John Gardiner

A page of literature, whether poem, play or novel, similarly, an Artist's canvas or fresco, represents a two-dimensional palimpsest impressed with multiple overlaid inspirational sources derived from Time and Tradition, and read/viewed by a three-dimensional human persona. Arabesques presents in its narration, analogically, the proposition that the novel's would-be three-dimensional dramatis personae, are themselves overviewed by their individualised four-dimensional Inner Thinkers, derivative from Descartes' famous statement: Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Australia's continental landscape is evoked as a geographical palimpsest lost to evolutionary Time, uniform in an unchanging sameness, transformed only with the coming of the Anglosphere's colonisation, dramatically contrasted with the cultural textures of Classical, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque creative genius still vibrant in today's Italy. Arabesque's principal protagonist, an eponymous Artist, aged fifty, romantically and socially unattached, a devotee of the highwater mark established by Italian painters and sculptors, finds himself alienated from, and in open conflict with, 2019's Identity Politics and virtue-signalling, determining to visit Rome, Florence and Venice to revivify his creative vision. In today's climate of shifting ambiguity and ambivalence, is it possible to delve one's own incarnational palimpsest, and rediscover in thought, feeling and artistry, the ecstasy of romance?

Beginning with the novel, WHAAM , and the years, 1968 - 1970, fictional dramatis personae commence a journey through unstoppable time against the woven tapestry of unfolding political, cultural and social milieux, moving onward through Exiles (1971 - 1973), Siren (1974 - 1976), and Trash (1977 - 1979). The literary style is representative of the film-frame, each paragraph (quick-cutting decoupage) evoking a cinematic experience packed with concentrated imagery, visual and aural. Friezes continues the momentum of time as a penetrative arrow gathering up the cloud of probabilities which darkened the earlier sequence of novels, taking the dramatis personae through the years, 1980 - 1982, elucidating the mystery within cause-and-effect. Humanity are dramatis personae on-stage in the World's Theatre, actors backdropped by time's film-frames progressing moment-by-moment, wrestling with the meaning of being-and-existence, struggling to manifest a personal political, romantic and metaphysical identity. A frieze is a still-life, not free-standing, in-the-round, but inextricably bound to a larger plane, a fixture in a frame of spacetime. Friezes continues with the presentation of the powerful Japanese motif, the Enso (O), itself a two-dimensional image but viewed by the dramatis personae from a three-dimensional perspective. If two-dimensional images form analogous and symbolic toolboxes for our three-dimensional consciousness, surely it follows a human persona too is a toolbox, a thought-experiment for each four-dimensional Inner Thinker. Friezes explores this penetrative resonance, drawing upon the mirroring analogues of sculpture, painting and cinema in particular, to establish human incarnation as a complex but understandable palimpsest.

Entablatures eponymous novelist undertakes an exploration of the conceptual implications held by the word palimpsest, using the gift of self-consciousness to place his origin within a presence he identifies as the inner thinker, the latter derivative from Rne Descartess famous dictum: Cogito ergo sum I think, therefore I am]. Palimpsest postulates a practice whereby ancient manuscripts were reused by superimposing later writing over earlier work, which was not completely erased. Therefore, traces of the earlier writing become visible, intermixing with later text, an image the eponymous novelist utilises to startling effect in Entablature. Crises unsettle the novelist. The year is 2017, the centenary of the infamous 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a traumatic memory colouring his meditations and social interactions, coupled with uncertainty surrounding the future of his romantic relationship with a corporate lawyer. Law is a pivotal point of contention, and the conflicting controversies between human, spiritual, and the laws of physics are interblended, creating subtext on the palimpsest of existence for the dramatis personae. Determinism and free will are cross-hatched in the weave of existence when the novelist has a chance encounter with his deceased sisters exbest friend, a social diarist. The novelist undertakes the creation of a new book, an epistolary novella, Hygeia, the text of which is included in full within Entablature. But is it the visible trace of an earlier embodiment visible through the text of his current existence? Enhancing the originality of this existential format are quoted samples from one of the novelists earlier books, Russian BrideRose Slavy, the latter name created by the iconic artist Marcel Duchamp.

Embedded in the intellectual and creative milieu of Classical Music as envisioned by a thirty five year old Australian composer preparing to undertake a d but recital tour of England, Tableaux parallels the romantic traditions established in Works such as Much Ado About Nothing, Restoration Comedies, the novels of Jane Austen, and the Plays of Oscar Wilde. The eponymous main character is assigned an English Agent for the tour, the working daughter of an Earl, whose best friend is an illustrator for The Spectator, but more importantly is revealed to be the daughter of a Marquis. Tableaux creates vivid romantic arrangements through developing intertwining relationships among the protagonists, against a tapestry woven with social, cultural and political observations on an egalitarian Australian society and hierarchical English aristocratic class structure. Tableaux is a Comedy of Manners for the twenty-first century in which Love is ultimately triumphant.

Now I am alone Man la Mode finds the central character self-reflecting upon and self-communing with memories of 40 years of marriage which have suddenly ended in crisis as he travels to and through Greece. Overshadowing him as he evokes the classical world through which he moves are the spirits of the two Great Romantic Poets, Shelley and Holderlin, who dreamed of journeying to Greece. While in Greece the main character encounters a woman who identifies herself as Hygeia, and together they visit the key classical sites: the Acropolis ... Ancient Agora ... Delphi ... Epidaurus ... Delos.

Cast in a prose style fluid as the frames of a movie, this novel explores and projects onto the screen of the page remembered glories from the Greek Myths, embodied in dramatis personae living in the late-twentieth century. The Spirit of Antiquity has not vanished, its cadences echo on, and the dramatis personae of Myths surrender to the musicality of its genius. Thought, feeling and memory infuse the blazing landscapes in which the novel is set, rich with allusion and emotional impressionism, with resurrections of hope in the power of the human imagination to overcome the shadows of nihilism ever threatening to close in upon the world. All is illusion, the world rendered a vast movie set in these modern times, and the vision of the Myths being realised by the dramatis personae before the camera blends with their off-screen existence: reel life and real life are seamlessly blurred. Come to the two-dimensional page of this novel as you would a movie screen and allow the light of your own imagination play over the imagery, absorb the poetry, music and visual splendour of the evocations forming there, and be transfigured as the dramatis personae are. Myths, the novel, delivers a glimpse into an eternally refreshing universal vision of a view of the world embodied every morning as the sun crests the horizon, for here is a rhythmic power manifest in the poet Shelley's famous lines concluding Prometheus Unbound ... to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates