Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida

Author Essay

This book was written over a number of years, much of it while walking along a stretch of the River Torrens in South Australia, where, with my friend, Kim Maltman, I’d been spending months at a time on successive trips. It was the middle of my life, and as I walked I thought about whatever came to mind – events of the day, memories, various personal preoccupations – all the while accompanied (or so it felt) by presences: works of music and literature that had been so important to me it was as though they had never left my side (the book’s title derives from one of these). As each day’s musings were worn away in the rhythms of walking, those same rhythms gave rise to another kind of thinking, attentive to the near-at-hand. The Torrens is overhung in places with willow, eucalyptus, and acacia, and many kinds of birds can be seen coming and going along its banks. It was this, I thought – a direct awareness of being in the world – that remains in the works we love, at once public and intimate, just beyond or beneath the words.