TWEET POETRY ELECTRONIC HAIKU

We tweet in 140 characters – including spaces and punctuation.

Such focus. Such discipline for the

unruly mind.

Tweets written on Mount Tarrangower, north central Victoria.

On the outskirts of the town of Maldon. October-November, 2011

Pink galahs grazing gravely in the grass.

Little grey rabbits dart amongst them, ears back,

flashing their white bums.

What fun!

 

So strong the wind.

I lean into it, roaring amongst the trees.

The wind and I shouting together.

 

Ann McCaffrey

Clouds over the mountain. Black shadows track the gullies.

The Queen of the Dragons is dead.

Wind grows strong and cold, sweeps down the mountain flanks.

White billowed cloud. The dragons call their mother home.

 

Silicate mind. Chains of connection.

Carbon rings but charcoal on my skin.

I stay when life has gone.

I become clay and you

will become me.

 

A hard track. A flinty mountain gully shack.

Room, mattress, hearth.

Empty white chair.

To sit in hope of gold or expectation of God?

The clear line of the mountain spine absorbed by night.

Birds fall silent. The silence hurts.

Thoughts grow solid, until a plover screams.

 

Red clay drips from unearthed trees.

Chainsaws & birds feed. Torn clouds.

The storm passes.

 

I will become mountain. I will be breeze on its slopes.

I will rouse wallabies. I am long grass, blue flowers.

I am flint and the ore.

Garbage bins rolling down track?

No. Thunder on the mountain.

Now rain & mist. Rosellas & rabbits feed quietly.

The only sound is my mind.

 

Light fades on my mountain to B minor chord on my guitar.

The mountain is not mine. The chord is but moving air,

the guitar a gift.

And me?

RED DOG THOUGHTS

I finally saw ‘Red Dog’ at the Theatre Royal in Castlemaine with a group of women: dog lovers all. I confess that my money was on Red Cat in the fight scenes. I stay away from cute dog movies, partly because – being a farm girl – I see dogs as farm workers not as human emotion absorption devices. Farm workers don’t sleep on/in your bed (well, maybe if you’re in a story by William Faulkner or one of those other Southern U.S. writers). OK, and DH Lawrence. Farm workers stay outside and you don’t fuss over them: except for shearers, who you have to mollycoddle if you want them to turn up on time.

So, I was sitting there with my arms crossed and frowning right from the start. But, damnit, the movie worked! I wasn’t quietly sobbing like some of my cohort, but I did get a little lump in the throat. The story wasn’t making a lot of sense. A bloke turns up in an old Bedford truck at an outback pub in the opening sequence. He’s been rocking along to 70s music on his truck radio to help us establish a time reference. The only radio station in the outback I recall in The Day was ABC Regional, and each transmitter had a footprint of about 20 miles. They didn’t play rock. At night you could pull in shortwave and listen to Willis Conover’s jazz programs even out at The Granites. But you had to chase the signal around the dial. I was doing a diamond drill core pickup run at that time. Daytime we listened to static or sang to ourselves.

But, it’s a movie, and you have to take some liberties to help the audience along.

He turns up at the pub just as Red Dog is about to be put down. Various characters come out and tell him the Red Dog story in flashback. What I immediately liked and resonated with was that these blokes were from all over: Poles, Italians, Balts, &c. The real Aussie outback workforce. I recalled the Single Men’s Quarters at Peko Mines where I worked, out from Tennant Creek. Someone had neatly stenciled ‘Australian Embassy’ on one of the toilet blocks. I remember an ex English merchant seaman discovering that his German mate had served on the ‘Scharnhorst’ and sunk the Englishman’s defenseless ship in the North Atlantic.

These stories have yet to be properly told. I recommend Raimond Gaitia’s, ‘Romulus, My Father’ as a starter.

Essentially, it’s an Ensemble Movie: a form Australian directors from Bruce Beresford to Dee McLachlan have handled very well. It’s not a form the US market particularly likes. They need a hero and a ‘ character arc’ and so forth. Assuming that ‘John’ ,The American who arrives on a motorcycle at the start of Act Two, is the hero we then have him out of the picture at the end of that act. The real character arc, of course, is Red Dog’s.

So, the truck driver is listening to (and watching) these various stories from some years earlier, being acted out. And then, in Act Three, he’s become the lead! ‘Nancy’ (Rachael Taylor cast and told to act like Nicole) doesn’t exactly fall into his arms, but she is repainting her new cottage and she does take the Red Dog pup in her arms. (Dog Lovers all understand this.) We had seen her dancing with him and one of my cohort pointed out she was wearing a smock which could imply that she was pregnant: she felt there was a romantic vibe happening. I missed the moment (if it exists) where truck driver steps into the movie – as Woody Allen steps in and out of Zelig. I was just happy that Red Cat and Red Dog became mates.

The Wedding Guest does NOT rescue the Ancient Mariner from drowning at the end of that poem. Mehitabel the cat does NOT marry Archie the narrator cockroach in Don Marquis’s poem sequence.

The movie works despite the logic of the script being somewhat convoluted. Why? Because the logic of a movie script is an emotional logic, not a story logic. The story is there as a carrier wave to transmit those emotional charges. The logical story has to be just believable enough not to take us out of our spell of wanting it to unfurl and serve us those delicious emotional charges. The trap for writers is to avoid ‘telling it like it was’ in this sort of movie. No. You tell it like the audience wants to believe it was and hopes that it will be. You tell it so that the audience feels the story in their belly, not dissects it in their brain. Don’t serve them up ‘Wake In Fright’ revisited. Don’t option Barbara Baynton’s works.

So, Good On Ya, Red Dog. You’ve brought audiences back to Aussie movies. And I will hang around and wait for Red Dog: the musical. It could well out-sell, ‘Cats’!

THE DIVINE FEMININE

       Women are about to change the world

A call to arms.

one line synopsis

Women bringing the world to balance and healing through their own inner power.

one paragraph synopsis

Once the Feminine and the Masculine in harmony ruled a beautiful world, but women were overthrown, and the world descended into brutal chaos. Now we are returning to re-establish the balance of the Feminine and call back our partners to evolve with us in harmony and heal this sick and torn world.

A proposal for an emotionally-charged documentary film and healing journey

                                                                                  written by

                                                                        JOSEPHINE EMERY

How can we live in our authentic femininity and masculinity?

How can these two essential energies live in balance, harmony and equality?

We come from a history of negation of the Divine Feminine and the oppression of women: from sexual abuse to financial oppression. These oppressions remain for so many women, across cultures. How can an individual woman robustly engage with these issues, and through these understandings, live powerfully in every aspect of her life, for herself and others? How can she create for herself a life, and a world, where she can live in partnership  – as the Divine Masculine appears out of the shadow of the domineering masculine? And as the re-emergent Androgyne third gender returns to embrace both Masculine and Feminine?

Climate change, hunger, poverty, war and terror, dispossessed peoples, oppression, mark the ending of the world’s old paradigm of masculine dominance.

Now – in traditional cultures, western cultures, third world cultures – a driving force for change is women. Women coming forward not with anger and violence, but with love, patience, understanding and an absolute refusal to bow to the pressures of the old male dominance patterns.

These are women who often live and speak from a sense of personal spiritual power, a power grounded in feminine knowledge.

Women’s spirituality – rooted in the lived experience of being a woman – is the force that drives the new generations of women to create a world that makes sense to them: where nurturance, not dominance is the focus.

In this film we interview leading spokeswomen – writers, counselors, public figures – for the New Paradigm. We hear from women whose lives have opened up into new possibilities as they shed the old story of oppression and embrace the new.

We interview men who are stepping forward into their sense of the Divine Masculine. We speak with leading transgendered spokespeople who are already living the re-emergent Androgyne in various ways.

Using the stories and myths of Atlantis and other Feminine-principled cultures – and the archaeological findings of Marija Gimbutas and others – we tell a powerfully emotional story of how our world was once a world of nurturance, balance and respect. A world torn apart – Eden destroyed – and the descent into warfare, division, the subjugation of women and now the imminent destruction of the biosphere. Our story takes us on a healing journey that begins with the wrenching apart of the feminine and masculine, and the crippling of the all-embracing third gender, but then reunites these elemental principles once more and shows us the way we can heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet.

………………………………

Why is this film important?

The aim of The Divine Feminine is to transform the world through the power of women.

The Divine Feminine focuses the individual energies of millions of women into a laser beam of transformation and change.

All around the world women have had enough. We’ve had 10,000 years of male dominance and what have we got to show for it? War, pestilence, violence, climate change, a degraded planet, starvation, disempowerment…the list goes on and on. We’ve had enough. We’re standing up to the bullies and taking back our birthright as the nurturers; as the ones who always clean up the mess they make. We’re here to heal ourselves, our children, our loved ones, and the planet…and we invite the men who care to join us. We’re making our stand in the name of our own feminine principle: the Divine Feminine. Join us.

Key messages.

Women can save – and are saving – the planet by their spirit and actions.

The subjugation and disempowerment of women is not a natural force, but the inevitable outcome of the loss of balance between male and female. This imbalance has led to the serious situation we and our planet now face.

The situation can be remedied – and is being remedied – by the re-empowerment of women within their own right.

Feminine spirituality is as valid as masculine spirituality. It is Goddess-centred and its myths and rituals are based around women’s perception of their bodies and their processes. This feminine spirituality is deeply embedded in our primal memories – embodied in such as the myth of Atlantis. These stories are now resurfacing and being acted out through feminine-spirit-based healing and ritual

………………………………..

                                 JOSEPHINE EMERY:  A PERSONAL STATEMENT

I am making this movie as the culmination of my life’s journey – and my lives’ journeys.

This life of mine has been an extraordinary one. I set myself an enormous obstacle to overcome when I chose to return. I set this lifetime as the one where I fully grasped the Goddess and Priestess power that I had relinquished a long, long, long time ago.

To live that power to its full I had to be born male and – as a mature adult – become female. I had to learn what it was like to walk the earth as a man and then as a woman in order to fully know the dreadful division that has split human energy asunder over the millenia. I had to step knowingly back into my original life energy as the Androgyne, the Berdache: the one who sees because they know both male and female.

Stepping into the full force of my energy flow has also steeped me in many of the lives I had previously lived…and am still living: for time is not linear but an infinite and ever-opening rose of unknowable dimensions.

I chose my path in this lifetime as a writer and story-maker so that I would be able to open to others the wonders, the challenges and the transformative power of a life that holds Masculine and Feminine in balance. There have been times when I let the balance slip – now one way, now the other. There were far too many years when I refused the Call to step into my power…and I suffered for that refusal.

To write this movie I left the city and once again embraced country living. Here I live in the eternal moment and in that moment the presence of the Divine is all around me.

I feel my supernatural helpers with me: the spiritual forces of Light that first revealed themselves to me as a small child on an isolated outback farm. In their presence I reconnect with the earth. I arrived in late winter and began nursing the garden into the beauty of spring. My years of city living were over. I was returning home, at the end of all my explorings and – as TS Eliot – said, “…knowing the place for the first time…”

This documentary is part of that story.  The story of the awakening of Goddess Energy.

Today, just before I began writing, an echidna waddled in through the vegetable beds I had prepared. She calmly ignored me and sniffed out the ants she likes to eat. She rustled into the flower beds and came out next to my feet and there acted as if I did not exist.  Or perhaps, knowing that I did exist but only as another entity of nature like herself and like the ants and grubs she sought. She dug down amongst the roots. I watched her little spade claws heave the dirt out past her rippled, glossy, spined body.

I returned to the computer knowing that, once again, the Goddess had blessed me – as she has done at other times in my life. Most notably when she sent a snake to slide past my bare feet as I sat meditating on sand-dunes by a winter’s beach, wrestling in my mind with the need to call on Her for a sign. She spoke through the snake. She spoke through the echidna.

Now she speaks through me to you through this movie.

YOUR MONEY: YOUR MOVIE

MY CROWD-FUNDING PITCH AT THE WHO WANTS TO BE A TERRORIST LAUNCH

In 2007 I’d not heard of Dee McLachlan or Andrea Buck or their movie, THE JAMMED. But I live next door to an independent cinema. I write movies myself. I keep my eyes open. I went in, sat down, the curtains opened…and I was spellbound. This was the best directed Australian movie I had seen in decades. Not a shot was wrong. It was a thriller and the tension was palpable. The script was tough, tender and knowing. This was pure, genuine movie storytelling. I went back for a second viewing and then took movie-industry friends the third time.

Shot on a tiny budget, THE JAMMED went on to be both a commercial and critical success. It looked like this team was on its way. Yet they found it impossible to raise finance for the next picture. They were about to go under. Dee and Andy’s own lives have been well publicised. Here they were, bucking all sorts of social stigma to raise their family, to cope with huge personal change in their lives, and to go on making superb motion pictures.

And, just at that time, I had come into some money through my dear, deceased mother’s estate. I needed to make some investment decisions.

I looked at their scripts. I knew that for an Australian movie to return its investment locally it would need to come in under $1M. I checked my network for who might have seed money to keep them going. I could only find one person: me! I looked back at their scripts. There was one – really only a treatment – about two young men, one Australian-born and one Arabic-born, caught up in the world of media-exploitation of the fear of terrorism and its evil siblings: racism and cultural paranoia.  This story took those issues head-on. And the budget promised – via digital capture – to be below a million dollars.

So I put my money into it. It was the first money in fact, and it kept their heads above water and got some vital early footage shot. The script kept shifting its focus. It became a comedy. The title changed a number of times. But the essential theme of a media-saturated world that turns every eventuality, every trauma and crisis, into mass entertainment stayed the same. Eventually the script became: WHO WANTS TO BE A TERRORIST.

In making my investment decision I was certainly aware of the bottom line, of the likelihood (or otherwise) of ROI. But my concept of Return On Investment has never been in purely financial terms. I do think in terms of social capital, and emotional and spiritual capital as well. Ideas that were afloat in the 1920s but are very unfashionable in the brave new world of the 21st Century. It’s a world with a well-suited atheism as its creed. There is no God, there is only The Market.

And I do think in terms of risk. Without it there is no growth, no change. There is only stasis. We can go on making the same Australian movie over and over again. Or we can risk change and growth.

I also think that for all of us involved in, engaged with, the Australian movie and media business, and endlessly arguing how to get better product onto the screen, there is one simple, argument-silencing action you can take. Put your own money where your mouth is! Invest in your local movies. And that is so much easier now with online, crowd-funding. Participation is just a click away. And it doesn’t require much of your cash at all. It’s a gesture which can become a film-financing revolution!

Here is the link.  Who Wants To Be a Terrorist.

Kick-Ass Chicks With Guns

JOSIE DOES A HIGH CONCEPT MOVIE WORKSHOP

 

I was quite surprised to be chosen for the Screen Australia, Michael Hauge, High Concept Movie Workshop.  I’d needed three ‘high concept’ movie ideas and thought I was clean out of ideas.

My mind soon threw up the usual recycled images from other people’s movies and stuff from the darker recesses of my own psychopathology. Bottom drawer material.

But I knew that somewhere in all that mental detritus would be something. And I knew that at this stage I didn’t know what it was.

All creative artists know the power of living with uncertainty. We know that without this ability we can achieve nothing. That we really do have to keep risking everything if we are to achieve anything. We do have to make fools of ourselves in order to discover our wisdom. Our wisdom is in knowing that foolishness is the first step upon the path.

A year earlier I’d written an essay about Road Movies for the AFTRS Lumina Journal.

I wrote,

The Road Movie is existential. In it we don’t have time for the God question. We have to keep moving. We have to react to circumstances that seem to come randomly at us – yet are probably called up by our own, inner turmoil.

Writing that I’d had a vision of a woman at the wheel of a big truck, pursued by she-knows-not-what. Only that she must keep driving and driving and that death is stalking her and that the load she carries is dangerous in the extreme.

I took the vision, that image, and played with it and saw her as a soldier, her truck loaded with explosives, pursued by her own side.

The story was short of at least two characters: the Villain and the Helper. I let the Villain sit. I visioned her Helper.

Only her sister can help her, but they have nothing in common.

I was embarrassed by its raw simplicity. It had shed all intellectual/existential pretension to reveal itself as story: pure and simple. And when I applied Michael’s High Concept story template to it I could see how it would work and I knew my Villain.

I’ve always had my own story templates in my head and have disdained ‘working to a formula’: afraid it would bury my philosophical concerns about the human condition. But I wrangled the story into his 6-stage plot structure, all in one-and-a-half pages.

His structure filled the gaps between the ‘turning points’ in the old 3-Act Screenplay structure. It was a left-brain structure that focused right-brain thought.  It forced me to find actions, not words, to drive an action movie. The ‘strait-jacket’ of a template became a release into marrying form with function. It gave me the key to transform movie roles traditionally reserved for men: ‘Die Hard’, ‘Speed’, but with the hero a woman. A role model for young women today, seizing power from the patriarchy.

Or, as Michael said of it: ‘Kick-ass chicks with guns!’

INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING

I find when I do a panel discussion that the profound changes in and realizations from my thinking occur afterwards, not during. So it was when the Australian Writers Guild got me up on stage at the local RSL Club last Thursday night with Marcus Gillezeau and Jennifer Wilson.

We were competing with Zumba and Tai Kwon Do classes. Downstairs the joint was being cash-flowed by the steady press of fingers on slot machine buttons. I’d come from a day of shooting a corporate video at a fish-processing works.

The Returned Servicemen’s League came into being as a response to the valor of Australian soldiers in various wars. I remembered the RSL club in my home town in the 1950s. Squadron Leader Harvey Charlesworth (school principal) hammering away at the piano whilst my father, Lt. Bob Emery, MM, (local farmer) screwed up his face and attacked his cornet. Ten years earlier both had been scared witless in and over the New Guinea jungle. Dad carried (and played) his cornet right through the campaign. He’d won his Military Medal as a sergeant and received a field promotion soon after.

Many years later – and several years apart – we would see both my mother and my father off into the nether world at that same club. She and the RSL Ladies Auxiliary had run the dinners, the dances, the social events that held that small, coastal community together. Holding a community together was something she modeled for me, both at the RSL and as Anglican church organist and member of the church council, and as the mother of four children on an isolated farm.

Now I was in a big city RSL club arguing for the merits of ‘digital storytelling’: new media vs old media. What were the differences? What was the way forward? Is there such a thing as ‘new media’? What is the place of the author in it?

Well, my first communications medium was a school exercise book interfacing with a Post Office pen and nib and a standard school inkwell at the top of my desk. My first typewriter was an Olivetti Dora portable that sat atop my backpack as I hitch-hiked Australia. I wrote my first book of short stories on that machine. Now I had a Macbook with enough computing power to fly me to the moon and back.

I’ve always been an author. But now I realize that I’ve also always been a story-maker. There’s a difference. As a child on the farm I would create and organize vast, interactive games for my brother and me and our friends. I would create the story universe: the overarching war-game; the city; the family; the doctors and nurses scenario; the highwayman and the lady; the Cowboys and Indians scenario. The others would contribute their own scenarios, narratives, responses, within that overarching universe. These were narratives created and sustained by the participants. User Generated Content, as we say nowadays.

But I got seduced by the power of the myth of the sole creator. The writer as the individual voice rising out of the collective. The only one in the village with the skill and power to tell the village stories. I worshipped at the altar of the Great Writers. My desire was to be one of them. To join the Elect (and select) Priesthood of Story. I traveled the land with my Olivetti listening to and writing down the stories others told me. I re-told those stories as ‘my’ stories. After all, I owned the technology (the Olivetti), I had the programming skills (the ability to string sentences together), I sourced the delivery medium (the magazine). I kept the cheque.

It was fascinating at the RSL Club forum to hear how passionately the Writers Guild members clung to the myth of the creator God/writer. Joseph Campbell was evoked. My suggestion that we open up our story worlds so that others could tell their stories within them was met with fear, hostility, and a condescending dismissal of such stories as lacking the integrative art of the true storyteller to ‘make it into a story’. The raw details of the untutored recollection of events was not a ‘story’ until an author had hammered it into respectable shape. Perhaps had fitted the Hero’s Journey template over it. Only then had it passed through the fire and been stamped with the stamp of authorship, so it no longer belonged to the community but to the author.

No, ordinary people could not be trusted to tell their extraordinary stories.

I recalled a community story workshop I’d run near my home-town after major bush-fires had devastated the farms and pine forests there. Such stories! Such raw, vivid, emotion and trauma. The decision whether to stay and fight the firestorm or flee. Husband against wife. Male testosterone pumping, looking for a fight…even a fight with an enemy way, way beyond his powers. The woman’s journey into the smoke with her children, pursued by fireballs. Car crashes in the smoke and confusion. She never saw him again.

What could I do in the face of all this? I could hold space for them. I could acknowledge their pain and loss and grief and I could help them focus on the craft of storytelling. I could get them to mold ‘stories’ out of their raw experience. I began to see how ‘story’ – an artificial reconstruction of trauma – could serve as a path to healing.

That was a long time ago. But pain and trauma is always with us. It is the core of ‘story’. It is the essence of human communications. We cannot take away from people the ownership of their own experience. We have to honor it and – as professional story-makers – offer what we can to them to enable them to reach out and tell their experience. That is my philosophy of interactive story-making.

That is what I can offer. That is why I have become passionate about the potential for digital media to act as the holding space for people’s stories, and for the ‘author’s’ role as the mediator who can work with those people and their stories and create a rich and binding tapestry of human emotion linking whole communities together once again.

CHINA HEART

China Heart is my first outing as a transmedia/ crossplatform producer. It debuted at Chinese New Year in Sydney. What have I learnt from the experience? Well, again I’ve had confirmed that ‘Story Is Everything’. Until I had Annette Shun Wah aboard as writer/director there was no ‘China Heart’. Annette brought passion, empathy and her own deep story to the production.

Digital media are strongly visual media. Tatiana Pentes had the right visual style for this production. She made it throb with beauty.

I worked for d/Lux Media Arts to realize it. Hitherto an organization known for curating media arts d/Lux – and its dynamic Director, Tara Morelos – discovered that ‘curating’ in the on-line world also means ‘producing’.

The architecture and the code came from The Project Factory. It was a move in new directions for this organization, also.

The project was built for The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney’s wonderful museum of technology.

It was always Annette’s and my desire to have this mobile phone experience also spill out into the streets. Thus we organized an art installation of wonderful historical photographs in Albion Place, Sydney. And we envisaged the climax of this tour/game/immersive experience as a live scene from Chinese Opera delivered in Sydney’s beautiful Chinese Garden of Friendship.

THE GIFT

Inner Sydney is a world of contrasts. The well-heeled, the survivors, the creative, and those who have fallen between the cracks in the social cement all mingle on the same pavement. It doesn’t take much to have those cracks appear. One minute you think you are in charge of your life and then…you’ve fallen through.

I’d noticed her whilst we’d been having our regular Women’s and Girls Emergency Centre Sub-committee meeting at my local pub. The pub is close to a major hospital. There’s a residential hotel next door. She had the look of someone from out of town. From the bush. She was eating dinner alone. After the rest of the committee left with their action plans I asked her if I could join her. She was grateful for the company.

She was a teacher from the central west. Her husband was a farmer. But he was in the city now for a triple-bypass. Her life had been the close-knit community of the country. She was floundering now. She asked about my group and I told her that we were involved with an organization providing support for inner-city women who had nowhere to live. No homes. Seemingly no hope. But, if you could just reach out and offer these women a sense of hope, of community, a chance to reach through the social cracks and get back on their feet…then hope was reborn and life could be seen to flower again.

Our steak and chips came. We ate.

She said how distressed she’d been to see such women as she wandered the streets whilst her husband lay in theatre: his chest open. She’d not seen women reduced to homelessness before. It was foreign, alien, to her conception of a world where people helped each other. It was so hard for her to conceive of a woman living in fear and confusion.

Her own daughters were scattered across the land: having families, having careers. Her own focus kept coming back to the rising generations: children needing a chance to become adults and make a mark in the world. And now seeing women who had tried their best…only to see it all come undone.

“I want to give you something,” she said.

She opened her purse and pulled out her cheque-book and wrote a cheque to WAGEC. She gave it to me. We looked at each other.

“I just want to do something.” she said, “Something for other women.”

We touched cheeks in the way women who don’t really know each other do.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much. I hope he’ll be fine.”

“He will,” she said. “He’s a survivor.”

We went out into the night together. An ambulance wailed by and swept down to the hospital entrance.

“All the best,” I said.

“And you,” she said. “And your organization.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled and I smiled back and we went our separate ways.

Looking Into The Fire

He was about 8, a chubby, serious child with a look of abstracted inwardness that I remembered from my own childhood. The dreamer. He was with his mother and grandmother on one of the leather settees in the parlor at our local pub. I’d come down there too for the gas fire. It was cold winter. The flames curled around the imitation logs in a fair copy of a real log fire. Except that no logs diminished. Coals did not form and glow and shimmer: no red, gold, blue. No figures appearing in their depths. No fairy folk or trolls.

He stretched across a seat and stared into the shallow face of his iphone. He had a game up and running. Planes chasing planes. Explosions. Battles. Beside him an arc of real flames hissed and flared. He didn’t glance at it. He didn’t seek pictures in its heart. His pictures were before him: structured, ordered, accessible anywhere. Always the same pictures over and over. You can go deeper into the game but the game has always been defined. It will never take you anywhere not predetermined.

I remembered those cold nights in the farmhouse and the magic of the coals. I looked deep into them and watched those fairyland figures evolve. They suggested stories to me and I felt the stories unravel in my mind. Unlike the coals my mind’s fire did not consume itself. It fed deeper and deeper. It suggested more and other worlds beyond the first world of the fire and the second world of the images. Beyond a third world of stories were other possible worlds also waiting to be called into being. Waiting.

His dad came back with a tray of drinks and a fatherly joke for him. Dad admired the game. His back to the fire as well. Only I watched it. I wanted it to begin to consume itself and – in its slow, lingering death throes – create the possibility of pictures. The fire was always a dance between that self-consumption and the steadying hand of the fire-feeder who would stoke it.

The planes went down in the game as he played. I wondered about his mind and where it would go. How would it it feed and grow? Precise and structured, like a game, like the digital world that was as natural to him as the farmhouse fire had been to me. The pictures in my world had been analogs. From them I inferred a personal world of the imagination. The pictures in his world were digital. From them he would learn a series of actions.

For me it seemed natural to believe that the world was far, far bigger than anything I could imagine – because in my mind I could see all those misty worlds beyond worlds behind the images in the fire. There would always be characters out there yet unrealized, unborn, come to haunt me in my nights. But if the game contained all that ever could be imagined, where could the mind go in search of the beyond? And how could it go there? What inner techniques could he discover that would take him on such journeys?

Are we closing down our minds now? And if so: why? What is it that we are afraid to let imagination call up, turning instead to the predigested simulacra of the games? A world of rules and outcomes; inputs and outputs; where the only possibility of a world beyond the code is contained in that cryptic phrase: ‘error message’.

An error is a crack through which another reality strives to enter the world of rules.

TAKING A TABLET IS NOT THE ANSWER!

I’m noticing how book publishers and newspaper moguls are hailing the iPad as a possible ‘saviour’ of their hitherto paper-based industries. Rupert Murdoch, in particular, sees it as a way to get his closed-garden of print behind a paywall that will trickle-feed the empire.

He and the others are missing the real change that has happened. It’s a change I don’t care for myself. I’ve resisted it as best I can, but there comes a time you just have to accept that your old way of life is over. In the case of the paper-based product it will linger because the generations brought up on these media will also take a while to die off. But they will. Death IS the one thing we are sure about.

They speak as if ‘the newspaper’ and ‘the book’ are not technological and cultural artefacts but are somehow naturally-occurring substances which the human organism has been genetically hard-wired to read and absorb. They cite the figures that show we all ‘consume’ more and more print online than we once did offline. (Yes but we ‘consume’ it in a far different way to how we may have ‘consumed’ Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’.)

The idea of ‘consuming’ Tolstoy or Dostoyevski is pretty alarming. ‘Relate to’, ‘empathize with’, ‘are challenged by’, ‘have spiritual revelations…’ but ‘consume’? What does that mean?

We all know the story of Gutenburg’s printing press and the rise of reading culture – and the rise of both religious and political revolution that followed as the serfs and peasants allegedly learnt to read. Martin Luther and Karl Marx both used the written manifesto to ignite their cultural fires. Critical theology began shortly after the bible was both translated into the common tongue and churned off the first printing presses. As long as it was in Latin and no one could read it, the old theology was safe from scrutiny. In the Vulgate, it just didn’t make sense.

The whole problem for the ruling classes as reading exploded in the 18th-19th Century was to contain it to a level where workers could be instructed, managers could be informed, the gentry could converse…but no one could join the dots. Censorship became a necessity for social control. But it kept breaking down.

Folk tales and Romances were massaged into a brand new shape: the novel. The first novels were often written as exchanges of letters or as first person reports. (A new form always borrows content from an existing form.) This entertainment medium proved ideal for leisured ladies. It kept them quietly at home absorbed in fantasy…which was fine until they themselves started playing with the form: from Mme de Stael to Virginia Woolf via Jane Austen…and then Germaine Greer.

The newspaper took advantage of the next technological innovation – from hand-set press to linotype. The word ‘News’ was invented from the names of the four cardinal directions: North East West South. The newspaper was one of the major products of the Industrial Revolution. Everything about its production was about the division of labor and mechanized process.

When I was a freelance journalist in the 1980s, newspaper Union rules would not allow me to file my copy directly. No. I had to write my piece out and then dictate it over the phone to a ‘copy-taker’, who then typed it into the system. A sub-editor would then cut it to fit the space available and assign a suitably inflammatory headline.

The book business was similarly mechanized and divided. Writer and printer never met. It’s still that way. Writers Unions, Guilds and Societies still carry on as if writers and publishers were labor and management in a vicious factory system.

All this as if human society was an unchanging entity and technological advance was simply reinforcing the old ways of doing things. The primacy of print. The elevation of reading over others modes of perception. A belief that the novel was the ultimate form of human expression – that long-form, written and read, story was the key to culture.

What had escaped notice was that much of the world couldn’t read. That the Marxist and Maoist revolutions owed as much (maybe more) to the power of the visual. The Communists seized upon the old church method of using a visual Icon to ‘tell a story’. Political poster imagery reached its zenith through the Great Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s. Much of the technical and artistic innovation in film-making was driven by the Russian revolution getting its story told via silent movies. Thank you Serge Eisenstein.

And what about the rise of radio? My generation, the ‘60s generation, embraced radio to consolidate our cross-cultural identities. The transistor fueled our rebellion. The novel as a form of identity-building began to fall against the onslaught of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, et al. In post World War 2 civil wars and rebellions, the radio station became number one target to be silenced.

The old print culture – newspapers and then paperback novels – depended upon another technical innovation to be promulgated. The rapid, efficient, nation-building system of railroad tracks. The train was an essential part of print culture. The rise of the news-stand at the station.

I love Bram Stoker’s, ‘Dracula’, as a book that brought all this together. First person narration by a dozen different people – all using leading-edge technology; typewriter, Edison phonograph, dictaphone – and the plot hingeing on the efficient railway timetabling of all Europe and England. The supernatural met the Industrial Revolution and exploded!

What sort of people benefitted most from this culture? Obviously they were not dyslectic. They were not visually acute. They weren’t dancers or musicians. Old-form print culture benefitted people like myself: short-sighted introverts with powerful memories and a facility with long-form written language (a highly artificial skill, when you think of it) and a particular form of reality processing and thinking. Our preoccupations became the heart of culture. And yet we were only a small percentage of the word’s population. Heartbreakingly, the extremely short-sighted (almost blind) Aldous Huxley was assigned the task of writing Mr Magoo scripts in Hollywood.

Those skills need constant learning, rehearsing and practice. For people without a natural facility in the reading medium if another way of communicating should arise that suits their skills better, they’ll take it.

Visual communication has been growing and growing at the expense of long form written story (and newspaper feature). Visual communication is more ‘natural’ than long form story. First we hear, then we see, then we speak, and finally we may read.

Yes, we do absorb more print online now than ever before. But look at how we absorb it! And look at how much sound, vision, color and movement accompanies it. How do you teach a 13 year old to read a novel when they are constantly absorbing 2 minute Youtube posts? That’s where the synaptic links are being laid down for future communications skills. That’s why newspaper and book buying is dying. What is the point of rewriting either ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ or ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’? That form of communication has had its day. Now we learn who we are by Googling our needs and desires. That’s what I did when I began to think that I was transgendered. I didn’t need a book. I needed a Chat Room.

To communicate now we do not need a publishing factory, a railway system, and a minutely divided structure of labor and management. That’s why the old publishing/newspaper system is dying. Where is the first place news organizations go for pictures of the latest calamity? Flickr! Facebook! They pull the images and the information down and poke them through the factory and maybe 12 hours later they’re available on the street…but they’ve already done the rounds of mobile devices. The latest ‘news’ is always old news.

Newspaper barons are like the old railroad barons. Their time has passed. Putting their content up on an iPad is like screening a movie on the bridge of the Titanic (a form of mass transport made redundant by the DC3). You could have done it, but the lifeboat was probably the better option.