Language

 

Look-it-up language, how do you spell that? Lookitup, Look It Up, like a birdcall. Look-it-up’s become a language of our minds, who travel online for hours of the week. When permacrisis is declared Word of the Year by a famous dictionary, we have never heard of permacrisis, we have to Look-it-up. It’s an open question if Look-it-up is symptomatic of permacrisis, or vice versa, but it pays to know. Apparently. Online we may bounce from one permacrisis to another, or reel, only to meet more fresh language that is simply safest, sincerest Look-it-up. It has its own poetry, by which is meant Look-it-up is new sensory experience, intellect update, blurry around the edges. However, it’s not as simple as phonemes, or your first language. TikTok missiles and shock jock whistles and schlock rock samples are itemised minutely, hourly. Screens – long, regular, short – reference communications requiring cinematic recall, translation radios, tune encyclopedias. Scarcely can Look-it-up be labelled artificial intelligence, as it’s our palpable minds must process this plethora of peopled expression. Still, discernment has its limits, to the screen flicking nearness newness in our eyes and ears at maximum rates. Look-it-up language tests mind’s auxiliary motors, texts its febrile manifestations, tempting a tipping point. New vocabulary pushes us to rest, to leave the screen awhile playing self-Scrabble with its millions of players. Our attention shifts towards origins that are not English and not non-English, not itunes or iframes or iabstracts. Our attention finds, for example, green. Trees are green, their manifold variations of foliage, variegated and non-variegated, viridian and verdant, offering us their exactly earthly beauty free of the novel sensations of Look-it-up. Grass in its endless possibilities sways and glows, a consistent healing of the ground that gives grass life, sending out seeds. Patterns of green river over us, beneath us, constellate and rush, shooting out more green than words in dictionaries, mysteriously indifferent to permacrisis, whatever that is; or so we hope. More green, and then our attention yearns towards original languages, the language of origin, that which makes our English sound like any other birdsong, the trees patterns upon patterns, and green simply the majesty of light and water. Such that our attention becomes speechless and clear before the languages our minds cannot keep up with. Sensory languages that all in glory extend simply and surely due to their very existence the invitation to Look-it-up. As though already, permacrisis left in the too hard basket long ago, it were all one omniscient Word of the Year, not requiring a definition. Beyond definition.

Green

 During cold morning daily lockdown block walk of crescent, avenue, street, terrace light [green] seeps an inch all over a prunus. Why town planners call any other street a terrace, I don’t know. Their ways are not our ways. Verbs come into play when looking at early shoots of green. Plums fountain amidst white blossom. Roses fight back, pittosporum bulges, poplars pop. Bare branches of unidentifiable trees slip, spray, constellate. Maples, maybe Monday. Other greenery is contrary. Jacarandas fritter, magnolias pinkify. An empty Flinders Street passes by with its sleepers wake sound. Clover comes from nowhere to win the day.  

Green (January)

Nature study on the Ballarat train. Warehouse fennel balances lemon graffiti dots on waving tiny tips. Imperial thistles, their hundred heads burnt to brown paper by 41-degree day. Cacti, burst above Bacchus Marsh cuttings, the stress of a public domestic. Eucalypts, Heysen giants framed by three-second plateglass window frames, one after another, for miles. January blackberry, dark instrumental interlude on unheard plug-in mixed track. Bulrushes, a post-modern brooch where dam waters meet. Hawthorns, dead car brown in the willow paddock. Eucalypts, roots upturned to sun, house without a roof. Thick thistles, only thistles, the train side of the barbed wire.

Green (November)

Under our window the pilgrim rose has doubled through winter, cloud of green with green buds that break through humidity into white-yellow by Cup Day.  It’s the first day of November. New shoots of serrated edge softness cover Japanese maples, their green trunks well able for any conditions. Some leaves are edged red. But above us the jacaranda has totally lost it, its curvatures and wiggles outlines where feathery green shaded the window. It’s the same old story morning glory. By December every branch will be blue-purple, more haze adding to the mauve haze lining hilly streets of sleepy Rosanna.

Green (October)

Magnolia leaves, large some flat cut into, flutter slightly in hundreds, light green under green. It’s the last day of October. New shoots now flourish across elms high above rooftops. Bush orchids project from dark mud, their cold green holding back forms of pinky-green flowers. Thistles, their down blown, and spindly grasses pushing small blooms, share a roadside plot with lost opium poppies, their leaves seeming repentant, their heads bent, unopen. Level on level of callistemon branches, their green resistant strategies at work, ready with what colour time has arranged. Jades in pots line a verandah, and cacti, greens varying.

Green (September)

September everywhere green, similar to moods. Ocean water for miles through winding trees below the road past Lorne. Or the dark green firs of Queenscliff, staying dark even when sun comes out. Tired green alongside the Geelong road, or is it just we who are tired? Up in Melbourne, hillsides of silver green and serried green exchange bristling antics with the wind. A shower drifts across a rainbow above the valley. Freeways guide the drivers’ side vision with solemn sheoaks. Broad and shiny are camellias in Rosanna. Home is where the trees fill raindrops on windowpanes with newly leafing maples.

Green (August)

Clip mottled brown and green leaves of the Cecile Brunner back to nothing. Bundle lengths of luscious weed in green waste bin for Tuesday night. Smell on fingertips the inimitable silvery green of new spearmint shoots. Re-pot fledgling parsley in compost speckled with eggshell and is that green osmocote®. Notice very first green buds on main stems of the heavily pruned Satsuma plum tree. Saw off the bothersome bushy green grevillea foliage clattering at the guttering. Rake hundreds of leaves, their green browned and shrivelled. Write gardening notes for a green Saturday in August, mild and overcast but no rain.

Green (January)

Mauve Queensland deco: jacaranda. Curved quiet Egyptian: palmtree. Melancholy darksome crowded: fir. Powder Streeton horizon: bluegum. ‘Name the tree’ game from Flinders Street to Emerald Lake. Cut-out sprawly floppy: fig. Shiny ewwwww pushy: mirror-bush. Pretty bee-laden ancient: flowering-gum. Sweeping weeping drooping: she-oak. English stations (Hawthorn, Laburnum, Clematis) and Australian stations (Boronia). Star-spangled red-lined downy: maple. Dotted gnarly cloud: peppercorn. Delicate filigree everywhere: wattle. Primeval fountain fanning: ferntree. Spiky stoic silhouettes: pine. Tender January Chinese: gingko. Something whatever blah: liquidambar. Extravagant limbless neck-bending: stringybark. Whitish blur Ikea: birch. Roundy bye-bye huge: oak. Netting impressionist backyard: apple. Glowing twirly raspberry: crepe myrtle.