “our own, distinctive mental worlds, our own inner journeyings and landscapes”.
When Hannah Kent wanted to inhabit the bleak fate of Icelander Agnes Magnusdottir in her first novel, Burial Rites, Laura Marling’s music helped take her there: “Certain songs gave me the emotional cues I needed to very quickly access the world and narratives of my characters, and forget myself and my modern world. It expedited that process of engagement … kept me steering in the right direction.”
Kent identifies “a sensibility, an emotional atmosphere” in Marling’s work that took her “straight into the mind of Agnes Magnusdottir”.
This passage into a character’s interior with the help of music is a mysterious process. The music Kent hears creates a different world in her mind; she is able to go deeper than imagining Agnes’s looks or gestures, and is transported into her emotional core. Kent sees Agnes, hears her, is her.
Burial Rites and The Good People both had their own playlist, Kent tells me. Icelandic choral work or tracks by Sigur Rós, Lykke Li or Marling played on repeat for Burial Rites. Music by Agnes Obel, The Chieftains, the Moulettes or Rioghnach Connolly accompanied The Good People. “Repetition was necessary,” she says, “because lyrics can be distracting if the song is new”.
Niall Williams echoes this: “The CD will often play on repeat, and I never listen to anything new while writing. Familiarity is important.”
Kent’s and Williams’ comments made me wonder if music functions for them as some kind of moderating persuader that frees the mind to wander unhindered into creative territory. If through some form of neural collaboration, familiar, iterative sound sequences encourage, even stimulate, the music of language.
In This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin describes what happens when we hear music as an “exquisite orchestration of brain regions”. He explains how the oldest and the newest parts of the brain connect through a precisely choreographed “neurochemical release and uptakebetween logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems”.
British science writer Philip Ball describes this process as a conversation between the brain’s hemispheres: “No other stimulus”, he writes in The Music Instinct, “comparably engages all aspects of our mental apparatus, and compels them to speak with one another: left to righthemisphere, logic to emotion.”
Music is a “gymnasium for the mind” he says, a whole-brain phenomenon where intellect and feeling coalesce, fuelled by music as “food of the mind as well as of the heart”.
But does this mean that writing to background music modifies how a writer attends to either the music or the writing? According to Levitin, music and language share some common neural resources, but “have independent pathways as well”. And Ball says our brains have “acceptedthe need for unprecedented collaboration between departments” when responding to music. Perhaps this means that those who do write to music experience a particular kind of neural concurrence that allows simultaneous processing of music and language? A confluence that allows music and writing pathways to merge more frequently, more easily?
Both Levitin and Ball write about music stimulating the brain in ways that can assist with other cognitive tasks. Philip Ball’s own practice demonstrates it: while he generally doesn’t have background music playing while he’s writing, there are times when it’s useful: “When doing routine tasks, like preparing an index or checking proofs, I’ll sometimes use music.” Then, Bach Fugues, string quartets by Beethoven, Mozart or Haydn, or Ravel’s chamber music “gently massage my mind to keep it alert”, Ball says. Music, therefore, functions as an ultralightmetronome rather than lullaby.
To eliminate background noise and “create a focused internal environment”, he’ll also listen to that same music through headphones when reading or doing research at The British Library. Art historian, fiction writer and author of Nest: The Art of Birds, Janine Burke lets the tempo of her work determine whether she listens to music while writing: “I might be writing very fast and intensively and I’ll put on some music to relax my mind a little, to take the edge off the intensity.” Burke pairs that fast-paced writing with African music in a way that suggests the pace of the music encourages her writing to flow in a similar rhythm. Burke prefers polyrhythmic beats from Mali, because that music “really speaks to the soul and the senses”. As long as the lyrics are notin English – “otherwise the words get entangled in what I’m writing” – the music provides Burke with “joyous company, inspirational support and deep pleasure” while she is writing. At other times, though – when she’s editing her work – Burke doesn’t want the intrusion of music, of “any other rhythm”, and she writes in silence. Although Australian writer and social researcher Hugh Mackay plays the piano and sings in a choir, he never has music playing while he writes: “I find music as background to writing is simply a distraction. I need to be totally engrossed in the work.” For Mackay, music is helpful when working on a new writing project – to take a break from the writing, but perhaps also to distil ideas – and he’ll play the piano or listen to music. For Australian author Robert Dessaix, music is never the background to anything. He writes in silence too. “I only listen to music in order to listen to music. Music should be listened to for its own sake.” Sometimes, though, ideas he can use creatively come to him while listening to music at a concert, or just before lights out – “but mostly as colours or shapes”, he says. And award-winning Australian writer Alex Miller also never listens to music while writing: “For me they are two very different things, listening and writing. Each requires a very different quality of attention … writing takes all my attention.” But music is an essential part of Miller’s day and his sense of wellbeing, and there are times when he’s listening to music and thinks of something to do with his writing. Then, he finds “a connection that I’ve overlooked … the thought brought forward in reverie”. Is it going too far to think that the conversation going on in his brain continues while he’s not paying attention, and makes a connection for him? That the left and right hemisphere bring the music and his writing together in their own exquisite orchestration? Melbourne writer and musician Sian Prior has experienced something like this. While Prior prefers not to listen to music while she writes, writing and music have converged unexpectedly. Prior wrote a chapter of her first book, Shy: A Memoir, in a notebook while listening to a clarinet recital. She’d played the music herself – a Brahms sonata – as a young musician. “I wrote about the memories and emotions that music and composer inspired in me and the words flowed out with unusual clarity,” she says. Then, what may be the first chapter of her next book formed during a baroque mandolin concert: “The music allowed some kind of space and clarity for thinking about the stories I want to tell in the second book.”
Edward Said has an elegant interpretation of how music can function like this in his essay, “Melody, Solitude, and Affirmation”. “One lives with music both practically and knowledgeably over time. One hears a composer’s work in more ways than those provided within the individualwork’s discrete boundaries … Into this ‘hearing’ of a composer, there enter many components … internalised by the musician … or the listeners.” Until recently, Zoë Morrison, author of Music and Freedom, never had music playing while she wrote. As a musician, Morrison can’t experience music as background; she tunes in to it, analyses it. However, that perspective changed after learning that Canadian writer MadeleineThien listened to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on repeat to block out the noise of the cafe where she wrote Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Morrison was subsequently listening to music by Vaughan Williams, when an idea about a character in her next novel formed: “I put the same music on through headphones and wrote about that character. I felt the music helped me move beyond the doubting mind and moreeasily into an intuitive state.” It helped, she says, that it was classical music, and familiar. Like Hannah Kent and Niall Williams, she played the music on repeat to keep the thread of the idea while she wrote. While Morrison was writing Music and Freedom, engaging with music encouraged her in creating her work: “Even playing certain pieces on the piano helped me shape the story and convey different points,” Morrison says. Like Alice Murray, the woman at the heart of Music and Freedom, for Zoë Morrison, “music … makes you feel.” Edward Said’s description of how music can anchor “the convergences of memory and intellectual history” helps explain what Prior and Morrison have experienced. Said registers “how a set of disparate things coming together consolidate and support each other” as he listens to a performance of Variations in D Minor by Brahms. He remembers things he’d not consciously retained and associations coalesce in his mind because of the music: an earlier recording of the music, a film score. Later, when he plays the music himself, a past teacher’s voice and gesturescome back to him. Philip Ball provides an explanation of the neural relay occurring here: the brain hears music as a “signal” and starts to pay attention, the cerebellum’s movement coordinator identifies the pulse and rhythm, and our grey matter communicates with the amygdala – the emotional centre of the brain – to produce a response. Then, “we call on the hippocampus to supply memories, both of the immediate past course of the music and the more distant associations and similarities it evokes.” When I began exploring whether music supports writing, it was a casual enquiry, motivated by a simple curiosity about other writers’ practice. At first it was what Robert Dessaix describes in an interview with Creative Nonfiction magazine as a “nonchalant saunter around a target”. But it took me much further into writers’ lives and music than I anticipated. Writers’ experiences of music as a source of consonance or dissonance while they write, as a conductor of literary current or circuit breaker, took me back to their books, to the music they hear and, in a limited way, to cognitive neuroscience – a new field for me. I re-read their books and paid more attention to the tempo, the rhythm, the cadence, the mood and tone in their writing. I looked again at the harmony, the grace and the emotional shading in their work to see if I could discern whether, for those who have music playing while they write, their writing had taken on some of the music, just as an apple nudging a branch takes some of the branch onto its skin. Whether or not they do have music playing while they write, I couldn’t see any differences. Their work, in all its diversity, has its own music, and this probably explains why they all feature on my bookshelves. A biased sample, the scientists would say. What’s clear, though, is that where music is an accompaniment to writing, it can block out the external world. It can create a state conducive to imaginative thought, and more, to imagined worlds. Haruki Murakami writes in Absolutely on Music, his illuminating conversations with conductor Seiji Ozawa, that to create “something where there was nothing requires deep individual concentration”. Music, for some writers, can be the arterial link to this concentration – whether it’s creating a work of fiction, or nonfiction. More than sonic wallpaper, for some writers music can be a companion, a muse, an assurer deflecting doubt. It can be an agent of meaning, a conveyor of shape and colour, a cue for memories, reflection and insight. Philip Ball told me it would take brain imaging while writing and hearing music to find out just how this happens. I’m happy to leave this as a mystery, and to remember to give way to the conversations going on in my head and encourage them to make the connections my conscious mind sometimes finds elusive. The Monthly published this essay in 2018
To eliminate background noise and “create a focused internal environment”, he’ll also listen to that same music through headphones when reading or doing research at The British Library. Art historian, fiction writer and author of Nest: The Art of Birds, Janine Burke lets the tempo of her work determine whether she listens to music while writing: “I might be writing very fast and intensively and I’ll put on some music to relax my mind a little, to take the edge off the intensity.” Burke pairs that fast-paced writing with African music in a way that suggests the pace of the music encourages her writing to flow in a similar rhythm. Burke prefers polyrhythmic beats from Mali, because that music “really speaks to the soul and the senses”. As long as the lyrics are notin English – “otherwise the words get entangled in what I’m writing” – the music provides Burke with “joyous company, inspirational support and deep pleasure” while she is writing. At other times, though – when she’s editing her work – Burke doesn’t want the intrusion of music, of “any other rhythm”, and she writes in silence. Although Australian writer and social researcher Hugh Mackay plays the piano and sings in a choir, he never has music playing while he writes: “I find music as background to writing is simply a distraction. I need to be totally engrossed in the work.” For Mackay, music is helpful when working on a new writing project – to take a break from the writing, but perhaps also to distil ideas – and he’ll play the piano or listen to music. For Australian author Robert Dessaix, music is never the background to anything. He writes in silence too. “I only listen to music in order to listen to music. Music should be listened to for its own sake.” Sometimes, though, ideas he can use creatively come to him while listening to music at a concert, or just before lights out – “but mostly as colours or shapes”, he says. And award-winning Australian writer Alex Miller also never listens to music while writing: “For me they are two very different things, listening and writing. Each requires a very different quality of attention … writing takes all my attention.” But music is an essential part of Miller’s day and his sense of wellbeing, and there are times when he’s listening to music and thinks of something to do with his writing. Then, he finds “a connection that I’ve overlooked … the thought brought forward in reverie”. Is it going too far to think that the conversation going on in his brain continues while he’s not paying attention, and makes a connection for him? That the left and right hemisphere bring the music and his writing together in their own exquisite orchestration? Melbourne writer and musician Sian Prior has experienced something like this. While Prior prefers not to listen to music while she writes, writing and music have converged unexpectedly. Prior wrote a chapter of her first book, Shy: A Memoir, in a notebook while listening to a clarinet recital. She’d played the music herself – a Brahms sonata – as a young musician. “I wrote about the memories and emotions that music and composer inspired in me and the words flowed out with unusual clarity,” she says. Then, what may be the first chapter of her next book formed during a baroque mandolin concert: “The music allowed some kind of space and clarity for thinking about the stories I want to tell in the second book.”
Edward Said has an elegant interpretation of how music can function like this in his essay, “Melody, Solitude, and Affirmation”. “One lives with music both practically and knowledgeably over time. One hears a composer’s work in more ways than those provided within the individualwork’s discrete boundaries … Into this ‘hearing’ of a composer, there enter many components … internalised by the musician … or the listeners.” Until recently, Zoë Morrison, author of Music and Freedom, never had music playing while she wrote. As a musician, Morrison can’t experience music as background; she tunes in to it, analyses it. However, that perspective changed after learning that Canadian writer MadeleineThien listened to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on repeat to block out the noise of the cafe where she wrote Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Morrison was subsequently listening to music by Vaughan Williams, when an idea about a character in her next novel formed: “I put the same music on through headphones and wrote about that character. I felt the music helped me move beyond the doubting mind and moreeasily into an intuitive state.” It helped, she says, that it was classical music, and familiar. Like Hannah Kent and Niall Williams, she played the music on repeat to keep the thread of the idea while she wrote. While Morrison was writing Music and Freedom, engaging with music encouraged her in creating her work: “Even playing certain pieces on the piano helped me shape the story and convey different points,” Morrison says. Like Alice Murray, the woman at the heart of Music and Freedom, for Zoë Morrison, “music … makes you feel.” Edward Said’s description of how music can anchor “the convergences of memory and intellectual history” helps explain what Prior and Morrison have experienced. Said registers “how a set of disparate things coming together consolidate and support each other” as he listens to a performance of Variations in D Minor by Brahms. He remembers things he’d not consciously retained and associations coalesce in his mind because of the music: an earlier recording of the music, a film score. Later, when he plays the music himself, a past teacher’s voice and gesturescome back to him. Philip Ball provides an explanation of the neural relay occurring here: the brain hears music as a “signal” and starts to pay attention, the cerebellum’s movement coordinator identifies the pulse and rhythm, and our grey matter communicates with the amygdala – the emotional centre of the brain – to produce a response. Then, “we call on the hippocampus to supply memories, both of the immediate past course of the music and the more distant associations and similarities it evokes.” When I began exploring whether music supports writing, it was a casual enquiry, motivated by a simple curiosity about other writers’ practice. At first it was what Robert Dessaix describes in an interview with Creative Nonfiction magazine as a “nonchalant saunter around a target”. But it took me much further into writers’ lives and music than I anticipated. Writers’ experiences of music as a source of consonance or dissonance while they write, as a conductor of literary current or circuit breaker, took me back to their books, to the music they hear and, in a limited way, to cognitive neuroscience – a new field for me. I re-read their books and paid more attention to the tempo, the rhythm, the cadence, the mood and tone in their writing. I looked again at the harmony, the grace and the emotional shading in their work to see if I could discern whether, for those who have music playing while they write, their writing had taken on some of the music, just as an apple nudging a branch takes some of the branch onto its skin. Whether or not they do have music playing while they write, I couldn’t see any differences. Their work, in all its diversity, has its own music, and this probably explains why they all feature on my bookshelves. A biased sample, the scientists would say. What’s clear, though, is that where music is an accompaniment to writing, it can block out the external world. It can create a state conducive to imaginative thought, and more, to imagined worlds. Haruki Murakami writes in Absolutely on Music, his illuminating conversations with conductor Seiji Ozawa, that to create “something where there was nothing requires deep individual concentration”. Music, for some writers, can be the arterial link to this concentration – whether it’s creating a work of fiction, or nonfiction. More than sonic wallpaper, for some writers music can be a companion, a muse, an assurer deflecting doubt. It can be an agent of meaning, a conveyor of shape and colour, a cue for memories, reflection and insight. Philip Ball told me it would take brain imaging while writing and hearing music to find out just how this happens. I’m happy to leave this as a mystery, and to remember to give way to the conversations going on in my head and encourage them to make the connections my conscious mind sometimes finds elusive. The Monthly published this essay in 2018
A Greeting from Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos
An Interview with Alexis Wright
Alexis Wright's Kelpie puppy, Ruby, gives me a thorough sniffing-over as Alexis invites me into her home. Ruby is ushered outside as Alexis pours tea, but the points of her velvet ears appear at the window throughout our conversation. Ruby has the run of the large, interesting garden Alexis and her husband have created, but she seems to know something more interesting is happening inside. She's right.
Alexis Wright is taking me on a journey through her life and work. In her gentle, mellifluous voice she takes me into her Grandmother's garden in Cloncurry; through her Gulf country homeland; over the Todd River in Alice Springs and into her despair about Australian governments’ failed Aboriginal policies. These are the landscapes of her fiction and non-fiction work, and the expansive landscapes of her imagination and intellect.
Born in Cloncurry in 1950, Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi Aboriginal nation. Wright's Grandmother moved her family from their traditional lands in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria to northwest Queensland when Wright's mother was a young girl. ‘My Grandmother was the centre of our family. I loved her; loved being with her. She had many grandchildren but I became her favourite whether she liked it or not.’
Wright’s Grandmother also created a garden: ‘She had a big garden; mango trees, chooks, ducks, vegies, old fashioned flowers like Zinnias.’ Her Grandmother loved to walk through the bush with her granddaughter and down to the river ‘where we’d dig up frogs for fishing’. It was the ‘wonderfully strange stories’ her Grandmother told of her ancestors and country which captured the young Wright’s imagination: ‘I was left tocreate images of what was otherwise invisible. Of places, people and things. Of what could only be imagined’.
As her Grandmother talked about her homeland, Wright felt her connection to the land, to the Rainbow Serpent river country where her Great-grandmother and Grandmother had grown up. ‘I always felt the pull to go there. I feel at home there. It’s special because that’s where my ancestors came from. Wherever you walk, they’ve walked. There’s a sense of place; you understand the stories, what it means to be a Waanyi person.’
Wright left that country for Dunedin, New Zealand, where she learnt sculpture, pottery and Japanese. She also studied biology and zoology at Otago University. Returning to Cloncurry a couple of years later, Wright worked with Aboriginal organisations where ‘the voices of strong and exceptional leaders’ inspired her to develop her own voice, and to write.
A move to Melbourne enabled Wright to study creative writing at RMIT, where she began her first novel, Plains of Promise. Wright then moved back to northern Australia; back where she could explore the stories of her homeland.
Wright says ‘it has taken me a lifetime to understand the potency of these stories given as a gift, just as my Grandmother had received them from our ancestors.’
This gift is shared in Carpentaria, Wright’s second novel, which took out just about every major Australian literary award after its release in 2006. Carpentaria awards crowd the mantelpiece in Wright’s lounge-room: 2007 Miles Franklin Award; Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year; Queensland Premier's Literary Award; Association for the Study of Australian Literature Gold Medal; Vance Palmer Award; and Vision Australia Braille Book of the Year Award – endorsement by those readers who discovered the wild Gulf country landscapes and the indomitable Phantom family under their fingers.
Alison Ravenscroft, author of The Postcolonial Eye, describes Wright as one of the most important writers in Australia. ‘Alexis is very interested in how you tell a story. She keeps asking questions.’ Ravenscroft believes Carpentaria is a work of art – ‘art that makes the gap in all our knowledge, and crucially the gap in our own, appear, but as a gap.’
Wright says she wanted to create a work of art. She wanted to ‘give authenticity to the region and to how people from that region with bad realities might truly feel and dream about impossibility.’ Alexis Wright calls this ‘the sovereignty of the mind’; the place where alternative narratives are created and culture cannot be taken away. ‘Carpentaria imagines the cultural mind as sovereign and in control, while freely navigating through the known country of colonialism to explore the possibilities of other worlds’, Wright says in her essay On writing Carpentaria (Heat, 2006,13).
Wright identified the omniscient voice for Carpentaria Elders listening to two men crossing the bridge over the Todd River in Alice Springs. ‘I heard the old men’s tone – it’s the way old men speak in Northern Australia. It’s the rhythm of their speech, rhythm in their tone. I decided that’s how the book should be written. It’s the voice of Elders no one listened to, or heard.’
That rhythm, that heartbeat of the Gulf, is strong and enduring for Wright. ‘It’s part of who I am, how I feel, and what can make me feel OK’, she says. ‘It’s a very important thing, the heartbeat. It goes through our land, through our stories; it’s about people connected through the heartbeat of our Dreaming.’
Carpentaria creates a larger-than-life, conscience-altering world which Wright found difficult to let go: ‘the day I finished Carpentaria I printed it out, tied it in a filing ribbon. I should have been happy, but I cried. While I wrote it I lived in two worlds and that Carpentaria world made more sense. I loved those strong characters, they were living with me. I saw them clearly in my mind.’
Alexis works ‘from the time I get up to sundown,’ she says. ‘I do a great deal of writing. I’m always thinking, trying to work out ideas, images, trying to put them together. I’m living in the world of imagination, that’s my job.’
When Alexis Wright is not working, ‘it's good to take time-out and dream. I take time- out in the garden, sit outside, look at nature.’ Like her Grandmother, Alexis Wright likes to get out into the bush on the weekends.
A flock of Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos fly screeching overhead as I leave. ‘That’s a good sign,’ Alexis says. Later in an email she writes they probably flew over to wish her daughter Lily a happy birthday. I don’t doubt it. This is an edited version of an essay published in Volta, the 2013 RMIT Creative Writing Anthology.
A flock of Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos fly screeching overhead as I leave. ‘That’s a good sign,’ Alexis says. Later in an email she writes they probably flew over to wish her daughter Lily a happy birthday. I don’t doubt it. This is an edited version of an essay published in Volta, the 2013 RMIT Creative Writing Anthology.
Blame Radiohead
He’s wearing his black-and-white-check shirt. As I reach over to adjust the collar at the back of his neck I remember it’s the one I bought him in Japan. It’s one of his favourites and he will wear it for days at a time. Even wear it to work two days in a row sometimes.
We’re at the airport and he’s taking me through the itinerary for his Japan trip one last time. He’ll be away for a month; the longest we’ve been apart since he was born nearly 19 years ago. He shrugs my hand away from his neck, frowns at me and hands me a copy of his schedule.
‘I get to Tokyo at 8am on Tuesday and have three days there. Then I’ll make my way to the festival. I’ll be there for four days then back to Tokyo on the 30th.’
The festival - the Fuji Rock Festival - is the main reason for his trip to Japan. Radiohead is the headline act at Fuji this year, and my son Nico is a serious fan. So serious that when he missed out on tickets for their Melbourne concert he searched for another option and hit upon Japan. That day, back in May, his mood change – from the savage disappointment of bungling the on-line Melbourne ticket purchase, to the euphoria ofsecuring a spot at Fuji – was as stark as the shift from the black to the white checks on his shirt, from night to day.
‘After that I’ll be in Kyoto for four days, Hiroshima for three, then catch up with my friend Josh in Osaka for a few days. After taking some short trips around Osaka I’ll get the bullet train back to Tokyo, have a week there and be home on the 23rd.’
I’m impressed by his planning. He’s done it all himself and often on those nights when I’d head to bed early with my book I’d wake in the early hours to see his light still on and find him stretched out in his bed with the Lonely Planet Japan guide, vicariously experiencing the places he’d soon be waking up in.
I bought him the guide before his Year 12 exams last year. I wanted to encourage him to think beyond exam pressure; to help him focus on his life after school and put those few short weeks of tension and anxiety into perspective.
My own trip to Japan the year before had been one of my most interesting and exhilarating experiences. I loved the beauty and order of the place, and there were many times when I thought ‘Nico would love this’. Japanese style, culture, food and art figure largely in our lives and we seek out opportunities to further our knowledge of the place and its history. When I returned from that trip Nico read my journal, studied myphotos, and loved hearing the stories of people I’d met, the places I’d been. And he loved his black-and-white-check shirt.
So while I can try to tell myself that I blame Radiohead for his setting off on a solo trip to the country that women of my mother’s generation still despise, I know I need to take some responsibility for adventure growing in his soul.
***
He’s been gone a week now. I’ve counted off those days and nights on the schedule he gave me at the airport. The house is cold, empty and quiet without him. There’s no lovely ‘good morning Lucy’ greeting in the morning; no cheerful recounting of the nights out with his friends; no shared meals at the end of the day swapping our daily news. The drum kit which has annoyed the neighbours and taken him into all sorts of musicalterritory, is quiet. But what there is though, is his excited voice on the phone and his funny ‘sitting-on-my- space-age-toilet-which-is-so-smart-it-flushed-before-I-sat-down’ emails, describing experiences which will, no doubt, fertilise that adventurous young soul. He is already talking about his next trip to Japan, and there’s no looking back for him now. His sights are set on his life beyond Melbourne, and certainly beyond those Year 12 days when what mattered most – for a short while – was getting ready for exams and finishing school with a score good enough to launch his music career. What’s clear to me now is that in shrugging my hand away from his collar at the airport, he was shaking off his dependent life, freeing himself from the maternal grip. The Japan experience is the beginning of Nico’s life as a young adult; as a young man who,according to psychologist Erik Erikson (the man who developed the theory about stages of psychosocial development in the 1950’s) is now seeking new affiliations and significant relationships. What he’ll need to achieve this, Erikson says, is a sense of competence, of mastery. Nico is showing signs of that already: he found his way around the largest metropolitan area in the world within 24 hours of arriving there: ‘have mastered the Tokyo underground which makes the Melbourne train service look like a bent twig’ said his first email. So I can’t really blame Radiohead for helping with that important transition can I? I should be grateful that their performance at Fuji is enabling my son to progress from adolescent to young adult in such a well-organised way. *** In three week’s time I’ll be at the airport again. I’ll be on the lookout for that black-and- white-check shirt. I’ll wait expectantly for those doors at Tullamarine to open and for my son to emerge, hoisting the pack we filled together a month earlier upon his young adultshoulders. Now it will be full of mementos from his journey. We’ll hug and he’ll say, ‘Hello Lucy, how are you?’ As we drive home he’ll start spilling out the details of his adventure day-by-day. Or will he? Whatever the script of our homeward journey, I’ll be looking for, listening to, the new young man inside that shirt. Thanks Radiohead. The Big Issue published this feature in 2012.
He’s been gone a week now. I’ve counted off those days and nights on the schedule he gave me at the airport. The house is cold, empty and quiet without him. There’s no lovely ‘good morning Lucy’ greeting in the morning; no cheerful recounting of the nights out with his friends; no shared meals at the end of the day swapping our daily news. The drum kit which has annoyed the neighbours and taken him into all sorts of musicalterritory, is quiet. But what there is though, is his excited voice on the phone and his funny ‘sitting-on-my- space-age-toilet-which-is-so-smart-it-flushed-before-I-sat-down’ emails, describing experiences which will, no doubt, fertilise that adventurous young soul. He is already talking about his next trip to Japan, and there’s no looking back for him now. His sights are set on his life beyond Melbourne, and certainly beyond those Year 12 days when what mattered most – for a short while – was getting ready for exams and finishing school with a score good enough to launch his music career. What’s clear to me now is that in shrugging my hand away from his collar at the airport, he was shaking off his dependent life, freeing himself from the maternal grip. The Japan experience is the beginning of Nico’s life as a young adult; as a young man who,according to psychologist Erik Erikson (the man who developed the theory about stages of psychosocial development in the 1950’s) is now seeking new affiliations and significant relationships. What he’ll need to achieve this, Erikson says, is a sense of competence, of mastery. Nico is showing signs of that already: he found his way around the largest metropolitan area in the world within 24 hours of arriving there: ‘have mastered the Tokyo underground which makes the Melbourne train service look like a bent twig’ said his first email. So I can’t really blame Radiohead for helping with that important transition can I? I should be grateful that their performance at Fuji is enabling my son to progress from adolescent to young adult in such a well-organised way. *** In three week’s time I’ll be at the airport again. I’ll be on the lookout for that black-and- white-check shirt. I’ll wait expectantly for those doors at Tullamarine to open and for my son to emerge, hoisting the pack we filled together a month earlier upon his young adultshoulders. Now it will be full of mementos from his journey. We’ll hug and he’ll say, ‘Hello Lucy, how are you?’ As we drive home he’ll start spilling out the details of his adventure day-by-day. Or will he? Whatever the script of our homeward journey, I’ll be looking for, listening to, the new young man inside that shirt. Thanks Radiohead. The Big Issue published this feature in 2012.
Fleeting Blossoms And Chance Encounters
The late-winter air is so icy my eyes water. Trying to read the map is futile so I crumple it into my pocket and head towards where I think Kyoto’s Gion district will be.
I’m soon lost – but it’s not an unpleasant kind of lost. I think of Robert Frost as sweeps of easy wind send downy flakes over silent houses and bare trees.
Walking along a paved street divided by an elevated garden, I hear excited voices and shuffling feet above. Two women in floral kimonos emerge and between them is a bride in a traditional white wedding kimono. She’s also wearing a large white headdress with an inverted-V shape cut from the front to reveal her face. It looks like a lampshade. Beneath it I see a demure smile.
The trio glides over to a man wearing a black kimono. He raises a parasol as his bride moves in beside him for photographs.
I wrap my coat across my chest and continue my solitary wander towards Gion.
***
Through luck or design, I find Shirakawa Minami-dōri – “white-river” street – my intended destination. I step onto a bridge over the Shirakawa canal, treading firmly to avoid slipping on slushy cobblestones.
There’s a Japanese businessman just ahead of me. Camera raised, he’s capturing what I’ve now spotted too: early cherry-blossoms.
He acknowledges me with a barely discernible nod. I smile, moving closer so I can frame gently-arched boughs beyond the curve of the bridge.
As I raise my camera he asks, “Will you permit me to take your photograph for you?”“Yes. Arigato.” Thank you.
He’s smiling now too. His large, even teeth shine above the collar of his overcoat turned up against the wind. Snowflakes settle on the black gloss of his hair.
A crow swoops past and lands in the tree. Its harsh gwar-gwar-gwar echoes off the water. We both laugh.“Ka-ka. Crow,” he says.
I look at the bird and then turn back towards him. Click.
He hands back my camera and I thank him. The bird sits silently.“Where are you from?” he asks.“Melbourne. Australia.”“How long will you stay in Japan?”“Five weeks. Gifu, Kyoto, then Tokyo. And you?”“I am in Kyoto for my brother’s wedding. I have just one day here.”
Larger snowflakes fall between us and he blinks one away from his eyelashes. His gaze is fixed on me and I wonder what he might say next.
He reaches into a department store carry-bag and pulls out a small cloth roll secured with cord and a ceramic bead.
“These are my chopsticks. They are new. I want you to have them as a souvenir of Japan.”
Arms extended, he holds the slender cylinder towards me.“No. I cannot take them; that is too kind.”“Yes. Take them.”
I hesitate. There’s only a damp map in my pocket. I have nothing to offer him.“Take them. Please.”
He bows as I accept his gift. I unroll a pair of polished hardwood chopsticks. Beautiful. I look at him unsure what to say. Snowflakes settle on his shoulders.
Touched by his kindness, I realise I’m going to cry and I fumble for a tissue. vHe looks on. Silent.
Forgetting everything I’ve learnt about Japanese etiquette, I reach for his hand.“Thank you. Arigato. You are very generous.”“When you are in Japan, do not forget about me.”
We both bow and walk away. I glance at my camera and the last picture is still on the small screen: I'm looking back over my shoulder, laughing. The blossom, the bare trees and the bird behind me.
The Weekend Australian published this in May 2017