Babel

 

Seminar on Street Art 6: Babel. Observe the city of 250 languages. Drop into the aural aroundedness. Distinguish its many Englishes, their accents and oops of grammar. Pronounce with aitch, haitch and huh. Notice the many variants of commuter Chinese. Unravel the beauties of iphone Spanish. Respect the originality of Greek. Encounter the aboriginality in Wurundjeri. Wonder, a lot. Abandon the belief you understand everything being said. Breathe the air on this first day. Breathe again, as everyone breathes. Listen to the world come to this city of towers, here to perpetuate its tried messages. Trial by embouchure, fearless with found phrases. Try to discern what is so trying from what makes every effort at trying. Live with the saying of it that doesn’t need to try. Interpret mood by the ups and downs of other intonations. Appreciate the incomprehensible that, for others, is the most comprehensible thing they have heard all day. Distinguish the English, single out the verbal wish. Gauge the basins or terraces or meanders where such tongues have their root in the geography of migration. Abide in the speedy profusion of multiple speech. Turn then. Turn past the airwaves. Gaze down past resolute institutions and punning shops to the walls of no-man words. Track with your pupils the contours of word hundreds, outlines and inners of unsaid words lining outer limits. Note how these names are not their real names. Consider this is because they desire to escape detection. See how these diversities seek to name the unnameable. Contemplate their tangles of consonants and vowels seven-feet high, concrete poetry that makes nothing happen. Query whether these experiments in unEnglish are not the mergings of 250 tongues bumping each other and curling into being. Question if this is not unquestionably the case. Measure the miles of street art speaking back to spraycan Babel its makers’ yearnings for agreement, their longing for speaking in tongues. Appreciate the language of walls, signs of the confusion of speech, giving birth to new words unfamiliar to an urban dictionary. Relax with a rapid city that talks over the top of itself, whispers and shouts in fast-drying paint. Listen the while to the out spokenness of neighbours, one of the most diverse in the world. Eyeball the walls, covered to the rooftops everywhere in lettering, lettering very deliberately absolutely no one can understand. Read with assurance the painted translations of the aural aroundedness, the object of a future signing itself with daring. Read their secrets, that are our secrets, coded but out in the open for all to share.

Foambow

 

Image: ‘The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen’ by J. M. W. Turner. 

Undated. Pencil, red ink, and watercolour on paper.

“Once as we descended a mountain side by side with the mountain torrent, my companion saw, while I missed seeing, a foambow.” A what?, I asked the page, a foambow? Clearly Christina Rossetti knows about foambows, even if she has never seen a foambow. The OED lists its first use in ‘Oenone’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1832: “And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow brightens.” While Rossetti uses the word in the entry in her daily devotional ‘Time Flies’ (published 1885) for September 16, continuing: “In all my life I do not recollect to have seen one, except perhaps in artificial fountains; but such general omission seems a matter of course, and therefore simply a matter of indifference. That single natural foambow which I might have beheld and espied not, is the one to which may attach a tinge of regret; because, in a certain sense, it depended upon myself to look at it, yet I did not look.” So, this is about missing a marvel because we were looking in the opposite direction at the time. Her biographer Mary Frances Sandars (1930) is strangely chiding, saying “if Christina Rossetti’s mind were set on some poem which would add to the beautiful literature of the world, if even she were allowing sway to fancies and feelings which would lead to such a composition, it was foolish to blame herself for being unmindful of a foambow.” Which is not Rossetti’s point we know, because the poet increases the emotional meaning in the next tense sentence: “I might have done so, and I did not: such is the sting today in petty matters.” Rossetti is reflecting on how minor losses and mishaps have a way of returning to memory, sometimes years later without warning, causing pangs or stings. All of which leads, with a leap, to a typical Rossetti concluding refrain: “And what else will be the sting in matters all important at the last day?” Foambow is not that important! Indeed, the word itself appears in lines by subsequent Victorian poets – William Morris, Charles Kingsley and H. B. Cotterill, to wit “in the sun-lit mountain slopes, the pine-woods and the glittering walls of rock, and in the colours of the foam-bow suspended amidst the spray of the swift down-thundering cataract,” before evaporating without trace. Google Image delivers a mere half-page for foambow, pictures of girls’ glitter foam bow hair accessories and boys’ DIY bow-and-arrow kits with foam tips. Not a foambow in sight. Helpfully though, Sandars identifies where Rossetti missed the foambow on her continental tour with her mother and brother William: “At any rate she saw the Falls of Schaffhausen, of which William gives an enthusiastic description.” Christina may have missed the iris formed by sunlight upon foam or spray, as of a cataract, but she knew her Tennyson.

Underground

 

Seminar on Street Art 5: Underground. It is unclear why they risked their lives, dark in fact, descending into the wide drains below Melbourne. The Cave Clan left little trace underground, graffiti being contrary to their secret code of exploration. Anonymity was essential once they crossed the entrance to hell, somewhere near an effluent creek. They were torchlight crews, down there to discover the last frontier. Their cavernous concrete caverns were a hard day’s night, measureless to man where sunless they ran, tiptoed, stumbled, forged new memories. Speleologists of the sewers, their aim was discovering new reaches of the depths, only staying away for obvious reasons on rainy days. Now the explorers rise above the surface, whether rain or clear, scaling above the grids of lit windows, ducking down calligrammed bluestone lanes, finding forlorn fences beneath a sterling moon, their purpose to leave traces over every wall. Their purpose being to discover the next unknown nook that by hook crook they will hook with good looks. Just take a Captain Cook! And well that was one particular rabbit-hole. Another entertains Alice as she enters upon her adventures underground. There small becomes large, elephant becomes mouse again, and mirror-writing turns the alphabet inside out. Obtuse interactions, empirical impossibilities. the nightmare of the subconscious meet Alice whether she is opening doors, falling through space, or sitting down to tea. She’s frank. She’s grace. She’s prudence. But ask her to compose a response and we find she has risen to the occasion with seven-foot high mirror signatures that she’s good-naturedly choreographed across the entire neighbourhood. It might be a kingly Lear limerick in her head, a mock heroic palindrome, but across the waste deep urban landscape her names are pure concrete poetry. Which is not a poetry spoken into open mike at the seedy slam, or recited to a hush of introspective literati. Concrete poetry was everyone’s personal advertising in the heyday of the Velvet Underground. Cut-and-paste edged up the blocks of letters page upon blank page, their tumbledown graphix, their typewriter sprays in the days before personal computers. Newsprint turned a Cubist yellow, juxtaposition looked almost random, the capital letters awry the pride of their compositors. Now the Nicos and Alices draw their signature poetry from the earth below, where all paint is ultimately sourced in its myriad shades: vermilion earth, obsidian earth, sunburst earth, viridian earth, even skyblue earth, rising in wondrous oceanic earth waves over the reinforced blocks that uphold apartments, warehouses, flyover stations and hangars alike. Flourishes optional and noticeably frequent.

Rossetti

 

Reading Christina Rossetti widely for next month’s Poets and the Faith paper at St. Peter’s, I rediscover her ‘reading diary’ of 365 daily reflections, published in 1885 in London under the title ‘Time Flies’. Wondering what she has to say in this daily devotional about the coming week, I turn to her entry for July 22, Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, of whom she notes in her terse manner: “The date of her death is unknown.” 

Rossetti writes: “A record of this Saint is a record of love. She ministered to the Lord of her substance, she stood by the Cross, she sat over against the Sepulchre, she sought Christ in the empty grave, and found Him and was found of Him in the contiguous garden.” 

Contiguous here means the touching or adjoining garden, but also especially surely a place of meeting, where one meets another without touching. This is a place where death meets life. The relationship, listed by the poet with such rhythm and concision, is brought into stronger focus in the next sentence: “Yet this is the same Mary Magdalene out of whom aforetime He had cast seven devils.” 

Rossetti’s lifetime knowledge of Scripture is everywhere given voice in ‘Time Flies’, as in all her poetic output. Likewise, her invaluable talent for attending to the story, choosing salient details, making vital connections, and turning them into something deeper. As she continues: “Nevertheless, the golden cord of love we are contemplating did all along continue unbroken in its chief strand: for before she loved Him, He loved her.” Subtly Rossetti introduces the suggestion that we, the reader or listener, are sharing this example and possibility ourselves in a state of contemplation. 

“Thus love it was which brought Christ and that soul together, and bound them together first and last. Or rather, first and not last: for time must end in eternity, and eternity must end which never endeth, before the mutual love of Christ and His saints shall end.” 

Gifted with sensitive insight and language skills, Christina Rossetti here also demonstrates the experienced method of the homilist. She may move from the particular to the general, the here-and-now to the universal, even as she identifies the message of unconditional love, concluding: “To love first is God’s prerogative. But blessed be He Who humbles not His least saint by loving last.” 

[Reflections on Christina Rossetti for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, the 21^st of July 2024, in the pew notes at St Peter’s, Eastern Hill, Melbourne.  Written by Philip Harvey. Image: ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and their World’ an illustrated collection of writings by her brother William Michael Rossetti (The Folio Society, 1995) and ‘Time Flies’, by Christina Rossetti (first edition, SPCK, 1885).]

Gift

 

Seminar on Street Art 4: Gift. On cold days with rain on the window I want to give thanks to the divine truth of breath and the pathos of someone’s seven-foot alphabet glimpsed from the wet freeway. Someone had taken the time, joining the crew, to fill in their own official form signed in blasted colours, then left for public admiration. And diverse opinion. The seven-foot letters join the labyrinth of cause and effect decorating walls above the daisy-speckled mud fields and lonely carparks of outerness, seven-feet being the comforting reminder of human height. I give thanks for these human beings, their diversity of being, reaching for the stars with spraycans and rollers to find that in this singular universe, seven-feet is the arch of heaven, their chosen wall a mere clay tablet in the larger scheme of things. Or on another day, walking by the creek in leafless winter, I see more reasons for thanks, gifts along fences and all over power stations that will never give up dreams of lettering go their seven-foot faces with perseverance and love, letting us see them who otherwise go unseen. Solid diamonds, flowing water, spattered algebra, exact crystals, mystic coins, blazing fires, mystery roses, coloured vowels, innocent birds, tiger's stripes, exploding inevitables, unhidden treasures are the words spoken, the names declared this morning where wattles blossom and boost buckets rot. I give thanks for their hours of forethought, their stealthy choice of site, their haste in rendering, as they add one more chain tag to Melbourne’s one thousand and one nights. Their dreams have set firm on frosty mornings in the cold white sun, their gift a message of hell or heaven, too hard now to tell. On some days I stop in secret and immemorial backstreets, ice-hard bluestone and repatched bitumen, to let converge on me the twenty-first century language of codes unknown. I give thanks for seven-foot inner city nicknames and the young daring of their makers, yet rarely can I discern their exact intention, or their form. I know they are word music (Deo gratias!), that they were wished for, but they may be anthem or apology, epistle or epitaph, inscription or insult, ode or oracle, understatement or umbilical. All or none of those. Their presence arouses awareness and amusement, excites euphuism and ephemerality, invites investigation and illusion, overnights opprobrium and opposition, uninvites unctuousness and umpiring. It could be taken for wisdom. The seven-foots plea to be noticed, but never give their artist’s name. They ask to be remembered, even as they flirt with anonymity. On winter days I wish to be home, where I was always going anyway, past the sum of all created things under the winter sun, giving thanks for all variations of irrepressible, soon forgotten, street art.

Anonymous

 

Seminar on Street Art 3: Anonymous. Essential to the wonder of street art is anonymity. It is a given that no one but the artist and close associates, the crew, really knows. It’s they who made all these endless extravagances. The public and constabulary are in the dark, even in broad daylight, Broadmeadows daylight, though it is likely the constabulary possess files of names caught red-handed with a spray can, indelible markers. It is itself part of the mystery how so many artists go to infinitesimal detail writing their impossibly obscure signature upon doors, walls, back lanes, freeways simply to declare their honourable anonymity. It is anonymity, indeed, that gives freedom to the artists to express themselves as they wish. They are not bound by expectations a famous name means to the voracious and unthinking public. Fame is fleeting as a car careering past, a glimpse while out shopping, a billboard stripped back to tin by the morning. Their real name is invisible behind their immense contrived street names, signed in original lettering across the city’s length, breadth and don’t forget height. How did they get up there? This is a profound conundrum, painted over high density urban spaces: the sight of hundreds of ornate signatures that are not the artists’ real names. Who are these people? Their desire to lay claim to the impersonal landscape with their personal Pessoan heteronyms is uncontrollable, and done at risk to their physical safety and civil security. The law takes a dim view of their brightest autographs. The law would return to dust-grey their flowery embellishments, using a heavy-duty city council paint roller. The uniformity of conformity. Yet the law itself has provided street artists with the creative restriction rule that garners such populous proliferations of anonymous prolixity: Thou Shalt Not Sign the Work. Their viewership assigns medieval cognomens to their inscrutable pseudonyms: The Master of the Sunshine Industrial Zone, Pudgy Budgie Member of the School of Pam the Bird, Looping Illuminator of the Mernda Line. ‘Foo Was Here’ is the germ of this superabundance of dancing signoffs. But this is about more than scrawling a peekaboo in the wrong location. The results of street art imply a most complex artistic premeditation, an unswerving determination, a clubbish anonymity. They display gift and the painterly training of Renaissance frescoists, those men and women who knew they had only 15 minutes starting Now to complete their unacknowledged masterwork before the plaster set.

Concrete

 

Seminar on Street Art 2: Concrete. Precast concrete slabs have sped up building construction everywhere. The resulting conglomeration of concrete rectangles, similar in appearance to an A4 sheet of paper, cross the landscape, relentless: a logical invitation to the concrete poet. Wild varieties of graphic verse, in every type of type and calligraphic application, liven the humdrum greyness of miles of slab. All of it free of charge to the company. Concrete poets take advantage of the disadvantages of this building material. To begin with, concrete is very expensive, replacement unthinkable. By coating the surface with polychromatic Baroque lettering, the concrete poet protects the dull and vulnerable concrete, extending its life by several years. Badge bombing strengthens the initial layer against sun and shower, an ornament to the industrial wasteland into which it speaks, as with multi-coloured tongues. Then concrete has a high compression strength, but a weak tensile strength. Concrete poets gibe at this temporality, often drawing cracks and chips into their overnight sensations as a gestural reminder that concrete walls, like their own most ardent efforts at attention, are not made to last. Concrete isn’t porous, another disadvantage that the poets turn to their advantage, brushing swathes of paint and spraying cans of colour over the smooth surface. In terms of speed, scale and level of detail, concrete is far superior to corrugated iron, which delivers optical confusion with its uncontrollable, interminable undulations, or the Melbourne paling fence, its textures porous and getting porouser, its timber shades spoiling the instant effects of a blank background. Unporous steadies the holding agents, beaming a chorus of diversity. Finally, concrete has the unhappy reputation of being unaesthetically pleasing. Concrete aficionados are divided as to the architectural beauty of the material. Snobs find pleasure in Soviet brutalism while land developers have a whole dictionary of laudatory words for every occasion, but public opinion wavers. Concrete poets, themselves aficionados if not for those reasons, find benefits to the underwhelming ordinariness of concrete. For them it is the opportunity to take up a fresh canvas, readymade and promising a constant viewership, that cannot begin to contain their unintelligible, gnomic poems. Much as references explain concrete poetry as a modernist version of shaped poetry, actually concrete poetry is old as Antiquity. Those earliest scratchings on city walls, those names for posterity that could be anyone in time, those tags against the forces of nature, those singular signatures – they fit the definition of concrete poem: “An arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance.”

Crew

 

Seminar on Street Art 1: Crew. ‘World’ and ‘Cola’ are names 20 feet high applied to large billboards and warehouse walls, paint dribbling at time to affect haze or Pollock, throughout the inner city. The actual World and Cola constitute a crew, their crew name the well-nigh universal WLS. The meaning of this set of letters is elusive to the uninitiated, which is most of the Melbourne population. Travellers who leave their phones in their pockets may spend quality reading time following the fortunes of World and Cola through cuttings, along vacant lots, under overpasses for miles. Or other crews that have taken a grip of available spaces with their nominated handle. Crews become recognisable as such by the sheer diversity of their art, WLS for example being presented in everything from ornate variegated two-storey calligraphy to inscrutable hardline block bubbles to irascible underlined logo bombs and dumb old badges of largely indifferent quality. Whoever they are on the Australian Census papers, World and Cola are amongst the most prolific and immediate artists that Melburnians get to see every day of the week. They enjoy the same notoriety as Pam the Bird, a graphic figure with beak and large eyes that adorns freeway signs, industrial estates and disused railway carriages across the western suburbs. Pam the Bird is often accompanied by the bold letters MP, which stand for the enigmatic message ‘Milk Please’. This in-joke hints at the idea Pam the Bird is a crew, that and the immense variety of art styles in which she is made manifest, however graf blogs still believe she is the product of one (very overworked) single-line roller grafittist, a lone hand, a rare bird. The term for this kind of romantic visionary is a king. Kings are happy to do their own thing with their lettered identity. They are only rarely lone wolves, because kings are in the business of making spraycan statements to get the attention of other street artists. Kings send coded messages using their distinctive acronyms or sets of initials to other kings, using the public surfaces of Melbourne as their writing paper. Pam the Bird possibly started out as a king but is now feral, or at the very least out of her/their tree. Seeing and being seen is one of the driving characteristics of kings, the crown frequently being a feature of their wild emblems, paint whirling through time to affect regal haloes or Basquiat. Crews and kings make the running, tending to regard newcomers to badging by the patronising term toy. Toys are okay, but they are like schoolboys who cut their initials in a desktop, leaving a mark. Toys deliver low grade product, poorly formed and not thought through. Chances are most toys are chancers who ruin a good fence with their inferior tags. They lower the standard of the neighbourhood and give a bad name to the real thing.

Quill

 

[For Amanda Witt] The twilight of the typewriter has made way for inkblack shutdown. Their trusty carriages settle in rusty garages. Keystrokes that felled a city are now as one with Nineveh. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for the end of the present line. Ping pulped the polysyllables in half. It made a phenomen of phenomenology, likewise left in the dark. And anyway, phenomenology has trouble explaining things it cannot see. Now the printer manual is a blank about margins of error. The dependence of computers on printers for hard copy is a universal truth. It’s a truth universally knowledge, that compatibility reliance is incompatible with time’s winged chariot. The reader cannot read the page the printer cannot read, due to dysfunction with connected software. Only connect, not. The blank page reflects a blank look. Ditto the half-life of the biro, which is the whole-life of a biro. The ballpoint leads a merry dance but too soon all good things come to an end. As Baron Bic said, though in impeccable French: profits are the mother of invention. Hence, they are only in it for the money, those microchips off the old block. If the mouse cannot dot its i’s, the keyboard has lost the plot, qwerty’s gone on holidays. That said, do not cook the goose. First, catch your goose. A bird in the hand is worth a complete corpus. Several feathers from the leftwing fit well in the right hand, rightwing feathers likewise in the left hand. Find the compatible feather. Leftwingers are usually in the majority. Where there is a quill there is a way. Ask your grandmother about inkwells. Ink is fluid and leaves large stains. Therefore, pour ink from jar with care to avoid Lake Titicaca. Well levels are dark and hard to distinguish, leading to prominent overflow. A well-lit environment promises gleam and shimmer upon the flowing ink. Dip the nib as though your life depended on it. Every word could be a last will and testament. The dark lady leaves a fine trail drying in the sun. However, if ink is unavailable, unnavigable, gouge the ground with the quill. Etch the wall with the thoughts of flight. Faster than a speeding stylus, more powerful than a reed in the wind, the Quill. The biographer’s weapon of choice using oozing ink of blood, sweat and tears. Underlinings in cacophonies of caca. Until something else comes along. The paperless artifice. Artificial interpretation that will beam neural waves quicker than light. Super-fingernails that inscribe into eternity every sentence as it is thunk. Unforgiving brain chips off the old block. Chat post-it notes reminding us we are alive. And other collectibles in the large clearance sale catalogue of future redundancies.