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.