Keaton

 

Buster is equally capable of expressing complacent contentment. A realm of continual improvisation. Unexpected leaps. A realm of continual education. Fantastic structures and machines have the stark authenticity of the handmade. Rigour and purposefulness. Buster is equally capable of expressing inhibited longing. Imaginative agility. He turns every action into the most elegant possible ideogram. Whether by means of intricately conceived machinery or the barest of gestures. No matter how impossible the attempt. Shades of awe and amazement reliably awaken. Buster is equally capable of expressing controlled panic. This comedy of catastrophe. He undergoes catastrophes and dodges extreme risks by a hair with a grace positively angelic. As if he had done nothing at all. His trajectory and vicissitudes. That risk of harm – of annihilation – continues to play out. Buster is equally capable of expressing dawning awareness. The clear-eyed genius of a very serious child. Inventing new and undreamt of uses for common objects. He worked things out in his head. Buster sits up, jumps on the chair he is sitting in and onto the table, from which he vaults over his adversary’s head and flies through a narrow open transom over the locked door. Heroic physical feats accomplished without bravado. Not with bravado but with a demeanour that could pass for self-effacement. He is actually in great peril. Missing death by inches. Buster is equally capable of expressing unspoken sorrow. Incarnated a superior but detached intelligence. All that information alleviates somewhat the sense of pain attached to loss of independence. He plays all the parts and all the members of the audience. Neither frozen nor funereal. Nor blank nor immobile nor masklike. The most quintessentially silent. At times almost otherworldly beauty. Buster is equally capable of expressing resigned acceptance. He learnt how not to get hurt, or how not to make too much of it if he did. When it’s done, it’s done. Buster is equally capable of expressing the supremely focused attention of the scientist on the brink of a discovery. Geometric abstraction. Not only plausible but inevitable. He dives forward into a small valise held open by his assistant and is instantly and inexplicably swallowed up. 

Note to readers: Found poem using words from a review ‘Keep Your Eye on the Kid’ by Geoffrey O’Brien of two new books about Buster Keaton, published in The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2022, pages 49-51.

 

Election

 

Our local candidate for the Angry Party was working up to something in his online propaganda spiel, before claiming he has for 30 years been proudly servicing our region. Doubtless he means serving our region. How to point out this solecism to an Angry Party person is not easy. How might he respond? With a serve? English is a tricky business. Reducing stress and listening to the policies would help. Angry were less forthcoming on that score. Observers and participants are saying this is the ugliest campaign in living memory, which is why anyone under 25 notices the absurdities rather than the ugliness. The Opposition has waited until the week of the vote to declare it has policies. This is a change from the plans it has announced so far, each one of which has been bested by some plan from the Government, but sheer fantasy land if you are the Opposition. Apparently the policies are in a 93-page document, just released, and the electorate is assured that they are very good, sound, safe policies. The substance of the policies is slower coming to light, leaving voters with the sense that all they need to do is download the policy document and discuss it over breakfast, picking up on the finer points. That could be more than one breakfast and there are only a couple more breakfasts until Saturday. All parties are agreed on one thing, the main issue is the Premier. I am referring to the person who saved thousands of lives in the past three years because he acted on the best medical advice. This is unsatisfactory for many thousands of voters, who are still alive and kicking and want to express their anger. Their anger seems to be about being made to stay in their dream home on their quarter acre block for weeks on end with clean running water and more pizzas deliveries than common sense. Contrarily, other voters seem exceedingly happy still to be alive and with a quarter acre block thrown in, not least the many voters who have just come to live in the electorate from overseas. The illusion that this is a level playing field is whipped into action by some city newspapers. Apparently it is a neck-and-neck race, while other newspapers don’t even bother with the predictions. Level playing fields are not level crossings, a Government campaign in plain sight extending its two terms of office. If emotions colour voting then there should be a Miserable Party, a Horrified Party, a Confused Party too. After all, weeks of torrential rain and floods should leave voters with the awareness that the main issue is climate. As it is, parties sell themselves as the Happiness Party, the Excitement Party, the Satisfaction Party also.

DeSanctimonious

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident: it is the right of every citizen to be DeSanctimonious. To be or not to be DeSanctimonious, that is the question. Sign up now for the 12-step DeSanctimonious program. If you are feeling tired, listless, sanctimonious, then perhaps it’s time to take up a free DeSanctimonious course. Do yourself a favour: download the new Taylor Swift album ‘DeSanctimonious Like You’ while stocks last. DeSanctimonious is as DeSanctimonious does. And lo! The DeSanctimonious shall inhabit the earth and there will be a season of rampant name-calling. They say he is one hell of a DeSanctimonious sonofabitch. That woman gives new meaning to the word DeSanctimonious, I mean really. The nicest thing I can say about them is they are, and I’m trying hard here, DeSanctimonious. Lexicographers, however, are divided over DeSanctimonious: isn’t it one of those Janus words, a contronym? Popular DeSanctimonious dummies manuals seem designed to overcome or reduce the condition amongst those accused, rightly or wrongly, of being DeSanctimonious. Are they or aren’t they? It cuts deep. They need to know. Something. This should not be a cause for sleepless nights. While other evidence suggests the word also means its opposite in general usage. Common sanctimoniousness isn’t enough. There is a desire to accelerate their DeSanctimonious credentials in all directions, gear up or even turbocharge the DeSanctimonious via DeSanctimonious weekend retreats and refresher courses, the ultimate objective being able to say and in all truth, even with a touch of arrogance, they are more DeSanctimonious than thou. This contronym contrariety can do your head in. You will wish you had never heard the word DeSanctimonious. It is recommended to play ‘Round Midnight’ by DeSanctimonious Monk on permanent loop until you are chill. Or imagine what it would be like, no direction home, if Bob Dylan had kept to the first draft: “Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”  Polysyllabic DeSanctimonious didn’t scan for Bob. Then again, if top secret documents can eventually be declassified, can someone become l-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y DeSanctimonious? Can they become less and less holy until there’s nothing holy left, only a hole? Or less and less sanctimonious until they are to all intents and purposes very holy and possibly even sacrosanct? It is a veritable paradox, a conundrum that defies mere grammar. Perhaps Dean Martin was right, everybody’s DeSanctimonious sometimes. Even, or especially, if they don’t know what the word means. This column is open for comments. 

Shan-shui

 

Rain falls. Fast parallels vast falling white walls. Footpaths become creekbeds. Ripples over old brickwork and concrete hairlines. Leaves catch wet and drop the droplets, weighing on their edges. Windows fleck and slither. Skylights fan with more fanning water. More and more. Rooftops take a beating. Beatings gush and slosh down inclines. Rise in gutters. Rain hides the hill. Rain visits rooftops and walls with the clouds of its making. Houses reside inside clouds. Hard corners and patterned extras. Thunder moderates to patter. Lines of falling light. Arcs of overflow. Clouds drift and hang. Clouds lift. Pools settle. Surfaces resume composure, assume spots that circle outward. Irregularity turns from brook into puddles. Sun shows itself. Very dark against very white cloud glows alive. Cat rounds the corner. Sharpens claws. Walks by. Shadows diminish in sunlight. Light greens the leaves. Leaves green the light and gleam. Branches lift. Flowers sway. Water splays. Bees topple and hover. Curves clamber over verticals. Ground rises up with tall grass. Grass rises up with the ground. Foliage resumes its shapes. Birds find footing. Little birds tip and dart. This hill of houses shines awhile its glass. Mercury barely budges. Streets return to normal. Thinking and breathing, breathing and writing. I start writing. Permanent nouns with surprise verbs. Please. Breathing out again. My head of ten thousand words tips towards you. Lifetime of words discovered and forgotten and rediscovered. Reaching for the one word that reading will see. For the seventh time I cross out the words. Words that raced with excitement. Words that later sounded pompous. Words that tried too hard sounding grandiose. Words that only played to the audience. Words that scurried. Words that held back. Words that were interesting and untrue. Today there is nothing to say. The big blank of absence. Your absence. Your retreat. Somewhere outside the rain. Possibly somewhere inside rain. This time I turn to a new page. The page proves nothing. Shan-shui started out this way. Which came first, the landscape or the words? Raindrops falling on the page. Let me colour them in. Let me make a word. Let me describe the hill with one hundred words. Turn a raindrop into a letter. Repeat those words here and there like drops of rain. A page covered in words. A page that talks after rain has cleared. If you were here we would talk about everything. Ten thousand things, more or less. Everything under the sun. Everything rain feeds. Talk about everything. Or let go of words a while. Simply share the silence.

Ninety

 

At the Sunday party at church for my mother’s birthday, the vicar said in his speech that in his previous parish (St John’s, Finch Street) he cared for the oldest living Australian, at 112 years old. This meant, he said to my mother (Dawn Harvey), that you only have 22 years to go. ‘Don’t speak too soon,” muttered a few observers amidst the general laughter. It was one of the more sensitive ways of declaring her great age without actually stating the number. Mother in reply, “I have just a few words”, said that being here (St John’s Camberwell) was the longest time she had ever been in one parish: thirty years. Covid has not yet shrunk my brain to the extent that I could still calculate, that is a third of her life. Such milestones prompt us to measure our own span against that of others. It is a simple fact, for example, that I will always be 22 and a half years younger than her, though nowadays it’s not her who seems old but me. This age development is reinforced by my teenage daughter, whose irritating talent for realism confirms that I am old, repeated at any time when she thinks it necessary to remind me, in case I’ve forgotten. When I was her age anyone over 30 was old, an English word meaning ‘old’; this is a perception that seems to pass down through the generations. Our laughter at the idea of aiming for 112 is the laughter of knowing, after years and years, a moment arrives when that’s not so important any more. Take King Charles, as we must, a person who shares his birthday with my mother. His mother’s obstinate determination to get on with it and break reign records, her refusal to buck the practice and abdicate in favour of him, sets brains expanding with thoughts about wisdom coming with experience and the merits of patience. That Mother might eventually receive a letter from Charles is about the least of her concerns. We imagine her receiving the letter with “well that’s all very interesting.” When she says “I have just a few words”, this is taken as a most unlikely prospect if you are anyone of her family and friends. Our weekend of birthday celebrations was volubility itself, in much the same way as hour-long phone calls with her frequently operate according to their own Pareto Principle of ratio 80:20 input. During such conversations you are likely to hear about every member of the family in order of news, achievements, travels, crises, &c. Memories, from as long ago as her own growing up in Ivanhoe and Mentone, then Blackburn and Ringwood, come into the present in a moment. Names from every decade, with stories attached, innumerable, rise bidden or unbidden, conversations where time frames collapse and age distinctions vanish. Sometimes we listen amazed at some extraordinary story from the decades, one we’ve never heard before, related by her as though it were common knowledge and happened only last weekend.

End

 

Reflection by Philip Harvey for the Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, the 13^th of November 2022, at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

The End of the World is ever before us. In fact, it has been before us for centuries, which is one way of appreciating Christ’s words that we are not to know the time or the hour. His message is to be vigilant. 

Like so much of the scriptural language of End Times, Luke speaks from a centre of great calm. This God-centeredness can take getting used to, given that calmness is very far from the content of much of the messaging. Plague, wars, famine, mass destruction and death - it’s like reading the newspapers. Or watching the movies. Only here the words are steadying, they speak of things that will come to pass, of things it’s necessary for us to keep in mind. At the same time there is the message, recurrent throughout scripture, whether stated directly or by implication or tone: Do not be afraid. Fear not.       

Indeed, scripture sounds almost matter-of-fact as to what needs to be done. The words are realistic about the impossible scale of apocalypse and anyone’s ability to avoid or control it, yet practical about how to respond, abide and endure. Malachi says “But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” Psalms declare that the Lord “will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.” Words of calm keep breaking through. And Paul says to the Thessalonians to “go on doing the things that we command,” namely in that context praying, sharing, and avoiding bone idleness. 

Jesus’ dramatic warnings in Luke about the destruction of the Temple are likewise calm, realistic and practical. If the Temple is the dwelling place of God, what to do when “not one stone will be left upon another”? He appears to be saying, such a day will come, a day in which all our illusions will be taken away from us. 

Sooner rather than later, we become aware that we are talking of things it is necessary to know, to be ready for, but spoken as a mystery. It is the mystery of how to speak of the future and ourselves on this one Earth in that future. Amongst the many signs and portents of End Times named in scripture are the words of scripture itself. What to make of them? There is time to take time. We are told though that it is about our relationship with God and with one another. Cataclysms, false prophets, persecutions, all these warnings in the world do not appear to be as important as the message to be watchful, do what is right, love God and one another, and live in daily gratitude. 

Malachi 4: 1-2; Psalm 98: 5-9; 2 Thessalonians 3: 7-12; Luke 21: 5-19.

Grandfather

 

My maternal grandfather, Charles Hulme, went to the Great War. The silver teaspoons from Beaulieu and Ypres gleam in the family cabinet.  He was a machine-gunner, and I was often told as a child that most machine-gunners survived the War for the simple reason they were protected by the gun shield. He’d say he was only wounded once, when he cut himself in the mess with a tin-opener. This story is family folklore. One can only imagine the things he must have seen with his own eyes. Charlie hated war and never talked about what he really saw. He rarely mentioned the brother who was killed in 1917; the loss was important to his silence. The War was not a point of conversation at family occasions, even if he wanted to talk about it. He also detested the jingoistic patriotism that came later. He never attended parades. He avoided marches, probably because the men would all reminisce and drink. It was all about getting drunk and two-up later, as far as he could see. Charlie was abstemious, but not a wowser. Self-indulgence was not an option for that generation. Charlie founded Blackburn Rover Scouts and laid wreathes at the Shrine of Remembrance on behalf of the Scout Movement. He would have done that out of honour and to demonstrate to the boys how to show true respect. For Charlie the whole experience of the War was about survival. Young men, thrown together, quickly came to depend on one another. Themselves a mixed-up lot, they worked together in the trenches simply in order to get through it. Sticking together made tolerable a situation that was hostile, vicious, and ludicrous. You could die at any moment. They would watch their brothers and friends being shot to pieces right before their eyes. It was in these baffling and desperate circumstances that the men worked together. Later the term ‘mateship’ was used of this behaviour, which is why the term today has changed. Mateship was about dealing every day with meaningless terror. Once arrived on the Front it quickly became obvious to these teenagers that the officers didn’t know what they were doing. An acre of mud could be won then lost again within days. Consequent disrespect for the officers informed Charlie’s disapproval too of making the chaplains officers, because they became distant from the soldiers. It tended to make it difficult for the chaplains to minister effectively to the men. Charlie married Evelyn McKeown in 1921. She never talked about the War either, but when I visited her at Cabrini Hospital in the 1980s she was on powerful painkillers and not her usual composed self. Staring out over the rooftops of Malvern her mind was fraught by the past. I might have said something about her youth because she suddenly burst into uncontrollable crying and yelled out, “Oh the waste! All those boys! The waste! The waste!” I was silenced by the sight of her distress. I still think about that visit when I hear our glib modern throwaways like “Haven’t you got over it yet?” I know that trauma can never go away, it stays inside and changes how people relate to the world, how they understand everything, sometimes. Sixty years later my grandmother still mourned the young men she had loved and lost to the War. The War affected everyone’s lives, got into every family. Armistice Day (now Remembrance Day) was more significant than Anzac Day for my grandparent’s generation, because it commemorated the end of a traumatic experience in their own lives. There was an ending. Those who came later ponder the distance between our way of remembering the War and theirs.

Theatre

 

It is illegal to produce a drama about Queen Elizabeth. This state rule was also a creative limitation rule if you were William Shakespeare, or his contemporary dramatist friends. Any depiction of the reigning Queen on stage, or in any medium, might lead to social conflict and instability. Subjects could get the wrong idea. Staging a play called ‘The Crown’ with Elizabeth and other state actors (as we say today) in lead roles would have put Shakespeare outside the purple circle, inside a gaol. This was never his goal. If major figures had words and actions attributed to them falsely, it was a threat to the monarchy, seditious and even treasonable. Shakespeare’s solution to making contemporary political theatre was to retell stories based on monarchs who were safely out of the way. Hence ‘Richard the Third’ is a propaganda exercise about lineage aimed at the Tudors’ archrivals, the Plantagenets. Queen Elizabeth could sleep soundly at night, especially while she and her successor King James VI and I had Shakespeare on their side. ‘Macbeth’ is famously a screen for the chaos in London after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Setting it somewhere remote, like Scotland, adds to the romance. This week’s call from the retro outfit the Australian Monarchist League reminds us of the wisdom of this quaint law. The law being, royals had to be well dead before writers dipped the poison pen that finished them off. Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, was the last monarch dealt with by Shakespeare, though she and James are everywhere in his plays, once you know where to look. Really, the League is beleaguered that calls for bans, boycotts, and disclaimers on ‘The Crown’ that depicts Charles influencing John Major to force Elizabeth to abdicate in the heir’s favour. It’s not like that in the real world. Dame Judi Dench’s appeals for historical accuracy raise eyebrows amongst those who have watched her perform the inaccuracies of Shakespeare over a lifetime. Richard the Third wasn’t all bad. The real Macbeth was a nice person. King Charles is a work-in-progress (exclamation mark), which is another way of saying he is still alive. To plot against his mother is the stuff of Jacobean drama, very bad propaganda for the House of Windsor, and of a certainty untrue. But, it’s great theatre! Pity that our present day Shakespeares cannot contrive a dramatic trigger that not only is right but feels right. Amongst numerous other reasons why royals (and many of their subjects) must long for a return of the ‘well dead’ rule are those trashy royal magazines designed to take the sparkle out of Markle; the magazines where Kate and Camilla hurl crockery at one another on a daily basis and it all ends up in tears. It’s a wonder there is any Spode left.       

Language

 

Look-it-up language, how do you spell that? Lookitup, Look It Up, like a birdcall. Look-it-up’s become a language of our minds, who travel online for hours of the week. When permacrisis is declared Word of the Year by a famous dictionary, we have never heard of permacrisis, we have to Look-it-up. It’s an open question if Look-it-up is symptomatic of permacrisis, or vice versa, but it pays to know. Apparently. Online we may bounce from one permacrisis to another, or reel, only to meet more fresh language that is simply safest, sincerest Look-it-up. It has its own poetry, by which is meant Look-it-up is new sensory experience, intellect update, blurry around the edges. However, it’s not as simple as phonemes, or your first language. TikTok missiles and shock jock whistles and schlock rock samples are itemised minutely, hourly. Screens – long, regular, short – reference communications requiring cinematic recall, translation radios, tune encyclopedias. Scarcely can Look-it-up be labelled artificial intelligence, as it’s our palpable minds must process this plethora of peopled expression. Still, discernment has its limits, to the screen flicking nearness newness in our eyes and ears at maximum rates. Look-it-up language tests mind’s auxiliary motors, texts its febrile manifestations, tempting a tipping point. New vocabulary pushes us to rest, to leave the screen awhile playing self-Scrabble with its millions of players. Our attention shifts towards origins that are not English and not non-English, not itunes or iframes or iabstracts. Our attention finds, for example, green. Trees are green, their manifold variations of foliage, variegated and non-variegated, viridian and verdant, offering us their exactly earthly beauty free of the novel sensations of Look-it-up. Grass in its endless possibilities sways and glows, a consistent healing of the ground that gives grass life, sending out seeds. Patterns of green river over us, beneath us, constellate and rush, shooting out more green than words in dictionaries, mysteriously indifferent to permacrisis, whatever that is; or so we hope. More green, and then our attention yearns towards original languages, the language of origin, that which makes our English sound like any other birdsong, the trees patterns upon patterns, and green simply the majesty of light and water. Such that our attention becomes speechless and clear before the languages our minds cannot keep up with. Sensory languages that all in glory extend simply and surely due to their very existence the invitation to Look-it-up. As though already, permacrisis left in the too hard basket long ago, it were all one omniscient Word of the Year, not requiring a definition. Beyond definition.

Horse

 

Morning coffee on Melbourne Cup Day at home prompted mock American nasal singing of the line “I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee…” but conversation turned not on who was so vain, Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, David Bowie, David Cassidy, or Cat Stevens, any one of whom (logically) must be vain to be a candidate, but on the question, can a horse naturally win? As you recall, the target of the song “went up to Saratoga,” location of a prestigious racetrack in New York State, “where your horse naturally won”. Being first past the post is important when you’re so vain, we conclude, but can the horse naturally win? Equine behaviourists are generally in agreement that horses are not aware they are in a race, nor that they are in the business of either winning or losing. They do not behave any differently after the race, either, whether they came at the front, middle or rear of the field. When young, horses jump and cavort. There can be some charging about, friskiness as they say, but while this may be called racing around, if this is racing in any conscious sense remains fairly open to doubt. Galloping is essential in adulthood for escaping from threat of different kinds. Also, bachelor stallions race each other, but especially the harem stallion, for attention of mares in the season; English jargon calls this horsey behaviour, or horsing around. Why would bachelors wish to do this in the pouring rain at the prestigious Flemington racetrack in front of thousands of humans in sopping suits and dripping fascinators and occasionally a “scarf it was apricot”? It is not a main concern of the race caller, obviously, or the bookkeepers. All of this leads to the ethics of the spectacle and the universal knowledge that jockeys can pull a race, any race, even the Melbourne Cup. Whether a horse can ‘naturally win’ is superfluous once it is understood that humans pull the strings, strings in this case being reins, whips, heels, raised voice and anything else jockeys use to manage the outcome. The horse’s health and physique is one thing, but the manoeuvrability of the rider is critical. Possibly the question revolves around whether horseracing itself is natural. It would seem at least to be an outcome of ancient domestication, leaving us to ask what purpose racing serves beyond vicarious and ephemeral pleasure, for the humans. One of my draws in the home sweep was Young Werther, a person Carly Simon could never deride with “you’re so vain”, given he is the epitome of Sturm und Drang, “the wife of a close friend” being the issue. You have to ask what kind of owner would name a horse Young Werther in the first place. Have they read the book? Over morning coffee, Young Werther did not look like much of chance on a wet track in a field of 24. Two scratchings.