Niche (January)

Nietzscheans find their niche. We meet them at university, supermen studying torts. They know they know everything. No time for namby-pamby humanity. The God-is-Dead crowd finger keyboard hollows with his wilful dictums, natural as nurture. They’re not joiners, every Nietzschean his own man. They vomit humble pie, legends in their own armchairs. They slump into their reupholstered niche, unlike Nietzsche. Alpine heights were his level, just Friedrich and his mountain storms. He notched rocks in January snow, inked jokes about lawyers, squibs on the Number Nein.  He was killed by a horse, or a tram, one of those. Not nice.

Inspiration (January)

It’s irritations get the words flowing, outrages we fix with a pen. Things we accept don’t rate a mention, life as it is goes on as it was. Beauty is pluriform and uncontainable, but effect is improved by removing certain paragraphs. By quoting the great man to enhance his greatness, he’s turned into a sound byte, a cute cut-out, a halfwit. January is packed with action we script into an attraction headlined January. We all grow up, eventually, taking our traumas with us. Breathing in and breathing out is, unlike writing, not prone to doubt. Paranoia spins a pretty proverb.

Heat (January)

Outside at 5.30 is warmer than inside. Getting on the train’s like stepping into a fridge. It’s impossible not to like palm trees on a hot day. Even the palm trees in Bentleigh. January. People choose not to move. They’ve given up on their screens. Too slippery? First light hits fences hard. But the crepe myrtles are soft as raspberry jam. It’s a great ball of unending fire, reflected in the train window. Though even the sun will come to an end, according to my daughter. The carpark is irritated crows. Southland isn’t Paradise, but at least it’s a fridge.

  

Tolerance (January)

Tolerance is preferable to intolerance. It is a test and result of virtue, in particular the virtues of patience, charity, self-restraint, humility, kindness. To ask for tolerance, or forbearance, is to ask for these things in our selves, and others. It means learning to live with difference in others. It doesn’t mean remaining silent in face of intolerance and wrong. Reluctance to accept difference (SPEH pew sheet, 28^th January) is a norm of life and the start of understanding, not its end. Is tolerance the same as toleration? Is showing tolerance the same as tolerating? Tolerare (Latin): to bear, endure.

Walking (January)

Two large people walking hand-in-hand toward a tram stop, the man with a long metal stick to feel the ground, so maybe he’s blind. A woman slumped forward walking across river bridge towards the casino, an old string bag full of things slung over her shoulder. A man with sky-blue sunglasses and ear cords walking past the storey-high windows. A woman in pink hijab and brown dress walking her child in a pram with bouncing cute distractions. A man in pointy helmet walking his bicycle uphill through the January heat. A young woman walking her luggage towards the airport bus. 

Weekend (January)

There’s an impasse. Clearly, people will never agree about January 26^th. Dispossession means everything’s taken away from you. But other arguments shout at corners, or in someone’s sleep. The anxiety of losing a long weekend, for example, which is why Australia Day was introduced anyway. Have you noticed there are months without long weekends? This has to stop. Months without long weekends should have one, by right, and it will be Australia Day. Why keep to one? We could have several each year. People resent NSW. But if annually each state nominated its own Australia Day long weekend, problem solved.

Australia (January)

From Latin. Language of an empire. Former empire. Official. Faraway. South land. Seafarer dream. Imagined. Indeterminate. Cloud on a globe. Dragons. Great south. Ballast balancing the North. Theory abandoned after Isaac (laughing muchly) Newton (checking his apple watch). What was Matthew (first author amongst many) Flinders (of fragments, splinters) thinking? Nothing at all like Wales. Here be gryphons. As he ended the chart. Coast mostly. Or Holland. Blue mountains. January heatwaves. Determinate. Material. An island continent. Post-Sahul, shape of a tropical fish. As former empire thinks Scythia. The first provincials have other names. Had. We don’t know them. Do we?