The Enchantress of Florence

In the day's last light the glowing lake below the palace city looked like a sea of molten gold. A traveller coming this way...might believe...the monarch so fabulously wealthy that he could allow a portion of his treasure to be poured into a giant hollow on the earth to dazzle and awe his guests...Nor were there guards at the golden water's edge; was the king so generous then that he allowed all his subjects...to draw up liquid bounty from the lake? ...But then the sun fell below the horizon, the gold sank beneath the water's surface, and was lost. Mermaids and serpents would guard it until the return of daylight. Until then, water itself would be the only treasure on offer, a gift the thirsty traveller gratefully accepted.

"Keep your secret," he said.  "Secrets are for children, and spies."  The stranger got down ... "And for sorcerers," he told the driver of the bullock cart.  "And for lovers too.  And kings."

Without water we are nothing, the traveller thought.  Even an emperor, denied water, will swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

Fires began to burn in the twilight like warnings.  From the black bowl of the sky came the answering fires of the stars.  As if the earth and the heavens were armies preparing for battle, he thought.  As if their encampments lie quiet at night and await the war of the day to come.

We will take your finest offspring from you and we will transform them utterly. We will make them forget you and turn them into the force that keeps you under our heel. By your own lost children will you be ruled.

Tell me everything. . . and then you will be free.

And in the absence of the men the women of the capital learnt all over again that they were not made of lies and treasons but only of hair and skin and flesh, that they were all as imperfect as each other, and that there was nothing special if they were hiding from one another, no poisons, no plots and that even sisters can in the end find a way of getting along.

"I jostled her," she said, " I shoved so that she almost fell and she was my senior. I did not honour her and now she is gone."   Akbar comforted his mother.  "She knew you loved her," he said.  "She knew that a woman maybe a bad jostled and a good friend as well."   But the Queen mother was inconsolable.  "She always seemed so young," she said.  "The angel made a mistake.  I am the one who was just waiting to die."

In bed she whispered to him that she had another self inside her, a bad self, and when that self took over she was no longer responsible for her actions, she might do anything, anything.

Return to Oz

The Adelaide botanical gardens are a gateway into faerie. I came back here because it is the space where I broke and made my life, all alone, 16 years ago. I wasn't sure what I would find, probably nothing. The significance of this kind of place tends to move when you go away from it for a while, and like always when chasing dreams, the map is fuzzy and unreliable.

Just inside the gate in the deep shade of a fig tree, an old woman was in gentle tears, perhaps seeking its lifegiving comfort. Her voice was matter of fact, a notebook open in front of her. She was relaying the details of someone's coma, their next step treatment, the spectre of death nowhere in her words or tone but everywhere in her face.

Follies and fake Greek statuary littered the path as I went further in, like a stage set signifying opulence. I saw a tall cigar pine, the last clue of a childhood scavenger hunt, so went that way. It led me to a missing link pine, one known through its fossils but then discovered to still be alive in 1994. I was alive.

I found my way to civilization and my innards pulled against it. Circled the water lilies with their fable of the girl who fell in love with the moon and trying to get closer to him fell in a lake and drowned. The moon took pity on her and turned her into the Amazonian water lily, who only blooms at night when her lover gazes on her.  (The moon is drowning while I sleep.)

I circled the Appolonian aisle, all Japanese river fountains, feng shui, hedges, and then the Dionysian aisle, an arbor of wisteria. A child screamed, barbaric and raw. The birds screamed, dulcent and free.

A tunnel of pine boughs led me underneath a troll bridge. I felt a thrill of fear. I was careful that I let no branches touch me but as I crawled under another bridge, and then another I began to wonder if I was on a path at all.

I climbed out before the cliff. Back almost civilized people picnicking, I don't know where I'm going but I can feel so strongly where I should not be.  Then lorikeets played in a formal fountain, Versailles in paradise.

I can see a glass palace in front of me. Is this where I am going? It seems too large, too grand. When are things bigger than you imagined them? I thought it always went the other way.

And yet, and yet there is something familiar about these sealed shut panes of glass. The fronds and vines that press hungrily against the barrier, reaching for me. The giant grotto, shaped like the large fireplace in the witch's house, shaped like my heart, at one end.

Both doors were open. I held the threshold, held back by an invisible force. Do I want to go in, after all? Do I want to give it up, all those years of wanting? Will that be some kind of end to it all? But then again haven't I already walked through these doors? Didn't it already happen, in dreams? I held my breath, and stepped inside.

Dreams from the last two months.

The last one was last night

It was me and Jeremy and we were going from one factory to another. We had to engage them, start them running. Big and silver like a futuristic hospital. The rhythm of the dream was kind of like a computer game. Like we'd go out and come back and it was like you'd level up. There was one factory and it was so nanotechnology inspired that the whole facility looked like a USB stick but you could look at it zoomed way in and see all these component parts.

We were in this really fun high energy rock band. We were working on out next album in this shabby but capacious share house. White boards, all one level, kind of a mess. The main character was this blonde girl who looked a little like tank girl but was kind of innocent, gullible, silly. She had all these necklaces around her neck including a miniature teddy bear she called Steve, who had this little key attached to him as well. Anyway there was a whole part where we were at the house talking about or trying to write some songs. It was a little creative difference ish, but not in the screaming breaking up way, it just wasn't that easy. And then we had to go to our concert. It was like living end style music, a little pop punk but good, kind of jumpy v high energy and cheerful. She's singing, Geena in empire records ish, and there's some glancing to and fro at bandmates etc. All good feelings. At the end of the concert the band had like six people and the front four jumped into the crowd, one after the other. Blonde girl has been making eyes at this shaved headed kind of homeless looking punk dude during the concert and jumps into his arms. Then after he's like holding her and they're talking. He is shallowly charming, and he's spinning this whole line about how his friend wanted nachos but they got messed up. It seems kind of transparently untrue but she's kind of uncertain but falling for it a little, in that you know something bad is up but you don't know how to get out of it so you go with it even though your instinct is being sticky and bad kind of way. She's like you want to make nachos? And he's like that's the beauty of it we don't have to. Then he hooks Steve on his finger and looks at it and says you hide that and she murmurs. But that kind of convinces her like a sign. So then we have an establishing shot of the house and then I woke up. He wasn't going to like rape her, but maybe rob the house or maybe just like score a free meal. He was dodgy though.

I was at Tony's house and his girlfriend was into indoor gardening. He had a lot of beautifully constructed small tendrilly vines.

The younger brother of the family maybe 12 or 13 had been hit by a car,or run into one anyway. He was in hospital and the family was talking about admitting their daughter, about 19 to the hospital to keep him company. But the girl was heavily pregnant, and the family was afraid she'd pop in the hospital and that doctor had refused to deal with the birth.

Before that I was in their yard, a long prospect of grass, splendid but featureless. And the servants, an older woman from the house and a gardener were telling me stories from the family, this one among them. They had a big house, white.

But before that, Jes and I were at these people's house before a concert and she was irritated because she was ready to go and I kept having things to do. I took cheese and butter from their house sort of ganking it bc I forgot it from the start. Like at the shops I was at before.

I was the captain of a space ship, male, a disk ship. We were a kind of space adventurer. There was a villainous lizard race. We were at war with them and trying to avoid them mostly as they were stronger. I could shrink the spaceship or the people were miniaturised. So when I was on shore on a planet I could carry the spaceship in my arms and talk to my crew through a slot . The war with the lizard people went on for a while . I was on a barren planet and how I remember it was that someone creeped up behind me . I thought it was one of the lizard men . How I remember it when I was attacked from behind and I grabbed my attacker and choked him and then broke his neck but after he was dead I realised it was not a lizard person but another humanoid race . I started to stash his body in a pile of leaves but then dragged it into a nearby marsh. He turned out to have a crew that had landed on the same planet. In the meantime my ship had a navigational fault. This ship navigated by a jumping method . It would identify an area of space with less than 30% density and then leap the ship there. This enabled us to avoid our enemies because we could jump from place to place far away in space with little control but fair certainty of safety. Since it organised the galaxy by density rather than linearly we could run and hide very effectively. However without the navigation system we could not necessarily avoid jumping into the middle of a star or planet. So we needed the assistance of the other crew to repair the navigation system and I did not trust them enough to tell them I had killed their friend. The other crew was also space adventurers but they had been less involved in the war. I did not think they would understand how trigger happy I had gotten. Further we were stranded so very vulnerable. They were looking for their mate and I was going through the motions of looking with them cognizant that the body was not well hidden though it was a swampy planet.

At the base of the garden was a tiny gate. Big enough to crawl through but not big enough to walk through. She walked me down there and was going to turn over the key to me, so wanted to show me the basics so I could explore. She deliberately didn't tell me everything she knew though.  The door was a small arched wooden gate, well seated into the back fence, and the key was an old fashioned wooden pencil. You could use the pencil to note your thoughts and experiences but even if the lead broke, the wooden bit would fit in the keyhole. So she showed me how to use the key and then I went through. I think only one person could go through at a time because if I went, she stayed, and the idea was that she had gotten what she needed to out of the place and was handing it over to me, thought I needed something too. She explained to me that the tiny people lived here. There was a path that went left and right, and a small creek. There was a sign that said to stay off the path, but it was really the only way to go, so both of us walked on it. I started out crawling. She said there was a better chance of seeing the tiny people that way. They were there and she had seen them, but they were shy and not that common. There were a race of bigger people who lived further in. Anyway, the rocks and bark hurt my knees so I stood up. Cats could live back in this world but no people. Still you'd see the occasional neighborhood cat you recognised.

I walked along the path to the left first. It seemed to be the longer way. The creek followed the road, and it was lovely in an English countryside kind of way. Far in the distance I could hear was seemed to be excited voices going up in cheers and cries, and I could see a bunch of dots that would seem to converse, then a cry would go up and they would all move. This, I thought must be the tiny people. But when I got there, they were birds. Tiny finches, green on on the back, white belly, with both black and scarlet on their heads. They were lovely, and it wasn't a kind of bird I had seen before, but I was still a little disappointed I hadn't seen the people.

The path continued up a green hill and turned, it seemed to go on a long way, and so I wanted to wait to go too far until I had more time, a proper expedition. So I turned back and went to the right of the gate. This way the road didn't extend far before you got to a small tavern. This thing had room after room and there were people carousing in one room, playing darts in another, and some people actually lived there. There was a girl a couple sizes smaller than me because I tried on her clothes, who had a whole walk in wardrobe and a couple of rooms. And a boy who also lived there. He was interested in the key but I got the impression it wasn't easy to take if I didn't let him.

Over the course of several visits we got to know these people and there was this whole plan to do a prank on these kids, we were going to take the girl's clothes to our side of the gate. It was like a joke, but also we really wanted something too. Then I woke up.

The Lake Isle Of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

– William Butler Yeats