Building

 

Image: ‘Southbank’ drawn from the train, outside

 lockdown, in my panorama book in the Autumn of 2021.

Melbourne is to have Australia’s tallest building, again. It will be a twisted spiral, courtesy of the computer. Actually, it will be two towers, two for the price of one being (at present) $2bn. The Mayor of Melbourne says “it will have a ripple effect in spreading confidence throughout the city and abroad.” The Mayor is not saying it’s just one more tall building to go with all the other tall buildings over there in Southbank. Nor is there any explanation about why confidence requires a tall building, though obviously someone thinks it necessary for Melbourne to keep up with the worldwide phallocracy. Nor is there a definition of ‘abroad’ where the ripples will have their effect; Broadford, perhaps. The Mayor calls the building “awe-inspiring” and “jaw-dropping”. It’s a case of awe-jaw. The name of this “ambitious” structure dispenses with the basic building blocks of spelling, the vowels. It will be called STH BNK, doubtless inspiring local wags with bonk jokes for some time to come. Someone, it’s not clear who, will be excited to learn that our tower will surpass Q1, the erection on the Gold Coast that is currently numero uno in our part of the world, heightwise. Perhaps pride was dinted when Q1 replaced 101 Collins for pre-eminence.  Aesthetes sigh at the ripple effect, thinking it has something to do with visuals, and surely ripples will be an effect of the twisted spiral. The Mayor of Melbourne, however, is focussed on things that are above: “It will challenge all future developments to not only consider, but to conquer the incredible.” Unquote. Bombast has no limits and goes back to the Tower of Babel, and earlier, even. How exactly anyone can conquer the incredible is a matter for John Ruskin and other theorists. Reassuringly, the Mayor of Melbourne shows how it’s done, though it is assumed the Mayor talks investment and jobs, rather than architecture, deftly ignoring a reason given for financing the project, “hoping it would revitalize Southbank.” Melburnians with long memories sometimes wonder how many tall buildings can be built on a floodplain, the ‘bank’ part of Southbank being more than geographic description. After all, the settlers banked the Birrarung below the falls with bluestone to make a port, but also to stop Emerald Hill from flooding. This vowelless skyscraper is not being built on solid bluestone foundations. Like its neighbour towers, it could well end up swaying in the southerly gales, creating a myriad ripple effect. That is neither here nor there to the Mayor, who is speechless even while giving speeches. In the same report it is said the state’s building sector “reels” amid rising building costs, with one major company collapsing recently, leaving hundreds of homes unbuilt. Renaming Docklands Ghosttown would show a lack of confidence. It takes all the vowels at our disposal to make a case.

Water

 

All the water melting off the ice sheets (‘ghiacciaio’) floods into the sea below. Tipping the mind into a direction of loss. Boats speed alarmingly over the great rising arc of waves. Everywhere where water can rise, where water spreads. The planet (‘pianeta’) itself. Gradually small news recedes behind the news of water. It has taken time for glaciers to reach the ‘frontpage’ (‘copertina’). Now that they have, we read the news with some reluctance, like most news on the ‘frontpage’. More recently it has been reported the seas’ surfaces warm at higher warmth than heretofore. Heretofore is a Shakespearean (‘eloquente’, ‘rinascimento’) way of saying previously. An alarming number of statistics are supplied to support this fluid situation. Ships sail calmly on. Internal human responses are more difficult to monitor, complicated by the desire to know more and, at the same time, a desire to want to know less. Each day includes a random half-hour of money, fame, disaster, ambition, and exotic locations, called the news (‘notizia’). News is always followed by a couple of minutes’ abstract disquisition on water, called the weather forecast (‘tempo atmosferico’). These disquisitions attempt realism (‘realismo’). Forecasts ignore melting glaciers, as a rule. All of this is by way of paraphrasing and modernising Giovanni Battista Fontana, not Giovanni Battista Fontana the Baroque composer, or Giovanni Battista Fontana the painter and engraver, the other one. ‘La nave preziosa calma continua a veleggiare’, to quote his Preface. In his rediscovered seventeenth-century manuscript ‘Acqua Alta’ (‘High Tide’ or, if you live nearby the lagoon, ‘High Water’), Fontana conjectures on the unlikely prospect he calls Noétà, which we might translate as the Noah Event, the remote possibility of his beloved city of Venice going completely underwater. The thought occurs from time to time, especially in the mind of his time traveller (‘viaggiatore del tempo’). Yet what do Venetians do? Fontana cannot decide if Venetians are stoics, pessimists, hedonists, procrastinators, canutes, clowns, or are simply too proud to do other than go down with the gondola. Instead of shifting to terra firma, instead of constructing an ark, they relocate upstairs, converting gothic windows into jetties for ready mobility. Are they realists, or romantics, or have they finally lost their marbles? He needn’t have been concerned, it is all for him just a fanciful idea. Fontana’s manuscript, printed in a limited edition on best cloth paper using an untraceable serif typeface, is popped back into the cabinet. Science fiction has its limits. Reclining on the sea-blue couch sends the mind into a sense of false security. Imagining the height of the sea, the breadth of horizons, the volume of the melt, it is time to switch off the lamp and sleep until daylight again.    

Weather

 

Weather, it was once explained to me after I asked a bureau employee what is weather, can be defined as rain. Either it is raining, or not raining. This would seem to make weather reports redundant, fairly much, yet weather insists on cropping up in most news conversations. I remember Rosemary Margan. She stood behind a Perspex screen with a map of Victoria decorated in wavy high and low fronts, herself drawing extra arrows meaningfully with a squeaky texta in the direction of Melbourne. She lived in a time when females were weathergirls and males were weathermen. One of the men was Rob Gell, a man who took weather with the full gravity it deserves, whether raining or not raining. Rob fearlessly talked isobars and continental troughs, his evening reports being in the nature of mathematical theorems, which they are once you think about it. Another man seemed not to take high pressure areas with the same earnestness. Edwin Maher cultivated the art of the pointer, an essential prop for homing in on a weather map. At first instead of a stick he introduced a carrot, then an ice-cream cone, till the novelty turned into a cult, with viewers sending in pointy objects of varying suggestiveness to promote their charity or special day. Nevertheless, today as well as taking us direct to the weather bureau, the internet provides much more in-depth, accurate weather than TV weatherpersons can squeeze into a minute. They are a thing of the past for someone who hasn’t watched television news for twenty years, but this week work colleagues disclosed that they are followers of Jane Bunn. Jane Bunn, apparently, has vocabulary. Her viewers can expect more than thunderstorms, they can expect “a rumble of thunder”. A cloudy day will include promisingly “fluffy clouds”. Alternately, there could be “drizzly showers.” This adjectival injection to Jane’s reports keeps her fans on edge, but divides those who like their weather more Gell-like. Forecasters walk the line of making the unpredictable sound predictable, and still getting it wrong; the line between doing something new and original with a script of mundane routine. Even Jane Bunn knows there is a limit to the ways she can say it’s going to rain tomorrow, but for now my work colleagues and I enjoy collecting her bon mots. “A little spit of rain.” “A few spots of drizzle.” “Small hail.” “Storms will be barrelling through.” I have also learnt that she collects rainbows, photographs of rainbows at least, from her many followers. These and other facsimiles of weather are posted on her Facebook page; all she has to do is include the latest choice during the evening broadcast. This kind of information revolution would have been impossible back in the days of transparent maps and sceptred pointers.

Consciousness

 

Puck and the fairies in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', production in 2019

We can lose a lot of sleep over consciousness. We lie awake wondering what consciousness is, why we have it while other entities in our universe don’t. We moon over why some say the universe itself has consciousness, one reason being we have consciousness just by saying we have consciousness. This line of thought does not answer all our questions and leads to eventually falling asleep. Sleep itself is presumed to be essential to consciousness, even though we are not conspicuously conscious at the time. Inside sleep is dream, an often inexplicable play-within-a-play that concentrates waking time peculiarly. One way of explaining waking consciousness is the global workspace theory (Bernard Baars, born 1946) which likens consciousness to a working theatre. Reading about this when awake sets up a model for consciousness, a common framework, that here in this short life of ours we can play with, script, concentrate our attention upon, improvise. Most of the neural activity in our experience takes place behind the scenes. Lighting, costumes, make-up and prima donna’s tears are conspicuously absent. Their life on the stage only occurs when they present themselves this side of the walk-on line. What is the play that will capture the consciousness of our daily awakening? Are we witnessing something by Peter Quince or William Shakespeare (1564-1616), or both? Have we stepped out of a dream where everything is ludicrously beautiful and new, or are we simply living our best life, as the fitful expression in the script would have it? Even at rest we are aware of being in motion. Even with the most baroque poetry we catch a meaning or two, strutting along with our worthily wordy interlocutor. Even as we entwine with the most lovely of amours we live out the facts of our singularity. Even as we pretend not to hear the spoken truth of our play-within-the-play, we are hanging on every word. Will’s soliloquies are theatricalised odes and eclogues, plays within the play, the voice breaking through to the essence of the situation. We are original in our own way, also. Until, before long, and we must keep our audience’s attention, the show must go on, we return to the main narrative, thence curtains, thence exits from the Globe into the consciousness of living with everyone else’s consciousness, out in the deliberate streets. What neural pathways shall we wander? What new theories of consciousness discover at the post-play party, or first night review, even? Our perceptions, sensations, thoughts, actions, emotions, (Oxford comma) and memories continue to foreground certain priorities, even as other priorities turn supernumerary, for now. How Will may have said this in languages other than his own is cause for thought. There are a lot of languages to choose from, for all of us, as we know and are conscious of.

Wikipedian

 

Original photograph: Large room of the ‘Escher x nendo’ show called ‘Between Two Worlds’, held between December 2018 and April 2019 at the National Gallery of Victoria.

The other night I attended a zoom training session for novice Wikipedians. They are the editors who create the phantasmagorical online encyclopedia from airy nothing, make minute corrections, (Oxford comma) and spend hours ‘scraping’. We were told by the Wikipedagogue, a word I just invented and probably should patent immediately, there are 381,000 active editors at present, and that’s just on the English language Wikipedia. This is but a fraction of those who visit the behemoth each day, Wikipedia being the fifth biggest website in the World. We were introduced to different types of long-serving Wikipedians. For example, there is the man with a bee in his bonnet about the use of ‘comprise’. He has warrant. H. W. Fowler himself says the “lamentably common use of ‘comprise’ as a synonym of ‘compose’ or ‘constitute’ is a wanton and indefensible weakening of our vocabulary.” Our editor spends days correcting wrong sentence constructions put together by hapless Wikipedians who seem not to know if ‘comprise’ refers to the whole or parts of something. Some would describe his behaviour as helpful, others as quixotic. This kind of personal mission though is not why any of us were at the zoom class, even if we’re sticklers for grammar. We were told that the editorial essentials comprise the following: it is an online encyclopedia; entries have a neutral point of view and are factual; the content is free; it does not have firm rules; and Wikipedians interact in a respectful and civil manner. This last point might be assumed, but as the internet lacks rules of etiquette, may be necessary. For every impeccable compiler of comprehensive facts on the given subject, we could encounter a sensitivity reader, blinkered historian, (Oxford comma) or vengeful cousin of the subject. Everything in entries must be suitable for the public domain (no copyright), so must be suitably rewritten; everything is referenced. All of that sounds simple enough. The hard anonymous work begins collecting material on the subject of our entry. This includes, but doesn’t comprise, the aforementioned ‘scraping’. Those of us used to this being what corrupt ex-presidents do with the bottom of the barrel, must adjust to its meaning as the extraction of vast masses of data on websites and copying into other documents and spreadsheets. We gaze at the prospect of ‘scraping’ for a living, even though the work is voluntary, with results that comprise but a formal fraction of the facts ‘scraped’. It dawned on us why the 19,000 articles devised in the first year of Wikipedia (2001), have increased to 6 million by February of this year. After one hour, armed with our own password, we could thus commence our verbal re-arrangement of reality. If we are not side-tracked by our firm belief in the Oxford comma, and the compulsion to add it to every article not currently correct in that respect.