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.

Time

 

Time is moving on, I thought aloud, as we drove up Heidelberg Road in peak hour to where the road bifurcates at the railway bridge in Ivanhoe. Or perhaps time is moving around. Sometimes I don’t understand time at all, said Carol, the driver, timing nicely her shift into the turning lane before arriving behind bumper-to-bumper all the way to Waterdale Road. I work all week and never get any time to work in the garden, she argued, implying I had all the time in the world to do gardening. I work in my sleep, I replied, upping my contribution towards the working week to 24/7, and do I get paid for all that work? Not likely, I reflected, haughtily. Carol, who works while she eats, she said, was of the view that she did much more real work than me and where did all that time go? The concept that time goes somewhere was left in the air as we motored along Upper Heidelberg Road over Eaglemont, the long and winding road that leads to our door. I hummed a famous line before claiming that I had been experimenting with the space-time continuum and now worked over 26 hours per day of Einsteinian time. The green bins are out tonight, said Carol, changing the subject and not for the first time. Perhaps they should be called space-time continuums, I pondered aloud, they look a bit like daleks. Sometimes I just don’t understand time at all, exclaimed Carol, what exactly is it doing, anything? Yes, I said, I agree, our memory tells us about these places and what they were then, but really it’s all one inside. Sometimes we just have to go with the flow because we’re not going to explain time just by talking. Carol turned the car right off Waiora Road where the magnificent vista of the complete Dandenongs veers into view, as it has done for the time of the Dreaming. It’s true though, I said as we coursed curvaceously down Ruthven Street into the Macleod valley, that we have organised time so it controls everything we think and do. This is wrong and a strong argument, I suggested, for prayer, and music, and contemplation. The only level crossing not danandrewsed came into sight as the phone rang a distinctive person’s tone, bringing these thoughts on business time to an abrupt cessation. True, it was not your usual conversation about raking the leaves and why is there so much leaf slush on the paths and who is going to put out the green bin anyway, as if that was not already a foregone conclusion when someone has 26 hours in the day in which to do it all, unpaid. Ringing off, soon Carol had moved on to the subject of bifurcation, one meaning of which is what Heidelberg Road does at Ivanhoe, but a second meaning is the possibility of a person being in two places at once. I thought, I don’t mind where Carol is, as long as she’s behind the wheel of the car when it’s moving and I’m in the passenger seat. It was nightfall as we careened up Torbay Street.     

Nuanced

 

Dawn is the vast convulsion of sight that is slept through oblivious of horizons and ever a space-time ripple effect, vast yet nuanced. Morning is cloud and magpie song and window dribble, piebald and nuanced. Morning is the dream we are fossicking to recall, goldmine of courts and caughts and coarseds and unavoidably nuanced. Morning is milk coffee at the screen displaying emails, new news, random posts, unwanted promotions, and the long read left unread yesternight, hypersensitive and nuanced. Morning is managing the crowd of plans, their tense demands or routine or tender, mindful and nuanced. Midday is announcing already, but largely unnoticed, the heights of colour, bold and yet eternally nuanced. Afternoon is thoroughly Louis MacNeice and nuanced. Afternoon will say a thousand things that must be heard and sorted by the mind into categories, for example whacko, f-a-s-c-i-n-a-t-i-n-g, obvious, delay till next time, gorblimey, yes I suppose so, yeah nah, patience is a virtue my dear, oh almost closing time, the skyline today is normative and yet um nuanced. Evening the cat returns, hungry and visible, his eyes a story from a back fence fairy tale, or academic dissertation hid in the stacks, cogent and nuanced.  Evening through the trees the autumn sunset and rooftops at every imaginable angle to the perpendicular turns cold and threatens rain and sounds of rain their frequency and patterns nuanced. Night is lamplight after dinner where my Renaissance informer in hardback feeds a steady supply of gossip and emotion and geography and theology both doctrinally sound blessedly and linguistically nuanced. Night is coming to terms with information overload, reduced to some essential particulars, that are foregrounded yet annoyingly somehow nuanced. Night is minds of electricity attending their projects with mixed feelings, interests scribbling across the margins, more revealing than the text, more truth-bearing and nuanced. Night is an extra layer and the answer to a question both ephemeral and nuanced. Early morning is fog so utter everything is indefinable and indescribable, leaving imagination to imagine everything in the fog as memory knows it to be, particular and nuanced. Morning is street lights going out and the post coming in, bills, supermarket flyers, but a letter personal and nuanced. Midday is a moment I miss, the background sounds of the world as wondrous and continuous as the tap-tap sing-song call-back foreground sounds of immediate moment, familiar and nuanced.  Afternoon is a chaos of wall lettering, an empty lot for redevelopment, traffic rising gradually again to incessant, the ceaseless city, grandiose, wounded, and nuanced. Evening is another day half done, and moments of peaceful thought about people, themselves and nuanced.