Baby

A baby is nestled from the opinion of the world. Sleeping on their mother’s breast, the world is movements of sound. Perhaps that’s where symphonies begin. Laughter awakes the baby from undisturbed bliss. Merriment perchance. Louder laughter at a voice with an upturn, a timing of lines. Yet louder then the turn up to full pitch of baby’s wail, filling the theatre to the ceiling with meaning, a voice demanding attention, a mouth with something to say. Arj Barker is distracted. He knows that voice, he’s heard it before, a straight line wanting air, or milk, or a face, all three. He delivered lines like that himself early in his career, spontaneous and attention-grabbing, on his mother’s breast. It’s the unmistakable voice of need. A need different from his, which is keeping to the script. Argy Bargy could lose the thread. He welcomes hecklers, the thrill of audience interaction, while the audience responds to his well-tended comic material. But this interjector doesn’t use words. Their unpremeditated expression is superior to the sound system, gets in under audience attention, and his intentions. Large Marker is the one with the one-liners, the stand-up tweets they repeat as they walk down the street, undelete, all in the name of the Large ego. This baby’s intrusion is a confusion, a wordless whine lacking comic timing, tingling the chandeliers with primal diffusion, a non-grammatical non sequitur of healthy lungs leaving Large tongue-tied, ego upstaged. Taj Mahaler’s reduced to Garage Parker, his lofty visions at the grandiose Athenaeum an anticlimactic search for a corner to reverse into without crashing the show. Baby babbles at the pretty lights as Taj in his mind fears the worst, a reviewer expert in one-line demolitions of his craft, out of the mouths of babes, and all that. Baby threatens to have the final word, an indignant protest only to be silenced by a nipple. Sarge Starkers is used to crowd control, his delivery keeps everyone in order, feeding from the hand that commands. He stands at ease while they stand to attention. But Sarge is cooling to baby’s heckle, frighting on stage in the emperor’s new clothes. His attention turns to the mother, cuddling her child in the old-fashioned manner, waiting for his next well-timed wit skit. Starkers bawls out the order, take her baby from the theatre, no maybes, or words to that effect, allowing for the shades of English typical of comedy festivals. Barge Harker wants all the attention, that’s show business, his name in lights, viral online. Contrary to baby, who remains nameless, a special command performance repeated every minute of the day the world over, saying It’s Me Time! Mother ups and departs, now the audience has lost the thread, her baby resting into new symphonies. Merriment perchance. While Harker has a farking feeling he won’t be hearing the end of this, on stage in the Athenaeum, up the proverbial creek with a barge pole. 

 

 

 

Image: Detail from the Yoko Ono exhibition ‘My Mommy is Beautiful’ at the NGV Triennial, 2024.

  

Idea

 

‘Listen! I have an idea’ is the subject of this year’s poetry prize. How do I teach this to sixty primary school students? By reading poems aloud, but first what is an idea? And do children have ideas? I raise these questions at a dinner party on the weekend. Friends at dinner agree, it’s a great subject, but even though we all have ideas, we don’t think of them in the abstract. I said I was helped by William Carlos Williams’ saying in his poetry “No ideas but in things.” In other words, things prompt words that reveal ideas. Young poets find poetry by using images in their own language. Our host wrestled with how thoughts expressed well are kind of the start of ideas. I introduced the oft-said concern that children simply parrot the ideas of adults, in particular their parents. Wine and conviviality got us no closer to a theory about how we write poetry about ideas. Or may did, but the wine was taking effect. Next day I asked my daughter on the phone, what is an idea? She said, after some thought, walking along the street, that an idea is when two thoughts meet, at any age. Trick being, how to present this definition of Idea to a group of under-12s? I cannot, of course, because it’s too cerebral, like thoughts and ideas in general. Some older students may respond with a poem like a philosophical argument, but most wish to say something, or else even write a poem called ‘I Have No Ideas Today’. But admittedly, thoughts meeting is often the genesis of poems, so how to make that happen. By chance, whatever chance is, over the weekend a relative gave me a spare copy of Saul Bellow’s essays. I discovered that Bellow is an intellectual who hates the word intellectual. His biographical interview ‘A Half Life’ (1990) opens “I certainly wasn’t conscious of ideas as such before I was ten. I did have ideas of some sort earlier, but they were the sort of primitive metaphysical ideas a small child has.” Asked for examples, he replies: “Sitting on a curbstone, looking at the sky, thinking: Where did it all come from? Why was I here?” I started to think that the first word in the theme was as important as the last. Listening was as much the theme as ideas. I needed to find poems for reading that showed things and that drew in the listener, whether child or adult. The theme equated poetry with the need to say something to others. If children already have ideas, whether as defined by my host on Saturday night, my daughter on her phone, or the American Nobel laureate in his interview, then those ideas will form by hearing poetry and imitating its sounds, feel, word games, subjects and so forth from their own experience. My job became one of finding poems that assisted that process, reading them out carefully, and seeing what happened next. Poems would follow, and ideas, even poems about what is an idea.

Finland

 

Standing at Westgarth Station the anonymous author considers how clouds superimpose themselves on other clouds, cold as snow. The clouds are images in his mind, slowly ending up upon alpine plains. A high bridge arches across the sky in his mind. The anonymous writer wonders why Gerald Murnane never uses the name Gerald for the first-person narrators of his incremental fictions. But not for long, as he finds images in his mind are of white expanses of Finland. Snow footpaths and snow windows show at some unearthly hour and briefly the moon the same. There are ice rivers and ice rinks all day in daylight then candles in the windows when an unearthly sunset makes everywhere black and the winter sea. Westgarth platform is an arc. Large mirrors on sturdy stilts help the train driver see the back carriage exits and entrances. The anonymous author notices how superimposed clouds and a bridge in the sky are reflections in a large mirror on Platform 2. Surface glaze and white sprays of graffiti improve the superimpositions in his mind. He thinks it must be exciting for humans and wolves when the darkness breaks open with a red line that widens into pink and yellow, in Finland, in winter. Windows and exterior landscapes turn white, making space for memory. When a Hurstbridge express train hurtles through the arc of Westgarth, disappearing around the bend, the station is left feeling redundant. The anonymous author senses the loneliness experienced sometimes by characters in stories by Tove Jansson. A mirror on stilts temporarily reflects woodlands and cold lakes and pale blue skies. He sees the music of Jean Sibelius, chilly and austere sonatinas, proof, if only in his writing, that music is visible. The unnamed writer wonders why Tove rarely used the name Tove, though all the characters in her fictions were people in her life. Tove gave them special names, some of them look like clouds and the main ways to reach islands in Finland are by boat or bridge. The nameless composer in words considers it a great relief to know wolves were never introduced into Australia. He wonders if an academic living in Westgarth with nothing better to do will one day collate a who’s who key to all the people in the novels of Gerald Murnane, formerly of Macleod. He recollects images in his mind in a glass whitely on stilts of the frozen north, or is that the melting north, or the misty north, the slushy north, the pale blue north? A stopping-all-stations to Macleod rounds the bend, slows and halts along the arc, beneath the bridge in the sky. Five people get off and two people get onto the train, also the unidentified author into the second front carriage. The driver waits till all is clear then closes the long line of carriage doors.

Omnishambles

 

Omnishambles, a word that should be used more often to explain the bewildering array of evidence and opinion met in daily life, at macro and micro levels. Confronted with a situation that is beyond our immediate ability to process in all its complexity, most of us reach readily for the common expression: What a mess! A useful summation, but sometimes for truly unruly presentations of a mess, why not opt for its baroque synonym, omnishambles? This was the word used by the judge in the Bruce Lehrmann vs Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson case this week in the Federal Court to describe the height, breadth, and depth of confusion (read, information) that met his senses during this court hearing. He was stating his task, which was to apply common sense and a knowledge of the law onto an omnishambles, the prefix omni- indicating that the shambles was everywhere and all-encompassing through several dimensions. At least from his perspective. And probably most of the jury’s, the jury consisting of a goodly proportion of the Australian population. Like us the judge, Justice Michael Lee, was being told lies and to his credit he showed great insight in calling out quite a number, especially from Lehrmann, using simple objectivity and knowledge of the type. This dispersed much omnipresent fog while gratifyingly showing none of us are omniscient. Weeks of hearings tiptoed around the certainty, because it was forever being denied, that sex occurred on the ministerial couch in Parliament. This shambling around the main subject was clearly irritating to the judge. He made clear with clinical analysis just what this discussion was really about. His verdict left none of the jury in any doubt, as the omnishambles exited stage right and a hundred cameras followed the actors in this strange farce down a busy Sydney street. His actual characterisation of the case went, “given its unexpected detours and the collateral damage, it might be more fitting to describe it as an omnishambles”, itself a fitting description of the messy night in question. That alcohol has its own verisimilitude was known to the judge. That there are any number of afterhours venue choices more private than Parliament House. That true confessions may happen years later in unanticipated places and with unlikely listeners. His every sentence spoke to a shared reality about people and life. Deliver us from subterfuge. Amen. Omnishambles started life as a British political word, apt thinks the jury given the events of the case transpired during the lifetime of the so-so ScoMo moment. Like the judge, the Oxford English Dictionary turned this mess into clear English, awarding omnishambles the Word of the Year in 2012. Its definition: “a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgement results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.”   

Autumn

 

Spring forward, fall back. One hour. Rule of thumb. Autumn, typically, is indifferent to these time signatures. Sunrise is cooler, too cool most chances. Yellow leaves no larger than (thinks cent coins, cuticles no fingernails) hmmmmm speckle concrete footpaths. Cute icicles. Rain leaves them brighter awhile, softening. Bodies rest into the slowdown of heat, enjoy the enjoining beatitude. Puddles inch inwards to an outline. Streetscapes turn amber, burgundy, lime. Coughs in the air occur, distant phrases of tired machinery. Metal pings when hit, assorted wheels grind iron rail grooves. Impressively the omnipresent clouds are this time dark grey, bodying reminder of our world of bodies, boding more and darker. Autumn, prolifically, let’s go of the foregoing immensities, their spatial expansions, their aging colours, as usual. Walking around the wind, or headlong against the wind, but not ahead of the wind, walkers have never felt so alive. Or so they say. Utensils shine dull silver quietly, there in the moment. And buildings and clouds, likewise. Immensities of park and field, evaporation and photosynthesis, sun ray and creek bed are let go. One hour, no more, no less, let go. Jigsaw suburbs fit into jigsaw city and jigsaw outskirts, every piece touched with change, strange joins. Storm drains thunder after downpours lessen. Autumn prolifically sounds. Next day the regularities push their known designs, regardless of saving hours. Stone is washed of sunlight dust, revealing its hidden warmth, worn well. Fennel rallies and fountains, weeds find a place to stay, vines reach their magnitude and start to fray. Explorative, pages are turned that have not been turned for years and yes, years. Birds scatter raindrops on pages from upper branches, firm in their tendencies. Houses in line resume their human scale as the cool air shrinks expectations back to normality. Absurd ringtones interrupt tranquillity. Fallen eucalypts from the big storm have turned brown on brown where fallen. A lightbulb at a day window says someone is home. Succulents too big to manage loll over rocks in tired profusion. Laughing conversation picks up on a favourite theme as it fades around a nearby corner. A construction site is a nest of cranes in a field of mud, angles waiting for the next stage. Lucid thoughts join together again in some old-fashioned way. A moment of your time becomes an hour, more or less, attention rapt in the flow. A feather, no less, falls on the footpath, reminder of soft arrows everywhere, of all the time it actually takes. Tomorrow, which is already here, witnesses more than it can say or fit in the space. Instead, erects signs to confirm where it’s at. Wall cracks held with cement retell the sag of ground in redbrick zigzag, all the way down, to the ground, nearly. The red tree in the side garden barely flutters.

Stormy

  

Photograph: The Rossetti family at home in Chelsea, London, taken by Lewis Carroll on the 7^th October, 1863. Left to right: Dante Gabriel, Christina, Frances Polidori (their mother), and William Michael. Photograph held at the V&A.

 It was a dark and stormy night, a month’s rain in 24 hours, not quite a once-in-one-hundred-year event, but relief for the garden and the overwarmed brains of heatwave survivors. “It was a dark and stormy night,” wrote 12-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1840), “in the month of December when a figure closely wrapped in the sable folds of his cloak, and mounted on a jaded steed, was seen hurrying across a bleak common towards a stately castle in the distance, whose lofty towers and time-worn battlements frowned over the wide expanse beneath.” It was a dark and stormy night is a perfectly marvellous and effective opening to a story, in truth. It was a dark and stormy night is not a sinning but a winning formula. It was a dark and Stormy night for the former president when the penny dropped that accumulating hush money and legal fees made his transaction with the adult film star the costliest transaction that day. It was a dark and stormy night, the ideal night to open a bright fresh document and begin your entry on that square of light for the worst opening sentence to a novel. It was a dark and stormy night, as meteoric meteorologist Jane Bunn would say, more eloquently than you or I. “It was a dark and stormy night,” wrote Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1830), not anticipating that within a decade Dante Gabriel Rossetti would be lifting the line to open his own romantic, some say melodramatic, story. It was a dark and stormy night inside Vincent Van Gogh’s head, sorting thunder from lightning trees, swirling black from too brief jagged cerulean. It was a dark and stormy night across the Bellarine Peninsula, the Geelong road awash, power failures in Werribee and other parts, awesome as a Sir David Attenborough docuseries only with no comforting voiceovers and very wet. It was a dark and stormy night or, as Alexandre Dumas would say “C’était une nuit orageuse et sombre, de gros nuages couraient au ciel, voilant la clarté des étoiles; la lune ne devait se lever qu’à minuit” (1844), doubtless setting the scene for the next entrance of dashing D’Artagnan. It was a dark and story night for fiction writers in every language, seated beneath the lamplight wondering which way the plot was going to go next, does it work or is it a dark and stormy mess. It was a dark and stormy night, a phrase used by Washington Irving in 1809, the origin of which is it seems obscure, lost in some dark and stormy night of literature. It was a dark and stormy night when Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton found himself more sinned against than sinning, sitting in his sitting room a sitting duck, out of luck, with zero stars out of five. It was a dark and stormy night, pouring, when Snoopy’s typewriter keys jammed from a day’s solid pawing (1971), ending his flow just as he was nearing The End.

Painfulness

 

A factor almost universally ignored nowadays by critics and readers is the extent of the pains a writer, or any artist at times, went to in assembling the created work. Critics behave as though the work is there primarily as a test of their superior reading skills, their special criteria for praise or dismissal. The intellectual, experiential, and emotional realities that made the work possible count for nothing much, or so it appears. The common reader, similarly, too often seems to talk about works in the same way they treat other phenomena, as consumables whose existence arrived on the shelf purely by chance, there for an hour’s passing distraction. This factor came to mind today re-reading a favourite Victorian author, Richard Chenevix Trench. He writes: ‘[Thomas] Fuller, our Church historian, having occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims, “Oh the painfulness of his preaching!” We might assume at first hearing, and if we did not know the former uses of ‘painfulness,’ that this was an exclamation wrung out at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the pain which he caused to others, but of the pains which he bestowed himself: and I am persuaded, if we had more ‘painful’ preachers in the old sense of the word, that is, who took pains themselves, we should have fewer ‘painful’ ones in the modern sense, who cause pain to their hearers. So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as “the painful writer of two hundred books” – not meaning hereby that these books were painful in the reading, but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.’ (‘English, Past and Present: Five Lectures.’ 3^rd Edition, Revised. London, 1856, page 180.) The Revd Trench of Itchen Stoke calls this “a very easy misapprehension,” adding it to the many in his lectures he went to pains in tracing, in order to illustrate how meanings change over the centuries. Linguistics, or philology, was a second string to Trench’s bow, whose several painful books of theology and biblical interpretation assisted his eventual advance to the position of Archbishop of Dublin. In fact, his mind- and time-expanding skills of etymology are one of the original inspirations for the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the supreme results of that Age of dedicated painfulness. He hadn’t time to help compile the OED, but he is regarded as one of its three founders. His different word studies books enunciated a complete and erudite rationale for collecting instances of word change in the literature, formulated before the genesis of the Dictionary itself in 1857. An entire literature has since evolved around OED editors and contributors past and present, lucid and less so, readers of this biographical literature avid to admire the extreme painfulness of their scholarship. Some of it on a par with Bishop Grosthead, better known by Trench’s time as Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln, one of England’s foremost medieval statesmen, theologians and philosophers, as well as being thought the real founder of the scientific method at Oxford.

Excellence

 

Each day for some weeks now I have been puzzling over the meaning of redefining excellence. ‘redefining excellence’ is the lowercase slogan of the building company constructing a new dwelling in our neighbourhood. There is time each morning, walking past their sign to the railway station, to unpack the wisdom, if it is wisdom, of this bold claim. Here are some of my breakfast thoughts on this subject, though be warned that from our place to the station is nearly all downhill. To begin with, can we redefine excellence? If something is already excellent, isn’t that enough? Surely excellence is what we strive for, that once achieved does not require further enhancement. If excellence is the aim, the crown, the hilltop of our work then that ought to be it; anything extra may even jeopardise excellence. There are reasons we do not have excellenter or excellentest. Then, do we want to redefine excellence? Yes or no? And how do we go about that? Some would see this as the argument from imitation. Haydn is excellent. Therefore, theoretically, redefining Haydn is how we get Mozart and Beethoven. Is this what the sign means? Maybe. Can the simple and excellent fifties brick dwelling recently demolished on the site be redefined into a two-storey twenties home with granny flat and swimming pool? At a stretch, maybe. Depends on our definition of the word redefine. Because implied in this verb is some notion that something more excellent than excellent is about to be achieved, something no one else could possibly manage. Simply to say that an excellent home is under construction is neither here nor there in a world brimming with superlatives. It is assumed from the ground up that the forthcoming construction will be excellent, of a certainty, because all constructions the length and breadth of the metropolis are excellent. We know that already. The implication is that this is more excellent, as distinct from excellenter, than all other excellent dwellings. To which is added an element of mystery: obviously the building company is across excellence from the start, but redefining excellence is another level again, an expression of excellence hitherto unseen, only what? -- with infinite views across the valley even further than the railway station. This is the kind of excellence we only read about in books. I am offering these thoughts to save you the trouble, because one tentative conclusion of mine is that redefining excellence does your head in. On the one hand it seems hubristic to make claims for excellence that defy the norms of the building industry, or even the history of architecture. While on the other, it could be an objective that is impossible accurately to assess, if excellence is only ever in the eye of the beholder. Much as I am certain that the company will deliver an excellent home, based on its own declared self-belief, I find the criteria lack definition. By now I am ordering coffee from the station barista, my thoughts heading towards the second front carriage of the stopping all stations.   

Saturday

 

Image: ‘Homeless Jesus’ by Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz, in front of Newman College Chapel in Parkville. 

Reflection on Holy Saturday for the pew notes at the Easter Vigil held at St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne, written by Philip Harvey

 When I worked at the theological library in Parkville, years ago, one of my reference jobs one time was to assist a postgraduate student on research enquiries about her chosen subject of Holy Saturday. She regularly wore a tee-shirt she’d had made bearing the message in large letters: “Don’t Ask! The Thesis Is Hell.” This livened things up and was fair warning that she meant business. 

One benefit of being a research librarian is that, out of necessity, you can get to learn almost as much about the subject as the researcher. For example, what is Holy Saturday? From experience, it is the great lull between the shock and dismay of Friday and the glory of Sunday. It is a gentle autumn day in Melbourne. However, in terms of the prayerful attention to the Passion it is a time of rest and reflection. We live in that place and time, possibly not for the last time, where It is Finished. Judged from personal and shared experience, we each have our own thesis about Holy Saturday. 

Attractive and helpful, I think, is the ancient reminder that it is the sabbath, wherein Christ is laid to rest after a week of extreme suffering. The command to keep that day holy is being kept in a very complete way. Living with the dead is something we do more frequently than we imagine, we speak their words and repeat their rituals, and here is a day in the calendar set aside for that purpose. It is a case of doing something simply by doing nothing. 

Within tradition, then, there is the descent of Christ into Hell. We sometimes sing about this in the creed, depending on which creed. Hell is a subject no one wants to talk about these days, even when it’s happening to them every day, or is plain as day. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Certainly, the overcoming of evil is one express meaning of the Descent and the lead of Christ on Holy Saturday is an example we are being told to pay witness to. 

The early English term for this was the Harrowing of Hell. This is the understanding, put at its Wikipedia simplest, that “in triumphant descent, Christ brought salvation to the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world.” A thesis is expected to explain, but sometimes a thesis must concede there are things outside human explanation. Sometimes all we can do is send a researcher in the right direction. 

That said, Holy Saturday is the lead in to the Easter Vigil. An autumn day may be spent convivially arranging flowers, polishing brass, practising joyous hymns, and designing the Paschal candle for the immense service of light and water, history and presence, that begins Easter Day. Shopping can involve plans for large Sunday meals and a trolley load of chocolate. Or we may like to celebrate  quietly, yet in dozens of small ways, this day when we ready ourselves again for the utterly unexpected.

Scriptwriter

 

The sword is mightier than the pen in the case of scriptwriter A.B., found on the golf links his clavicle bisected by a rapier. Irony runs deep for his fans, familiar as they are with his popular thriller ‘Do Unto Others’ in which novelist C.D. comes to a sticky end after producing a spate of murder mysteries with unlikely weapons, illogical plot lines, and random executions. See in particular his ‘Dead Herrings’, a term that has seeped into the language. Some viewers feel A.B. had it coming, especially after the gratuitous removal of the charming barmaid E. F., main lead of the eternal earner ‘Accidents Happen’. E.F. gave as good as she got, spun a steady line in catachresis and hyperbole, and was always in by 10.30. She was life itself before getting a screwdriver to have a conversation with a fuse box, only to find it spoke back. Viewers wept Little Nell tears, even as A.B. explained the climactic mishap in terms of a contractual obligation on set. Viewers never forget. Indeed, the rapier is the tip of the iceberg for Detective Inspector G.H., who had to explain a number of alleged dispatches of scriptwriters in recent weeks to a packed press corps. “These people are just trying to make an honest living entertaining the prurient and gullible with stories real or imagined about serial killers. Our investigations are continuing. Obviously there is a pattern here. We have crime novelists who live in fear of writing more. Some of them have turned to poetry to escape detection. We need to keep this situation in perspective, but at the same time we are fast running out of crime writers, which can only be bad long term for the economy.” Critic I.J., in his weekly column ‘Creampuff’, was terse: “Something is wrong when the line is crossed between fiction and real life. In fiction we may suspend belief, as Coleridge says, so that a roomful of characters feel nothing when a murder is announced, each being a suspect until most of them are bumped off bridges, sample the wrong cocktail, the list goes on. It’s the writer’s prerogative.” Creampuff has not caught up with Season 2 of ‘The Scriptwriters’, each episode of which entails the misadventures of crime authors meeting similar ends to those they inflict with seeming indifference and a strange streak of sadism on their own characters. Ratings are through the roof for these tales of novelists and screenwriters who get their comeuppance, their time run out, in some deserted warehouse, university quad, or abject canal. As academic K.L. has written: “The death of the author takes on a new twist when readers and viewers decide the script has ruined their evening, removed their favourite star definitively by some smartarse manoeuvre, leaving them with no option but revenge to uphold what is decent and right and true to life. It’s nuanced. It’s a new genre.”

Quite

 

Quite what to make of it is a good question. Quite, what to make of it, is also a good question. Is the same question, you might think, or even quite the same question. Yes, quite. Indeed, quite is a presence in our language that may or may not be saying something meaningful at any one time. Quite how it is used hangs in the air with an air of significance. While ofttimes seeming to be making motions of quivering and vanishing. The word acts as an intensive, but in some instances with such variations of effect as to make it almost nebulous. For example, to say the sky is quite blue today could mean the sky is about as blue as we are ever likely to see the sky. At the same time, it could mean about as blue as we could hope or expect given the conditions. Or even, blue enough, certain parts of the sky, what with the quite obvious imminent arrival of a large thunderstorm. Then there is its use as a quantity or measurement. Asked did we enjoy the symphony, we answer in the affirmative, oh quite. This may be construed as 100% approval of the symphony, or anything between that figure and the 1% of enthusiasm that is simply making an effort to accept that a symphony took place. This yardstick of excellence, or something anyway, anything sometimes, is frequently difficult to gauge in other contexts too, as when we speak of someone that we like them quite a lot. Is that more than a lot? Or less than a lot? It can depend entirely on the tone of voice and expression of face. And what’s a lot? Yes, well, quite. Quite a lot ranges anywhere between they’re okay through to reverencing the ground upon which they quietly tread. We are warned against overuse of quite, how a habit turns into a mannerism that can never be quite broken. Quite may get slightly, or even quite, out of control. There are worse verbal tics, it could be said, and anyway used with skill quite adds mystery and authority to many situations. It is true to say that words mean exactly what they say. Or do they? This truth is specially meant to be the case here, where the word is quite what it means, neither more nor less. Question being, what does it mean? One answer is it means just what it means, quite. Yet that’s not quite it, either. There is a nagging concern even though the word may have defined borders, they are porous. There is the real issue of quite being so buoyant with nuance that it’s at risk of nuancing itself out of existence, floating off like a talk bubble that swallowed the universe, or some such. This is an unlikely destination for a word that is said and always purports to be so confoundedly grounded. I could go on, and possibly at quite some length, but it’s good to know when to quit. Indeed, I was once told that brevity is the soul of quite.

Mahler

 

Jaime Martin conducts the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

 and choirs through Mahler's Third Symphony this week.

The night is young and the concert hall is hung in tuning sounds, dress circles and a hundred points of light. Mobiles switched off, the audience adopt immobile postures in readiness. The largest orchestra, assembled in array like a cityscape, somewhere like curlicued Vienna, begins to speak that city’s multifarious languages of old, all in good time. Though what are these towering forest sounds, shifting in unison or harmony or disruption, to do with this capital cityscape in sight of the ancient frontiers? Disquiet might be querulous, absence might be abyss, thunder might be transitory, the dress circle is in two minds. We could step onto that steam train in our minds, surging through alps, descrying passing waterfalls outside its blue windows, racing with absolute glee towards the modern world. We could be on a high for days, and then what? Nature very rightly surges from the earth and the flocks that wheel around its topmost expressions make song as faint as twenty violins. A clang or toot directs thoughts into day just past, inconsistencies of computer behaviour, hopeless headlines, something someone said lingering, liltingly. Or recent months, mind of insistent realities, bushfire sunsets, homeless walking the streets in need of home. Everyone is turning to tune in, shifting from one immobile style to another more comfortable, while an orchestra is a picture of concentration, concatenations his, consternations his. Discordance might be declamation, crescendo be craziness, rupture might be premonition, the stalls are all ears. But where are the archdukes of yesteryear? A forest of cellos send calling cards, steam trains of percussion talk up the procession process, a skyline of horns resound the present moment. Subscribers rest into their good fortune as the inscribed movement “comfortable without haste” merges into the movement “very slowly, mysteriously”, human voices singing now of the day that could only be summer in its intensity glory. And yet, as before now, the closing sixth opens the way through. Disjunction flows into connection, presence is indescribable presence, whispers wander into wonder, everyone is listening, everyone is close in, everyone is hearing the resolutions, everyone is in the space. The conductor signals closure and bends to silence. Ovations join in the unstrained uplift, sounds of thanks mingling with relief and tradition. And so, stalls and dress circle escalator up, walk out into the star hung night of city windows and flowing river crowd. Talk of Mahler’s intended seventh movement on heaven, never included after the glorious sixth. It would have been an anticlimax, we agree, and oh heaven is not to be an anticlimax. There is lychee ice cream and a cooling breeze as we cross the bridge on a high that will continue for days.

Bookshop

 

Image: The crowd gathered outside the Hill of Content bookshop for Thursday’s auction. Photo: Eddie Jim. Words: Nicole Lindsay, in The Melbourne Age.

My first bookshop account was with Margareta Webber’s circa 1973, when she was still upstairs in Little Collins Street. Trying to remember, I must have opened my account at the Hill of Content Bookshop in the early eighties when I developed spending power. Knowing most of the staff was an added incentive. Reading this weekend’s headline puts one in an Ecclesiastes frame of mind: “Hill of discontent as famous Melbourne bookshop fails to find a buyer.” Journalist Nicole Lindsay’s report prompts practical and wistful thoughts. “Melbourne’s first CBD auction of the year got off to a rocky start on Thursday,” Nicole writes, “when the well-known bookshop was passed in on a vendor bid of $5.7 million.” Not the shop, of course, the land and property. The bookshop could go elsewhere, maybe, but where? I think of the sizable part of my own library purchased from Janet Campbell, Pauline Osborne, Andrew Robertson at the counter, plopped into HoC bags and hauled home, wherever home was at the time. “The bookshop, a city institution, is on a month-to-month lease in the building.” One thinks of Thomas’ Records up the street, closed in 2018, or Gaslight Records directly across the street, left wondering if that end of town has changed character in ways that are not sustainable, or if rents, or online have reduced literary possibilities to zero. “Three bidders made a play for the three-storey freehold shop, which had been owned by the family behind the Collins Booksellers business for 73 years.” Well, Collins collapsed, while HoC was rescued, but for how long? “About 200 people crowded the footpath next door to Grossi Florentino restaurant for the auction, which took about 40 minutes and drew just eight bids, two of them vendor bids made by auctioneer Paul Tzamalis.” A good poem, in a book one could only buy at this shop, may take 40 minutes just to size up. “The slow bidding meant Tzamalis went inside to negotiate with the vendors four times. The first party to put up his hand outside the shop was a local investor bidding for his family. His main competitor was a student from Adelaide, in a swank new Louis Vuitton suit, from a Chinese family which owns a restaurant chain.” Et cetera, as if restaurants will be the only future for the area. Indeed, Nicole observes, “High-end restaurants, including Florentino, Bottega and the Lucas Group’s Batard dominate the top end of Bourke Street. There was a strong likelihood of any new owner ending the Hill of Content’s lease…” a sentence ending with the flickering, or rather guttering, last sign of light: “… but the shop has survived to sell more books.” Sure. What are we not being told? For everything there is a season. Yet Wisdom keeps you safe, this is the advantage of knowledge. What has happened before will happen again. Generations come and go, but the world stays just the same. Ecclesiastes keeps going round in my mind, and is that useless? Is it all, as Eugene Peterson translates ‘vanity’, smoke?

Celebrity

 

It is a pleasure to amble through a shopping centre, knowing that at no time will a celebrity show up to ruin the ambience. Sometimes shoppers have a sad or distracted appearance. This is due to the music in their earplugs which is being performed, alas, by a celebrity, or even worse by two celebrities in a duet. In the city I sometimes see a large circle of admirers surrounding a busker. This is a pleasant sight so I join them, happy in the knowledge I don’t need to make a quick exit, having mistakenly gatecrashed a celebrity autograph event or celebrity selfie opportunity. Busking, on a Chinese erhu violin or treated Fender Stratocaster, cheers up my already cheerful day. Celebrities spend much of their time walking along red carpet in the latest gold-spangled overalls. Overalls as you know are the fashion this year but only celebrities wear gold-spangled overalls. They wear resilient sunglasses, which are not like other people’s sunglasses, only don’t ask me why. They do strange things like filling their lips with air so they look puffy and choosing a facelift that leaves me thinking they are auditioning for parts in a horror movie. Celebrities, a very great many of them, are usually seen on film sets, which means happily they are not at the swimming pool, the library, the native gardens, or other favourite places. The exponential increase in movies seems to be related to the exponential increase in celebrities. I have it on good authority that a celebrity is someone more successful than me, that I must look up to as a god. Obviously our world has become so full of little idols that we are spoilt for choice. If that’s a choice I wish to make. I notice that celebrities are always on something called an A-List. It is not of the slightest interest which list they are on, as far as I’m concerned, given their main purpose in life seems to be having their name on some list. Wandering around town, travelling on a tram, it is pleasant to see anonymous people of every persuasion going about their lives with the slightly anxious, slightly wondering look that people have in large urban spaces. Anonymity is, I sometimes find, my A-List. This is quite an extensive list yet, paradoxically, a blank list for the simple reason that everyone is anonymously nameless. This pleasant scene is not, however, to be taken for granted. At any moment a perfectly presentable person will appear in the urban area wearing a celebrity tee-shirt, or else is yabbering on about some celebrity being the most supreme being hovering above a lotus flower. Still, anonymity, that is where everything returns, unbeknownst it seems to celebrity. It is a relief to see celebrity in relief, the song of the celebrity about the burden of celebrity, their trademark payoff, their byting opinion, their ego badinage, their instagram statistics. Seeing one coming, I cross the street, even though they seem to be doing their darndest to appear anonymous, behind their resilient shades.       

 

 

Bibliography

 

After “nearly two decades” the library of Charles Darwin has been catalogued. The only reason this extensive labour hasn’t taken longer is because no new items have been added since his death in April 1882. James Joyce, who was born two months previous in 1882, February, makes comic mileage listing all the books on Leopold Bloom’s shelves at 7 Eccles Street, Dublin. The seemingly ramshackle bibliography of directories and reckoners, religious texts and war histories, salacious fiction and scientific introductions, serves as its own portrait of the owner, right down to an overdue library book written by Arthur Conan Doyle. Bloom is an autodidact, busy collecting all sorts of seemingly random information towards the greater purpose of figuring everything out that there is to know. The character’s internal dialogues throughout ‘Ulysses’ are stacked with such passing knowledge, there to link his gestating thoughts into some kind of personal worldview, though whether in jest or no, Bloom’s talent for getting things right must be balanced with the times he gets it wrong. The death of bibliography since silicon has been overstated. We discover when we visit online databases just how much Joyce knew about Darwin, where his novels turned evolution, like nearly everything else in creation, into a theory worthy of sport, a serious explanation of life not to be taken too seriously. ‘Ulysses’ is full of Jest So Stories. This example of the view that we are what we read takes on prodigious form when considering the Darwin personal library project. It lists “7,400 titles across 13,000 items including journals, pamphlets and reviews.” The bibliography shows that Darwin was not an autodidact, of course, but worked closely with others, either directly or via the published literature of the day and in many different languages. Item: a German periodical containing the first photograph of bacteria. Item: notes on earthworms by the Revd. James Joyce, superintendent of Roman excavations at Silchester (1877). Victorianism is not dead when we find that the project recovered from auction his copy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Wives and Daughters’ (1880), containing a note “This book was a great favourite of Charles Darwin’s and the last book to be read aloud to him.” This is one of the outstanding bibliographical projects of our time, though locally automated catalogues now make it possible to keep quickly accessible records of any donor’s or writer’s collection for future research, an impossible task pre-silicon. Having listed the books of the idiosyncratic Bloom, Joyce then records “what reflections occupied his mind” while gazing at the spines in a mirror: “The necessity of order, a place for everything and everything in its place: the deficient appreciation of literature possessed by females: the incongruity of an apple incuneated in a tumbler and of an umbrella inclined in a closestool: the insecurity of hiding any secret document behind, beneath or between the pages of a book.”    

Mun-dirra

 

At the cavernous entrance to the monolith is a one-finger salute. The hand atop its big bluestone plinth sends an unambiguous message to the gallery. On the one hand, it could be a jaunty thumbs-up of the sort emulated by groups of schoolboys in front of it, being photographed. On the other hand, the thumb is shaped like a tall finger, with phallic connotations that don’t take long for those with a mind for such suggestion. Walking with the schoolboys and their teachers through the cavern and its weeping wall, we have all day to test our powers of ambiguity on roomfuls of postmodernity. Or as one wag describes it, entering an AI area, The Try-any-old Thing. Two figures tall as David, though one reads her iphone, the other stares hands in pockets, stand in the atrium somehow aware of their Goliath. Women come and go, talking of not-Michelangelo. Ambiguities mount, or perhaps dismount, depending on how visitors see them. Robotic dogs draw with forepaws on walls mindless abstractions undeserving of reviews. Hieronymus Bosch goes mad again on hard-drives. Neck-bending screens depict unstoppable megacities of the world until the neck hurts. Materiality made over in every material, positioned to mock and mimic the old masters. A loose thread of try-anythings straggles through another portal and with nothing else to do either, I follow. We walk into a space where handiwork unfolds, curves, caresses, balances and bobs, reads tides and holds fast. Where ambiguity is put aside, if it ever had a place. Maningrida fish net fences wiggle into the distance, made of dried pandanus spiralis and “natural dyes”, anythings are told on tidy captions and through audible earplugs. The low-level frenzy of technological change is replaced by the original elements of grass, sunshine, flowing water, dextrous digitality where time is read by shadows on the sand. Fingers and thumbs interweave for hours, gestures practised year by year since youth, every inch and row pressed firmly into place, particularly. The appearance of perfect straight lines is corrected at close quarters, each rush and bind leaving its own variations on the retina. Blessedly free of tour guides and their high-level phraseology, we peer quietly through the nets into passageways of other nets, orange and yellow, black and brown, riding undulant the length and out of sight. We could be, for a brief moment, barramundi reading the signs, gliding towards a detour; giant groper dreaming where salt and fresh commingle, part company. Instead we take photographs, trace a weave with our eye to where all traces leave off. Someone jokes about this being a real immersion experience and, true, it is a moment the abstract by-product of sheer necessity catches our otherwise distracted attention in its charming coils and curves. Later there will be time to read about Mun-dirra, its unambiguous purpose, the ends for which the fences were woven, the contradictions their presence possess inside a monolith. But for now, the physical now, I bide my time thinking about Arnhem Land.

Passionnel

 

Crime passionnel is filling the news. That’s the old-fashioned French term. Coverage turns the mind to our understanding of crime of passion. Beaumont has murdered Jesse and Luke. We knew he did this very early. Reports had established it as fact before their bodies were found by the police. This grotesque true crime story plays itself out in real time to an entire nation, or the percentage who for their own reasons follow each grisly update. Unhappily, it continues to play itself out. Sometimes we question ourselves, our interest in knowing every detail, details police, media, and the algorithms readily supply. That Beaumont was a police officer does not make the work easier for the police. That he was, until last week, a celebrity blogger leads the nation to ask, what is a celebrity blogger? Daily the psychological profile builds, even though at some stage we don’t want to know. Tracking his desperate movements across city and country roads leaves an emptiness inside, a revulsion. Even a certain guilt about the secret, irrespective of its public nature. Would someone do that? Following the case each day we say inside, don’t do it! Don’t go there! The lyrics of ‘Walk Away Renée’ surface, “... you won’t see me follow you back home. The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same. You’re not to blame.” To wish for the other person to exist is the most essential definition of love. We learn this over a lifetime. We all want a lifetime. Nor are Beaumont’s actions a crime of passion in the strict legal sense, it seems. The law wants proof of  a shocked spontaneous response, or proof in turn that he was out of his mind at the time. Evidence in the news indicates Beaumont probably was out of his mind. A lawyer is required to define and prove the state called in English ‘mad-at-the-time’; but the murders were premeditated over a course of some time. The jury of public analysis is in session. It’s horrible, it’s true. They have enough evidence. People write blogs, are forensic over morning coffee, wait for the next instalment. Live and let live. When it’s over, it’s over. Everyone concludes, crime passionnel is a waste, there is no love there, love had already turned into hatred, ego, selfishness, denial. How is that? And that’s before criminologists begin introducing the pathologies. Their big words arrive too late, after the fact. Soon the story falters as the presence of the present moment holds sway. What more do we need to know? This is not a noir series, the next episode of our favourite detective show. Lives are lost. None of this need have happened. Lives are badly damaged, but everyone is still tuning in. What to do with others’ misfortunes? It’s all happening somewhere else. We cannot return Jesse and Luke to the world of the living. We can talk freely, we can reflect. We will not envy Beaumont the celebrity he will experience amongst his fellow prisoners.

Transfiguration

 

 Reading Mark’s account of the Transfiguration (Mark 9.2–9). Reflection for the Second Sunday in Lent, the 25^th of February 2024, in the pew notes at St Peter’s, Eastern Hill, Melbourne.  Written by Philip Harvey. 

Incomprehensible. Inexplicable. Unexpected.  Indescribable. These are responses a reader like me still has, after a lifetime, reading the Transfiguration. 

The manifold stories that make up the Gospels bear witness and are, for that reason alone, credible. The Ministry has its own confounding logic. The Crucifixion is an uncompromising fact, one that we have to bear up. But the Transfiguration occurs without warning or background briefing. Like Peter, a reader bumbles around trying to make things hospitable for everyone, but like him we are actually gobsmacked (or its Greek equivalent). We all need to be brought up to speed. 

This story is about when we see someone we know anew, in a completely new light. We have known this person, but now we see them with amazement, their words and actions, their very being. It’s almost hard to believe the wonder of what we are being shown. This is one first way of reading the story. 

Another way is to understand we are seeing a sacred scene, one in which we learn about the company Jesus keeps and what that says about Jesus. His conversation is with all known tradition, past, present and to come. This itself is an example for us to follow, but it is also placing us in a relationship with him that cannot be ignored. If this is what Jesus is being shown to be, we are already in a changing relationship with him, like the disciples. We are being made to look and listen. 

By reading the Transfiguration as sacred scene, we start to appreciate the challenges of the witnesses to this vision and their spare efforts at description of what they experienced. Verisimilitude in a story means getting close to the truth, but in the terms of this story we are in the tricky position of being shown the Truth. We notice that the Transfiguration is one means of revealing the person and work of Jesus, just as the stories of his Ministry and Passion are other means of gradually making the incomprehensible comprehensible, the inexplicable somehow explicable, the unexpected eternally unexpected and surprising, the indescribable describable within the limits of our available language. 

While the nature and temper of the Transfiguration story is unique, filled with light, its meanings grow in the context of Scripture and the life and death of Jesus himself. The event is as intimate and ordinary as a conversation with a disciple, yet astounding and universal in its commanding presence, whether then or now, or to come. The story, and the event it describes in its own manner, comes at a moment where the heritage of the past is being met in Jesus; the present is verily present;, and the future will now mean, inexplicably for all of them, Crucifixion and rising to new life.  

Hicks

 

This is a super large serve of ice cream scoops. There’s mint choc chip at the pinnacle, then rum and raisin scoops, blueberry gelato, honeycomb crunch, lime pistachio. The mind adjusts to the sight of so much ice cream beginning to melt and sag. Or else it’s bean bags. In muted pastel colours, it will be observed, not the classic bean bag hot pink or bright orange leather. Visitors could choose their own bag for the day, except signs say do not touch. Then again, the scoops could be boulders and actually the wall caption says they’re boulders. The gallery is clear that the sculptor Sheila Hicks (American, born 1934, though like half of them lives most of the time in Paris) says they’re boulders. Rather too comfortable saggy boulders, it could be said, with soft shoulders. The caption, black print on a white rectangle just below eye level, talks art talk suitable for art talkers. Such things as Hicks being unconventional and someone who understands gestural form and painterly reference. And it’s true. The boulders resemble the close attention to form achieved by Pierre Bonnard as he dobs tiniest blobs of teensiest hairbrush finesse to make a vase or dog in one of his panoramic works, of the kind seen in the very same gallery space only last year. It reminds me of the Bendigo wool shop, the one at the Woollen Mill, with its bargain room of chunky twist and lengthy merino and alpaca balls by the scoopful up to the ceiling. Oddly, no one entering the gallery space looks at the pinnacle of woolly clouds ascending on high. I watch as they glance quickly then skirt it, refuse to eyeball, walk around the fact, going quickly over instead to inspect the Indigenous ink paintings on the facing walls. I conclude that the pinnacle spectacle is hard to engage with. Perhaps they have a guilty conscience about so much unused wool in one place. Or panic attack memories of knitting bees in youth. I don’t ask. Then again, it could be airport luggage left in the rain, in the days before they invented carousels. Or else it really is the mountain of purgatory, is my next thought. How much ice cream have you eaten in your life? And was it enough? Or much too much? Who told you to write outside the margins? And what really happened at the knitting bee, anyway? Perhaps purgatory is an acrylic thick ply wool profiterole mountain. Does it have a purpose? It’s a purgatory almost impossible to scale. Sheila Hicks, for reasons best known to herself, calls the boulders ‘Nowhere to Go’, but they could well be called ‘Nowhere to Sleep’. So soft, but so steep. The kids’ caption talks of thinking about wool, when what they would want to do is jump head first into a hundred bean bags at once. That would be a Happening, mayhem at ground level, but the mountain refuses such rest and recreation, with conventional signs instructing everyone do not touch the exhibit.

Kew

 

Turning out of the Monastery at 4 in the afternoon, I walk downhill towards the tram stop on the other side of the river. I let go of library plans and turn to thinking serendipitously. The air is fresh, there is a large blue sky, and the entire city skyline is visible beneath overhanging trees. Since the pedestrian bridge reopened in December, this is my preferred walk after work. The streets are quiet on this side of the Studley Park maze; someone is tending their native garden, a solitary van turns the corner to deliver its parcel. Houses above the river tell the history of Kew. Post-Federation deco residences stare out across Richmond. Mid-century apartments, called units in those days, are blocked in here and there. Architects’ dreams have replaced many of the foregoing, their abstract geometries of glass, steel, and timber a thrill to the eye behind bending eucalypts immeasurably high, peppercorns and jacarandas. ‘Yes’ posters are still affixed to certain picket fences. A Xavier boy rambles across the street and through a side gate. I wonder what it would be like to live in some of these homes. The footpath, uprooted and re-concreted in parts, leads me and my thoughts about random relevancies to the edge of the Park. I must watch for bicyclists, who will appear at intensive speed zipping downhill to the footbridge. Workmen have repainted the white line for left and right, but it is still every individual for themselves as our human world suddenly divides into the courteous and the get-out-of-my-way-I’m-coming-through. Signage leans to the courteous side. The greens and browns of grass and tree rise up on every side of my sight as I enter the walkway down to the bridge. I marvel at the view of countless units, which today are called apartments, clustering all along the bank on the Burnley side, obscuring the Skipping Girl neon. And against all expectation, along a long side of the hard meander of the Yarra, the Studley Park Vineyard comes bristling into view, waiting for the next flood, the closest vineyard to the city of Melbourne. The results may be purchased at Leo’s near Kew Junction at an interesting price; not, I reflect, a Doherty $20 special. The sun shines on the brown river as the sound underfoot changes from footpath to bridge planks and a bicycle does a marimba. A rowing eight slides below, the cox bleating repeats. I walk up to the jumbling sounds of tram and truck and traffic that is Victoria Street, knowing the next part of the day is now beginning. There are dinner ingredients to buy, a New Yorker article half-read, news to tap up on my phone, as I step onto the next tram with the rest of the human race: Myki rebels, intensities on laptops, a cat lady and her trolley, Vietnamese shoppers from Victoria Gardens, tradies in orange and yellow, a gaggle of Genazzano girls, druggies who don’t keep their thoughts to themselves, tourists in unknown languages …

Monster

 

His mouth typecasts tomorrow’s headline. His hair, the shade called faded flowerpot, jokes of implants. His makeup flakes in the floodlights. His fakeups glare from each pore. His portraits are warhol wildernesses, sound byte addresses, ridiculous confesses. His eyes are dollar signs of vegas lines. His stub fingers sign unread laws, break unwritten ones, point nowhere. In earliest memory but a buffoon, vacant lot dealer, a vulgar stealer. Now he’s daily a monster, a mobster, a denier liar. Daily the monster pierces our velcro-clad microsoft screens. Daily the monster crams the space in my phone. His mouth syndicates his polished propagandas. His body bursts bigly from stretch cars, his obscene limousines. His eyes are windows with jail bars. His humourless shoes leave nasty scars. He is the king kong of something something wrong. Subtext of the abject oppress rap song, the stop-press unstoppered 24-hour news off-on, the cycle where all goes rhythms, irretrievable ugly as sin algorithms. Daily his latest loudmouth incites viral spiral. Daily the next scene of his long running serial excites provocation, journalist preoccupation. Daily the monster delivers for daydream believers his monster mash-up, his gnashing of grievance, his lashings of fever, his golden showers of deviance. The monster’s prospects edge every conversation. His mouthpieces cast headlines to the four corners. His reality show is the news feed the news feed needs. His wrestling match lacks all humour, his shoes grunt and shunt. His trials won’t soon be over. His hush money beams loud from the rooftops. His final count interference is an open secret, a threat met, a rumour every hour. His funds dodges are duds and fudges. The monster contorts on my stand-alone computer. The monster grandstands flatly upon my hand-held phone. Delimit the outpour, press delete, shutdown the contraptions. The monster is still there, he doesn’t care. Someone wants us to know. Someone seems to want to know. His vanity is his greatest claim. His lies don’t go away. The monster is obvious in your face, my face, our space. Click him, mute him, he is nothing. His tie is a red stripe. His spittle white stars, a shambling mockery of old glory, his suit blue turning back into black. One day, remember, the monster brittle will die. He will kick up daisies, almost daily. Leaving behind a skyline of desperation, his streets of desolation. His poster image will be a target of remorse. The monster will become human again, a name on a board game, a flutter of horror. His accounts will be found wanting. He didn’t pay the bills. The monster talked faster than a locomotive. The monster could walk off a tall building in a single bound. He fell quicker than a speeding bullet. Untruth, injustice and the mega-maga way for the monster, at the end of the day. The bottom line will be truth.

Movement

 

Waterdrop, photograph by Bridie Harvey, circa 2014

Readers of this column, their eyes blinking at original adjectives, have grown used to me quoting admiringly from the English version of ‘El Quadern Gris’ of Catalan author Josep Pla. This voluminous, captivating journal, written in 1918 and 1919, is a constant surprise. A page curves into a wave and subsides again as I turn to the next. Here is Josep on the 10^th of October, 1918, not that long ago when you think about it, wrinkling your nose: “Machines have progressed in leaps and bounds, and are capable of astonishing movements one never could have imagined. Nonetheless, I don’t think that machines, for all their sophistication, will ever imitate the very peculiar, very funny, very endearing way that cats’ (especially kittens’) ears wriggle.” Even the idea that machines progress in leaps and bounds must be called into question, given most of them have no limbs, and none have a heart. As observers understand, meanwhile, ear wriggling and twitching are signs of cats’ thought patterns and emotional well-being. They are relaxed. They are attentive. They are autonomous and independent. They are paragons of natural movement. They are at home in their human habitat. Other body movements add to their comfortable repertoire of domesticity: quiet paws, weaving spine, languid tail. At the same time, Josep’s brief observation is making a larger point, or perhaps that’s a swerve, or giant leap. Our world is shaped by machines, but they are so predictable. They are normal as a car, uncomplicated as a computer screen, dumb as a CCTV. We expect nothing out of the ordinary from machines, their progress ever a case of purpose meeting need. Even the most animate of machines is never going to speak. Their discourse is a non-event, no matter how many odes are writ ironically in their honour or spontaneous reviews exclaimed as they emerge from their packing case. Ode to a Light Bulb is a fairly one-way engagement. Readers might be familiar with Ode to the Photocopier. There are whole books full of odes to the steam ship, in photogravure and objective correlative. But we stray from Josep’s essential swerve or leap, which is movement in nature, starting with the fingers tapping this essay on a somnolent keyboard, drifting with eyesight to the garden outside where grass, every leaf and bud is yearning for sun and raindrop, then birds resting on the fence as they watch in several directions with quick looks and eloquent claws. The book is a machine, of course, and thousands of them are devoted each year to this matter of movement. Science textbooks are their own kind of ode and we read them occasionally to upgrade our knowledge of how nature swims, swoops, flowers, leaves, wriggles, twitches, yearns, folds, leaps, bounds, tails, clouds, and so forth, though encyclopedias digital or print are immoveable, unmoving entities compared to that which they describe, that we observe for minutes or hours, like Josep, quite able to discern a machine from the real thing, be it peculiar, funny, endearing, whatever next.    

Taylor

 

Taylor Swift grew up on a Christmas tree farm. This was one of the quiz facts on the Taylor questionnaire Bridie and I glanced through in her 2015 program while Vance Joy did the warm-up. We were perched in a bay of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, together with thousands of other female (mainly) fans. I think of Taylor Swift each January into February, as I step around Christmas trees left out flat on the footpath, their needles turning brown in the sun. I hum ‘Delicate’ in my mind. Christmas trees are big business. Everyone wants a Christmas tree. Knowing your product and your market are ground rules of the Swift family. Someone is bound to benefit from farming them, a Swift turnaround in the end-of-year rush. Nature provides the raw material that we decorate in a thousand different ways. Then the lights are taken down again, the baubles unhooked, the big star returned to storage, and the tree fast-tracked to the side of the street. By that stage it could be just one more compact disc or overpriced vinyl that has gone out of style, replaced at the back of the rack. Another question was, did we know she is named after James Taylor, a fact that stays in the mind years later like a catchy riff until I wonder if I’m being brainwashed. Taylor’s music was note perfect but the MCG stage show was just you know Hollywood, take it or leave it. Bridie, like her friends, let go of Tay once she was making too much money; I listen to Taylor more than she does, nowadays. I enjoy her witty wonderful arrangements and changes, ditto her exceptional storytelling techniques in a lyric, where a single phrase can alter the meaning and feel of a whole song. The rest of it is glitz. I note that her new album is called ‘The Tortured Poets Department’. Could it be about crucifixion? Has she written a Passion Play? More likely it is a storyline in keeping with her verse about “Boys only want love if it’s torture/ Don’t say I didn’t, say I didn’t warn ya…”, and the titles of the just released tracklist suggest that relationships remain the main game. She made the announcement at the 2024 Grammys, so promotion is high on her mind yet, take advantage of the Season. I guess it will be more of Taylor’s joke-on-herself that is at the same time a joke on someone else. Is this the ultimate takedown of emo verse? Or does anything we ever say have emo somewhere in the mix, up high, or way down low? Perhaps I should offer a U3A course on the subject, everyone else is. An unavoidable topic on my curriculum though would have to be Taylor’s carbon footprint, as she wings from stadium to stadium in 2024 in her private jet. The discussion could pick up on Christmas trees, how they are not good for the Australian soil, in a certain light are just one more consumable. Pets are for life, not just for Christmas; that sort of thing.