Yesterday (December)

Yesterday’s Christmas, and Christmases before that, toughened memory of human birth, and God’s. Yesterday’s star of Bethlehem, an account best left for wisdom to ponder, children to understand on first sight. Yesterday’s December, examinations over, beach cricket, or Wiltshire under snow, or someone to go with somewhere new. Yesterday’s song of yesterday’s love, recalling the todays we live for, for someone other than ourselves. Yesterday’s novel, a sensation a season, that couldn’t be put down, now cannot be found when required. Yesterday’s stars, all we’ll ever see, beaconing if not beckoning light years away, ago, from our midnight garden party.

Exoplanet (December)

What on Earth do we expect of exoplanets? Is it survival of the flittest, flattest, foamest? Survival may not be nature’s order, rather a harmony in harmony with rotation. Or death may have no dominion where life is a permanent contract with elements. Do they, if we can call them ‘they’, hone the equivalent of telescopes to observe little us through their equivalents of eyes? Is photography relevant, or radio? And why oceans anyway? Happily heliocentric, geocentric and anthropocentric, are we also crazily aquacentric? Is colour a thing, or millions of colours? Have ‘they’ advanced to the mad December rush?

Space (December)

Blackboards of equations, whiteboards of diagrams do nothing to explain Einstein’s idea that space is not ‘nothing’; how space is a physical entity that interacts with matter. His words are a two-line poem: “Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move.” This words explanation is more domestic than it first sounds. Reading them during December holidays, in the Brian Wilson quiet in my room, my home is a model universe. Kitchen cupboards tower like Pillars of Creation, Christmas lights manufacture starry backdrops to galaxies of furniture. Air is space, curving everywhere, telling matter how to move.

 

Sun (December)

Coagulating luminescent streams, rippling heat ripped, trailed explosive tongues, sun unfurls radiant arcs. Sun consummates constant breaks into darkness, burns bruising. Self-exploding survival mechanism, nurseries of tumult flowers, departments of instant fire mountains vanishing, sun has nowhere to go but out. Sun cures us, can kill us. Watch sun outshine its brightest offshoots, sleeves going somewhere in. Sun, who all my life dost brighten; light, who dost my soul enlighten, rendering the means to make hymns. Sun, eclipsed each day, we rest from in Earth’s shade, egos intact, playful with our fragile inventions like jobs markets, world trips, December horoscopes.   

Brilliant noise, by Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruXUmlvJ2qI

Book (December)

For Christmas I’m given Phaidon’s new blockbuster, ‘Universe: exploring the astronomical world’. Over 300 pages of art and science images from every century, so heavy it rests on a stand to read. Traherne said we could happily spend years studying the skies, while love is where we learn. Hence ‘A different person’, memoir of the American poet and rich kid James Merrill, alive to la dolce vita. Meanwhile, this December, Bridie absorbs ‘Paris through a fashion eye’, ‘Vogue on Yves Saint Laurent’, anything haute couture. With, for light relief, ‘Blowfish’s Oceanopedia: 291 extraordinary things you didn’t know about the sea’.

Quote (December)

In my dream the most remarkable set of quotes is being collected. They drift into view and I copy-and-paste them, computer-like, into a box. Even in my dream I know that if I wake the quotes will prove childish, possibly meaningless, but that now they have only to be arranged right to form a stunning poem. The quotes are made not so much of words as colours, or unnamed extraordinary calligraphic shapes, or planes of perception. Some quotes are more a hot December day at Wye River before storm clouds; a face; an old movie. Frustrated arranging, I wake up.

Composition (December)

[Seven of seven in B&W] Body comes out that way, out of the body. We’ve no say in it. Hungry from the first, thirst for water, always more water. Stand in the street, weave across a field, body a survivor midst natural colours. What we could do without a body: nothing. Body goes that way then this way. December is delirious a month, a drug, dreams come true. Others take photographs to pass time, or the pain. It’s like watching  shadow draw. It never ends, extending and withdrawing given the light of day. What we could do without photographs: anything.

Niépce (December)

[Six of seven in B&W] The first photograph, that has survived, is of that form beloved of French artists, the roofscape. It was taken in 1826 or 1827, let’s say December, to remind us that cities like Melbourne exist entirely inside the photographic age. The image was made on lithographic stone coated in bitumen that was dissolved in lavender oil. Through the murk we discern not a face or natural shape, but geometry. Nicéphore Niépce was behind it all, or ahead of it all, coating it all, it an end product of other experiments he called heliography, or ‘sun drawing’. 

Brownie (December)

[Five of seven in B&W] Brownie was carefully boxed up, wall inside wall, eyes front, and easy to use, which made it easy to sell. Snaps, the negative rolls enlightened for positive ends, developed into bits of squares recalling every occasion. Carefully our ancestors measured black corners, fitted the squares into corners on grey felt paper. Ephemeral minutiae time turns into talismans. My father stands on a rock outside Bright, the caption in fountain pen ‘Sir Edmund Hillary’. Mother, on same rock, ‘Lady Hillary’. Dad with his Eliot: “The evening with the photograph album.” Mother carefully stores them for posterity.

Hasselblad (December)

[Four of seven in B&W] In my twenties I absorbed great photographers. An hour with Cartier-Bresson left me seeing everything as a decisive moment. After Ansel Adams no landscape came up to scratch. Kertész pictured my absorption in books. I was captured by their erudite talk about Leicas and Hasselblads. Warhol though made sheets of famous friends at Studio 54, his dachshund dressed as the pope. I couldn’t like looking at other people’s breakfasts January through December, themselves somewhere or other, no light check. Photography was art from the start, but I lived in denial. It was always social media.

Selfie (December)

[Three of seven in B&W] Me with bestie. Me with pyramids. Me with camel. Signatures of all things I happen to be in front of at the time. Me explores my space. Me conquers the world. Been there, done a selfie, with my bestie. Who am I, sending selfies, to my list? Or there’s anti-selfie. A full frontal of the hand that serves the selfie. An aerial shot that’s mostly hairdo. Angle centrally the nose-ring me inserted with help from bestie. Me refuses the 24-hour happy. Me knows December is Advent waiting, then Christmas given. Me looks beyond camera’s wants.  

Written for Talitha Fraser and in honour of what I call her anti-selfies. Also written for Kate McAll in response to her invitation to the B&W challenge.