The Second Scary

 

Hello thank  you to everyone who commented on my last post. Your comments made me keen to work with the scarecrow a little more. Thank you to those who suggested that as well. You know who you are :)

The Scarecrow is a bit weird really. He keeps telling me his name is 'Ralph' - and that he is not really a scare crow, just a poor chap from Tasmania who cannot afford the right brand of conditioner.

Ralph? 

I ask you.... what were his parents thinking?

Watch out! Here Comes the Bogey Man - and Boy is He Mad!

I once read a story about a little boy who goes a' wandering and meets up with a talking scarecrow.

Together they go on some wonderful adventures around the countryside. They meet other talking objects. They see the world.

The story has all the hall marks of a best seller. There's romance - the scarecrow falls in love with a straw broom they find in a barn. There's danger - the scarecrow must brave the flickering infestuous flames of the camp fire. And there's intrigue - who is the talking scarecrow? What does he metaphorically mean? Is he the embodiment of our own inner psyche? 

Or, perhaps, when every thing is said and done, is the scarecrow just a talking scarecow?

The Battle of Evermore

Oh dance in the dark of night,

Sing to the morning light.
The magic runes are writ in gold to bring the balance back.

Bring it back.

At last the sun is shining,

The clouds of blue roll by,
With flames from the dragon of darkness,

the sunlight blinds his eyes.
 

From: "The Battle of Evermore."

For guitar and mandolin; written by Robert Plant

When I was a teenager records cost $7.95.

They were so expensive we could only afford a record every few months - so we'd share them or tape them. We'd a small library of records going, and so it turned out that each member of our social group knew all the words to a small bunch of songs. This knowledge was a unifying factor, a kind of tribal subconsciousness.

Stand and Deliver!

This week I have been revisiting the bush ranger Ned Kelly, whose bones have recently been identified in a mass grave outside one of our oldest prisons. (you can find my original post here)

Well most of his bones - his skull is yet to be found. I had heard it was being used as a paper weight by the prison warden for quite a few years - and then vanished. But that could be apocryphal. But maybe not. The victors have often treated the bodies of the vanquished with distain. Just look at the Iliad and Hector and Achilles.

But before we go on, can you do me a favour? Just start the music in this youtube video while you look at the pics? - assuming you are looking at the pics !  It's not Kelly, but another bushranger. But it sounds kinda good. :0

The Devil's Organ, Art's Fairy Tail Houses, Carousel Horse

The Absence of Pain

The first time I thought how pleasant it might be to extremum vitae spiritum edere was in 1994.

I was sitting at a set of traffic lights at the corner of Turton and Maitland Roads in the city of Newcastle. The lights were red, it was 10 past nine in the morning, I was heading off for work and I had on a starched white shirt, black pants, and a yellow ochre tie that my wife had made me.

The time of year was late winter, the morning sun was in the northern sky and beamed through the windscreen. The sun made me a little drowsy as I watched the traffic buzzing past.

The suggestion of the pleasantness of death, of non-being, crept up on me like a soft shadow. It started with a smell - the smell of fresh loamy dirt infused with the comforting aromas of rotting leaves.