Péefko

I remember Jiri Tibor Novak. In conversation, when I named a person or thing that caught his attention, he would repeat that name or thing, then give a small disquisition about said person or subject. He confirmed a shared interest and extended our mental image. He sat at the long kitchen table with homemade coffee. He wanted to know what people made with their hands. He wanted to know not what they were thinking in passing, the usual thing, but their own thought. JTN sent new year’s cards with his initials. They were Czech péefko (PF), a Bohemian Christmas-New Year custom derived from the French ‘pour féliciter’ (felicitations). It is with this in mind that I ponder the poignancy (if that’s the word) of him dying between Christmas and New Year. I had not seen him for a few years, so the news was an unhappy surprise. I wished I’d visited him lately. I have a collection of PFs. Years ago he invited several poets to write about ladders. Poems are ladders, especially quatrains where each pause is a rung. We scale down them, then climb slowly up again, checking the more interesting or unusual views. I sent twelve ladder poems, I like writing cycles, but JTN’s ladder project never took off and we never raised the subject again. Ladders were one of his vehicles. Others were tents, flowerpots, boats, caravans, sandcastles, birds, chrysanthemums. They betokened connections between the two big worlds of his world, well summarised by the poet Jan Pieklo as his “toy Prague bush house/ near Vaclavske Namesti/ in Angahook Lorne State Park/ of Victoria.” Vaclav, or Wenceslaus, is the same Wenceslaus of the carol sung each Christmas. After 1983, JTN installed a sealed room in his bush house to protect his artworks from more bushfires. He kept dozens of notebooks and sketchbooks. He made many kinds of handwriting. He put me on to Bohumil Hrabal, for which I am annually grateful. He loved Maurice Sendak and would have enjoyed the valedictory ‘My Brother’s Book’: “While Guy wheeled round in the steep air/ A crescent in the sky,/ Passing worlds at every plunge-/ Dropping down and down/ On soft Bohemia.” That landlocked land is many passing worlds from the Great Ocean Road, with its ever-present strait of blue on one side of the motional car. Lighthouses were another of JTN’s constant vehicles. There are many of his paintings, prints, and drawings in our house. There is a set of five of his boat prints, set somewhere off the coastline: inkwell boat, semicolon boat, fire boat, hillside town boat, angel wing boat. The painting everyone sees upon entering the front door is one of his caravans, at rest after many journeys. The hillside painting on the caravan could be Prague or it could be the Otways.