Ordinary (October)

I grew up with the Sundays after Trinity. They were so ordinary. I suppose it’s where we find ourselves, Ordinary Time. We have the Moon but we cannot always have Venice. Earth, but not always Uluru. Breath, but not ecstasy. Ordinary Sundays still have O’Clock. The sun rises on the good and the evil, and on their children. Rises on another ordinary October day of our extraordinarily extraordinary Extraordinary. Days are put aside for God becoming flesh, God raising from the dead, God sending breath. Given such overwhelming miracles, we should be grateful for something so ordinary as Ordinary Sundays.

OED (October)

The enduring head of a former English Department, Intercultural Communications or something, wrote a newspaper review of one of those OED histories. His trained anti-imperial post-colonial mind quickly identified the OED as imperial and colonialist. I will never, he declared, read it the same way again. Given his vehemence, why bother? The greatest poet (arguably, always) at the End of Empire, safe in NYC, wore out his OED and thought to purchase a new set. His face was wrinkled with innumerable profound cross-references. On his third cigarette after breakfast he gleefully scanned Sir James Murray’s columns: Octavo, Octet, Octillion, October…

Oeuvre (October)

You cannot make an omelette without breaking oeuvres. To oeuvre is human, to forgive divine. Look on my oeuvres, ye Mighty, and despair! Why go on? The French may be “too ironic”, but they still want to store every oeuvre in a cabinet. Pléiades cramp style. Why can’t they leave things alone? Chillax. The Chinese, by contrast, invented paper. Oeuvres were calligraphed up and down the length. Perhaps it was plentiful paper caused armies to burn enemy libraries during campaigns. Oeuvres will be replaced soon enough, they thought. “That October,” loosely translated, “was a bad month for the Ming Dynasty.”

Omniscience (October)

How do we get our head around it? It’s beyond me. I shelve Aquinas every week, but do I understand? Even Christ answered questions with quicksilver questions and he didn’t keep diaries. October? Blank. Know-alls are unpopular, we know they don’t know all. Argentine novelists write stories about libraries of everything known. Impossible, no one knows our secret thoughts. Argentine popes say God knows: it’s as well we have someone to share them with. It does my head in, omniscience. And just when we start to explain omniscience, a medieval philosopher comes up with omnipresence. Why does he do that?

Olivetti (October)

Childhood longhand was a winding road of crossed teas and dotted eyes, pleasurable concentration. The teenage bold move-up to typewriters was pressing, manias forcing rapid words. There was Olympia and Underwood, but Olivetti was something else. Skyblue casing came from Renaissance painting, the keys cute as a Fiat. October essays, fomented letters, confetti poems generated from its perfect engine. Golfballs, memory, processing – inventions since could not displace our admiration. Computers did it for typewriters. The squat Apple box was too much temptation, even if today it’s a bad prop from Dr. Who. Typewriters became collectibles, curiosities for our children’s childhoods.

Oddment (October)

Computer springs, betting tickets, fizzy bottles. Whatever happened to ‘Keep Australia Beautiful’? Scattered sheets of Herald-Sun, dated October, unread. Half-empty Slurpee buckets. Wrappers, fliptops, chip bags. It usedn’t to be like this on trains. Banana skins, Mac attack, dead sandwiches. Don’t these people have homes to go to? Clothing for The Unartful Dodger: beanie, scarf, deco bracelet. Then, some oddments beggar belief. Fractured phone, moonstone brooch, a $50 note. Lift up some litter and there they are. Authorised Officers check our Mykis, but do they clean up after themselves? “Don’t forget to touch off.” As if we could ever forget.

Onesie (October)

Our special line of onesie is on display in a street or house near you. This onesie is a one-piece item of covering made of soft pliable material, pink, white, brown, black. Worn for sleeping, working, recreation, in fact all-round use by both young and old alike. Our onesie expands, sometimes unpredictably, to suit the individual wearer, though with age the lining stretches and parts can sag or droop. Special features include slits that open and shut when the wearer wishes to see and nails that grow of their own accord. Full replacement every seven years. Going fast this October. 

Orifice (October)

‘One log, nine holes’ is an ancient riddle I read once somewhere and not in a golfing book. Two O’s of the eyes take in half of our world at a time.  The O’s of hearing, in one ear and in the other. O of the mouth, like Jonathan Jo in A.A. Milne, shaping every watery sound: Artichoke, Electricity, October. The O yes or O no of scents in the nostrils as they regulate breathing. O of the anus, O indeed, but healthful and harmless. And O of the genitals, without which life as we know it would not exist.

Of (October)

My colleague Susan Southall writes blogs. She adopts the titling convention of ‘On’ before the subject. ‘On Hope’ she announces. ‘On Remission’ she warns. Like its cousin ‘Of’ it hovers, petite and (sometimes) portentous. How did this convention evolve? John Florio translated Montaigne (1603). ‘Of Feare’. ‘Of Steeds, called in French Destriers’. Montaigne uses ‘De’, implying in the process he knows as well as his reader the subject will never be exhausted. To assay is easy, but he keeps writing to understand what he understands, better. What do we know? Of Translation? Of Understanding? Of October? Of Anniversaries? Of Anything?

Ownership (October)

Australia is, for some, a marble table in the Prime Minister’s suite, suitable for coffee trays, big deals, and jumping on. The former Treasurer stomped, the Loans Minister danced on it and broke his leg. The table was smashed. So was the deposed PM, tongue rotating in his head at 33 1/3 rpm. It was quite a breakup, that October, full details still to be pieced together. Australia is despoiled and divided, the whole time having a party. Offcuts were proudly displayed on desks, reminder of the greatness once bestowed on them by the people, trophies of achievements they destroyed.

Ochre (October)

Our trim beauteous train carriage glides through the ochre cuttings of Heidelberg, another sunny October morning. Eyes turn momentarily from ‘Journey to the End of the Night’ or the phone screen message home or makeup time in the tiny oval mirror or waking-up absentmindedness to sudden ochre peripherals of rock dirt gravel striated in sloping walls racing past train windows. Millennia old floodlines and upheavals are ochre hardness, quartz dullness, speckled white stone. Millennia, as if the word were meaningful like our thoughts. But then we emerge again, private peak-hour journeyers, into the greens and blues of the Eaglemont embankment.

Opposing (October)

Is there any way out of opposing dualistic thinking? Religions say there is, though even they’re prone to dualisms. Lately we have entered the Digital Age, which we are reminded of each time we click ‘Like’ on blog or Facebook, as though irresistibly. Up it goes, a thumb that flags our apparent desire to give approval. Australians are especially proud to share the continent with marsupials, many of which have opposing digits, in particular koalas. Whether February, June, October, they are high in trees giving their thumbs-up in typically prehensile fashion. Most birds have opposing digits, which makes sense, really.

Offending (October)

Only at university, nearer October than March, could one get involved in a production of Peter Handke’s ‘Offending the Audience’ (‘Publikumsbeschimpfung’) that eschewed the original austere directions. Actors delivered lines in varieties of voice, mocked styles of blocking, and played Berlioz at earthquake levels. There are no parts, it is one long screed attacking the staid pretensions of German theatre-going in the sixties. But offending the director and cast is equally possible, with dismissive reviews and the wife of one well-known Melbourne theatrical declaring loudly after the final lines, “Well, we could have spent an hour more productively than this!”

Octave (October)

October 4^th 1582 (Julian) was the day before October 15^th 1582 (Gregorian). It was the month when, in Rome, the days shifted from Old Style to New. The bull ‘Inter Gravissimus’ made it so, whatever the many objections of Protestants and Orthodox. It was also, though no one much noticed at the time, the day when, in Alba de Tormes, Teresa of Avila died. Did she die on the night of the fourth or the morning of the fifteenth? And was a child born on the fourth to be named Teresa within the Octave, or one born on the fifteenth?

Olive (October)

Olives were an hors-d’oeuvre, on a pick with cheese cube, in our childhood. Olive was on British Paints colour charts, we could paint a door olive. We were bottled up. The Mediterraneans changed our English ways: scattered in pizzas, fresh with fish. Salty or sweet, black or green, we were on a Grand Tour without leaving our kitchen. Kalamata, Spanish, we called them out at market. Olive oil flowed. Olive trees were spotted in nature strips. Hors-d’oeuvres became antipasti, a whole meal. We got on planes for well-watered places like Italy. Groves covered October hillsides. The world was our olive.