Movement

 

Waterdrop, photograph by Bridie Harvey, circa 2014

Readers of this column, their eyes blinking at original adjectives, have grown used to me quoting admiringly from the English version of ‘El Quadern Gris’ of Catalan author Josep Pla. This voluminous, captivating journal, written in 1918 and 1919, is a constant surprise. A page curves into a wave and subsides again as I turn to the next. Here is Josep on the 10^th of October, 1918, not that long ago when you think about it, wrinkling your nose: “Machines have progressed in leaps and bounds, and are capable of astonishing movements one never could have imagined. Nonetheless, I don’t think that machines, for all their sophistication, will ever imitate the very peculiar, very funny, very endearing way that cats’ (especially kittens’) ears wriggle.” Even the idea that machines progress in leaps and bounds must be called into question, given most of them have no limbs, and none have a heart. As observers understand, meanwhile, ear wriggling and twitching are signs of cats’ thought patterns and emotional well-being. They are relaxed. They are attentive. They are autonomous and independent. They are paragons of natural movement. They are at home in their human habitat. Other body movements add to their comfortable repertoire of domesticity: quiet paws, weaving spine, languid tail. At the same time, Josep’s brief observation is making a larger point, or perhaps that’s a swerve, or giant leap. Our world is shaped by machines, but they are so predictable. They are normal as a car, uncomplicated as a computer screen, dumb as a CCTV. We expect nothing out of the ordinary from machines, their progress ever a case of purpose meeting need. Even the most animate of machines is never going to speak. Their discourse is a non-event, no matter how many odes are writ ironically in their honour or spontaneous reviews exclaimed as they emerge from their packing case. Ode to a Light Bulb is a fairly one-way engagement. Readers might be familiar with Ode to the Photocopier. There are whole books full of odes to the steam ship, in photogravure and objective correlative. But we stray from Josep’s essential swerve or leap, which is movement in nature, starting with the fingers tapping this essay on a somnolent keyboard, drifting with eyesight to the garden outside where grass, every leaf and bud is yearning for sun and raindrop, then birds resting on the fence as they watch in several directions with quick looks and eloquent claws. The book is a machine, of course, and thousands of them are devoted each year to this matter of movement. Science textbooks are their own kind of ode and we read them occasionally to upgrade our knowledge of how nature swims, swoops, flowers, leaves, wriggles, twitches, yearns, folds, leaps, bounds, tails, clouds, and so forth, though encyclopedias digital or print are immoveable, unmoving entities compared to that which they describe, that we observe for minutes or hours, like Josep, quite able to discern a machine from the real thing, be it peculiar, funny, endearing, whatever next.    

Sea

 

Yesterday the sea was a bristling flatness, thousands of tiny whitecaps and cat’s paws under duress of the west wind. Today the rains have come, turning all sights into grey rainfall to the shore, then temporary calm and its rainbows, then more rain setting in. Tomorrow above the Great Ocean Road I might spend time watching ships on the horizon, surfers under curls, dogs on the shore, if the rains go. Josep Pla, on the other hand, has trouble understanding what people find in the open sea that they can spend so long staring at it. He interviews a fisherman who spends more time staring at the sea than anyone else. When Pla pushes him about why he does this for such lengths of time, the fisherman replies, “I don’t know … I couldn’t say …” Pla calls this practice an enigma. One time he tries out Aeschylus’s phrase “The sea, ineffable smile,” on another old salt, only to be rebuked with “Have you ever seen the sea smile?” Pla concludes, this may be no more than a literary turn of phrase, a futile fiction. He refers to Lord Byron’s adjectives for the sea, in the French translation. And his Catalan hero Eugeni d’Ors, aka Xenius: “The sea, in its stark nakedness.” This puts me in mind of other short definitions, for example Marianne Moore’s forbidding poem on the subject, entitled ‘A Grave’. James Reeves says “the sea is a hungry dog,” and any amount of ink has flowed on what Homer means by “the wine dark sea.” Leaving us to come up, like Pla, with our own very short definitions of this vastest expanse on Earth. His diary of 1918-1919 ‘Quadern Gris’ (‘The Gray Notebook’) was finally translated from Catalan nearly one hundred years afterwards. I wonder if he ever softened towards the sea? He finds it horrible, without beauty, tiresome, “a harsh, horrendous form assumed by nature.” One wonders if, aged 22 on the day of this entry 30^th September 1919, he is not indulging in youthful playful dispute, honing his wits with university friends in Barcelona. If you must get into dialectic on a subject, what bigger or graver than the sea? “The open sea on its own is horrendous, oppressive, and unpleasantly sterile,” Pla writes, an unusual position to take if you think most of life came out of the fertile sea. However, this subjective mood changes when he looks at sea in relation to land, stating that “a mixture of land and sea is magnificent – a continuous, surprising source of beauty.” Soon he is writing in superlatives, admiring how this mixture is the essential element of beauty ascribed to Catalonia’s seaside towns and most particularly Barcelona itself, where it is “one of the most beautiful things about the city.” I put down his book to look again at the sea, that primary fact of existence, never primarily an aesthetic proposition. What is the right word for sea, if you can only have one word? Below that grey wintry plane that has no straight borders, that can be all horizon and no straight lines, entire worlds exist we can hardly imagine, unaware of our right word, our changing opinions.

Podium

 

Some lecturers’ podiums are surfboards. Wave after wave of ideas, varying in height, are ridden for an hour that feels like all morning. The taste of the tingle stays with you for years. Some professors’ podiums, podia if you prefer, are jukeboxes, wherefrom the same borrowed tune is played each time annually as in its heyday. Such repetitious resource will inspire young turks in the back row to pen their dunciad ‘Odium of Podium’ (unsigned), little knowing they are on track to join the queue to the podium. Young tutors’ podiums are launching pads, their carefully prepared rockets taking off in showers of self-belief, jargon and nuance. Or runways, where the newest moda is on show and it’s hard to say which designs will survive the next change in the brainstorm weather. Some podiums are drunken boats, other podiums sink without trace. These memories of university came to mind after reading a sentence from Xènius: ‘The problem with professors is neither the system nor their ideas nor their temperaments; it is the podium.’ Xènius is the penname of Eugenio d’Ors y Rovira (1884-1954), being quoted here admiringly by his fellow Catalan author Josep Pla i Casadevall (1897-1981) in Pla’s diary ‘Quadern Gris’, ‘The Gray Notebook’, entry for 19 January 1919. Pla, at the ripe old age of 21, complains that he has learnt nothing at university and can only recall two lectures of any value. Like d’Ors, he sees the podium as the obstacle rather than the bridge to learning, a bulwark to impede progress, not protect it. The podium, as its name suggests, is where professors and possible professors get a toehold. I sometimes think of friends and acquaintances who pursued academic life and how they got a foot in the door using a podium. Like everyone, I learnt sooner or later that university was often less about learning than departmental politics, the podium acting as springboard for some careers, a gallows for others. It was no different at the University of Barcelona one hundred years ago. Sometimes I meet an old acquaintance from the professoriat, as Plat calls it, and am amused more than dismayed at how some of them now talk through their podium, as others talk through their hat. They engage in shop, which is a particular dialect of Podium, a language of terms that occasionally approaches poetry. Like Pla, I conclude by asking myself, “is there anything else like it in this life?” I enjoy recalling addresses I heard from the podium at university. Some of the ideas were entirely new and mysterious to me, what was their source? We all have favourite lectures from those times, valuing them for their moment in time, even if now we would completely rewrite them and copy the rewrites into diaries, like d’Ors or Pla, or share online.

Image: ‘The Gray Notebook’ by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan and published by New York Review of Books in 2013; resting on a page of photographs of park bench mosaics in Güell Park (1900-1914) in Barcelona designed by Antoni Gaudí.