Island Sixteen Isle of Ecstasy and Holy Terror

(Extract from: Muse of the Long Haul Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination)
Copyright, Dr Ian Irvine, 2013 all rights reserved. All short extracts from the texts discussed are acknowledged and used under fair usage related to review and theoretical critique under international copyright law.

Images: Various band-posters from the early 1991-1993 copyright remains with various bands depicted (mostly Goyas Child members/designers). Other images by Sue King-Smith, Ian Irvine or friends of the band, copyright 19921993.

Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. NB: This piece is published at Scribd as part of a series drawn from the soon to be print published non-fiction book on experiential poetics entitled: Muse of the Long Haul: Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination.

Island Sixteen Isle of Ecstasy and Holy Terror

Deities of this lower world, to which all we of mortal birth descend, if I have your permission to dispense with rambling insincerities and speak the simple truth, I did not come here to see the dim haunts of Tartarus, nor yet to chain Medusas monstrous dog, with its three heads and snaky ruff. I came because of my wife, cut off before she reached her prime when she trod on a serpent and it poured its poison into her veins. I wished to be strong enough to endure my grief, and I will not deny that I tried to do so: but Love was too much for me. 1 Where are you Dionysus? Leading your dancing bands Over the mountain slopes, past many a wild beasts lair, Or upon rocky crags, with the thyrsus in their hands? Or in the woodland coverts, maybe, of Olympus, where Orpheus once gathered the trees and mountain beasts, Gathered them with his lyre, and sang an enchanting air. Happy vale of Pieria! Bacchus delights in you 2

The Chills were an 80s band out of Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand. Their haunting guitar melodies are legendary in the deep south of that country. I heard a song of theirs called Pink Frost in 1988 or soI was holidaying in South Australia with my brother and his partner, and they had a tape of the band. I also loved the famous English folk-poem The Unquiet Gravea variation on the theme of the lover stolen by death from the beloved. The romantic image of the sleeping or dead muse/beloved cradled in the arms of her grieving loverperhaps there has been some kind of Romeo and Juliet type tragedyfascinated me at the time. The image, of course, is highly Romanticalmost Gothic/pre-Raphaelite, though in my young-adult helplessness I also connected it to Dantes loss of Beatrice. Id read the Inferno in 1984 and understood that before Dante got to see Beatrice in heaven he had to journey through the Medieval version of hell. At the time I linked the image-constellation to the Jungian concept of the sick or deeply repressed Anima archetype to the idea that in highly rational, highly patriarchal societies men neglect their feminine sidesthe consequence being dissatisfaction in love, trouble in relationships, an inability to relate to women properly, etc. To some degree, of course, my own circumstances structured the imageryif society had distorted, to some degree, my capacity to share love then there was a sense in which my Anima/Muse was underground; symbolically speaking, sleeping or dead. Indeed, in terms of Graves thesis, the Goddess figure generally (and thus healthy models of the feminine for men and women) had been systematically banished by the elites of Western civilisation! Under such circumstances, and given I fancied myself a poet/songwriter/fiction writer even then, it was likely that Id interpret the terrible beauty of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth in terms of both Graves general thesis and in terms of my own circumstances. The trouble was Orpheus never managed to revive his Eurydicethe myth was tragic and represented, to my mind, a victory for civilisation over the deeper needs of the soul. Eventually I wrote two songs concerned with this imageryone featured prominently in the live performances of Goyas Child, the band I formed with four other musos in 1991. On more than one occasion spectators claimed that in listening to the song theyd felt hairs stand up pm the back of their necksit was certainly a very haunting song to play live. The myth also featured as a guiding metaphor for the
1 2

Ovid, Book X, Metamorphosis, p. 225,Trans. M M. Innes, 1975. Euripides, The Bacchae, in The Bacchae and Other Plays, p. 198, Penguin, 1969, translators Radice and Baldick.

last chapter of my Honours thesis on the poetry of Robert Graves. I first came across the story in Ovids Metamorphosis. In simple terms Eurydice, Orpheus new bride, is bitten by a snake on the ankle and sinks lifelessly to the ground. Ovid tells us: The Thracian poet mourned her loss; when he had wept for her to the full in the upper world, he made so bold as to descend through the gate of Taenarus to the Styx, to try to rouse the sympathy of the shades as well. Inevitably Orphic music came to be representative of the poets grief and in the myth his mournful songs of grief are used to plead with Hades and Persephone, King and Queen of the Underworld, for his wifes release from death. The strategy is successful and Eurydice is permitted to return with Orpheus to the upper-world, provided, that is, Orpheus can keep his faith and resist the urge to look back at Eurydice during the ascent. Ovid takes up the story:
Up the sloping path, through the mute silence they made their way, up the steep dark track, wrapped in impenetrable gloom, till they had almost reached the surface of the earth. Here anxious in case his wifes strength be failing and eager to see her, the lover looked behind him, and straightway Eurydice slipped back into the depths.3

Things go to pieces somewhat after this event. The poet grieves excessively and Ovid tells us: Orpheus had shrunk from loving any woman, either because of his unhappy experience, or because he had pledged himself not to do so. Eventually, Ciconian women caught sight of him, one screams: See! Look here! Here is the man who scorns us! A musical battlesymbolically between Apollo and Dionysusensues in which clamorous shouting, Phrygian flutes with curving horns, tambourines, the beating of breasts, and Bacchic howlings drown out the music of the lyre. Ovid narrates that the womens weapons, at length, draw crimson and eventually, Dead to all reverence, they tore him apart. But the poet is not easily silenced. As a gruesome addenda we are told that though his limbs were scattered his head and lyre remained animated: Wonderful to relate, as they floated down in midstream, the lyre uttered a plaintive melody, and the lifeless tongue made a piteous murmur I never quite knew what to make of this storyin some respects Orpheus seemed too precious, too wussy, to use the Australian vernacular, to me. More importantly I found the ending puzzling and dissatisfying. It had one redeeming feature, however, another kind of music helped Orpheus out of his existential impasseBacchic music! From one perspective the manic women had done the poor fellow a service through their actions, theyd reunited him with Eurydice, his dead beloved. Such is the paradox of Dionysian liberation. I studied a number of Greek tragedies, including The Bacchae, early in my arts degree and couldnt help superimposing Jim Morrison singing The End in some dingy LA pub over the figure of Dionysus as depicted in that ancient play. I remember being fascinated by the way in which the deity undermined the morality policethe authoritiesof the town. He was an uneasing figure for me, howevera product perhaps of the moral extremism that placed Apollo the sun GodGod of reason and measured musical compositionat one pole, and Dionysus, God of chaos, drugs, madness and manic violence at the other. To my mind there had to be some kind of in-between. In Euripides play Dionysus tells of his purpose in visiting Thebes:
3

Ovid, Metamorphoses, p.226.

I am Dionysus, son of Zeus. My mother was Semele, daughter of Cadmus; I was delivered from her womb by the fire of a lightning-flash. To-day I have laid aside the appearance of a god, and have come disguised as a mortal man to this city of Thebes Here by palace I see the monument recoding my mothers death by lightning; here are the smouldering ruins of her house, which bear the still living flame of Zeaus firethe undying token of Heras cruelty to my mother.4

As a mature age student interested in music and poetry I skipped these early sections outlining the Gods motivation. Had I have paid more attention I would have learnt the reason why the ordinary women of Thebes had deserted their homes for the woods and plains around the city, possessed, so the story goes by the Bacchic mania:
The reason why Thebes is the first place in Hellas where, at my command, women have raised the Bacchic shout, put on the fawnskin cloak, and taken my weapon in their hands, the thrysus wreathed with ivythe reason is this: my mothers sisters saidwhat they should have been the last to saythat I, Dionysus, was not the progeny of Zeus; but that Semele, being with child by some mortal, at her fathers suggestion ascribed to Zeaus the loss of her virginity; and they loudly insisted that this lie about the fatherhood of her child was the sin for which Zeus had struck her dead.5

Of course Hera, in the form of an older family friend, had tricked Semele into demanding of her loverZeusthat he reveal himself in all his glory. Given she uttered something like a spell Zeus was forced to obeythe result was predictably messy, a smouldering corpse! Semele was incinerated by the deitys immense light and energyan interesting mythological trope in itself. Dionysus, understandably, wants revenge on Hera and also the women of Thebesafter all, hadnt they denied his divinity? And hadnt they lied about the death of his mother? He is also mad (literally angry) with grieffor his mother. Such factors perhaps determine the unique quality of the music and art composed under this deitys influence. His is a revelry coloured by anger, holy terror, grief and desire for revenge. In the Bacchae the revenge impulse unleashes itself in equal measure on the women of Thebes (represented by Agaue mother of Pentheus) and the male authorities of the town (represented by Pentheus and Cadmus). In the climax of the play Agaue is shown coming down from the Bacchic madness that had led her and her fellow Maenads to kill a lion-cubor so they believed. After averting her eyes to the sky the frenzy passes and she looks down at the head of the creature she hallucinated to be a cub:
Cadmus: and whose head is that you hold in your arms? Agaue: A lionsor so the women said who hunted it. Cadmus: Now look straight at it; it is not much trouble to look. Agaue looks at the head in silence; then cries out. Agaue: Oh! What am I looking at? What am I holding?

A few lines later she realises: it is Pentheus head I hold in my accursed hand. We are told that the deitys revenge has been too cruel, too just. Music and art operating under such an influence is necessarily a dark phenomenon, and
4 5

Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, p.181, trans. P. Vellacott, Penguin, 1969. Ibid, p.182.

yet Dionysus is much more than the story above would seem to indicate. According to multiple classical sources Dionysus was associated with wine, periods of social inversion, boisterousness, sacred orgies and ritual madnessoften enacted during the festivals that were held annually in his honour. Interestingly for creative people he was also associated with tragedy and comedy, and there is a sense that the secularisation of the Western literary tradition that began in Athens had much to do with the ambivalence associated with the presiding deity, Dionysus. Since Id contracted a Dionysian attitude toward writing (particularly poetry) by way of Graves theories on inspiration, I felt that old discomfort at the violence underlying many archaic figures of inspiration. In late 1991 it became apparent to me that two of the archetypal poet-muso figures of antiquity, i.e. Orpheus and Bacchus, had left us with creativity narratives soaked in gore. Walter Otto, in Dionysus: Myth and Cult, however, outlines other facets to Dionysus that have fascinated me for some years now. In a sense the deitys rationale opposes any attempts to clamping life energies in artificial, straight-jackets of authoritarian morality. From a Freudian perspective, the greater the denial of the life-force, the more violent and tragic the inevitable Dionysian back-lash. The truth is that at some level we will the God to take revenge on Pentheus for precisely his inflexible, life-denying attitudes. The lesson is that the life-force can sometimes appear as a cruel, impersonaleven inhumanforce. Denied healthy, embodied means of expression, it will seek alternative, even distorted and sadistic, paths toward expression. There is a strange emotional logic to all of this, one that perhaps brings us back to the central tragedy of the mytha grieving God at war with all the laws of heaven and eartha god of ecstasy and revenge:
On, on! Run, dance, delirious, possessed! Dionysus comes to his own; Bring from the Phrygian hills to the broad streets of Hellas The god, child of a god Spirit of revel and rapture, Dionysus!6

Early in the second year of my humanities studies at La Trobe the sensitive, fragile archetype of Orpheus shape-shifted, for a time, into the more ecstatic, extroverted and as it turned out public archetype of Dionysusnot to mention his legion of maenads. The melancholy of Orpheus, dreaming helplessly in the wilds for his dead anima, gave way, after the mandatory rending asunder, to the arrival of Dionysus. I have no doubt that release from a long-term relationship accompanied by hurt at the resultant separation from my children helped fuel the Bacchic musical eruption that followedit certainly added to the mood of much of the music I produced with the guys and elsewhere over the next few years. Even as I was acting out the last energetic thrusts of the Bacchic madness on stage in 1991-93 with Goyas Child, I was also quietly burying Orpheus and Eurydice in the University library. That myth figured prominently in my honours thesis on Graves The White Goddess. In retrospect, I was probably trying to bury, once and for all, the unrequited longing of my late adolescence. In a retrospect the Orpheus myth best fits the period from 1982 to 1992. I was inspired, through inner deadness, to awaken a symbolically dead anima during those yearsadmittedly this is a Jungian interpretation. In 1992 I graduated from this myth when I found a person to relate to who wasnt stuck down in Hades!
6

Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, p.184, trans. P. Vellacott, Penguin, 1969.

Dionysus came to me, as he does to everyone, abruptly, violently, like a seizure, like a total change of perspective etc. I felt like a new person. I was up on stage for one, singing (screaming?) original words at the top of my lungs with wild guitars, driving rhythms and haunting synth melodies all around. Each gig a kind of Dionysian frenzyfor the God of nonconformist (alternative?) music is surely Dionysus-Bacchus. A while back a friend loaned me a copy of Craig Schuftans book The Culture Club. The book makes a pretty good fist of linking major developments in high and avant garde literature and culture generally to developments in popular music over the past forty or so years. As I read I felt relieved that some of my doubts about the originality and cultural relevance of many of the bands Id loved (and aped!) in the 80s and 90s had been so powerfully inspired by cultural movements as diverse as Bauhaus, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Existentialism, Expressionism, the Impressionists, Futurisms, The Beats, Constructivism, Fluxus, Jungian psychology, Freudian psychology, etc, etc. All the big names in serious 20th century culture were there in the index alongside the names of bands Id loved as a young adult. Suddenly it felt legitimate again to applaud those bands, to speak about them as innovators and even critics of culture to some extent. I immediately recalled the hundreds of band posters Id seen over the years advertising gigs, album releases, not to mention dozens of album covercollage, surrealism, found objects etc. i.e. modernist design motifs, were prominent. These days, however, the inspiration is not one way. In the nineties I knew of a female artist who liked to dress up in a favorite pair of pajamas before putting on a Bernard Cohen tape to paint to. Personally, I still feel most creative when I discover the music of a new band. Like the recently deceased Australian poet Dorothy Porter Im happy to admit that the raw, brash, expressionistic rock music of the sixties and seventies modeled for me a key function of artto express, to make conscious the inexpressible, the unconscious. Alternative rock music helped me through some of the most difficult periods of my life. One risks embarrassment confessing to thisunlike admitting say to being moved by literary giants like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Antonin Artaud, etc., or classical musicians like Beethoven or Bach. Despite this risk I think its important to address the puzzle that is popular music in all its formshow it moves us deeply and soothes us when we hurt. I sometimes feel embarrassed, sometimes proud, of the alternative rocker Ian that emerged in my personality in mid-1991. I possess a series of early 90s photos of myself fronting a band called Goyas Child. I rarely show them to anyone but close family members and close friendstheyre allowed to laugh because theyre often in the photos with me looking just as ridiculous, over-serious etc.! In some of the pictures its late at night and Im looking distinctly otherworldly inebriated perhaps. Im in various postures: singingscreaming into a microphone, posing for a band shot,

making whoopy with an electric guitarposturing or not posturing as the case may be. Together the photos depict a very different me from the alienated father of 1989 and even from the forty-something me writing these words. Of course Grunge had just hit and the Smashing Pumpkins were busy screaming about being rats in cages with a lot of rage. A local band called Teenage Head (which says it all really) seemed particularly up on all of this coolness and Id watched the lead singer carefully, his name was Shane Kendall (another La Trobe humanities student), and concluded that it was possible to virtually primal on stage and not be seen as crazy in any way. I needed no more encouragement! As of 2013 Goya's Child strikes me as a 22 year old 'entity' - almost an archetypaltranspersonal energy/force - that simply refuses to die/fade out, despite the best efforts of its various members over the years! It muddles along in a coma, on resuscitation if you like, neglected, bigger than all of us, but never quite achieving more general currency perhaps its perpetual closeness to oblivion has kept GC strangely authentic and beyond simple commercialisation. Interestingly, since 2010 songs by both versions of the band have gained wider distribution in more countries than at any point in the band's history. GC (1&2) songs, with accompanying hastily created videos (some with live audio recordings at Australian pubs and venues from the early 90s, others connected to the movie Freedom Deep which was internationally distributed) have recently featured at (or been embedded into) hundreds of sites in numerous countries. After my last gig with the band in October 1993 I had a long time to meditate on the archetype behind the band and its music and brief history that follows tells something of the band's early story. The overall feel of a GC1 performance is that of late 80s early 90s alternative rock, think The Cure, Interpol, The Pixies, The Smiths, Nick Cave, The Smashing Pumpkins, U2 etc. - our trademark was a certain kind of hypnotic distorted/echo rhythm and lead guitar backed by expressionistic vocals, heavy bass riffs and haunting gothic synth sounds. The History of Goya's Child (Version 1 - 19911994) Goya's Child (1) was founded as a musical entity in the winter of 1991. Its inception was slow. The actual idea was first mooted in 1987 when I was sitting around with my then partner, Dalia, my brother Andy, and his girlfriend, Christine, as well as flat mate and long time friend, James Gaghan. I went for a stroll with two ponies who were shitting all over a bare field and came back with the name 'Goya's Child'. We were thinking about Arthur Janov's Primal Scream psychologyJanov had theorised that childhood in the modern industrialised world is inherently traumatic. Needless to say Goya's famous painting, 'Saturn Devouring Cronus' encapsulated the theory most clearly. For years after that day out at Emu Creek close to Bendigo I used the name as a kind of magic charm to accompany the copious amounts of original (but incomplete) music I was writing at that time. When I went back to La Trobe University in 1990 I became good friends with James Mannix, at that time a classical guitarist intent, like myself, on a humanities education. Both of us were frustrated by the lack of original music in Bendigo and decided to form a band of our

own. I had messed around since 1988 with a recording bandalso called Goya's Child recording dozens of songs with John Drougas, a then friendly commercial cleaner (later fellow Humanities student) who ran a low-cost local recording studio as a sideline business. The musical skill necessary to take my ideas for songs to the next level, however, had evaded me, until meeting the then 'clean cut' young humanities student James Mannix. At that time James was playing classical guitar in pubs around Bendigo: 'digestion music' as he called it. He professed to have no idea how to play electric guitar. However, his skill with the classical guitar impressed me and tentatively we began writing songs togetherthe dream was 'simply' to earn a living from music. James and I eventually moved into a two bedroom flat only one hundred meters from the university (we still never quite got to lectures on time!). The two of us were in our second year of our Humanities degrees. The heady air of student life combined with the frustrations I felt at being separated from my daughter Lena led to us writing a couple of dozen original compositions together by the middle of the year. The purchase of both a top of the range synthesizer (Yamaha SY77) and high quality sound system (with the requisite 'vocal effects' unit!) also sent us looking for a bassist, a drummer and a synth player. It also sent me close to the poverty line since I was still paying back a large Austudy debt. By September of 1991 two local psyche nurses, Liam Thorpe and Richie O'Neil joined the band. Liam was to play bass and back-up vocals and Richie was to be the drummer. Liam's capacity to improvise musically and create lyrics and Richie's steady drumming on a beast of a kit allowed the 'band' to progress quickly (Goya's Child was about to become .... a garage band!) The music began to flow fast and furious, many of the band's better songs came in the next six months. It was also during this period that our own peculiar stylegothic, bleak, melodic, dark, and poeticwas established. In general, I sang lyrics, Liam harmonized or sometimes sang his own material, James improvised on guitar and Richie tried to set the rhythm tone. Often songs came out all but complete on the first recording. Our vague modus operandi involved us attempting to open up to unconscious inspirational elements/energies. The muse continued to visit us at regular intervals into 1992 but slowed somewhat in 1993. By late 1991 the fifth and final member had joined usSteven White (Y.T. for short). Y.T. had never actually played synth, but since the band was guitar based we figured it didn't matter! After diligently learning the music set him he began to improvise and add mood to the strangely haunting music the band was producing in the latter part of 1991. The other key element at this time was Scott Hunt the band's mixeralso a fellow humanities student as well as an enthusiast of avant garde films and a magazine editor.

The biggest surprise to me was first time we received cash from a publican for performing our original songs in his pubIll never forget that moment, it was late at night as patrons milled around the exit. It was an important moment since it represented my original efforts being taken seriously by society. I had to suspend my habitual critique of capitalism in order to enjoy the moment properlyand it kept happening, gig after gig, for a couple of years. By mid 1993 however I was starting to feel ever more restricted by the band. Sue recalls vividly a band practice in early 1993. My daughter, Lena, was across from New Zealand on an access visit and given the band were having an evening practice we decided that Sue would bring Lena down to Art Space to watch proceedings for an hour or so before taking her home to bed. The big double-stacked black speakers were set up maybe 15 meters apart on the cold concrete floor. Out front was the large 12 track mixer wed been using for two yearscarefully tended by Scott our roadie/mixer. Bizarre art images hung on the tall whitewashed walls behind us and the sounds of the music echoed every-which-way in the cooling night air. As usual we kept the lights low and red to emphasise mood. Usually wed practice until three or four in the morning stopping only now and then for drinks or a snack. We often found that songs came early in the morning, when our defenses were downsometimes straight after a break. Given this fact we tended to run through our established set before 12pmafter 12pm we opened our antennae to the universe. This way of creating was something we fell into naturallyit was also a lesson in creativity that Ive never forgotten. That night with Lena present was a typical practice in many respects and yet it was also the beginning of the end. Lena, who was about seven, had earphones around her neck, just in case the noise got too much for her little ears. They were sitting up on the balcony area above one of the studios directly facing the band as we practiced. Sue felt that most of the guys were cold and perfunctory, both to Lena and to her, that night. To be fair, perhaps theyd simply been stressed or otherwise absorbed that night. Whatever they were thinking and feeling it became clear to me that an important aspect of my lifemy relationship with my daughterfelt threatened, and not so much by the band as by the underlying values of the entire alternative rock scene. An uncomfortable question was forming: should I really seek to make a career out of late night gigs in seedy barsmost likely for very little financial return? The decision to do my BA Honors in 1993 represents the answermy children and Sue had to come first. Nothing was said, but after that practice I knew I wasnt long for the band the issue became how they would acknowledge my creative input after my departure. Id written many of the bands lyrics (including melody lines) and together with all the guys had spent a lot of time and energy on the structural aspects of many of our songs. The problem, from their perspective, was perhaps that all members had contributed something to the bulk of our songs similarly, Liam and I had written many songs together. In early 1994 I hoped theyd be fair about acknowledging my 3 years of creative input. In the Australian spring of 2010 they acknowledged publicly eighty percent of my input better late than never, I guess. The acknowledgement felt like a kind of resolution that allowed me to feel much more positive about what wed achieved collectively through the band. What did we achieve? By the time I departed a number of the band's songs had featured on Victorian and national radio stationsin particular the national youth radio station JJJ. Later

versions of 5 songs Id helped write also featured as part of the sound track to the internationally distributed Australian SF movie Freedom Deep (three versions: 1996-2008). The rest of the sound track also featured many GC (2) songs. The band (both incarnations) was also listed in the Whos Who of Australian Rock from the mid-1990s on. I hope we also assisted some of our followers through some of the more difficult periods of their lives. Aftermath My time with the band lasted about three years. When we parted company I was over thirty, had two children dependent upon me in New Zealand and was being pushed by financial and internal creative pressures in the direction of academia and writing. One could grow old gracefully by indulging in such activities! There remains, however, a part of me that still loves writing and performing original songs. In Western civilization the kind of music Ive written and enjoyed since the early eighties is inevitably seen as alternativeassociating it with the mind-set of the young adult male. I dont know why this is the caseperhaps the song-writing part of me simply never grew up (not an unknown phenomenon is the music industry)! I love folk music and some forms of experimental music, and these genres have influenced some of what Ive created of late. However, nothing moves me like jangling effects-laden guitars, not to mention the Dionysian Fuck the worldthe life force must prevail! attitude underlying many alternative rock bands.

Author Bio (as at May 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), as well as in a number of Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of three journals and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.