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.

Frisbee

 

My exercise scientist plays Ultimate Frisbee. He sustains injuries. This is common with Ultimates. He tells me during my weekly half hour of physio gym that his team has 23 players but only seven play in a game. This is due to the popularity of the sport but also because of the high number of short-term injuries during the season. Attrition rates seem to be factored in: the fracture factor, in fact. The frisbee is an identifiable flying object, a flying saucer in search of a winning cup. The saucer is a breeze machine, a skimming skylark, a harmless missile. This implacable plastic discus spurs memory of happy summer days on broad wet beaches catching coastal air currents all day. Which is a naive view, blue sky thinking, once I learn they are not harmless while gashing an eyebrow or splaying into an ankle at breakneck speed. It is called a non-contact sport. My exercise scientist’s injury was due to the fast-moving nature of the game, it has to be explained, where freely running rapidly back and forth raises extra hazards. Or even harder, standing still, which is a feature. Or standing still in a hurry, the moment when muscles may snap and bones splinter. In a game where every contestant is an Ultimate it’s nice to believe the contest is democratic, a level playing field of Ultimates only, and even though self-officiating is generally the normative rule, referees are sometimes brought in when one team thinks themselves more Ultimate than their opponents. Argument subsides when it’s established once again that everyone here is an Ultimate. A frisbee is a wheel of fortune. No sooner has my exercise scientist’s sprain started to mend than he is out twirling and whirling the wheel again, wristing all in the hope of Ultimate glory. It sounds simple, though hurling yourself bodily towards a curving projectile with the object of catching it, shifting on pivotal feet suddenly to achieve connection or avoid collision, receiving a tupperware plate travelling at 70 miles per hour with one finger, is not simple. Watching his unbounded enthusiasm I arrive, frisbee-like, at the thought that we’re different, that sport has long been for me restricted to working weights on physio machines in aid of abs, glutes, quads, and pecs, or else drawing out of thin air and sacred memory the applicable and yet unforeseen adjective for the unavoidable and yes conclusive noun. Obviously my exercise scientist has a good chance of being Ultimate for years to come; it must be a good feeling, if that’s your aim. I have taken the road less travelled, down a naïve sandy path with family and friends, there to flex our flexor carpi radialises as backwards forwards we skim the air with our beach-house frisbee, that stabilising, gyroscopic, spirographical, canine-incised, chemiluminescent, boomerangish wheel of fortune.