Password

 

Your name written backwards is not advisable. Your date of birth, in whatever configuration, likewise. The name of your first pet is probably widely accessible from overuse and therefore not a good password. Your password should be strong. Not just muscular and gym ready but, where possible, clad in interlocking high-mesh chainmail. A combination of upper and lower case, random numerals, and a flinged string of wingdings, is strong. Strong avoids the obvious, for example, a line of upper and lower letters sequential along the keyboard (i.e. qwerty syndrome), but at the same time it must be memorable. 12345678 is carte blanche for your nemesis hack. Pin your belief in the future. Pin your chances on the secure word of a computer. Given that the average person has over fifty passwords, and even though you are not the average person, using the same password on every account is inadvisable. Fifty different passwords should be a compulsory subject in secondary school. The annual turnover of personal passwords makes the invention of new passwords a weekly occupation over a lifetime. The huge popularity of Tolkien novels is in direct proportion to the rise in passwords. Identification is natural with living characters who cannot do anything or go anywhere without a password, a rebus of runes that unlocks their innumerable underground vaults. English espionage books, fictional, factional, and factual, enjoy unprecedented vogue in a world where it’s needful to invent personal passwords that would drive the wizards of Bletchley Park batty. Nonplussed is another word to describe their state, busy sorting the zeroes and the ones. Despite this spiral of codes, childhood reminds us that the point of a password is that it is private nay secret, individual nay unique, special nay singular. Therefore, if you are weary of the world of passwords, close your laptop, mute the phone, and go on a long holiday. Once arrived at your chosen destination, you will unwind. You can start remembering the days before passwords, the times when your mind was never taken up with remembering passwords, the age of articulation. Strong passwords, weak passwords, piss-weak passwords, appallingly porous passwords, passwords granular with dangerous diacritics and obscure punctuation marks – none of this need concern you anymore. On holidays you can almost be there again, dialling a friend, chatting for hours, sparring with their discomforting talent for puns, all of that! Ordering a simple meal is free of the anxiety of credit card Decline. Turn into your cat, whose one password “Mrkgnao” gets it everything it wants, everywhere anytime. Have your forgotten your password? asks a screen, jolting you back into the present. More precisely, did you ever remember your password? Obviously you do not know your password and the Little Black Book of Passwords is under some pile of papers somewhere. If it isn’t in a buried digital file to which you don’t have the password. Click to enter the future. The random password generator saves you the time of thinking up one yourself, even if it’s not strong; is, in fact, stunningly unmemorable. This is the future. You are turning into an idiolect of indecipherable idiocy, half-demented by your glossary of unknown words, wondering which ones end (or start) with a #  

 

 

Australia

 

Australia. Toponym. Psychology of Australia pores over maps. Holes in the outline. Offshore the Investigator. Further back, beyond horizons, the papery background of charts gone by. Conjectures put on ice. Big South. Down there somewhere. The Latin for somewhere that balances the globe. A theatre pushing the limits past a tempest into the unknown. Minds bend towards each other over a known map. A bench of marks. Or ask Trim, a cat, is Australia the most perfect option? Mrkgnao. Outside is yes. Meanwhile, what’s inside? The line of forest isn’t saying, nor mountain lengths far side of the water. Yet, the isle is full of noises. The continents of the globe are European. America is a Florentine merchant. Bank on it. Silver and gold, florins and fantastical flora. The contents of the globe could be European. When in Rome do as the Romans do. Give them A-ratings. Say Africa, Asia, Australia. Tripoli and beyond, Triple-A. Leaf through these thoughts that once were had. Or leave them alone, into forgetting. The colour of Australia is summer come autumn purple and green. The somewhere else land. The not where we come from land. The great south land. Downunder. Gorgeous plunder. Yellow and red like gold. White and grey like silver. Frequently high frequency birds afar off. Sunburnt country. Sweeping plains. Probably. Flooding rain. Jewel-sea. And people. Probably. Space made up of anonymous. Only then, the language of Australia. Bundoora means plains where kangaroos roam. Probably. Websites vary on exact wording. Warringal means eagle’s nest. Northland is in this country. Northland means gorgeous plunder. There are adequate parking facilities. Coffee assists with survival. Northland came before Southland, let alone Eastland. Southland means Australia. Residents may anchor their vessel at Southland any time day or night. Artificial Intelligence cannot make this up. One reason for this is sentient memory. Another is that most people who go to Southland have a sense of irony. Another way of saying all of this is that far horizon poetry lacks people. A difficulty of definition with Australia is where it contains plethora or nullius. And how much does it cost. At the end of the day. As people like to say. Who owns it. That’s why the owl and pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green Investigator. To put a circle around the whole business. And give it a name. A trim name, a Triple-A name, a Northland name. Ego began to build a whole philosophy around it. Which is why Ego is blind. With all its baggage on the wharf. Blind and deaf to those with lovely words for all of life around them, but no name for a continent being emptied of its content. There is even a day for this name, an argument about this name, every green summer. But voices to listen to.

Eloquent

 

Weekly reflection for the Third Sunday in Epiphany, the 22^nd of January 2023.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

The Corinthians were a relaxed and comfortable lot, more than partial on occasion to a spot of eloquent wisdom. Aren’t we all? Scripture in sundry places moves us to look for wisdom where it may be found, so why is Paul so down on eloquent wisdom? One reason is that Corinthians prized impressive rhetoric, to the degree that what sounded best had to be the truest. Many of them were Sophists, lovers of complex argument and drop-dead conclusions, where the meaning and the message got lost in the eloquence. Paul makes light-hearted fun of this mode of discourse, but his purpose is to draw attention to the only message worth knowing about: the cross of Christ. As he then famously adds, the cross is foolishness to the Greeks, but “to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”     

The cross can be described as an epiphany of Christ, once we appreciate the meaning of the Greek word ‘epiphany’ as a manifestation or revelation of God. Christ shows forth God not only in words but in actions, signs, and wonders. His humbling, his pleas for meaning, his thirst, his forgiveness of others; at a certain moment, words fail. Verbal spectaculars and arresting arguments may win friends and influence people, while being no more than edifications of self. But what to make of the cross? As Paul puts it, not without rhetorical impact, “Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?” 

This coming out of darkness into light is how Matthew describes the very start of Christ’s ministry, using the powerful words of the prophet Isaiah. It is a succession of epiphanies, whether in his primary call to repent, the simplest language of Christ calling disciples to follow him, or the proclamations and healings that occur wherever he goes. All of this walking its way up to a form of eloquent wisdom that would have baffled the Sophists, the language of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, confronting, seemingly contradictory, consoling – the language of the good news. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” And as the song known as Psalm 27 begins with such wonder and certitude: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” 

Isaiah 9: 1-4. Psalm 27:1-10. 1 Corinthians 1: 10-18. Matthew 4: 12-25.

Doggerel

 

The Fifty Most Quoted Lines of Doggerel. 50. The mind has its own little place, all to itself: Can make a Heaven of Hols, a Hols like Heaven. (Milton) 49. Full fathom five thy fibula lies. (Shakespeare) 48. If your keeper can keep your lead when all about you are losing theirs (Kipling) 47. How do I love thee? Let me count the whistles. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) 46. If music be the food of love, let’s play bone. (Shakespeare) 45. We few, we happy few, we band of borzois. (Shakespeare) 44. What is this life if, empty of care,/We have no time to stand and stare. (W.H. Davies) 43. The unmoving Shih Tzu shites; and, having shat,/Moves on. (Fitzgerald) 42. They also serve who only stand and woof. (Milton) 41. The quality of mincemeat is not strained. (Shakespeare) 40. In Xanadu dida Kupla Kanines a Stainless Pleasure Bowl devour (Coleridge) 39. Frengles, Roamins, Corgidors, lend me your ears. (Shakespeare) 38. Shall I compère thee through this summer’s day. (Shakespeare) 37. Season of missed-yous and shaggy fitfulness. (Keats) 36. A thing of beauty is a jog forever. (Keats) 35. Do not go gentle into that good bite. (Dylan Thomas) 34. Busy old heinzer, unruly stray. (Donne) 33. Stop all the clocks, cut up the chicken bones. Dinner time! (Auden) 32. Human kind cannot bear very much reliability. (Eliot) 31. O Romeo, Romeo; woofwoof arooooo Romeo! (Shakespeare) 30. The labrador doth protest too much, methinks. (Shakespeare) 29. The old layabout: Dolce and Decorous yes. (Owen) 28. Arouse is arouse is arouse is arouse. (Gertrude Stein) 27. When I am an old woman I shall walk poodles. (Jenny Joseph) 26. I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a pekinese. (Joyce Kilmer) 25. Hope springs eternally upon the human breast. (Pope) 24. When in disgrace without fortune biscuits in men's eyes. (Shakespeare) 23. I grow old... I grow old...I shall tear the bottoms of their trousers ROFL. (Eliot) 22. 'The time has come', the Whippet said,'To baulk at many things'. (Lewis Carroll) 21. A narrow feline in the grass. (Dickinson) 20. Beauty is truth, truth beauty; is that all? (Keats) 19. To be or not to be, is that a question? (Shakespeare) 18. In Philanderer’s fields the puppies plow. (McCrae) 17. The proper study of mankind is mandatory. (Pope) 16. A little teasing is a dangerous thing. (Pope) 15. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd retrieval stick hurrying near. (Marvell) 14. Candy’s for dandies and liquor, city slickers. (Ogden Nash) 13. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like her sunnies. (Shakespeare) 12. Things fall apart; the scents have gone cold. (Yeats) 11. Because I could not stop for death I blindly stepped forever forward. (Dickinson)10. Tis better to have loafed unloosed /Than never to have loafed at all. (Tennyson) 9. Look on my works, ye mighty, and declare ‘Good boy!’ (Shelley) 8. To strive, to seek, to find, to wag the tail, and not to yield, much. (Tennyson) 7. Dream softly because you dream of my treads (Yeats) 6. Not with a bark this time but a kind of extended low-level industrial whining mixed with grump-snorts and a grumbling sort of growly whimper. (Eliot) 5. And smiles to go before I sleep. (Frost) 4. I wandered cloudily as a loon. (Wordsworth) 3. The dog is faith in the man. (Wordsworth) 2. The master is the ‘I am’ of my fate. (Henley) 1. To errrrr is human; to forage, divine. (Pope)

The source for this list is Mark Forsyth’s blog ‘The Inky Fool’:

 https://blog.inkyfool.com/search?q=most+quoted+lines

Grievous

 

Being second in line is a matter of diminishing hopes, as each new heir is born into the world. If hope is the word, many have preferred to escape the chance. Soon enough you are bumped down the succession line, a spare for a time, soon a longshot. It is grievous. Unless you adopt a role or a role finds you. Queue jumping is not an option. Ask anyone in the same position. Observe how they dealt with no longer being a contender. Some rode horses, some hit the drink. Very few of them became memoirists, how outré, there to set straight the grievous truth. Being knocked to the floor is not an occurrence for retelling, as boys may do in the heat of argument. Leastways, not when the brother heir apologises and the other brother shows he cannot forgive. This script for a forthcoming episode of The Crown will be a bestseller. Call it Longshot. Parodies will stream in the firmament, all very Jacobean. The fight takes on instant mythic status that can only be dispelled by more mythic contests, whether with fists, phrases, or franchises. It’s grievous, but not grievous bodily harm. It’s Jacobean, but Marvel Heroes too, as No. 2 calls the heir, hereafter No. 1, his arch-nemesis. He might talk to the arch-bishop about the nature of mercy and forgiveness. Rather than talk to professional confessors (read also, interviewers) surrounded by costly vases and Californian armchairs designed by the House of Privilege. Breaking one of those could put you back. The extended one-hour interview could include sly surprises about the three grievous sins. How is selfishness opposed to faith? asks the compere of No. 2, in jocular fashion. Do you find that lust is opposed to hope? Given everything you’ve said up to this point, would you say that pride is opposed to love? Thought-provoking, but will it lose the viewer base? The networks could sustain a grievous loss of promised income. Born to fulfil a job, he chucked it, it was unfulfilling, finding instead a job ghost writing Longshot and talking of Longshot in decorative, if fragile, locations. Ephemeral is a word of longstanding. How long will Longshot last? No. 1, by saying nothing, leads. It’s a game of chess not found in Afghanistan, with No. 1 in control of all the pieces. He even talks to bishops and knights. Add these words to the Top Secret profile file, together with every short view and big story online to do with same. As Europe endures its hottest year on record, any comment to make? Though Britain is not part of Europe, but rather an ego in search of an empire, would you agree? It’s grievous, a most grievous fault, but that’s all we have time for now folks and okay here’s a word from our sponsor. If you can’t read this, it’s because you don’t have a screen.

Unknown

 

Turning out the light I begin wondering about ‘a poem of the unknown’. Turn it back on and write ‘a poem of the unknown’ in my notebook, no poem as such forthcoming, to visit next morning. Extinguishing the light again, I go into deep sleep, there to dream unknown experiences. Dream of opening night of a play where I’m a lead part but have not learnt my lines. Made worse by the realisation I’m also in another play showing at the same time in another part of town, script unlearnt. Wake with relief in the morning, sunny January and blessedly cool, with the prospect of googling ‘a poem of the unknown’. Responds with poems about the unknown soldier, author unknown (anonymous), lines in search of an author’s name, Auden’s ‘The Unknown Citizen’, study notes explaining what ‘The Unknown Citizen’ is about. Ask myself, do notes sum up a poem? Are they help or hindrance? Is anything left to the imagination? Are notes just a way of getting through the exam? Decide that the questions answer themselves in the negative. Leave the whole matter alone. Reflect that everything we collect and put around us are knowns. Note how knowns is a lovely half-rhyme with nouns. Exist as knowns in the sense of being expressions and objects redolent of our knowing. Surrounding ourselves with unknowns is not a common pastime. Or is it? Consider, meanwhile, that we are anyway surrounded with unknowns all the time. Starting with the universe itself, which anyway is multiverses, a subject for multiverse poetry. Continuing in real time with the smooth indeed sublime workings of our own bodies, which hurt and heal in ways unknown to the actual bearer. Marvel at doctors who seem to know, dictating into their voiceboxes with pharmacy fluency and medical Latin. Walking along to the shops for morning coffee, I ponder unknown stories behind a hundred passing doorways. Wonder at the causes of their arguments, unknown even to themselves. Meditate on love, springing unknown to resolve the sorriest mess. Drink coffee and think of science for a moment, last word on the known, until replaced by the previously unknown. Brood temporarily over history, the unknowns buried out of sight in a field, the knowns whose grievous biographies sell better than any poetry. Make mental notes, how past may be unknowable as the future. Wrestle with poetry, now that we mention it, the sweetness at the base of the glass, as its words speak with seeming dogmatism of things they admit they know only so much. Consuming the end of the croissant, all I have are crumbs for my ‘poem of the unknown’, a flower without a name here, a thought without a predicate there, a whole day in which to make up any script I like about the unknown.

Beatles

 

Paul is the one who wills it to keep going. His determination to make new songs from airy nothing is the first noticeable thing. He invents musical lines then experiments with them, tries new tricks, extends the possibilities. Like the others, the repertoire in Paul’s head is immense. They can all play with it, fool with it, improve on it. Their famed ability to shift direction creatively is ever on show here, one reason why eight hours of film is about right. We watch the conception, gestation, delivery, and life of the song. A year after everyone else, I watch Get Back over consecutive summer nights, a magical mystery tour that is a superlative historical document. John mocks, jokes, parodies, zones out. Behind the bravura Goons fireworks though is a listener, whether to the musical sounds or others’ words. He reads the room. His connection with Paul is strange, powerful, magical and mysterious. Ringo is a calm, amused presence. And then there is George, the astonishing riffer, turning very good into something else again. His role, almost taken for granted, is to take it higher, one reason why his leaving the band is the surprise dramatic climax at the end of 1/3. Around them swirl circles, the inner circle of lovers and studio music assistants and old friends. Then the next circle, imposing and slightly sinister, of business dealers, egotistical directors, and wannabe managers, the last obviously crooks. Meanwhile the Fabs sing about all of these types, all of them, in their lyrics, the knowingness going on in the actual artistic process, one of the film’s more subtle delights. 3/3 is the unique cultural symbol of their rooftop concert, something viewers understand so well it takes time to absorb that within the film’s narrative, it’s more like an unexpected transcendent lead break. Instead of going to Africa, the expectation set up through these January sessions, they go upstairs. Only we know it will be their last live concert together, the first time live for two years also about the first time they’ve heard themselves live for five. Down in Savile Row below, Londoners look up for the music source, fans who recognise the band instantly, day workers who think the band are “a good thing”, snobs who complain the noise disrupts business, bobbies with the task of having to turn off the amp. A bemused clergyman says it’s good to see there’s something for free in this country. The shift from the dour hangar at Twickenham to the bright new Apple studio of 2/2, to the rooftop colours the mood of each part, but it’s all studio. Which is part of the problem, Did the band break up because they were tired of being cooped up day and night, month after month? It must have been a contributing cause. What is never in doubt is the continuous original creativity shared in real time by the world.

Story

 

Re-reading a favourite work of Italo Calvino, his unfinished lectures entitled ‘Six memos for the next millennium’ (1988), I find the lecture on ‘Quickness’ includes this paragraph. “Borges and Bioy Casares put together an anthology of short extraordinary tales (Cuentos breves y extraordinaires, 1955). I would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line. But so far I have not found any to match the one by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso: ‘Cuandro despertó, el dinosaur todavía estaba allí.’ (When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.)” That he doesn’t quote other one-sentence stories, only this one, is further demonstration of Calvino’s literary virtue of quickness. His attraction to the concept of the one-sentence story is in keeping with his enjoyment of writing experiment, the challenge of making up more such self-contained and complete brief tales. Monterroso is legendary for such exercises, which in his case are intrinsic to his thinking, a natural trait of his personality. His dinosaur story has a literal first meaning, itself arresting, but then meanings that evolve from scrutiny of the tale - can we ever feel separate from prehistory, even in our dreams? Is the dreamer himself not a dinosaur? Could he exist if not for dinosaurs? Are dreams not a product of primeval evolution? Poetry readers are familiar with such compact storytelling and related levels of reading. Sappho’s fragments leave everything open to the hearer’s experience and imagination: ‘Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees.’ Haiku is Buddhist nature poetry wishing to place the reader in the present, but many haiku are also cuentos breves y extraordinaires. When the poet Shushiki confides ‘Dead my old fine hopes and dry my dreaming but still … iris, blue each spring’, we may fill in the hopes and dreamings anew, while Kikaku’s short story likewise intimates innumerable stories in its one line: ‘Oh lucky beggar! … Bright heaven and cool earth your summer outfit.’ The fashion for reducing great works of literature to a sentence has an ephemeral appeal, unlike the works being reduced. Marcel Proust, he of controlled length, cannot be contained in one brief line, nor can that line hold the attention for long. Calvino’s ultimate and covert desire though, I think, is not to make an anthology, but to write a series of such stories himself. I admit it’s my first instinct as well. Summer days are spent watching out for one-sentence inventions. I am on alert, like a dinosaur. Until I start noticing that so much of our conversation, whether gossip or news, opinion or fact, dream or plan, works in the same way to say the best or the most in the best and the least number of words. Only thing being, we don’t immediately write them down, like Calvino or Sappho or Shushiki or Monterroso.    

Clepsydra

 

Entry No. 105 in Sei Shōnagon’s book records in passing the Time Office of the imperial palace in Kyoto, visited on that certain day circa 1000 CE by inquisitive ladies-in-waiting who wish to hear within earshot the unusual sound of the Office’s gong. Time is kept by clepsydrae, as Note 392 explains. This job was one of the functions of the Bureau of Divination in the Ministry of Central Affairs, the Time Office being “staffed by two Doctors of the Clepsydra assisted by twenty Time Watchers.” Clepsydra is the translator’s Greek equivalent for water clock, one of the oldest kinds of clock in the world. During the day, a Time Watcher every two hours would “inscribe” an updated time on a board in the palace courtyard. Note 392 to Entry No. 105 concludes: “During the course of each of the night watches an officer would strum his bowstring to keep away evil spirits; then, after naming himself, he would announce the time in a stentorian voice.” Reading her book, we become strongly aware of how the festivals kept the time for everyone, including new year, as they marked the progress of each year through the changing seasons. Irrigation kept the hours while high days, which were plenteous, kept the months for the majority of the people, who did not have access to a clepsydra. Dew, fog, rain, sleet, and snow mark the passage of time in Sei Shōnagon’s entries, while the sound, sight, taste, touch and movement of water feature in her lists of minor pleasures of life. That said, her attention is not taken by the viscous activities of water, in other words its quickness or slowness as clockwork. Nor does she seem concerned by ice and what happens when a clepsydra freezes in the winter. Perhaps the answer is on our iphone.  Anyone with an iphone may check their World Clock day and night, catch news of festivals worldwide, and be woken by a choice of Boing, Popcorn, or Locomotive. We are not reliant on a Time Watcher to give the stentorian two-hourly update based on the flow of water from one vessel into another vessel. We do though have alternative choices of Raindrops, Ripples, or Waves on our devices, if we so desire. Our iphone may be five minutes ahead of the weather, or five days, with some people quibbling if these predictions are not accurate to within an inch of a hailstorm. Springtime floods brought on by Pacific climate change cause one to wonder if the Earth is not its own clepsydra. Melting of ice caps causes us to ponder measurements in geological time, time spans over which we have no control, where guesswork is useless as seas rise and tip into new ocean basins, evaporating with fierce sun and deluging continents for months on end. Not even a Doctor of the Clepsydra can explain such ends of time, finding perspective and consolation by reading the sutras.