Symphony

 

Image of Iso-mandala no. 274, made in early 2021

It is the first time we have been in the concert hall named after Rupert Hamer for over two years. How strange to see the Melbourne Symphony regulars milling in the foyers and corridors. Even the increase in unmasked faces lent a peculiar new reality to the gala opening. The theme of the whole concert was new beginnings, so Josef Haydn’s ‘Le Matin’ was as good a place as any to start. The marvel of sunrise fills the first movement, with the other movements fulfilling further expansions of morning. I liked the way the conductor’s hands fluttered lightly like birds in the direction of different sections as they took up the call. Jaime Martin worked without the score, enjoying each moment of Haydn’s day as it arrived. It is impossible, once familiar with Haydn, not to laugh along with him at the inventive games he plays with the instruments. Although lightness is all, his characteristic masterful unpredictability was a harbinger of the much more grandiose unpredictability at play in the final piece, Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony. In between we heard ‘Baparripna’ (‘Dawn’ in Yorta-Yorta), composed by Deborah Cheetham. William Barton’s yidaki (didgeridoo) talked up different bird sounds to those of Haydn’s, the raw aural activity of early morning. His breathings and songs were joined by the orchestra in a glorious cacophonous event, designed to push the limits. The program notes explain we are hearing the magpies in the blue solitude, a sound known very well to Australians. Cheetham’s music lifts the lid of night onto a new day, a place of increasing complexity and beauty. I was not sure if the romantic second half of ‘Baparripna’ was intended to resolve or heighten the thrilling first half, but I wasn’t about to argue as layers of sound merged into an almost conventional classical conclusion. The ovation was as excited as the music. Haydn and Cheetham’s work were a good foil for the complete sound sensation of Mahler, a composer living also in his own country in space and time. The scale and variety of his symphonic experiments, their simultaneous intimacy and grandeur, take us into our own Mahler-like emotions and memories. Program notes explain that No. 1 is inspired by an unhappy love affair with the singer Johanna Richter, which may be why I heard the second movement as a set of Viennese waltzes, each one of which gets crazier and out of kilter, until Gustaf has to try again with a different waltz. Softest sounds and loudest sounds exist together in unexplained yet brilliant relationship. Outside later we walked across Princes Bridge in the crowded warmth of Saturday night, hearing snatches of tram bell and busker sax and party laughter, the better for a return to the eclectic and limitless music of a symphony orchestra live.      

Asperges

 

Musings for the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Quinquagesima), the 27^th of February 2022. Pew Notes, St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

Asperges is about the first experience we have during most of the year when we gather for High Mass worship at St. Peter’s. The words of Psalm 51 settle us into the worship; they also set the reality of our being there. Because this is not just a case of ‘come as you are’, which is anyway a given. Sometimes we ‘come as we aren’t’, full of illusions and quiet desperation and self-interest before all else. The words speak to the state we are in, our need for forgiveness, our varied messiness or pride or unhappiness or whatever. They gently but firmly ask for mercy, with the belief that genuine repentance can bring relief. When our sin is ever before us, our deepest need is restoration to life, even fullness of life. It is a call to become more than just who we are now. Psalm 51 is a prayer for transformation. 

The Gospel is heard at every service of the year and today’s three sayings are fairly direct awakenings to the fact that we are not all we think we’re cracked up to be. No one wants to hear that modern life is a case of the blind leading the blind. Jesus the teacher is explaining how we become more like him, our blindness cleaned up, our illusions overcome, the more we follow his way, as distinct from heading happily into some pitfall or other. His way is that of love and forgiveness. The hard, yet simple, process of transformation is possible. He has a way of saying it that makes us listen. 

Even if we are thick as two short planks, we see Jesus’ joke about the speck in someone else’s eye. He does not exaggerate when he says that the object in our own eye may be so big we cannot see it for looking. The beam (Greek: dokon) is the largest piece of timber in house construction, a measure of the immense difference between us in our mansion and those who have next to nothing to own, a mote of sawdust. As Psalm 51 has it, “a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” 

More arrestingly still, Jesus challenges us with what is in our hearts, whether of good or evil, “for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.” It’s not a case of one or the other. Each of us lives with choices in our knowledge of good and evil. For the Psalmist, the choice is to “teach me wisdom in my secret heart,” to ask God to “blot out all my iniquities.”

Philip Harvey

Skyline

 

When I was a child there was a campaign to ‘Keep St. Paul’s In The City Skyline’. Badges, pins, spoons, pamphlets and other paraphernalia were earnestly distributed to the good people of Melbourne, the purpose being a restoration appeal. Some of the stone was starting to chip off the old blocks. I thought like a child. My child’s mind thought it a plea to galvanize opposition to encroaching skyscrapers. In particular the two square blocks of nothing-in-particular the Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria promised to build across the street. I was too young to synthesise the finer points of their arguments. Postcards of the period still portrayed polychrome Melbourne on the Yarra, leafy avenues and princely bridges, with the spires of the cathedral dead centre. Obviously, this was the skyline as intended, the place for a village, St. Paul’s the furthest place upstream vessels could venture in 1835. The still point of the turning world, almost. Campaigners remembered their own ‘30s, the spires completed before a clear blue sky, an edifice to make lovers of neo-gothic proud, and Melburnians impressed. These childhood visions were not about to be spoilt by mere blots on the landscape, whatever their claim to modernity. It sounds a forlorn hope, nostalgic wishfulness, to keep a building prominent in the skyline. My dentist, a man of conservative habit, railed at all the cranes and sky-high girders of the ‘80s skyline, having only bad words for the blatant culprit, Premier John Cain. Why that civil mild-mannered premier, rather than any other premier, was to blame for the daily alteration of the skyline it was difficult to ascertain, but everything about Southbank everything everything was laid firmly at the feet of one person, and the expansion of skylines in all directions ever since was the fault of Cain Junior, he of cabbage hat and blessed memory. Everything. Others blame New York. Perhaps my dentist had nightmares about endless rows of teeth erupting from everywhere at once; he retired soon after. Centuries come and go. Progress persists in its regressive way. More and more mere blots arise, made to look something-in-particular, encased in filigree steel patterns or shaped like a lemonade bottle squashed by a tram. Such skylines have gone viral far and wide, mushrooming squares in suburban settings that give fresh meaning to the placename Box Hill. Soon Moonee Ponds will be the Box Hill of the West, and where will it all end? Paraphernalia to address these encroachments are in short supply as the greater metropolis turns into a giant’s causeway, everyone afforded their own local skyline, unstoppable chips off the old block, every suburb with its own Box Hill.

War

 

“That nations should not be oppressed, and that there should be none of these useless wars, and that men may be indignant with those who seem to cause these evils, and may not kill them – it seems that only a very small thing is necessary.” This is Aylmer Maude’s translation of words in a pamphlet by Count Leo Tolstoy [‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ (1900)] that was prohibited in Russia, while its German version was seized and all copies destroyed as “insulting to the German Kaiser.” What is necessary? “It is necessary that men should understand things as they are, should call them by their right names, and should know that an army is an instrument for killing, and that the enrolment and management of an army – the very things which kings, emperors and presidents occupy themselves with so self-confidently – is a preparation for murder.” Tolstoy argues that people go along with their leaders because they are hypnotized by what is going on. Men are stupefied into becoming “instruments for murder”. It’s not one particular person who causes oppression and wars. The misery of nations is caused “by the particular order of Society under which the people are so tied up together that they find themselves all in the power of a few men, or more often in the power of one single man: a man so perverted by his unnatural position as arbiter of the fate and lives of millions, that he is always in an unhealthy state, and always suffers more or less from a mania of self-aggrandizement, which only his exceptional position conceals from general notice.” Tolstoy concludes by saying “we may help to prevent people killing either kings or one another, not by killing – murder only increases hypnotism – but by arousing people from their hypnotic state.” ‘How much land does a man need?’ is the title of one of Tolstoy’s short stories (1886). A peasant woman says to her sister, “All may be well one day, the next the Devil comes along and tempts your husband with cards, women and drink. And then you’re ruined. It does happen, doesn’t it?” The husband hears this and complains that his only grievance is that “I don’t have enough land. Give me enough of that and I’d fear no one – not even the Devil himself!” But the Devil has been listening the whole time and decides to play “a little game” with the husband.  The husband finds more and better and larger deals for acquiring land, sowing crops, building impressive homesteads, and all the time the land deals get more outrageous, and further away from his home in distant provinces. Until finally he is tempted by a land claim that brings about his own demise. Without spelling out the moral, Tolstoy’s concluding sentence records the peasant’s workman digging his grave, “six feet from head to heel, which was exactly the right length – and buried him.”

Mamafesta

 

Saturday afternoon is Finnegans Wake afternoon, you can feel it in the air. Zoom picks up after two o’clock and the participants pick up where we left off last month, at page 104 in the Penguin edition. It is Anna Livia Plurabelle, “the Bringer of Pluralities”, and “her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest,” when in fact the mamafesta has gone by many names, or titles “at disjointed times.” The time is out of joint, Shakespeare peeking in at any moment, but recorded time is discontinuous, solved in this case by a list of titles that tell her story instead. That is Joyce’s procedure, tell the story through a three-page Rabelaisian list of titles playing on and punning upon titles the reader may recognise. One such title in the mamafesta is the book ‘For Ark See Zoo’. That’s true, the ark is a zoo, but then it’s The Zoo, it’s everything in creation in one ship in space. Then, note the A-Z nouns. This is the title of an encylopaedia of everything living. The title even makes good-natured mockery of an encyclopaedia’s limits, its cross-referencing system, as if to consolidate what’s going on. The Jewish myth in Genesis of remaking creation keeps moving in cyclic fashion: zoos are one outcome. And here’s a second of the 125 titles of the untitled mamafesta (manifesto, but not ‘man’, mama; also, a fiesta) under discussion on zoom this sunny afternoon: ‘The Log of Anny to the Base All’. Anny is Anna, but the mathematicians amongst us notice instantly that it’s a logarithm. But not just any logarithm, a logarithm that is off the charts, one that operates to the ‘Base All’, in other words that is not number-limited (even at this stage I have to believe what they’re saying) but is everything. This is not how logarithms are designed to work, which may itself be Joyce’s little joke on logarithms. In terms of flow, fluidity, river recreating existence, however, Joyce’s science is immense, especially as it’s all said in eight words that make no sense to the common reader, though something to a group of common readers on zoom on a Saturday afternoon. In the writing of Finnegans Wake, Joyce played a game with people for seventeen years of not disclosing the true name of what he called Work In Progress. All the titles on pages 104-107 are candidates for the title of his book. I like ‘Intimier Minnelisp of an Extoreor Monolothe’. Would this have sold x copies? Intimate mini-lisp of an exterior monologue. That’s a first translation. It describes my experience of reading this book. There are times when what I most value are the personal lines that speak to me in what is a big bull, a minotaur of a book at times, loved and maybe also loathed. I pick up threads that will get me out of the maze, little by little. Next month we finish the list of mamafesta titles, over three hours. Fun for some, in the sun.

Opera

 

He has his work cut out for him, ruling the whole world. The whole world answers back. There was a time when he thought he was clever. It explains why he’s such a mess. We could even start to feel small sympathy. But he’s a god, he can loose fire on the whole world at a moment’s notice. We don’t have that kind of reach. Just as well this is all happening in a theatre. The red upholstery, ever before us, is a better focus for thought than the grandiose set changes and endless sky backdrops on stage. Masterfully wrought though they be. Sometimes heroes concentrate on the here-and-now. Where to go? What to think? Have they outrun the wolves? The children have brought disgrace on the family and his wife, not happy, has got Wotan to sort it out. Gods are abrasive. Gods raise the heat. Everyone enjoys watching a huge argument, especially sung. We laugh gently at the worst of their exchanges in the surtitles. We note how they drink more than they eat. Marvel at how Wagner never says in five minutes anything that can be said in half an hour. They must have had all the time in the whole world in 1870. We can only imagine. Emotion is far from abrupt. Emotion is languid, running back over the main issues at leisure. Truth takes time to sink in, so sing the truth seriatum. Sink and swim. We watch the conductor, his lifetime supply of emojis drawn by hand in the air their own version of the ruthless events above the pit. The conductor knows all this like the back of his hand. Brother sleeps with sister. Swords and daggers make their point. The program notes leave us in the dark. Instead of a plan then, there’s more singing. Time to spend studying the costumes, elegantly inapposite for the brutal conversations sung in practised emphases down below the dress circle. It’s hard being an eyeball. Even harder being Wotan. Sorting out his children will not end well, for someone very much in need of Bad Dad Therapy. Moments at a time we stare into the pool in the mineral water bottle at our foot, hoping for the best. Are relieved to find Wagner offers an interval. Fortunately hope arises in the form of Brünnhilde. She knows the score. She gives individuation a good name. She speaks the word known to all mortals. As more heroes get pitched somewhere dead and heroic by silvery sirens, she breaks the pattern with Sieglinde’s method of dealing with all this craziness: deep sleep. We wonder at how someone can sleep upright that long. Given the territory though, we can guess first time which hero will broach her ring of fire. Meaning, more music, more gods losing it, more mineral water. There’s a pattern here, right? Still, death is not an option. We release ourselves from the shock of the old in heartfelt applause. Wonder without cease such sounds come from mortals. Then rise with the lights-up from the five-hour matinee, as if from a dream, exiting once more into the whole world. It is the same whole world. The latest heatwave makes an oven of Exhibition Street. Anyone with any sense holds onto their mask and wonders when, not if, Russia will invade Ukraine.

Element

 

The air is cooler today, for a warm day, refreshing after the weeks of heat. Windows are wound open for movement of air through the house and we can put the hot days into memory for a while. They cool in the mind. Every window of our house is green. It was planned that way when we moved here twenty years ago. The feathery leaves of Gleditsia ripple jauntily, that survived the heat wave and then the heat wave. Twisty leaves of the cherry tree have endured more than their usual share, dropping early this year come autumn. Due to a swollen foot, I watch the action from the couch, the flowering gum at the front window, a circle of fallen red on the ground. Then return to my book, one I had forgotten I had, its Australian paper a browner shade of pale since it first saw light in 1993. Clouds have a way of being the same, but always different. This is not a paradox, it’s how clouds are. The tank in the shade of bamboo and nelly-kelly shades in turn the weigh of water, almost to the top, that skittered off the gutter chutes through last year. Quiet old rainwater, waiting heavily for the moment of release, when it will sprinkle the garden, again and again, almost like rain, making everything young. The rainwater that came in torrents, as predicted, when La Niña threw some wet ones from every corner of the South Pacific. We are all children of the same climate pattern. We gauge water levels by the greenness of the garden, water informing every leaf. Runoff rests in a large bin, too, where it descended in rushes down the spout. Now the cat is the only sound, sipping from the brim. He can do what he likes, go where he will, unlike the possums. The fire in the sky never lets up. The intensity flares and then filters, depending on planet tilt and cloud and canopy and roof. It is time for more reading in the shade of the main room, the soft side of the house, the book not so experimental as to raise the temperature. I rest my right foot on a cushion. The fires have been minimal on the east side of the continent this summer. The infernos on the west side are hard to read, memory having its lifetime load of bushfire snapshots. In the evening I may light a sandalwood stick with a match, to repel mosquitoes, and continue reading these elemental poems of Martin Johnston. The earth abides, its mass and particularity ever present underfoot. Though my foot is too sore to justify weeding or digging today. Earth, its limitless gradations of granularity tamped down gently by the feet of the creatures, reliant on its solid certainty. Tomatoes keep ripening, the artichokes need to be collected, and eccentric strawberries maintain a quiet succession of green-goes-red after the season has ended. Dry days drive us tentatively towards any screen that reports rain forecasts. The roots of everything are hanging on it.

Font

 

A new pair of glasses can help return you from 14-point to 12-point reading. Another benefit is being able again to read friends’ emails, those who delight in communicating via party-time 1920s Harlow Solid Italic or the impossibly 1950s font Gigli, all dimples, smiles, and curls. Truly, I am charmed by the lettering, but for comprehension please say it in Calibri. The font Ink Free is true to its name, as Ink Free letters disappear into the background due to a rapid increase in thinness. This is also called communication breakdown. The typeface dropdown list at the top of a digital document has revolutionised printing. But did anyone notice? The clean screen, like the blank page, is the playground of font fans. We can test a text with a vast range of classical, modern, and theme fonts, watching our words stretch pages. Goudy Stout turns our words into a billboard. Wide Latin threatens to break borders all over. On the other hand, tests with text may scrunch our best efforts. Lucida Consolata reduces a page of A4 text to a black window in the top corner. New bifocals won’t help there, not even a magnifying glass. Designers like to invent new fonts, as well, patenting their alphabets in case they become the next big thing, whether downward of 8-point or upward of 72-point. In this world of every lean and lacy letter, it’s no wonder someone has to do some benign enforcement, if only to be understood. Times New Roman is a common default setting and I use it without a second thought when preparing business memos or domestic emails. The words we transcribe with such sterling abandon onto social media are regularised in real time into Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, or Helvetica, whatever our computer’s sans-serif default happens to be. Who knew? Sometimes I wonder and stare at the words I make and try to imagine where they came from. My Garamond phase was like that. This font is named after Claude Garamond, obviously, a 16^th-century Parisian engraver and punchcutter. Every individual letter we write, with or without accents, in modern documents was carefully designed and created by a person called thus, a punchcutter. Punchcutter is not just a job description in a novel by Charles Dickens. If you look closely enough at the social congestion in a Brueghel painting, a punchcutter is working away at a top window, or trudging through the snow for lunch. It was their requirement to fashion out of metal the tiny tin letters that went into printing presses. Much as I like drawing alphabets during lectures, I cannot see myself converting them into tin type for fun and profit. I prefer dropdown menus. Hence, at present I am going through a Bodoni MT phase for bread-and-butter replies to official emails; Cambria for all my writing, it suits my eye contact.

Change

 

Eberhard Weber, his expressive German bass playing, so distinctive and elevating, his own, but ours, for hours, sounds like sounds from another time today, as I listen to its timing, its timeline like the road that bends over the red railway bridge at Ivanhoe and descends past the Boulevard across Darebin Creek towards the fantasy apartments of Yarra Bend in the middle of the pandemic. There’s only one, pandemic. In those days the common cold is what we caught, when we went out the front door. A plane flight to Stuttgart was but a taxi away. Mysterious how elegant music listened to over years with simple gratitude of a sudden with change sounds like messages from another age. The music signatures itself into time, a time before the global virus, a time of expanding world travel, toward a different future. This our future of contracting world travel, contracted thus. Listening to accomplished lines and riffs and improvisations as I travel along in a fitted face mask, I enjoy what a reviewer must once have called its “technical prowess”, the mask my last resistance to an invisible airborne Greek letter. I once went to hear Jan Garbarek, at Hamer Hall, I did, knew some of his records over and over, but someone said listen to the bass player, he is amazing. The bass line clean and direct, like the road taking me past garden homes and concertinaed shops towards the towers of change on our horizon, where the papermill was taken down brick by brick for an estate of apartments materialising in its place behind storeys of scaffolding. The road is just the same but how I see the road, has changed. I wish I knew where this music was taking me, and this road, comforting as both continue to be. Music, not played like that, or recorded quite like that, anymore. Cordial greetings from the 20^th century, says the electric bass of Eberhard Weber and his musical companions and the cambers of the old road making fluctuating dips and smooth bends across the riverine landscape. Like others I think, is it me? Is it all in my mind? The corona like a film in the mind, a turnover, turntable, a turnaround has separated me from former familiarities. I reach out to understand them and their directions, a bass line so confident so eloquent so virtuoso in artistry it speaks without punctuation like the early colonial road that ends where we choose to pull the car over and park in a vacant spot. Listening to the manner he found from classical training and jazz change and his own natural gift for composition and performance once, Eberhard Weber they tell me playing in chunky ways that are funky and spunky and vibey and truly other words that mean something different now to what they meant then. Later that day, dusk, I will go online to reconnect with his 20^th century scribbling and plunging bass lines like no one’s business.         

Launch

 

In late 1921 subscriptions were being placed for the forthcoming ‘Ulysses’. In Paris, excerpts were read aloud in public. The book was going to press. In this portentous climate, it was James Joyce himself who resolved that the launch be timed to occur on his 40^th birthday, the 2^nd of February 1922. That’s the day after the patronal day of St Brigid of Kildare. The Joyce family lived in Paris, a city that did not exist in the time of Homer and would have been vague information to Brigid of Kildare. Through December and January Joyce continued to send text updates to the printer Maurice Darantière, who worked in Dijon. The launch became the final deadline. Joyce was resigning to the idea the book was finally seeing the light of day, remarking, “The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.” Darantière promised to deliver three copies via the Dijon-Paris express on the morning in question, so it was all very tight. Sylvia Beach, publisher, went to the station at 7 am on the 2^nd to find that the printer had sent two of the promised three copies. Ten minutes by taxi she was able to present Joyce with his copy; the other she took to her shop Shakespeare & Co., where it was put on exhibit. As Richard Ellmann writes: “Everyone crowded in from nine o’clock until closing time to see it.” The other part of what we would call the launch occurred that night, when close Paris friends of the Joyces dined with them at the Italian restaurant Ferrari’s. Ellmann again: “Joyce sat at the head of the table, sideways, his legs crossed with the toe of one crossed again under the calf of the other. He wore a new ring, a reward he had promised himself years before. He seemed already melancholy, sighing now and then as he ordered dinner and ate nothing. He had brought with him a package containing his copy of ‘Ulysses’, and placed it under his chair. Nora remarked that he had thought about the book for sixteen years, and spent seven years writing it. Everyone asked to see it opened, but he seemed to shrink from producing it. After the dessert he at last untied the parcel and laid the book on the table. It was bound in the Greek colors – white letters on a blue field – that he considered lucky for him, and suggested the myth of Greece and of Homer, the white island rising from the sea. There was a toast to the book and its author which left Joyce deeply moved.”  Later in the evening, at another café Joyce drew the attention of three of the women in attendance to their inclusion in ‘Ulysses’ as figures in the marriage of the forest: Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, and the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac. Joyce wished to party on, but his wife Nora “emphatically shepherded him towards a cab.”