Chattest

 

Epiphany begins early for the dozens of lorikeets and honeyeaters breakfasting loudly in the top outcrops of our flowering gumtree. The colour of the flowers is red-orange, a colour currently not available as an option in any pencil box or paint set. Microsoft Paint is pitifully unprepared for this version of red. Lorikeets screech, whistle, chat and chatter, leading at times to the communication known as chattest. Chattest is very long and loud, making all other thought impossible for anyone in close proximity, all lorikeets in the area engaging in chattest simultaneously. Honeyeaters, demure even by contrast, keep to lower branches, or else bide their time until the lorikeet storm has passed, which won’t be any time until they have had their fill of pollen and nectar. Our nearby plum tree is netted, like a white cloud, to save the satsuma plums for the humans. The photograph appended demonstrates how difficult it is for a camera to distinguish tree from birds. Their bodies are dark green as the leaves yet banded with light green, again like the leaves, such that they may be a leaf, or even a flower, if there are any left. Flowers, because beaks and undersides of wings are the same red-orange as the gum-flowers upon which they breakfast louder than any breakfast radio host, a coincidence of colour that would make even a Charles Darwin sit up and take notice. Their heads, furthermore, are the strong blue associated with the summer sky, especially the summer sky as seen as triangles and other geometric forms through leaves of a flowering gum on the morning of Epiphany. Already the day is opening up in ways familiar to many of us. Honeyeaters, not birds we normally think of as demure, arrive in the flowering gum as gradually lorikeets reduce their chatter to a chat and as gradually, dash colourfully away in twos and threes. The strings of LED-light microstars will soon be unlaced from the Christmas Tree, thence to be coiled into their box and returned to a top ledge until next Advent. Angels, donkeys, shepherds and the like will be unpinned from tips of branches, thence placed carefully in their own Chinese lacquer box until next time this year. And the tree itself will be unbolted from its boy scout base, to meet its end on the nature strip or, more likely, the green waste bin. Christmas cards will be taken down, re-read, notes made about senders who have left special hints in their cards, then stacked in a shoebox until such time as a decision is made about what to do with the outcomes of this friendly convention. Already the day is warming up, with a prediction of 31C, which is 87 in the old language, so not a scorcher but best to keep in the shade. It pays to get out early and come in early.     

 

Epiphany

 

Wisdom, wherever it comes from and however it wins, knows to play at times the game of gesture. If you must give something to someone of highest value, give gold. Even kings do not sniff at that. This substance will not lose its favour on the bedposts overnight. Even if gold can only imitate the sunlight shining in the flowing water, the millions of leaves that yesterday were green and tomorrow will be shrivelled black on the ground. Even if gold is inedible and can never replace loaves coming out of the ovens in a night kitchen. Even if gold can buy everything that looks, sounds, smells, tastes and feels like happiness, but will have to be traded in at reduced cost, sometime, back there in the good old days. Gold is no substitute for the blood in people’s veins, the shapely mysteries of the body, the clarity of consciousness. Wisdom venerates wisdom. Wisdom gives back seventy times seven, long after the gold gift finds its way into a display case in the museum of ancient history. One of Herod’s little toys, left behind when wisdom went where wisdom goes next. Always on its mettle. Or out on some backroad without a signpost. Wisdom, whenever it happens and whoever it speaks to, is ordinary stuff. It makes no great show of its own knowledge. Its lack of pretension is humbling to the average person of pretension. As ordinary as incense, that is no more than a stick and mud, stuck in mud, that burning makes a fume rippling up into space, and a scent that soothes the tired head. Shit mud, or the ooze from a tree that frankly no one’s paying much attention to, as they frolic after fantasy, or gorge on glamour, or believe in others’ captive lies. Dried ooze that glowing hot sends out lines, like a continuous prayer, nothing but the truth, quiet as you like, even on a windy day, or when it’s snowing like in a Christmas card. Incense, that is nothing to write home about, but that people keep a bundle of for special occasions. Wisdom, whether or not it has any palpable use, will admit of dying. Who knows, people sort through every kind of epiphany to find an explanation for that one. Click their fingers, as if the answer will appear like magic. Or, wishfully, sink their shares into death disappearing, preferably forever. Think, if they snap freeze the epiphany will happen in their next life, because it’s sure not happening in this one. Yet it has already started. It is starting now. People’s bodies can scarcely guess what might happen next. Their hands fill quotebooks more and more, their lifetime of myrrh. Whereas wisdom, for reasons that seem to change meaning over a lifetime, would have death be a gift. As if this were the only way forward, handed out from the start. Here also is where the body must be cared for, even people’s lifetimes are the body caring all the time for the bearer. At the start, wisdom is given gifts, then enters into the classroom to learn the whole thing again, at the most personal level, seventy times seven.

Epiphany

“It is no more than the moment

       when the meaning strikes one:

Which is not the same as

“It is the moment of truth

       in its extraordinariness”:

Both of which stress the effect that

“It is the showing-forth of that

       previously in obscurity”:

Rather than the present sensation of

“It is the perfect moment crystallized;

       it is the moment whole”:

None of which shall equal

“It is the appearance

       of that which was sought in hope”:

Nor the simplicity and force of

“It is

       the manifestation of a god.”

Definitions, redefinitions

       get the sense and lose the feel,

Are soon consigned by hand

And moment after moment

       to their own ordinariness.

Then there is the effort that,

In word and act, would hold these moments

       to save them from obscurity

Rather than let event and need fly,

And consciousness gather the meaning

       for personal use.

Comes from this sequel

A private sequence

       of which the end is us,

Forcing our none-too-secret hopes

That we are

       and were as others in time.

For it is we who are more,

       more than moments of meaning,

Our own closing, openness

That is the truth

       in remarkableness;

It is our election rushing

From a coming-out to that

       future which is obscurity.

Much more than the present sensation

Is our keeping the present

       from slipping out of reach.

None of which can negate

How we test appearances

       for their signs of hope,

And in simplicity and force

Put before the god

       our single gift.