Machine

 

Rubii Red's Naarm tram (detail): https://rising.melbourne/wormhole/art-trams-guide-2023

My dreams convey wishes through walls and over valleys on a machine effective as breathing. Weightless I meet imagination’s soundless machines, their unconscious motivations a road movie that cannot wait. Before, all too soon, a machine of ascending bells wakes me again to this other reality. Its ringtone is Clements. The reality of the machine that browns off bread jumps to my attention. Reality that includes a machine talking back to itself extra half-baked opinions time will stale. I reach into the sustenance machine that cools everything within an inch of an ice block. Its ringtone is Shudder. School drop is the slings and arrows of vying machines warming to a grizzle, bending to a kerb. Those same machines interminably queueing against a sunrise red, a sphere of evergreen. Querulous and viewing machines that burn atmosphere and rust after impact. More machines than anyone knows what to do with. Woken from their dreams again, more work-brave sunlighters step onto machines that roll on interwoven steel links to their money-making quarters. The sunups gaze into the wells of the world, their eye-flown one picky to next, asking their googie-egg timer autocorrected enquiries. Can we live without all the machines? Is naming machines a sign of over-dependence? Complete assimilation? They stare from the interweave window pondering their eye-flown’s stonewall replies, the science adamant there will be machines. More machines than anyone knows what to do with. Adamantine as a promise. Ear machines channel serrated songs and simply symphonies solo. Their ringtone is Ear Candy. I could count out my days on the machines converting clean Yan Yean into brown cappuccino. I sit at that glass watching the wheels called machines. The machine that rains inside. The machine for random intervals. Machines to plumb the bottomless abyss. Machines to construct every story of every storey. Machines that build-up granite illusions. Machines for relicking award-winning perpendiculars. Machines for putting out the relics single-handed. Their ringtone is Pulse. I could take time out from information machines, cool and delectable in the air, their cerebrations heavier and gadget options an omnishambles, to imagine my world without machines. I could unplug, switch off all machines, their ringtones rung off. I could send my thoughts to everyone on my eye-flown one last time. Observe how quaint is the face of the time machine on the townhall tower, its arms all over the place. I could resume the sensational search for food. I could stay at home without a machine. At sundown red I could paint calligraphy poetry quietly down roomscrolls, exert black lettering to say all in a little.

 

Chekhov

 

The school play in 1971 was Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Seagull’, in Russian ‘Chaika’, or ‘Chayka’. Bob Crosthwaite, a director of charm and insight, was brought in to make things happen, starting with a plan to perform the play in-the-round on the floor of the old Assembly Hall. A boys-only school was not going to stretch to the Elizabethan practice of women’s roles played by boys, which would have caused a stir. Girls from our sister school of Shelford were invited to play the main female parts. I played the minor role of Sorin (pictured right), the landowner on whose estate most of the action takes place. This involved too much streaky make-up, necessary to give a 16-year-old the look of a 61-year-old. Sorin’s sister, Madame Arkadina, was an aging actress and part-time superbitch, a characteristic that is pivotal to the unfolding family drama. She was played by Miss Clarke, the sister of the captain of Caulfield Grammar’s basketball team. (I cannot remember her first name. Jenny, I think.) Arkadina’s son, Treplev, is an emerging symbolist playwright. His play-within-the-play in ‘The Seagull’ is an extreme contrast to the drily ironic dialogue of Chekhov. His mother scoffs at this play, generally showing an indifference to her son’s writerly ambitions. Treplev was played by Paul Salzman, today Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University. Like most of the characters in this play, Treplev takes exceptional interest in Nina Mikhailovna, played this time by Leigh-Anne Stuckey. Love triangles are in the air, Chekhov describing these with outcomes that are sometimes comic, sometimes not. Nina is more interested in the novelist Trigorin, Trigorin is currently with Arkadina, Treplev only has eyes for Nina, and Treplev is the only object of interest for Masha. I cannot remember who played Masha (pictured), the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, and I ask her forgiveness. The third person in the photograph is Ronald Kitchen, who is playing Dr Dorn, a family friend who on reflection keeps the moral balance in the play. Sympathetic with the tortured poet Treplev, his is the character with lines for the audience that hint at how to “read the room”. Trigorin was played by Rod Faulkes, which he did memorably with the deft control required of such a duplicitous figure. Much in the play hinges on Trigorin’s undisclosed motives, especially given the disastrous conclusion two years later. I remember on opening night seeing a bemused Norman Kaye sitting in the front row, a Caulfield music teacher whom some of us saw play Astrov once in another Chekhov play, ‘Uncle Vanya’ at the St Martin’s Theatre in South Yarra. How many performances were there of ‘The Seagull’? Three, maybe four. Acting together in such a great play was a thrill for all of us and I was struck by how much laughter the genius Russian playwright could inspire from such a stack of messy relationships.

Lucia

 

The opera opens impressively, as opera will. Grown-ups criss-cross staging to-and-fro set-ups. An engraved set of ruins and treetops tends to gothic. The world is dressed for the occasion. Until the early transition to confession. Lucia has dreams, she has omens. The opera is on a downward spiral. She cannot say what. She is highly conversant, but she cannot say why omens. The climate of an opinion turns into mood. Mood could turn into “a fact”. The chorus shares the general idea. And this, thus, is where matters change. The opera has a life of its own. Like rifts in a family. Like states heading for showdown. Edgardo exchanges rings with Lucia. Then must leave for “political reasons”, for now. X marks the spot where they sign-off with footfalls. Out into the dark of a known world. The opera requires a signature to be satisfied. A forged signature will suffice, in absence of the real thing. Some of this resembles the novel, but no matter. Semblance is cause for a song. Six voices, each cogent, singing their own reasons, argue out the cross-purposes in perfect harmony. Expectations command from the grave. Parents, ancestors, on either side of a divide innocence will relearn. Alone, a lovers’ refrain remains as a possibility. The opera converges on a moment. Lightning, count the seconds, thunder. It might be abandon, or a duel. If a duel, lover or brother will die, Edgardo or Enrico. This is the way “the system” works. It doesn’t work for Lucia. Signs of murder are in the open, scenery unaltered. Possibility diminishing. And thus the spiral goes downward. The opera is short on conciliation. No one calls a truce. Police are not in sight. The crowd itself could get out of control, but being a chorus chooses to keep time. Peace is restored for a period. The opera staggers with its wounds. Before they were words, dangerous words, that now break open the flesh. Plotless she roams her marriage celebration. A knife leads the wayward proceedings. Lucia pleads with ghosts. She confides with chimeras. Song is the fragments of previous song. Some of the audience leave. Never seen anything like it. But the chorus stands unmute witness to their own complicity. The opera dies on its feet. Messages do not reach their intended, arrive too late. Enrico transgresses a theatrical rule, dying alone by his own hand. True as from the start. Speechless, stalls and dress circle watch the fall in all its symmetry. The opera says it’s curtains. Bitter enemies bow hand-in-hand, to-and-fro, stage front-and-back. Violin bows tap applause on their stands. The conductor offers final gestures, all present and correct. Cognoscenti bravissimi. Herself is only mortal at the edge of things, falling a last time to the ground, and rising. Thunder, count the seconds. Turn on the lights and then turn on the lights. Costumiers are left to clean up the blood.

See

 

See more. Simply by clicking See more, more often. If you can be bothered. See more, as if you haven’t seen more for the past hour. See more Naples, and die. The See more link on social media, an invitation to See less, look at the pictures, go somewhere else, delimit the screen. See less, a masterpiece reduced to a couplet, a speech reduced to a chyron, a chyron transposed to a gif. See more of the gif that keeps on gifing. Imagine the children’s story book where See more invites you to adventure. Turn the page, See more. We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re not scared. Don’t ever go down to the end of the town. See more, if you don’t go down with me. Grownups’ books aren’t like that. See more staples, and sigh. See more, until you want to See less. Our See more reading is not managed by See more media. When the magazine tells you See more turn to page 222, this means the denouement. Are you going to refuse? To See less is to have spent the hour without purpose.  On principle, because you are given to See more more often, you do so as normal. See less, as you nod off to sleep. Next day meet the firewall. See more, subscribe and the worried world is your oyster, your pearl of wisdom. See less, if you cannot pay. A lot less. Clearly the computer comes to control your reading experience. See more versus See less, the handheld cinema on your desktop. Why, only this week you went no further than the headline precis in the newspaper. Councils in England are removing apostrophes from road signs. See less. Place names are depossessed because computers get confused. The See More computer that, through its own intelligence, takes a person’s entire written corpus then converts it into immutable hash, the same computer cannot identify an apostrophe. The supermind ‘thinks’ the squiggle means something else.  Differentiation is not in the program. See more. If the computer were to swallow all available grammar books, would it help, or simply regurgitate what any intelligent computer thinks is grammar? The reading experience of the average computer cannot be very fulfilling. English lessons are so full of theorems and exceptions. See more. But anyway, while we’re here underneath the See less line, its (thankfully, not it’s) artificial intelligence is trained to deceive. Its rearrangements of the entire corpus are programmed for desirable and undesirable behaviours. Undesirable, like bluffing the reader, pretending, tampering, sandbagging, and other forms of automated rhetoric. Behaviour that may lead us to See more and trust only writing in print produced before computers learnt duplicity. Or before computers. Simply by turning the pre-2022 page. Or cease reading at all. The principle being, less is more. More or less.

Eternal

 

Reflections on Eternal Life for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, the 12^th of May 2024, in the pew notes at St Peter’s, Eastern Hill, Melbourne.  Written by Philip Harvey. 

Is anyone qualified to talk about Eternal Life? Makers of Scripture give solid, if at times paradoxical, advice on Eternal Life, while theologians of all Ages display considerable manoeuvrability in explaining something that affects them personally. Yet it seems to me we are all just amateurs, even only beginners, when asked to put words to Eternal Life.  

Our death, the limitations of our life, are consistently spelt out in Scripture. Generations come and go, their span tallying closely with our own knowledge of life’s preciousness and brevity. What then is Eternal Life? John’s Letter (1 John 5.9–13) states that God gave us Eternal Life and “this life is in his Son.” John seems to be saying we may learn about this through the words and deeds of Jesus Christ, and also through his person, in light of the Resurrection. A philosopher once said rather obviously, we cannot speak of that which we do not know. He felt we should remain silent. But the Cross and the Resurrection speak insistently of finding meaning and the Gospel writers would have us retell these signs whenever and wherever. 

We are not necessarily going to be given high distinctions just because we can verbally repeat the lesson. Our understanding grows and deepens by continuous learning of that source of all wisdom. We remain open now to what was, is and will be, before and after life as we know it at present. John’s Gospel (John 17.6–19) speaks of the gift of Eternal Life that Jesus has brought those who encountered him, “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” The Resurrection experience entails returning to Galilee, the disciple’s Galilee where they first met the parables, healings, confrontations, and sermons of Jesus, but also our Galilee, which is where we meet God through Jesus wherever and whenever throughout our days, very especially in our worship.  

Anything being said in the Gospel can, unexpectedly or expectedly, reveal to us the here and now of Eternal Life. This seems, at least to this beginner, to be what Jesus is saying, via John, when he prays “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world.”  God’s “name” is being made known through the example of Jesus, his words, actions, and very being. Like those others who encountered him, we are asked to stay open to every clue and sign and showing that may bless us, and others, with Eternal Life. Scripture is not a closed book, but rather speaks with decided brevity of perpetual possibility and the depths of true holiness.

Birthday

 

Thank you to all of you who sent good wishes yesterday. Woke early, washed and dressed, then walked out in cold dark morn to catch the train into Fitzroy, via Westgarth. Admired a graffito like a Chinese figure (pictured) on old milkbar wall, for reference in my calligraphy illumination project. My exercise scientist at physio gym enquired what it was like to be 45. Replied: I’m adapting, slowly. Aphro & Wolfe café for brekky toastie and large skinny latte not takeaway. Loveheart froth. David Collins shows up from gym. Conversation on John Cage ensues over coffees: 25’15” on 4’33”. All music is human defined sound. Went to Glenferrie Readings with $100 gift voucher. The shop has all been redesigned. Couldn’t find one book I had to have forever. All noir fiction and over-egged cookbooks. Thought: that’s Hawthorn, I guess. Voucher expires in 2026, so there’s plenty of time to get to Carlton store for big art books. Midday Mass at St John’s, Camberwell. A homily on facing loss and the horror of Gaza, based on the farewell to the grieving disciples. Then two-and-a-half hour lunch with Mother at Camberwell Library Café called Ignite. Why Ignite when it’s only open in the middle of the day? Spinach and ricotta rolls WITH tomato sauce. She gives me a card from which the yearly traditional $50 note slips out. Also a drawing she found while ‘sorting through’ family papers, a pencil drawing by Great Aunt Hilda of Hilda’s cat, circa 1940s (pictured). How many of these drawings are in her possession?, I ask myself later. She passes on Mick’s present, his new album ‘Five Ways to say Goodbye’. Notes with interest the final track: ‘Like a Hurricane’ by Neil Young, a favourite of mine. (Later he texts in reply to thanks message, of his version of the Young: “very minimal approach”.) Draw illuminations of passing graffiti down Bridge Road, the tram overrun with chatty Melbourne Girls’ College students. Dinner at home. Bridie and Carol turn on pizza and prosecco, then tiramisu with flaming candles. Isn’t that a tautology? No, candles can gutter. They sing the song twice, first discordantly laughing, second time harmoniously, serious. Presents marvellous thank you from their recent stay in Wangaratta: jars of Milawa mustard Rosemary and Milawa mustard Honey, Brown Brothers Durif Limited Release, a huge children’s poetry book, some names I’ve never heard of, looks fun. Bedtime reading, slightly squiffy: Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mrs David Ogilvie. She is exorbitantly witty every second sentence in a way never seen in any of her poetry, and her knowledge of current politics is amazing. Writing from Paris when Napoleon III effects a coup, she goes against popular sentiment and sides with the takeover. Then, as Denis Norden once said riffing on Samuel Pepys: “And saw Tibet.”

Bridge

 

Beside the river, below the bridge, is Studley Park Vineyard. Autumn has got hold of the vineyard, just as it changes the surrounding trees. A few times a week now I walk the length of the bridge, its walkway above the vineyard, to and from work. And one thing about a narrow footbridge is I see everyone’s faces, close up for passing seconds. I give thanks for each person in their being who crosses the bridge, more real than myriad fleeting faces on computer screens of daily life. Only, what to divine from their features? What labyrinth of thought goes on behind their well-washed appearances? The schoolboy with earnest aspect, what causes this overall effect? Homework? A workman unsmiling, one senses from his benign eye he longs for a smile. Or then this sensitive woman on her way to … the office? What’s uppermost in her world? The diversity of beings scarcely glance to the vineyard below. For many a topmost concern is cyclists, being hit by one at uppermost speed, and then what? That intense chap seems to be rehearsing his lecture to the cyclist before it happens. Or perhaps he’s walking off a hangover. Cyclists have no time for the vineyard, their mercurial helmets pointed at city destinations; neither for the brown river, antithesis of speed that today gives no impression of flowing. How to decipher the universe of the couple and their dog trudging unremittingly towards the Yarra Trail? Is that happy trudging? or some ultimate trial?, asks the second glance. Some stare at the ground. The bridge simply joins one world with another. All I can do is look at each person passing with an ancient wonder, as colours fall and currents get a slow move on. What thousand nights and a night could find voice from the aging woman going shopping, one step at a time? And what hell has that severe face stepped from, or is he just nervous about random cyclists who won’t change gears? Meanwhile, an angel is near at hand, cheered by autumn and brim with celestial information. Another one unawares is trying to find the weather updates on their phone, agitated habit of a lifetime. Why worry? Two friends of inquisitive mien discuss business in tranquil Vietnamese. I wonder where they are going: will their endeavours prove fruitful? A university student tries on the day, her knowledgeable face questioning the day moon. And why apartments? Another has his ear plugged to The National (I guess, expression-wise) on permanent loop. Composed, heads full of errands nod briskly towards each other’s humanity. Yellow signs declare pedestrian right-of-way but bridge walkers wait, playing out their crude etiquette, as more cyclists dash through. Crossing the bridge resumes again, all manner of walks, brisk and leisurely, between one world and another, their faces staying in the mind.