Oceanic

 

Oceans suck. Oceans topple. Wild and uncomprehending and stupid and carefree as we are in our youth we do not think about the ocean as we plunge through its waves, line after line of the bruisers, salt in our eyes and foam up our noses, in the summertime of every happiness and little of lastingness. As we drip through the shallows toward another sheer clearness that may rush us through escalating seconds of cruise or dump us in a storm of sand and back current, we never think of the intricate capillaries almost infinite under the skin, the sunshine drying off the sea film from shoulders in a minute, the otherworld of science fiction action only fifty yards further out beneath the blue top. And it, swirly ocean, not a day older or younger. Gentle beings so rough and blithe and independent of the world, who splash into that turbulent form as if it were toyland, who rinse the past out in a trice, we were innocent and lovely and fed. But what might be the moment when we will yearn for gentleness we always had, be found dependent on the world back at the shoreline, where we look now with our goggles on? Knowingly, we are not drawn further out into that bluer depth, are stopped by the excuse of pleasure, by adult words of warning long since noted in electron and muscle, and held firm by that other mass, the great multihued airy fixture, that standout freewheeling bodily entity of safety, that stern containment called land. The years, talkative as per usual, teach us the truisms of a blue planet. Oceans confuse. Oceans ruin. When not a sight of recurrent wonder, their shapes can be some great tedium, like the year at the end of a failed marriage, the movie where the genius director lost the plot, the dormant doldrums that once roused therapy cannot shake off. The swell is building up now to troughs, so what. The day will be as flat as you could hope for, so what. The ripple on that crest could have been a dolphin, so what.   We might for now like to turn away from all that horizon, stop guessing the name of every passing vessel, take refuge in the happily multiplying possibilities of a room. Had we but thought, in a previous century, with the wisdom of foresight, every day we were having a conversation with the blue that, heatedly, belatedly forsooth, has found a way of getting out of hand. Oceans rise. Oceans expand. Gentle beings so attentive and technological, who read of tidal storms and drowning islands on handheld screens, who cannot connect in our highly evolved minds the words melting and icecap, discover for the first time in some time the logic of record temperatures and colossal inundations. Being talked back to takes some time, quite a time, to adjust to, staring at the ground for the words to say. Words that are feeble apologies directed at most of the world’s water, bewildered poetry in postmodern windspray manner, stunned blurts at breaking news, even though today is fine, winds light and variable, a perfect day for yachting or peering into rockpools and any amount of talking in our own tongue.

Spoon (Domestic Ponge)

 

Dangled heavily from a free-standing hook by a fashioned tube arc of shining grey steel, the handsome implement stays ready for use at any time. Hung might be more correct than dangled, placed even more accurate as it never turns idly in position with a visiting breeze but rather remains fixed freely firm in the air due to weight and gravity like the escutcheon above a palace gate. Its elevation with others of its kind, the sombre ladles and grey-day spatulas in a position at arm’s length from the action, is a reminder of its critical role at the given moment when pots boil or saucepans simmer. Then it moves in to play its part in the culinary operation that forever tantalises with the belief in a flavour perfection, a more pleasurable taste outcome. It is a wonder and necessity, an ancient invention that has gone through varying permutations only modernist design, then computer templates, could render with such a level of visual as well as practical originality. Twelve centimetres of stainless steel grip, a cylindrical handhold shining dully above the kitchen fray, then extends another twelve centimetres of tapering handle easy to balance, that then dips and spreads into a gorgeous oval spoon, broad and shallow, decoratively smelted with a crosshatch of 66 small circular slots. Their grid, held to the light, makes diamond shapes that could be a magnified eye of a fly or set of equidistant raindrops on a pond. Their spacing apart allows for liquid to flow through and the scooped contents of the cauldron to remain aloft, the steaming cubes of potato or hot bright pearls of Lebanese couscous that must be separated from the soupy base. Slots, contrarily, being a cause for discussion, as what is a slot. A long narrow hole, that’s true, an elongated depression, an extended aperture, none of which accounts for roundness, or roundness in great numbers. Manufacturers are at odds as to what to call a slotted spoon, some opting for sale purposes for their own synonym: perforated serving spoon, premium wide skimmer, culinary plating spoon, metal mesh sieve ladle, colander scooper, steel spider strainer. The strain shows and there isn’t anyway time as the contents of the bubbling preparation need attending to now. Nipping and scraping of the goodness collecting at the edges, stirring and turning of the Earth’s produce cooking through nicely thank you very much to the optimum, loading and lifting of the same above the plumbline for ocular and olfactory examination, this is the moment of the thingummyjig plucked from its hoity toity highness on the kitchen rack, rummaging delicately with the end product of a recipe known or found, borrowed, enhanced, turned round about, spiced up, or down, in the thick of the place sometimes referred to as too hot to handle.   

Xanadu

 

Inspired to re-read Italo Calvino, I am at present in ‘Invisible Cities’ (1972). It’s a fantasy dialogue between two 13^th-century contemporaries, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which accounts of exotic cities leave one wondering if they existed, or are all in the mind of Italo Calvino. Remarks by a critic on the jacket are a spoiler: “Calvino is describing only one city in this book. Venice, that decaying heap of incomparable splendour…” It is true Marco Polo was a Venetian, that he travelled to Shangdu, and that on page 86 he says, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” But this is too literal an explanation, too final, as if the author’s intentions could be summarised. Each city described by Polo, or in Kublai’s dreams, is one of childlike impressions grounded in adult experience. The cities enjoy an existence that is only spoken about, that may have been like that then, but may not be now. Their precariousness is as valuable a quality as their beauty, or the specific mystery details that Polo finds memorable. Any of them could be a place closer to home for Kublai, because every time Polo describes a city he is saying something about Shangdu, a city that no longer exists except in archaeology and imagination. In our own indwelling, if we turn our mind to it. This is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge did after taking too much opium and reading Samuel Purchas’ 1613 paraphrastic translation of Polo: “In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace…”, writing a poem about Xanadu, the archaic anglicised version of Shangdu in Mongolia, pleasure domes, mazy motions, and all. Calvino was fortunate not to be visited by the Person from Porlock, which means we are lucky enough to read dozens of versions of ‘Kubla Khan’ in his novel, each one different. Later in the story, Kublai says to Polo, “confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!” In other words, he speaks from memory of these many named cities that conjure Venice, a city that has survived, but also Xanadu, one that has not. Because this is the mood of the novel: to relate that which exists, or existed, but may now only exist in words. They are states of grace in which we may imagine our own city past, present, and future. The Melbournes, say, of river mangrove, Victorian sepia, and creambrick expanse. Australian cities in general, hardly imaginable in this medieval tale. Polo’s accounts are elegies of Venice, yet of what Venice may become, Xanadu. Life lived in a metropolis sinking into a lagoon is precarious. And what Xanadu was and became, words of fortunate travellers to foreign parts, translated words transformed by an opiumhead. Polo’s writing continues to raise debate while Kublai wrote very much poetry almost all of which, like his summer capital of Shangdu (or Xanadu), is now lost.