Podium

 

Some lecturers’ podiums are surfboards. Wave after wave of ideas, varying in height, are ridden for an hour that feels like all morning. The taste of the tingle stays with you for years. Some professors’ podiums, podia if you prefer, are jukeboxes, wherefrom the same borrowed tune is played each time annually as in its heyday. Such repetitious resource will inspire young turks in the back row to pen their dunciad ‘Odium of Podium’ (unsigned), little knowing they are on track to join the queue to the podium. Young tutors’ podiums are launching pads, their carefully prepared rockets taking off in showers of self-belief, jargon and nuance. Or runways, where the newest moda is on show and it’s hard to say which designs will survive the next change in the brainstorm weather. Some podiums are drunken boats, other podiums sink without trace. These memories of university came to mind after reading a sentence from Xènius: ‘The problem with professors is neither the system nor their ideas nor their temperaments; it is the podium.’ Xènius is the penname of Eugenio d’Ors y Rovira (1884-1954), being quoted here admiringly by his fellow Catalan author Josep Pla i Casadevall (1897-1981) in Pla’s diary ‘Quadern Gris’, ‘The Gray Notebook’, entry for 19 January 1919. Pla, at the ripe old age of 21, complains that he has learnt nothing at university and can only recall two lectures of any value. Like d’Ors, he sees the podium as the obstacle rather than the bridge to learning, a bulwark to impede progress, not protect it. The podium, as its name suggests, is where professors and possible professors get a toehold. I sometimes think of friends and acquaintances who pursued academic life and how they got a foot in the door using a podium. Like everyone, I learnt sooner or later that university was often less about learning than departmental politics, the podium acting as springboard for some careers, a gallows for others. It was no different at the University of Barcelona one hundred years ago. Sometimes I meet an old acquaintance from the professoriat, as Plat calls it, and am amused more than dismayed at how some of them now talk through their podium, as others talk through their hat. They engage in shop, which is a particular dialect of Podium, a language of terms that occasionally approaches poetry. Like Pla, I conclude by asking myself, “is there anything else like it in this life?” I enjoy recalling addresses I heard from the podium at university. Some of the ideas were entirely new and mysterious to me, what was their source? We all have favourite lectures from those times, valuing them for their moment in time, even if now we would completely rewrite them and copy the rewrites into diaries, like d’Ors or Pla, or share online.

Image: ‘The Gray Notebook’ by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan and published by New York Review of Books in 2013; resting on a page of photographs of park bench mosaics in Güell Park (1900-1914) in Barcelona designed by Antoni Gaudí.

Time

 

Time is moving on, I thought aloud, as we drove up Heidelberg Road in peak hour to where the road bifurcates at the railway bridge in Ivanhoe. Or perhaps time is moving around. Sometimes I don’t understand time at all, said Carol, the driver, timing nicely her shift into the turning lane before arriving behind bumper-to-bumper all the way to Waterdale Road. I work all week and never get any time to work in the garden, she argued, implying I had all the time in the world to do gardening. I work in my sleep, I replied, upping my contribution towards the working week to 24/7, and do I get paid for all that work? Not likely, I reflected, haughtily. Carol, who works while she eats, she said, was of the view that she did much more real work than me and where did all that time go? The concept that time goes somewhere was left in the air as we motored along Upper Heidelberg Road over Eaglemont, the long and winding road that leads to our door. I hummed a famous line before claiming that I had been experimenting with the space-time continuum and now worked over 26 hours per day of Einsteinian time. The green bins are out tonight, said Carol, changing the subject and not for the first time. Perhaps they should be called space-time continuums, I pondered aloud, they look a bit like daleks. Sometimes I just don’t understand time at all, exclaimed Carol, what exactly is it doing, anything? Yes, I said, I agree, our memory tells us about these places and what they were then, but really it’s all one inside. Sometimes we just have to go with the flow because we’re not going to explain time just by talking. Carol turned the car right off Waiora Road where the magnificent vista of the complete Dandenongs veers into view, as it has done for the time of the Dreaming. It’s true though, I said as we coursed curvaceously down Ruthven Street into the Macleod valley, that we have organised time so it controls everything we think and do. This is wrong and a strong argument, I suggested, for prayer, and music, and contemplation. The only level crossing not danandrewsed came into sight as the phone rang a distinctive person’s tone, bringing these thoughts on business time to an abrupt cessation. True, it was not your usual conversation about raking the leaves and why is there so much leaf slush on the paths and who is going to put out the green bin anyway, as if that was not already a foregone conclusion when someone has 26 hours in the day in which to do it all, unpaid. Ringing off, soon Carol had moved on to the subject of bifurcation, one meaning of which is what Heidelberg Road does at Ivanhoe, but a second meaning is the possibility of a person being in two places at once. I thought, I don’t mind where Carol is, as long as she’s behind the wheel of the car when it’s moving and I’m in the passenger seat. It was nightfall as we careened up Torbay Street.     

Nuanced

 

Dawn is the vast convulsion of sight that is slept through oblivious of horizons and ever a space-time ripple effect, vast yet nuanced. Morning is cloud and magpie song and window dribble, piebald and nuanced. Morning is the dream we are fossicking to recall, goldmine of courts and caughts and coarseds and unavoidably nuanced. Morning is milk coffee at the screen displaying emails, new news, random posts, unwanted promotions, and the long read left unread yesternight, hypersensitive and nuanced. Morning is managing the crowd of plans, their tense demands or routine or tender, mindful and nuanced. Midday is announcing already, but largely unnoticed, the heights of colour, bold and yet eternally nuanced. Afternoon is thoroughly Louis MacNeice and nuanced. Afternoon will say a thousand things that must be heard and sorted by the mind into categories, for example whacko, f-a-s-c-i-n-a-t-i-n-g, obvious, delay till next time, gorblimey, yes I suppose so, yeah nah, patience is a virtue my dear, oh almost closing time, the skyline today is normative and yet um nuanced. Evening the cat returns, hungry and visible, his eyes a story from a back fence fairy tale, or academic dissertation hid in the stacks, cogent and nuanced.  Evening through the trees the autumn sunset and rooftops at every imaginable angle to the perpendicular turns cold and threatens rain and sounds of rain their frequency and patterns nuanced. Night is lamplight after dinner where my Renaissance informer in hardback feeds a steady supply of gossip and emotion and geography and theology both doctrinally sound blessedly and linguistically nuanced. Night is coming to terms with information overload, reduced to some essential particulars, that are foregrounded yet annoyingly somehow nuanced. Night is minds of electricity attending their projects with mixed feelings, interests scribbling across the margins, more revealing than the text, more truth-bearing and nuanced. Night is an extra layer and the answer to a question both ephemeral and nuanced. Early morning is fog so utter everything is indefinable and indescribable, leaving imagination to imagine everything in the fog as memory knows it to be, particular and nuanced. Morning is street lights going out and the post coming in, bills, supermarket flyers, but a letter personal and nuanced. Midday is a moment I miss, the background sounds of the world as wondrous and continuous as the tap-tap sing-song call-back foreground sounds of immediate moment, familiar and nuanced.  Afternoon is a chaos of wall lettering, an empty lot for redevelopment, traffic rising gradually again to incessant, the ceaseless city, grandiose, wounded, and nuanced. Evening is another day half done, and moments of peaceful thought about people, themselves and nuanced.

Computer

 

A scrunched, fading bookmark fell from a book. It was a cutting, a newspaper poem by Judith Wright entitled “Computers”. ‘Those things make me nervous/ but not for the reasons you think,’ she begins, setting up the dichotomy that our ways are not a poet’s ways. Notice her connection of ‘things’ with ‘think’. ‘Not because they’ll take away our living;/ if we really liked living/ that wouldn’t matter,/we could start living instead. You don’t need much money to live.’ She raises this matter of ‘living’, which is about the most important subject in the world, more important than computers. Notice how she introduces money from nowhere. She seems to be making a link between computers and money, one that today has become profound. Living, for Judith, is about creating, if we are to understand the next verse aright: ‘Not because they’ll write poems or paint pictures;/ no one who knows what poetry is/ or what pictures are/ could do more than laugh at that one.’ This is a confident assertion of the originality of human creation, made with a certainty based in experience. Laughter, by implication, is not a computer’s forte. She turns her gaze to society and politics, as was oft her wont: ‘Not because they’ll start breeding, set up an elite,/ exclude us, run everything – /anyone who looks can see/ that’s happened already./ We could live in the gaps between them.’ Judith doesn’t describe these gaps, though we can intuit plenty of them in the lines of the poem. Instead, we have reached halfway, which is when she turns to the true explanation of her nervousness. ‘No, they make me nervous/ because they’re eating us;/ here a muscle, there a mind,/ an action or a vision.’ As elsewhere, she moves quickly from the particular to the immensely general, invoking in spare lines an incipient negative mood formed by computers. ‘See: when I said ‘vision’/ it made you smile./ No one now can have a vision/ because They don’t have them.’ Her conversational mode works to take us into her confidence. Then, having done so, goes up several registers: ‘We’re ashamed to fall in love/ because They don’t do it. / We analyse poems instead of reading them/ because that’s what computers do./ We think it’s square to be human/ because They aren’t.’ Actually, it’s most computers that are square (literally), not humans. But we grasp her meaning, computers are some irresistibly cool invention we tell ourselves we cannot do without. ‘Square’ is the only word that dates Judith’s poem, which googling reveals was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 18^th of June 1966. So, having assessed the advent of computers, in a poem that bears close analysis, the poet does a fresh turn of thought, leaving us fairly much squarely where computers started, the root cause of the problem: ‘No, then it can’t be computers/ that make me nervous./ It’s us. Perhaps we make them/ because we’re sick of humans.’ I smile and pin Judith’s poem on the corkboard for further consideration.

Car

 

Blunder buses have taken over. The roads are alive with the sound of asunder. Blunders barrel out of driveways like wayward schoolboys. They notice not anyone. They careen without care across width of lanes, their drivers blinkered and their blinkers, afterthoughts. Their suburb adds to the takeover of blunder buses, black as bitumen, paralleling towards mundane oblivion. Thus the customised dream machines, their widening vistas, vanish behind windows fitted for force fields. Airy showrooms long since released their beaming blunders, their busy numbers, to the plunder of air and sky, gearing up for the downward wonder of tumble and shatter. Who knows where they came from, does anyone know? Round as a range, broad as a bomb site, they benchmark themselves each decade. Their former shells decayed, carburettor carcasses, the wheels fell off. Bigger is bluster, the barging blunders, dozens damnfine the freeway and doozeys more, past stopping or noticing, queue a brief breath when they see red. Fumes unnoticed by anyone, the toxic crowds expending petrol, fairly furioso. Names of blunder bus drivers are unknown, impossible names to guess so fast they pass. Visible at the front windscreen of their pride, their sight is fixed ahead, rarely wavering a minute. Names like Gas and Guzzle come to mind, but these are not their brands. No one will ever know their names. No one will know their actual claims, as they accelerate out of sight at thundering speed. Goodbye where their duco skin contracts to the vanishing point, on permanent collision course. Yet their paintwork bespeaks clouds, White Whale, Bright Edge, Beatitude Beige, Silver Lining, Oblong Foliage, Rainy Monday, and their finish betokens the infinite care of focussed decades perfecting exterior with interior for the promised comfort of seatbelteds in the back. Their bod-bothering broadness builds buildings. Every condo pit its own carpark, every multistorey a tribute to idle speed. Urbanity wrests hills, plateaux  and vales for blunder’s sole advantage, expert attention given to dotted lines and arrows left and right to the ends of their known world. Their balance and carriage are an artform modernism calls its own, more mobile than pop art, sculptured purpose pointing ever in one direction. Best get out of the way! Admire, if you will, the beauty that no one can refuse, the climactic chauffeured eyeblink designed for reuse, blundering in its hundreds upon hundreds, unquestioned and unopposed, toward a destination drivers choose to excuse. They notice not anything that the future explains, too busy getting over into the turning lane, too preoccupied with the satnav lady’s wrong direction, more worried about the next one minute and no time to think.       

Birthday

 

Siri called my wife in the morning to tell her that it is Philip Harvey’s birthday today and she might want to send him a greeting. Thoughtful of Siri, though others might accuse Siri of micromanaging. Carol’s thoughts were ahead of her private intelligence assistant. She had already presented me with a brown bag shaped like a wine bottle, with a bottle of St Hugo’s inside, and an envelope with a card inside of two people, their hair all salt and no pepper, sipping red wine at a garden table. Phone call from Mother. Facebook friends sent birthday messages, intermingled with their range of opinions about the coronation, streamed on all channels the night before. Cantuar was lugubrious or commanding, his sermon was on point or unintelligible. The new king was melancholy or commanding, he smiled, or didn’t smile enough, the weight of the crown would demand two Panadol later, or a stiff whisky. I leant towards Bollinger. Some thought it a pantomime, or outdated, or commanding, their own special attitude, while it looked to me like a eucharist with other things going on including anointing and crowning. I decided to thank my social media friends by writing a thank you note on A4. Voilà! After a morning walk in sparkling streets between regular rainfalls, I read by the window, in no special order, Austin Farrer, Ludwig Bemelmans, and Marina Warner. By chance into the afternoon online I discovered that today is World Laughter Day. Who thinks these things up? Apparently its intention is to “raise awareness” about laughter, that laughter is a “simple tool for improving wellness.” Is the joke on me? Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you could end up like the new king. Is the world laughing with him, or at him? Both, to believe the various screens in our house. Bridie says helpfully, as long as you have the last laugh. Research says that this festival falls on the first Sunday of May, so the laughs are on me this year. Last weekend I spent the longest time in my adult life in my birthplace. Bendigo over four days took in the charms resulting from the goldrush and two of the four operas of the Ring, an achievement my father, a classical music buff, said could not be done in Australia; his granddaughter was working in Costumes. Change is all about us, as Farrer, Bemelmans, and Warner testify by their different means. Last year I spent the longest time in my adult life in hospital emergency. Favourite birthday cards from the ward are my meal orders for the day, the computer setting generating the message of the ages to all those blessed and fortunate enough to be being looked after on their own personal World Laughter Day by doctors, nurses, surgeons, specialists, caterers, cleaners, cardiologists, rheumatologists, and other experts at gists, each assisting in making sure we see out another year, or thirty.

Spoof

 

Spoof is a word used, without hint of irony, for the word products of artificial intelligence. My information technology man said to me yesterday that we are at an Orville Wright moment. He explained how I could feed all of my writing into chat and chat could fashion a work of literature in my style on any subject, the outcome being what I have since discovered is spoof. He might be awfully right, not least about chat creating a pale imitation of the sentence structure, vocabulary, and shifts of thought that comprise the kind of thing that I am at least halfway happy with at the time of composition. My consolation is that I can think about whether the words on the page work or not, a skill beyond the capability of artificial intelligence. Inventing new words, imagining poetic forms, making surprise digressions are also within my purlieu, or is that purview, or bailiwick. The other day I read about the man who invented artificial intelligence and thereby, wittingly or not, chat and spoof. He was renouncing artificial intelligence and all its works, saying it wasn’t meant to go down that path, perhaps he meant a flight path, or just the Wright path, that this was not what he had in mind one bit, and he regretted how his brainchild had turned into every parent’s nightmare. He seemed to be going through an Albert Einstein moment, of which admittedly there a few, but the one where the exciting discovery of relativity led to the exciting prospect of splitting the atom, or more particularly the unexciting prospect of the world being destroyed by people who wanted to use their science for the wrong ends. The artificial man’s ire was directed in particular at young information technologists who had perfected the chat’s insatiable appetite for devouring a person’s entire written lifetime then regurgitating said words in the manner of the devoured person. Not though as well, not using language that made connections between the imitation sentences, or in other words, spoof. His ire, a synonym for anger, was especially inspired by their attitude that they’d proven it could be done, and someone else can sort out the problems later. Inventing new theorems, imagining technological feasibilities, making surprise discoveries are one thing, but the silicon children just want to have fun with the libraries of the known world, regardless of copyright or authors’ finer feelings or the wonders of human originality or good expression, either. Spoof is the word they use for their creature’s unreadable mangling of the available text. While authors go through their own William Shakespeare moment, asking did we write the words we just wrote or was it a descendant of the Earl of Oxford, it’s unclear if all the persiflage spewed out by artificial intelligence using said words has any author, any past, or even more particularly, any future.

Image: Iso-mandala No. 262 (Ovid Void 6), a homage to Thomas Merton made in the summer of 2021.

 

Shepherd

 

Reflection for the Fourth Sunday in Easter, the 30^th of April 2023.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

For a little while now, Australia has been a land of long 5-wire fences and stock grids. Sheep are familiar in the landscape, but not shepherds. Yet the role of the shepherd is perfectly understood in time and imagination, such that it takes little to explain the claim “The Lord is my shepherd” in our most commonly used psalm. Identifying the nature of this necessary relationship is a salutary exercise. 

As we know, every line of the psalm lists a prized value in our relationship with the Shepherd. We will not be left in complete want. He provides rest from our difficulties. He takes us into stillness. He restores us and leads us in the right way. Even if we find ourselves in darkness, or are met with evil, we will not be afraid, his presence is with us. Even surrounded by enemies, he won’t simply be present but actually provides a meal for our sustenance. Furthermore, a meal that offers everything we need and more: the cup overflows. Having such a watcher and guide is enough for a lifetime, says the psalmist, where being within cooee of the Shepherd is to be at home in the world. We need not be alone, nor are we self-sufficient. 

Clearly, this person is more reliable than your average politician, lawyer or bureaucrat. And though fallibility is human, the Shepherd is also a model for how we may relate to those around us. Anyone, in fact. This seems to be what’s happening in the community described in Acts. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers… [they] ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.” Peter takes it further, encouraging us to follow the example of Christ’s suffering, he who “committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” He assures us that even when we go astray, we can return to the one he calls ”the shepherd and guardian of your souls.” 

John is useful in reminding us that those who are with the Shepherd “know his voice.” Becoming familiar with that voice, following where he goes, and listening at every opportunity, in whatever way feels valid, is to be in a place of relationship, security, stillness, and learning – all of the valuable factors for life, growth and well-being expressed in the psalm this morning.    

Acts 2: 42-47. Psalm 23. 1 Peter 2: 19-25. John 10: 1-10.

Bendigo

More roads, more signs, more conversation than you would believe. On Friday the car takes you to Bendigo, one effortless freeway of turnoffs pointing to bluestone townships and sandstone towns, memories long since. Landscapes join at mountain ridges, wave thickly toward horizons. More skies, more clouds, more treetops than you would believe. German opera declaims its takeover in rich expanses, trialling every life change for all that glitters. Songs saying more than they know, props that betoken the balance of existence, costumes breathing presence every second. More youth, more gold, more individuation than you would believe. Ovations, then scarved you walk down cobblestone streets home against cold night air, your voices arguing admiringly small moments on the big stage. More growth, more dreams, more beauty than you would believe. Come Saturday you breakfast in typical style then tour the stalwart bookshops. More classics, more bargains, more unbelievables than you would believe. The town has the whole weekend. Galleries with more Australiana than you can poke a stick at, nostalgic interviews with once and future Siegfrieds, or you can descend the central mine to unpack a steamer trunk of idylls. More bliss, more tears, more unrestraint than you would believe. Home again in your trusty car through darkness behung with odd lampposts of terra firma. To unheard-of talk about purity of storyline versus the obstructions of concept, conducted over late night repasts and your glass of best terra rossa. Betimes to sleep, bedtimes and wakefulness, and what then but. More light, more leaves, more bellringing than you would believe. Sunday in the world takes you and yours into ranging streets and postprandial unto corridors of Wagnerians, tense huddles of Wagnerites, and is there a difference as they file through the doors to an afternoon of Twilight, with promises of exiting in the dark. More longing, more lies, more betrayal than you would believe. Until wisdom might best be named the cold light of day, as you join the others still all kept in the dark. The orchestra never rests, flowing beneath your gaze like the proverbial stream, the mythic reef of gold, the ever-present conscious mind repetitious awake then asleep then awake again. Singers step forward as directed, their words a breath away from heaven or hell. More lunge, more looks, more comeuppances than you would believe. And six seven hours is over as you leave the onstage fires behind and scarved, coated talk the way home past conservatory and poppet head, of fairy tales and do they have psychology, of how opera graces you with unthinkable avenues. More lights-out, more leaving, more TuesdayWednesdayThursday than you would believe. While Monday for now is that day of settling for less, packing-up the print bargains, marking the turnoff to Malmsbury, your car making its way onto the ring road. More streets, more names, more becoming than you would believe.

Image: The entrance gates of the Ulumbarra Theatre (formerly Sandhurst Gaol) in Bendigo, venue for Melbourne Opera’s staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle this autumn. Reading ‘A Hawk among Sparrows’, a biography of Austin Farrer, I was taken by a sentence in one his letters (1932) on page 91: “…[Hugh Lister] turning up suddenly in a car with his mother, and motored me gently round Otmoor and up to Brill, more light, more leaves, more buttercups than you would believe.”