Hours

 

Little hours of a very good film in which the world makes perfect sense for an hour. Little hours of walks in the gardens where curvaceous natives break the pattern of straight streets. Little hours of medium print an accomplished book offers, words every one an amazement. Little hours that put aside the war for a while, its menacing meanings and foolish arguments. Little hours of preparing dinner. Little hours are not little minutes of eating dim sims or chit-chat or winding down the car window to watch the houses passing by. Little hours are not days of planning for the party and going to the party and partying and going home from the party and getting on the phone next day to talk about the party. Little hours are by and large more or less productive in one way or another. Little hours of zoom sessions once in a while when there is a real motive for logging on. Little hours of a phone call talking about everyone else and not ourselves. Little hours of listening to old vinyl finds played again on the ultra-modern record player, filling rooms and passageways with their sixties instrumentation. Little hours of forgetting the terms of the pandemic, distancing and sanitiser and case figures. Little hours of doing nothing, as the expression goes, but getting something done. Little hours of visiting the supermarket, reading all the labels on the jars, and imitating the bellbird beeps at checkout. Little hours of train travel with the last of the fully masked, reading clouds above the embankments, and full-scale Sistine graffiti along the cuttings. Little hours of asking why that person deserves all the help they can get while that other person needs help but does everyone’s head in. Little hours of magpies patrolling nature strips. Little hours of Little Bourke Street at the rowdy restaurant, the one with the amazing noodle dishes. Little hours of accepting climate change and wondering why the government is run by dickheads. Little hours of dreaming about life before the personal computer. Little hours of siesta with the curtains drawn. Little hours of thoughts more or less one-syllable words that come and go one by one in some sort of line. Little hours of writing sentences about a searching sentence-writer who lived in the seventeenth-century, not that long ago. Little hours of dreams in which the people could be me or the people could be you. Little hours of weeding terracotta pots and bedraggled vegetable beds. Little hours that clock in at forty-two minutes or stretch to eighty-four minutes, and so on and so forth between those extremes. Little hours of actually tidying the room with its piles of papers and random clothing and discarded blister packs. Little hours of a coffee with a friend talking only about each other’s stuff, and another coffee. Little hours booked in the diary for next week. Little hours of breath.

Repeat

 

How pleasant buoyant gregarious is the announcement at South Melbourne light-rail stop of a morning. “Gidday passengers! My name is Emmanuel and I’m from the rolling stock department here at Yarra Trams. Welcome aboard your Route 96 service. Please remember to touch on, take a seat if available, and enjoy the ride.” Readers look up. Students lift an eyelid. Parents with children cease their squabble. It could be the first morning of the world, the voice charming boyish laidback, his sinuous sentences singing to the inner ear a message of happy day. Passengers relax. Then as if in answer to a call, as happily dappled sunlight flickers through the tree-lined cutting, we hear him again, nearing Albert Park light-rail stop. “Gidday passengers! My name is Emmanuel and I’m from the rolling stock department here at Yarra Trams. Welcome aboard your Route 96 service. Please remember to touch on, take a seat if available, and enjoy the ride.” Well isn’t that nice, double Emmanuel, welcome aboard, like listening to a favourite hit song. Our favourable feelings about the rolling stock department and touching on are given an extra push. Still, it must be observed, feelings change over time, when for example the song remains the same, as we find the same loop playing every day of the week at South Melbourne light-rail stop, with a repeat as we approach the flowery gabled graffitied light-rail stop of Albert Park. “Gidday passengers! My name is Emmanuel and I’m from the rolling stock department here at Yarra Trams. Welcome aboard your Route 96 service. Please remember to touch on, take a seat if available, and enjoy the ride.” Eighteen months of our favourite hit each morning tends to alter our relationship to Emmanuel in subtle unwelcome ways. I have nothing against Emmanuel personally. He had a job to do, he did it, he did it well. I don’t even mind the voice as such. It has become a sound that means we are now in South Melbourne. Now if I want a message, I prefer Cheryl from the Network. Cheryl’s garbled announcements about journey delays, wearing masks, and weekend trackwork, interspersed with static, conclude with the scripted wish to have a great day everybody before the Network cuts in with beep beep beep. I suppose one day I’ll miss “Gidday passengers! My name is Emmanuel and I’m from the rolling stock department here at Yarra Trams. Welcome aboard your Route 96 service. Please remember to touch on, take a seat if available, and enjoy the ride,” but not just yet. I wish Emmanuel could vary the message. I imagine St Kilda crazies breaking into a karaoke of “Gidday passengers! My name is Emmanuel …” but they remain slumped and inert in corners of the carriage. Emmanuel is stuck on rotation, repeat, in a rut. It’s my stop next so it’s time to bid seeyalater, till tomorrow in South Melbourne.

Prodigal

 

Musings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Laetare), the 27^th of March 2022. Pew Notes, St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne 

“Being Swallowed up therefore in the Miserable Gulph of idle talk and worthless vanities, thenceforth I lived among Shadows, like a Prodigal Son feeding upon Husks with Swine. A Comfortless Wilderness full of Thorns and Troubles the World was, or worse, a Waste Place covered with Idleness and Play, and Shops and Markets and Taverns.” For the poet Thomas Traherne (1637-1674), people are insatiable. Our wishes and desires can even drive us to sell up our inheritance, go on world trips in search of everything or nothing, living out our version of the poverty of abundance: work, consume, be silent, die. Like the younger brother in this morning’s Gospel story, in the end there can seem no way back and no way out. 

But Traherne does not deny insatiableness. He understands we need to measure our desires and direct our insatiableness towards that which brings life, not emptiness and loss. He continues the memory of his own early adulthood in his ‘Centuries of Meditations III 14’: “As for Churches they were things I did not understand. And Scholes were a Burden: so that there was nothing in the World worth the having, or Enjoying, but my Game and Sport, which also was a Dream and being passed wholly forgotten. So that I had utterly forgotten all Goodness Bounty Comfort and Glory: which things are the very Brightness of the Glory of GOD: for lack of which therefore He was unknown.” 

When the brother returns home, instead of being treated as worthless or simply fit for hire, his father welcomes him ecstatically as found, honouring his existence in ways that confound the mere customs of society. He was dead to them, now he’s alive. The person who told them to go to hell has come back from some place like hell. 

Which leaves the awkward business of the angry elder brother. Like the teller of the parable, Traherne is not either/or, he’s both/and. He is inclusive. His message is the “Goodness Bounty Comfort and Glory” already available to the elder brother, that the father now is getting him to understand, again. And like so many of Jesus’ stories, it’s open-ended. What’s going to happen next? Somehow, it’s implicit in forgiveness. Any time spent learning and living God’s love is time not spent on husks.     

Philip Harvey

Tintin

 

This month my nineteen-year-old daughter talks about her first university assignments in early childhood development. Today, by chance, I came across this unfinished piece in the file dated June 2008: “Reading to your children is a rediscovery of the primary worlds of your own imagination. As if for the first time you plunge into the rivery world of Ratty and Mole, empathise (but only just) with Peter Rabbit sent to bed without supper, and engage in fisticuffs together with Bunyip Bluegum, Bill Barnacle, and Sam Sawnoff for possession of a self-reproducing pudding. I presumed that my five-year-old daughter would want to wait before setting off on the adventures of the Belgian journalist Tintin, but how presumptuous is that. The striking colours and fine drawing of these cartoon books, their ingenious dialogues and plot shifts, their quaintnesses and quirks, appealed immediately. We started with the least typical of all Tintin stories, ‘The Castafiore Emerald’. Usually, we get caught up in action, travel to foreign locations, get into scrapes, and solve questions of high espionage. This story takes place inside one house over a few days, its main interest being the theft of a jewel from the collection of Madame Bianca Castafiore, a self-absorbed opera diva who arrives on people’s doorsteps and chooses to stay. Suspects are numerous, above all the caravan of gypsies camped near the property at the invitation of the proprietor. Outsiders abound in Tintin, almost always turning out to be innocent of any wrongdoing. The truth lies closer to home. It’s apparent why children relate to the central character. Just as Lewis Carroll’s Alice walks through wonderlands of eccentric, dysfunctional and inexplicable adults, maintaining her authority through sheer common sense, so Tintin’s immediate circle of friends are oddballs that only accentuate Tintin’s natural good grace and rational responses to situations, whether elementary or alarming. Children need and seek the balanced viewpoint of a reliable character. And Tintin has a lot to cope with. Captain Haddock, for example. Hergé must have had a field day developing his second main character, an alcoholic seadog retired, but not from the grog. He is grumpy, cantankerous, prone to misjudgements. He has a short fuse and can explode at any moment at anyone with a barrage of his signature invective, “Billions of bilious blistering blue barnacles!” He is the irritable foil to the affable Tintin, just like the objectionable magic pudding. Haddock’s other occupations are reading books, smoking a pipe, and taking walks in the countryside. This man of leisure would live out his life undisturbed if it were not for his friend Tintin, whose high spirits and desire for sleuthing shakes Haddock out of his easy chair. Like Tintin’s dog Snowy, Haddock can have reservations about going on life-and-death tours of Africa or Asia, but the thrill of the new gets the better of him. This trio are the driving force of the narrative.” Elsewhere I summarise the plot as “based on an enigma rather than an adventure, as much ado about nothing is only resolved in the final frame on the last page.”

Sandwich

 

After church last Sunday at Camberwell, we went over to Mother’s for lunch. This was not going to be “lavish” as she had “a hundred things to do” and lunch would be sandwiches. The large tray that arrived at the table was lavish with the following neatly cut white rows: chicken and fine sliced avocado sandwiches; egg, lettuce and mayonnaise sandwiches, the egg not whizzed to a froth but chopped to keep the flavours. In this way we covered all bases in conversation as the rows gradually disappeared, helped by top-ups of mineral water. Thus restored, we got away soon enough to the hundred things that comprise Sunday afternoon. Sometimes when I look at a lunchbox it reminds me of primary school, the variations of sandwich from one week to the next that our mother produced without comment: crumpled Vegemite sandwiches, sometimes squared with a precise slice of cheddar; tomato sandwiches 10% soggy; ham and sweet mustard pickle sandwiches. The memory required to ring the changes for four ravenous children only later came to be seen as a thing of wonder and a joy forever. Once we went with Mother and Aunt Marjorie to see a children’s matinee in Collins Street; maybe it was Danny Kaye at the Regent. While we had ice-creams, Marjorie ordered an Open Danish. This was the most sophisticated thing we had seen all day, a sandwich constructed upon only one slice of rye, loaded with sumptuous sprawl. Marjorie would order shandies from the bar, an exotic accompaniment completely outside our orbit. Sweet beer was registered as a fact in the childhood mind, but when is a sandwich not a sandwich? Simply by asking we displayed the Englishness of our upbringing, never mind we had never been to England. The Australian talent for reducing long words to short words had yet to invent sanger. This was before the days of panini, tramezzino, focaccia and all the subsequent sandwich surprises that knelled the last of England for slips of skips like us. That said, England continues to be a default setting. We ordinarily expect at the vicarage garden party to be offered cucumber sandwiches, an expectation usually dashed by empirical observation: a singed sausage with BBQ sauce in a Tip Top crust. Lining up for my lunch order at the local Milk Bar (see also Convenience Store) I marvel at how they make a salad sandwich to hold together at a ratio of 5:1 salad:bread. The jambon has not caught on. We read how a Boston court case found that burritos, tacos and quesadillas are not sandwiches, being made from only one tortilla, not two. Aunt Marjorie would have thought this “stuff and nonsense”, and anyway, can a sandwich not have as many slices of bread as needed? ‘Hans Christian Andersen’ – yes, that would have been it!

Icon

 

Last night’s dream: “Instructions to the Archbishop of Moscow, on the Making of an Icon. Find a solid block of wood in the bombed-out theatre that housed the faithful below ground. A seat back of finest timber 40 x 80 cm is ideal. The dress circle has a good supply line, though some examples will be charred. Clean the wood with potable water, if available, wipe and dry. Gouge and hammer the timber image with a handy street weapon, for example a chisel or scraper. These tools can be found lying about on the footpaths. Once smooth, the timber is treated with oil, though you may have to wait for fresh imports from Poland. You are ready to sketch in the chosen saint of your icon. Find a model amongst the remnant of remainers in the city, perhaps in a local estate or at the docks looking at the damage to the places that were their world. And still are. Make sure their face has been washed and their hair and beard combed for the correct Byzantine look. Outlines of the saint are drawn using a grey compound of gesso and concrete dust scooped from bomb craters. Be careful not to fall into a crater as the mud level is deceptive. Your palette should include such helpful reminders of sources as lapis lazuli from antique Afghanistan and old gold from the ruined streets of Syria. Pay close attention to the face of the saint, his devastation and loss. You could compose a small homily about him on the subject of resilience. His eyes must follow the viewer with an intensity and benevolence second only to your own. Unless the food runs out, you should complete your icon after several sittings. Edge the frame with sunflower gold and set behind a line of candles. Be careful though not to position the candles too close to the completed icon or it will catch fire. This could lay waste your days of careful preparation and application, leaving you feeling unhappy, or even beside yourself for a short while. The city is almost empty, so consolation will not come readily. If you need counselling, it is wise to carry your phone with you at all times. Google Maps may be your only guide given half the street signs are flattened and twisted. A piece of glass between icon and flame will avert this disaster. There are still plenty of broken shards of window about the place that will serve the purpose. Clothing should not be demonstrative. Forgo a mitre and cope, in preference for a cassock. The hem of an old cassock is ideal for wiping the brushes after each session. You are virtually incognito, though some iconographers wear mufti because they are less likely to be mistaken for an enemy alien, arrested or shot on the spot. With practice you could try for a second, third, or fourth icon. Time is on your hands. The results gaze back at you with unnerving force.”

Thinking

 

Our being passes the whole of life thinking. We never cease from thinking, even in our most unthinking moments. Sleep and dream too seem to be thinking, a quiet combustible time we pass so much of our waking time trying to understand, in retrospect. We have access while thinking to all known created being, from the tiniest periwinkle to the vastest supernova. We can think about them all, though not all at once. Indeed, our thinking can only think so much at once, such that part of thinking seems to be putting a hold on thinking; self-regulation, in fact. Active awareness includes judgement, synthesis, decision, so many silent and formidable processes, yet instrumental as these are in being, they are still not everything that is thinking. Our senses colour in our thinking, while supplying a lifetime of sound effects to modify the effects. For some of us, it’s all too much. We would sometimes like thinking to cease, if only for a few hours or years. Opiates, addictions, movie marathons, and other remedies to the persistence of thinking are easily available, though they don’t stop us thinking. Reality meets us coming around the corner, one more thing to think about, only slow it down. Others cannot have enough, unceasing as they are in their pursuit of lifelong thinking. The language continues to evolve that might invent enough vocabulary for thinking, maybe. We walk around our highly tempered language like an actor, as stuff keeps happening. The next invasion, for example, is always possible and when it happens we take on the changes. The imagination expands the daily or yearly givens into possibilities that only thinking can do. The outside will offer mysteries that we must understand inside: sunlight or a falling leaf or a thunderbolt. Which leaves us with Thomas Traherne, or rather his saying: “As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.” [Centuries of Meditations’ I 8] Our thinking will continue, regardless of what he is saying, but what is he saying? That we live thinking, we don’t have to do anything about it. That we are conscious of how our thinking can take us anywhere anytime, but that to go where we think well requires a choice. We train ourselves in the way of thinking well, as if there is indeed a correct way. We can do this more and more, with practice, as we know that thinking well is true. It is simply learning to think in that way and not another. We can ask for something outside of ourselves to assist in overcoming the difficulty of thinking well. This way of thinking can be prayer, a whole mode of existence, a vast improvement. It is as easy and difficult as thinking well.

Desecration

 

The desecration tears up the earth, scalds the grass and enflames the treetops. Windows shatter together in highrises, the vacuum punch  turning them to charnels. Already the model dinosaurs of iron treadle across custom lines and into the countryside they intend to lay waste. They will join the wreckage over time. Many will explode by roadsides, their belly inhabitants lost names in someone else’s ground plan. Planes overhead are only going one way. It’s an ad hoc tik tok shock and awe war, the posts of the most close-ups coloured of the desecration for the online to flick through. Rivers also of broken bridges and highways of ruined trespass. Those who enjoyed last Christmas in their own warm interiors trudge to the borders in dishevelled lines, carrying their dogs, leaving behind a sudden ended lifetime to the fortunes of lost and found. The scatter of valuables is passing thoughts. Images of villages fall apart to the sameness of war, the deadly arithmetic of seized lands. The presentiments of imminent desecration leave city streets empty, long before curfew. Odesa tests the mood of early spring, Kyiv awaits what no one can guess. An entire theatre of diplomats make statements that are not dialogue, here on the safe side of the ocean. Statements that next week may have no force at all. The poison has never been anyone’s choice but the poisoner’s. No one and anyone sees him spiking the drink of his loyal opponent, a hospital regular. That other face turns green on the news screen. His bumbling spies could not kill their target, for trying, in the prestigious city of Salisbury. Therefore, what else is the poisoner but one who poisons everything impeding his ambition? It is his drug of choice, his favourite mixer, the final opiate for his kind of people. He has never kept it a secret, it’s a style he’s adopted from strongman history. For he will threaten to unscrew the vial of nuclear desecration. His orders will be undertaken by youths too young to remember what such clouds and winds have laid desolate. Such witnesses to the final clouds live disfigured to talk it through. His orders are signed off on a long table white as a superyacht, empty of guests or friends. Poison is his comrade, till all minds see the effects, downloading the latest updates day and night, scanning the worst, objecting to a polluted opinion. To resist the offer of poison is easy. To stand back is not everyone’s choice. To cease from desecration could be a word at the right time. Ceasing is the option. Stopping is the step. Withdrawing is the way forward. A tyrant has no time for thought. While the streets are free it’s time to take a walk and clear the head. The text for the hour is ‘Sufficient unto the day …’

Spin

 

His one claim was to turn a ball on a one-cent piece in any direction. It was an elevated game of two-up. The ball could go around their legs, across their guard, under their defence. He turned spin on its head. It was his trick to play, prestidigitation on a stage of evenly rolled grass. It was a wonder, and no wonder that he enjoyed every moment. No book or video will disclose the secrets that made him the magician. They arrived through the grandstand gates every day to see the rabbit pulled out of the hat, the sword transmogrified into a gladiolus. The ball could drop and rise at a whim, scoot past the ankle, wave at the bat passing by. The disbelieving looks of hapless batsmen raised the belief of longing spectators, reassured by such a simple excelling of the norm. They applauded as forlorn the batsman took the long walk to the pavilion, behind him the circle of magical jubilation. Everyone was stumped, except for the blond magician, keeping the next trick close to his heart as he turned to run in for the upcoming sleight of hand. Another hail of bails. Words were not his forte. Memorable quotes were not forthcoming, no stirring lines to get spectators out of bed in the morning. No fighting them on the beaches, on the landing grounds. There was no need when, with one dextrous hurl of the object at the pitch perfect point of turf with his singular spin enforced on that delivery, victory was more or less what else is there to say you know what I mean. Party time was assured, a way of life, tailenders then cocktails, the perfect end to a perfect day in the sun. He went up in the world, which for him meant flipping a coin and going to live in Brahton. There the lycra breezed past on all-twos, king-size mattresses were home delivered to the front gate, yachts wiggled past his vision and before he looked up next were gone. There was no one to say he can’t bat, can’t bowl. Though what he did say could be picked up by devices and relayed to the longing spectators in bytes of wow great sex and see you after the game. He let someone else put spin on the spin. For the trickster, there was always more jogging along the beaches and a field to turn the ball a foot around their feet. Long interviews, on the other hand, were not a magic show, only the dozens of ways of saying he had no regrets. Already the score was on the board, something for the statisticians to argue over during broadcasts. He was the bronzed magician in baggy green with zinc-white lips, excelling under the sun because it’s the norm. Bronzed statues of bronzed gods, each in the special sport contortion that brought them fame, encircle the stadium of dreams. His spin is one such gesture. His apotheosis shall be a name on a grandstand.

Principle

 

The day is young that is waking at the first with thoughts as they occur from out of dreams and into the vision of shapes again, familiar with the light. Many another has learned through time to give thanks at waking for the light itself and every existing being and thing that breathing permits them to enjoy, further. Such understanding comes voluntarily to the awakened one, never mind their level of lucidity or vagueness, cheeriness or grumpiness, refreshment or hangover. Waking at first is for many another the hour of least affected thought. The time before breakfast is when thought alone is sorting itself out, observing its mood, sitting quietly with an assembly of early morning ideas, making out some liveable form from which to proceed. It is the hour prior to conversation with the world, the trial and error of social media, the holdfast position in preparation for daily news updates, the hour before opening a book. This book by Thomas Traherne, for example. “He thought it a Vain Thing to see Glorious Principles lie Buried in Books, unless he did remove them into his Understanding; and a vain thing to remov them unless he did revive them, and rais them up by continual exercise.” This is paragraph 2 of Book IV of ‘Centuries of Meditations’. The editor has kept the seventeenth century spelling and capitalisation, which give the sentences all manner of pitches and tones and emphases, as if playing an organ. The author is not saying books are vain, but vain if they are not being used for the purpose intended. For him understanding grows, the conversation goes on regardless, in a day where books will lend to the conversation. He removes the contents of the book, by which he means transfers the thoughts to his own mind, the place where they may live again. The sentences of his book are the beginning of the day of their thought, general statements and fundamental truths and primary assumptions that he calls principles, which is why he finishes this paragraph with these words. “Let this therfore be the first Principle of your soul. That to have no Principles, or to liv beside them, is equaly Miserable. And that Philosophers are not those that Speak, but Do great Things.” Thomas Traherne, in his own book, would have us become alive to our own thoughts and more awake to our own principles. Actively to consider thoughts and consciously to think them through with others will fill the day with gladness and felicity. Not to do so will make for personal misery. A great thing spoken, or found in a book, is but one thing. Thought enlivens the day once it is raised up by continual exercise, he is saying from sometime in the seventeenth century, and for this author that is the purpose of a book. Our principles are resurrected, if in a book, and removed to where they can live.

Invest

 

You say, Marketers lie, they exaggerate and inflate, while with your secret affiliate marketing model you can invest in ‘from zero to a million’ masterclasses and get a boatload of bonuses thrown in. But I say, your words whistle in the chimney, they bubble like the holes in the leaky hull of your boat, and who is there to talk to, and were those holes always there? You say, You can get five figures per month while trading two to four hours per day and focusing on only one proven method, our volume profile formula, the only proven trading method. But I say, figures divide as a mirage in the heat, formulas do not put food in the pantry, and who is the man that would argue for one way of trading, he is as a musician with a faulty instrument, or a scientist with but an abacus. You say, Bolster cash flow and completely transform your business growth trajectory with our innovative financing cash-unlocked method, get the e-book before the banking sector catches on and tries to close us down online, do it now. But I say, Why do banks want to remove you from the web? You say, Be confident in your investing decision with our unlimited personal portfolio non-discretionary track record intelligent investment free trial successful in-depth knowledge teamwork 15-day window. But I say, Who takes counsel from strangers or gives themselves over to ungrammatical jargon? You say, Buy my roadmap book for running ads, following ideal customers around every corner of the internet, and making billions out of low cost subscriptions. But I say, your review of your own book is ever before us, a warning of false claims and page-turning temptations, a signpost to a road going nowhere, rapidly. You say, Maximise profits, minimise risks with our revolutionary all-in-one e-commerce buying platform, get ready to cost-effective instantly viral view, download plan, crush zone, elite invest, crypto research, budget market and leave your real estate in the dust. But I say, is not one home enough, and what are twenty that are but vexation and sleepless night, fifty that are starving their inhabitants of life, even as you calculate extravagances that will never see an opening night? You say, I wanted my life back, I wanted to live on my own yacht, and you can too with boost marketing, so de-risk your marketing strategy and crush your revenue goal now. But I say, as I have said before, your words bubble like the holes in the leaky hull of your yacht, and who is there to listen to the cor anglais wind up your chimney? You say, You can be the next CEO with your distinctive personal branding, your all-important promotion, the heaven-sent interview, and seismic directorship workshops. But I say, Oceans rise and deserts fan out and the children of this generation see only an electric wall of your word illusions.   

Day

 

Martha Hamilton says the phrase ‘back in the day’ has always intrigued her. Which day would that be? She says it is interesting indeed to accumulate so many days that they are sorted into large groups, as well as the particular present day. I have to agree. I also ponder ‘back in the day’. The phase is used in a glib way, I find. It has about it the disbelieving air of people who haven’t quite processed that they have a past, that time has a way of being different now to what it was then, as if that could happen to someone like them. They feel discountenanced by the use of a verb to describe time’s behaviour. Time moves on, for example. Does it? And did time move on ‘back in the day’? Unlikely. Susan Southall says days may be passed, spent, or seized. Observably, the past is redolent of such action verbs. Diaries go to any lengths to confirm the fact. Historians stay up half the night. But then, ‘back in the day’ seems not to be a simple case of the past. The phrase is cloudy with psychology, hovering with historical hinting. The phrase is often used to indicate another time, when things were normal, or at least normal for them. As Martha Hamilton says, it’s the very vagueness of the day being referred to that is intriguing. The seeming impossibility of dating ‘back in the day’ to a date, or even a timespan, is implicit. And not just impossibility, actual aversion. It would be awfully inappropriate, even transgressive, to locate ‘back in the day’ to an exact day on a calendar. Calendars are for hanging on a hook in the kitchen. Possessors of this period of unaccountable time maintain the appearance of having some kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge that is not about to be understood, or appreciated, by those of today. Then again, the very vagueness frequently seems to refer to something as broad as the 1980s, or the Victorian era, or the time before electricity, or clocks. There is an unexplained before-and-after moment that only the cognoscenti grasp. Keeping it unexplained adds to the allure.  Susan Southall is of the view that each of the days has its purpose and each day has its times. This is an antidote, I think, to the anxious nostalgia of ‘back in the day’. It is best to learn from the present and stay there. Knowing that that‘s where you are is a start. Her view is the necessary and necessarily true flipside to sufficient unto the day being the evil thereof. Anyone who hasn’t pondered the truth of that saying could long desperately and long for any kind of ‘back in the day’. What else is there, if the present is inexplicable? Then again, maybe we all have in the back of our minds a ‘back in the day’ quadrant, mulling over memories, not quite sure why what’s happening now is better (or worse) than what happened then, whenever that happened, the calendar in the mind being vaguish.

Positive

 

Steadily and scrupulously for the past two years I have avoided covid, using my common sense, following all of the public health directions, and discovering the benefits of lockdown. I can recall a time when the Premier’s morning press conference was the main viewing of the day. This came to an end at the La Trobe University carpark, local site of testing moments for many over time, on Tuesday morning. The now familiar ritual of pokers in mouth and nostrils was carried out in a thoroughly civilised fashion. Just over twelves hours later, nearing the midnight hour, my phone went ping to advise via message that my result was positive. It felt a long two years to end with this simple advance in learning. While part of me thought about how I had just joined the other half of the human race, another part was tracing for clues as to where and who and how positive could be the result. We are in isolation until next Tuesday, at least. It is observable how easily we slide into lockdown mode, with supermarket deliveries online and orders for a Doherty Half-Dozen from Dan Murphy’s. The difference with this self-imposed lockdown is the machine that goes ping. Austin Health has my number and sends messages of appreciable length, stacked with information and questions. First contact was a woman from Austin Health who went through most of these. My favourite was “Do you have an oxygen tank in your home?” My answer to this question was, “No, we do not have an oxygen tank in our home.” Later I thought, if it was that bad, I’d already be in ICU. It’s omicron, we think to ourselves, as though the most natural thing in the world. Symptoms include fever, sore throat, coughing, tiredness, the very symptoms we have been reading on every second public wall and official communication for two years. When she asks if I experience chest pain, I say I did have a slight pain in the night. This was a mistake, as she wishes to know if it is lung or heart, brief or prolonged, left side or right side. I tell her I don’t what side it was on, it was just pain. This reply won’t help with the statistics., but at least I got it off my chest. There has been no pain since, so that’s good. Later she asks me about my mood. I tell her I’m grumpy because I’ve got covid. She laughs at this reply, which tells me it’s not a standard reply to the question. So here we are at home in isolation. I live on buttered toast and beakers of Hydralyte. Panadol is the nurse’s friend. My workplace has had to close, yet another minor instance of how covid slows work and social life all over town. The world itself is suddenly over there again, beyond our private radius. Sleep is most of the day, broken only by the untimely ping of Austin Health with more updates, more questions. I can’t say I’m complaining. Triple vaccination tides over this result most effectively.