Application

 

Seminar on Street Art 7: Application. Downtown in the city of downloads, fingertips walk stepping stone icons. Alone. Applications simulate control. Controlled, the digital beings connect to an artificial globe. The world. Passwords are passports, pins are wins. Interminable applications. Innumerable applications. The app for measuring light. The app for wrong from right. The app for updates on nostalgia. The app for computer neuralgia. The app for more money less time. App (pop-up: download now) where punishment fits the crime. The app for craziest quotes ever. Ever. The app that never says never.  Everywhere now, inexplicably new and now, pretending to know how applications happen. Snap them then tap them. All desires known. Sent to your iPhone. Private configurations, tonics and iconics. A service to keep an eye on. So many to choose from, which ones to try on? There is the app for A to speak with B. The app they said was free. The app for conveyor belts. The app for how things felt. The app for the way to dusty death. The app for taking your next breath. Uptown in the city of uploads, these handy daydreams of universal connect power out. They lose the feel of write. They fall through the stormwater grills, through the wise cracks. Forget about snacks. Upload overload, offload. Interminable until terminable. In their stead, instead, rise cartouches from the earth. The polychrome earth. Encapsulated in caps, applications in gloss paint proliferate. They instigate their maker’s unique claim. In touch with the grain and shape. Their name in rows with other names of the unnamed. Sign your name legibly. Make your application early. The graf of the tracks of their tears. The graf of the cracks in their fears. The graf of open secrets in code. The graf of calligraphy overload. The graf of internal fires. The graf of nighttime mires. The graf of the loneliest street. The graf where like-minds meet. Yes, secrets, coded but out in the open for all to share. The fair and aware, the scared and rare, bared in primary colours where inner city meets outer spaces. Garish and nightmarish, or cherished and first wish? Squarish and flairish, flourished, efflorescent. Dare this. Private configurations gone public in Dulux and Montana. British Paints, sure can. The graf of poetical overtures. The graf of seven-foot signatures. The graf with its back to the wall. The graf that is having a ball. The graf of not seen nothing yet. The graf of exploding alphabets.

 

Two Sonnets: 

‘The App’ 

The app for measuring light.

The app for wrong from right.

The app for updates on nostalgia.

The app for computer neuralgia.

The app for more money less time.

App: the punishment fits the crime.

The app for craziest quotes ever. Ever.

The app that never says never.

 

The app for A to speak with B.

The app they said was free.

The app for conveyor belts.

The app for how things felt.

The app for the way to dusty death.

The app for taking your next breath.

 

‘The Graf’ 

The graf of the tracks of their tears.

The graf of the cracks in their fears.

The graf of open secrets in code.

The graf of calligraphy overload.

The graf of internal fires.

The graf of nighttime mires.

The graf of the loneliest street.

The graf where like-minds meet.

 

The graf of poetical overtures.

The graf of seven-foot signatures.

The graf with its back to the wall.

The graf that is having a ball.

The graf of not seen nothing yet.

The graf of exploding alphabets.

 

 

What

 

‘You are what you think’ is one of those modern phrases that wishes to sum up your personal situation. Intended to make you think about thinking, such phrases often leave you not knowing what to think, or stop further thought from occurring. You also rather wish at times you were not what you think. 

Another saying in this genre is ‘You are what you watch’, and certainly in our 24/7 world of screens there are times when watching appears to be many people’s sole occupation. It is a blessing to know that we might be defined by more than all the movies we’ve ever watched, or the hours put into doomscrolling.  

Then there’s ‘You are what you do,’ an unfortunate social equation we meet when someone new asks us, after names have been exchanged, and what do you do? We know we are more than our occupation, what we do, but fall into the same trap too easily when talking of others, and to others. Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, took a different tack on this phrase: ‘You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.’ Actions speak louder than words, it’s said, but meanwhile who are we? 

‘You are what you learn’ has warrant, though there are cases of only learning what we want to know, not another thought in the world, and conversely learning more than is good for us, or useful, or to the point. Foodies and anthropologists are wont to say ‘you are what you eat’, a ‘truth’ that means something when you have enough to eat, but even then, aren’t we more than consumers? Perish the thought! 

Today’s Gospel (John 6: 56-69) takes this last phrase to amazing, even unthinkable and unimaginable new levels. The simple invitation to eat of Christ’s flesh in the form of broken bread is, we learn, to partake of eternal life. And in the first place seems to involve simply the action of doing it, of taking and eating the bread. It is truer to say in this respect, ‘you become what you eat’, as we learn (sometimes ever so slowly) how our experience is matched by the words of Gospel. Each time we respond to the invitation and eat the bread and drink of the cup, our thinking is further turned towards God’s will. Our thinking, watching, doing, not doing, learning and consuming are, in our communion together, transformed by the wisdom embodied in Jesus.    

Pharoah

 

His stone face cannot be spoken to. He is silent as the day he was turned into granite. Communication is a one-way street. The words are just my words, staring back. Ancient is a way of life, incomparable, agreed to by the parties. The gods give glimpses, as they do, giving and taking. There is all the time in the world, however long that is. Attention to detail is painstaking. His head must have been a headache. His goatee is curled to a nicety. His cheek is not to be taken for granted. His stare is their stare, staring back. Blank to some, his eyes are born cartouches. The florid world arises between blinks. Words cannot encapsulate its every movement. Sculptors etch away at an asp or a lily. Majesty vies with mortality, formality with futility. His day job was preparing everyone for the night ahead. As fortune would have it, his name is lost. His game is an impossible guess, survival and loss in either order. He was the boss, counting the cost. Days were spent chiselling his name on a lintel. Date indeterminate. Source the Delta, the Valley, who can tell. He turned rock hard even as his flesh was turning to water.  His people looked the other way. It was enough for them he kept peace with the gods. His lion’s body went to rest in the sanctuary. In time terms, his long look back became for them a glance over the shoulder. The people woke to a new day. Saluting made way for looting. Travel was an improvement on travail. Thoughts make way for the photo opportunity. Sent from my iPhone to friends, pictures of pharaohs, heaps of hieroglyphs, priests at an angle half in the frame. Medium busy day for visitors to the gallery. Their eager expressions, their mobile profiles. Reading the millennial rollcall of pharaohs. Their low-fidelity of opinions fill the rooms. Like being in a sepulchre. Beings and opinions circulating in the airy half-light. My iPhone, what is it. The black hole in the middle of the room. A cartouche of all the news that fits. Its date determined by a technician in the Valley. In time terms, the blink of an eye, the touch of a fingertip. Getting it right, the light and shade. I amble, wearied, while they dart from stone to stone, children with their iPhones. They snap stone face with glee, one more oblong of ancient, a cartouche of a meaning they will flick through later. All those mummies and dadoes. Their days are spent scrolling through memories. They are not looking too close. They are not looking too deep.

Reality

 

Having never watched even five minutes of reality TV in my life, it comes as a surprise to watch one of its most famous promoters going steadily mad in real time. Every time he opens his mouth he cannot lie straight in bed. Even when his mouth’s shut he twitches and glares as the camera catches his descent towards an insane asylum. Countries where the state control its media would limit its ageing mouthpiece’s appearances to 60 seconds of the “hello!” hallowed cult leader. The script would keep to the script. But the former leader of the free world lives in a country of 24-hour feeds where his every word is regurgitated for everyone to see and hear. Reality TV was never like this, I imagine. The worst of the regurgitation was edited out before going to air, leaving only prime gurge for the public to gorge upon. Instead we have a stream of consciousness that hasn’t read a book for several years, Rambo rambles every colour of the rainbow. AI cannot keep up with the script, AI being programmed to understand grammar and present a monotone version with some relationship to reality. Unusually, this reality TV show is called a presidential election. Usually such an election requires future leaders of the free world to know when to say something, and when not. This is a norm and is called politics in the free world. Lawyers are good at this technique, real estate grifters not so. Hence, when a former leader who would be a future leader of the free world fills every second with his next thought, it is a new kind of reality TV. The Senate and People of Rome were never party to the endless unconnected opinions of an unhinge, which is as well given they had to worship their leader as a god. Forsooth, Romans were conditioned to rumour. They would have felt uncomfortable having the rumours about Unhingeus confirmed in permanent news cycles that Unhingeus himself was only too willing to circulate. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Sounds weird, but not as weird as watching it every day on our screens, as the amateur psychologist in all of us examines why the former leader of the free world pretends his wife is not living a separate life from his. Pretends he knows people he’s never met. Pretends to have policies. Pretends that his rallies are the biggest in history, at the very least, or even bigger. Pretends he has not had sex with a concubine, even though a law court found he shifted millions of denarii to keep her quiet about it. Pretends he has read a book. Fortunately for historians, AI was invented to study his insane transcripts in condensed form, even as he descends for the whole world to watch towards either a jail or, as mentioned earlier, an asylum. Critics uniformly give his performance half a star: doesn’t keep to the script, every third word is ‘nasty’.        

Uommibatto

When Dante Gabriel Rossetti acquired a wombat (circa 1869), his sister Christina was amongst the most enraptured Londoners in her response to the Antipodean creature. As usual with Christina, she immediately penned an Effusion, others would say an Ode, this time in Italian. All good odes open with an O. “O Uommibatto,” she exclaims, “Agil, giocondo, / Che ti sei fatto/ Irsuto e tondo!” Let’s unpack that. Her impression is spontaneous (D.G. himself said she was the more spontaneous poet), espying how the wombat is agile and carefree. One biographer, Mary Sandars (1930), translates ‘giocondo’ as frisky, which I suggest she’s used to rhyme with tricksy, however ‘giocondo’ comes closest to joyous, Betty Flowers’ word in the Penguin Complete Poems (2003). Fans of Leonardo da Vinci will notice the connection with his most famous portrait, and who is to say Christina does not have La Gioconda in mind upon meeting this mysterious and happy being? How you have grown hairy and round, is the gist of the next line, as one would but wonder who had never before seen such a creature. The addressee, Uommibatto, is a most curious coinage to anyone halfway familiar (like me) with Christina’s writings, strikingly using the word for man (uomo) in connection with bumping or beating (battere), conjuring a picture of boisterous liveliness. D.G.’s frontispiece to her extraordinary poem ‘Goblin Market’ features a wombat, amongst other creatures, while one of the goblins in the story is likened to a wombat. The main rhyme thread is giocondo-tondo-vagabondo-mondo-pondo, which is worth pondering when we notice how the second half of the poem shifts, via these rhymes, from lightness to heaviness, from initial delight at the vision glorious to the weighty meaning of the wombat’s very existence. Because Christina knows what they all know, this being, “hairy and round”, came from the other side of the world, down under. Sandars translates, “Pray run not from us/ A vagrant wild,/ Pray do not vanish”, expression of a fear of loss, even perhaps the death of the wombat far from home. “Deh non fuggire/ Qual vagabondo,/ Non disparire/ Fornado il mondo,” this last phrase “piercing the globe” thinks Sandars, while Flowers sees that Christina is talking about burrowing. For burrowing is, as every Australian knows, a basic characteristic of wombats, though the poet is not just thinking about digging. How do we imagine the world? “Pesa davvero/ D’un emisfero/ Non lieve il pondo,” she concludes, this creature embodying the reality of our hemispherical planet, grace and then gravity. The lines are almost untranslatable. Sandars goes, “the weight ‘tis clear/ Cannot be told.” Flowers too bumbles about, close to the gist, saying: “It’s really the weight of/ a hemisphere/ Not a light burden.” How do we imagine the world?

Carrot

 

I met carrot man this morning at St Vincent’s Plaza in Victoria Parade. He was busy minding his own business, watching the peak hour traffic hurtle past the Eye and Ear Hospital. It’s the first time I’ve seen him close up. The only other time I’ve seen him is from a distance last summer walking past the Royal Derby Hotel in Brunswick Street towards the Fitzroy Swimming Pool. Sightings of carrot man are an important connection, part of Melbourne existence. You tend to remember. The first thing you notice is the carrot, which sticks out a mile, even when leaning nonchalantly against the plate glass of the tram stop. It is a very vibrant orange with bright green tufts. It’s solid pâpier-maché. Then you notice him, smiling bemusedly at the commuters changing trams, and patients slowly alighting heading towards their doctor’s appointments. As it happens, he was also having a doctor’s appointment today, which is what he said when I asked how he was going. I assured him that colonoscopies were perfectly okay and you don’t know what’s happening at the time. I’ve had one myself, I said, pointing towards St Vincent’s. After being asked, he said his name is Nathan.  Nathan and I agreed that anaesthetics are one of the wonders of modern life, a blessing. He talked about cameras that have been sent in to look at his heart, so obviously he’s looking after himself. I mentioned that he was well-known. Nathan replied, natural as you like, that he’s been viral in China. Not everyone can say they’ve been viral in China. Perhaps this is why he was comfortable about me asking him to have his photograph taken. He gets asked all the time, he said, with a sheepish grin. In all the excitement I overlooked to give Nathan my name, something that probably happens frequently when you’re carrot man. I took his picture. Had he been sitting here long?, I asked, as though this was the most normal thing to ask a total stranger with a huge carrot on a tram stop. Nathan said that he’d been here a while, it was nice and sunny now for an icy morning, but that when he felt like going somewhere else then he’d go there. The 109 to Box Hill was turning the corner into our stop. No mention had been made of the carrot. “Eh, what’s up Doc?” was never going to be a clever conversational gambit. Still smiling, I told him to stay warm, which he seemed to be doing very well already, and I stepped onto the tram. Googling for carrot man articles on my way down Victoria Parade I read that people keep carrot man Instagram accounts, maintaining regular updates of Nathan’s present location, condition, words of wisdom. I suppose it’s time to add my own words to the public record.