Illumination

 

The writing life requires great belief. Weather can be an obstacle. Weather may even be used as an excuse to avoid writing. Onset of rain makes walls damp. The writer must brave the elements in what they’re standing up in, if they are to find a clean dry surface. The primary interest, to make a significant contribution, overrides such concerns. Writing asks for application of thought. A writer works with whatever materials are to hand. Corrugations are a creative challenge for some, for others an intolerable hindrance to free expression. Weed-decorated brickwork does not offer the best field for a writer’s personal data. As we know, writing is a person’s signature, their gesture in language to an unknowing world. In this case, the writing generally is the signature alone, commonly initials or an original pseudonym rendered with such unique particularity as to be recognisable but to themselves and their fellow writers. They may gloat and laugh at their handiwork. Sentences are not encouraged in writing. Sentences take too long. Although sentences may turn into slogans or mottoes, they may also draw the uninvited readership of the constabulary. Writing need not go from left to right only. Every surface, large or small, may be entered from any direction and exited likewise. Writing upside down from the rooftop of a ten-storey building is not encouraged, nor can it be stopped. Such foolhardy enthusiasm in the name of a signature is not for everyone. Nor is writing for everyone. Some people prefer illumination. Here are some guidelines. The illuminator has a noble air. Maintaining this noble air is important, even when it gets tiring. Take an unlined book into high density areas for writing. Illumination is passive artform, affirmative action, research calligraphy, reader response. The illuminator finds an ideal window seat on public transport vehicles. They view the writing at a raised level. Complaints about weather conditions are obviated. Time is of the essence as writing rushes past at the whim of driver and traffic. This means choosing writing quickly as it hoves into sight. Note literally both the main flourishes and as many finer details as time permits. Practice makes perfect; the novice works best by training at tram stops and railway stations. Once the vehicle has moved on, the illuminator may fill in the writing with colour, rounding the arcs and thickening the strokes. Al fresco is always available, nevertheless. Illuminators enter back lanes with sharpie pen and drawing book. Some of the most meticulous writing is there for illumination. Critics rubbish this work as ‘cannibalisation’ of writing, and suchlike jargon. Their arrant bosh may be nobly overlooked. It may be sprayed against a hoarding, then copied into the illuminator’s workshop book with a Smiggle colour change pen.  

Uncorking

 

The periderm of a Mediterranean oak, cork is resistant to air and water. Quercus suber developed its protective and insulating qualities to resist extremes, particularly fire. Cork is also uncooperative in decomposing back into earth, making it a more likely candidate than mud, Napoleon’s water-earth sign, for title of fifth element. Ponder how this has been the one best substance known for keeping alive the drink of gods and we mere mortals, the sacramental drink. The company name is burnt or printed into its cylindrical sides. Its speckled or compacted appearance is common as rainwater or autumn leaves. Light, clean, dry, the cork is slid securely into the neck of the bottle, where it expands to contain the work and time allotted. The work is not arduous and the cork is ideally suited; the time could be months, years, decades, so it as well the cork does all its work lying on the horizontal. (Champagne corks come attached with little thinking caps, result of bulging heads.) Years proceed, or more realistically, vintages reach the optimum. Eventually the destined hour approaches. Allowing for breathing space, first the seal is shucked off. Then a metal serpent is brought from its drawer where it resides uncomfortably with the rest of the metal zoo. It was called a steel-worm and bottle-screw in the seventeenth century. The French say tire-bouchon, the Spanish sacacorchos, Italians cavatappi. Pop! notes. The point of it all is set where serpent may spiral itself effectively through the very midst of the fifth element. Should it go off course, its coil is seen through the glass. Once its pointed tongue pokes out the base the handle is gripped and the cork eased whole from the bottle, making a vinos hole. The bottle may be gripped between the feet, or under one arm. The hugging tendency of the cork gives way, slides to make one of the most sacred sounds of the kitchen, a glorious psalm between unknown creator and joyful imbiber, a little thunder of ovation, communion and presentiment. From the bottle emerges bouquet. And more. Oenologists expend hours discovering new word analogies for the multiplicity of colours, scents and tastes cork protected and helped evolve. Gruffly then the cork is wrenched from prong, twisted till it crumbles or drops, unceremoniously made redundant. Most go in bin or compost, but some cherish these honourable objects, store them in fountainous vases or rattling cupboards. To think there is a world shortage of quercus suber sounds like just one more daily fact, or redundancy (again), to undermine our courage. Some wine shops collect them for recycling. And so we raise a toast to this security device, as we brood on the takeover of the screw-top. The French say couvercle sur le visse, the Spanish tapa rosca, Italians tappo a vite. Pop! Not.  

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.