As yet another October comes to an end I'd like to reflect upon dumb good fortune and how it sometimes pays a visit. Some of you will know that Ann and I are in the process of trying to bring her daughter JJ to Australia on a 445 visa. Any kind of visa and any communication at a deep level with government is likely to be fraught and the risks of getting it wrong are not to be taken lightly. Visa documents and processes are complicated and dogged by official language and puzzling omissions and repetitions.

That said, most mistakes are made by the applicants. Ann and I sent JJ's visa application (two lengthy documents and many attachments) to Thailand in March. JJ and her father then presented said documents and a whopping fee to a designated visa collection agency two weeks later in Bangkok. All seemed to go well and nothing more was heard until last week when Ann, curious that there had been no communication from the Australian authorities, asked JJ to double check her email account.

Here is where the fun starts! We were aghast to learn that there was an email, dated May 15, that had requested a police check from yours truly, as the one I had supplied had expired. This is not normally a problem except when one peruses the small print - Please supply the document within 28 days! Panic stations ensued because this deadline had long since passed in June and my reading of the official tea-leaves was clear - no police check, no visa. Moreover, the visa process would continue without the document and would therefore fail.

A flurry of emails later, and following many earnest prayers, we got the reprieve we had not thought possible - an extension. The relief was more than palpable - I cried tears of sheer release, because I thought we were sunk. But good fortune smiled and for that I am grateful.

Whose mistake was this? At the simplest level, it was ours, because we should have been alert to all communications. On another level, one might see a flaw in the wisdom of sending an important official email to a 14 year old school girl and not to either of her parents.

But the best response is always gratitude and we are truly grateful.

trading up-
towers rise like waratahs
impaling the sky

slanting sunlight
still-water warm as breath,
first Spring swim

I have alluded to the poet Li Bai before, who wrote in the 8th Century. He was a part of the great flourishing of verse in the Tang dynasty and his poems reflect his life - he travelled widely, had a fecund imagination and paid an almost shamanistic attention to the natural world. He was a Daoist practitioner. He also wrote lovely, sometimes sad poems about love and longing, of which the following gem, is but one. It is probably my favourite, so lively the images, so palpable the yearning.

Song of Changgan

My hair had hardly covered my forehead.
I was picking flowers, playing by my door,
When you, my lover, on a bamboo horse,
Came trotting in circles and throwing green plums.
We lived near together on a lane in Ch'ang-kan,
Both of us young and happy-hearted.

At fourteen I became your wife,
So bashful that I dared not smile,
And I lowered my head toward a dark corner
And would not turn to your thousand calls;
But at fifteen I straightened my brows and laughed,
Learning that no dust could ever seal our love,
That even unto death I would await you by my post
And would never lose heart in the tower of silent watching.

Then when I was sixteen, you left on a long journey
Through the Gorges of Ch'u-t'ang, of rock and whirling water.
And then came the Fifth-month, more than I could bear,
And I tried to hear the monkeys in your lofty far-off sky.
Your footprints by our door, where I had watched you go,
Were hidden, every one of them, under green moss,
Hidden under moss too deep to sweep away.
And the first autumn wind added fallen leaves.
And now, in the Eighth-month, yellowing butterflies
Hover, two by two, in our west-garden grasses
And, because of all this, my heart is breaking
And I fear for my bright cheeks, lest they fade.

Oh, at last, when you return through the three Pa districts,
Send me a message home ahead!
And I will come and meet you and will never mind the distance,
All the way to Chang-feng Sha.

My copy of Man and his Symbols by Carl Jung (et al) arrived in the post a day ago. It is a slightly tatty, second-hand tome that wound its way from someone in the UK to my door. Jung is generally regarded as difficult to read because of his mysticism, but this volume is straight- forward enough and I have not had to reread anything thus far, a positive sign of lucid writing if ever there was one.

I am really interested in Jung's ideas on the structure of the mind, which he posits consists of the conscious mind, the personal subconscious and the collective subconscious. The latter is the most fascinating; the idea of a kind of race memory (symbols passed on through heredity as a result of our long evolutionary journey) is something I have always wondered at. But how to prove these elegant, deep theories? I am aware of the long years of experience Jung had both as a clinician and theorist, but reading through the book one is struck by the thought, where is the evidence? That doesn't, however subtract from the quality of the ideas expressed, at least, not in my estimation. For most therapists, I suppose the lure of the shorter-term REBT or CBT and their in-the-now approaches is preferable. The Jungian therapist might take years, but it would be quite a ride for all concerned.

I will more to say about Man and his Symbols as I get deeper in, perhaps something even worthwhile.

Some wit from a local political group posted this on Facebook today and I think it is worthy of republishing here. It's an apt segue from my last post.

Today's Wentworth by-election in the east of Sydney would ordinarily be a shoe-in for the Liberal Party. This is as blue-ribbon as it gets, with a whopping 18.9% swing required for it to change hands. Wentworth was, until very recently, the electorate of the former Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull, whose recent knifing precipitated this moment.

Yet despite having a good candidate, the Government is in trouble and may lose to an independent. The voting public are volatile and apparently angry, a bad weather indicator for incumbents. This is consistent with the past ten years of voting in which governments have been thrown out and minor parties have been increasingly indulged, often creating instability.

Why are folks angry? Well, some politicians have set a poor standard through their woeful conduct. Leadership spills, the overthrow of Prime Ministers and the simmering pot of Machiavellian plotting have taken a toll too. People are sick of the games. Not unreasonably, they want governments to govern.

Then there is the perceived pace of change - population growth, immigration, the global economy - all can excite fear in the imagination. The hyper-information age and the rise of disinformation are flames to this tinder. Every dog has its day; likewise, any Joe with a keyboard is a purveyor of truth, or truths, since all truths are valid, aren't they?

(The lie of the land back in 2016. Electoral returns in Wentworth. Things will not be the same tonight.)

Another birthday turned my thoughts yet again to poetry. As I rode the train home from Sydney, Yeat's Sailing To Byzantium came to mind. It is not because I feel like "a paltry thing/a tattered coat upon a stick", which is bleak enough, but rather, I have a sense of being a little out-of-step with the younger generation. Or perhaps more than that or not just them. Much as I may try to stay current (and I do), I still perceive a sense of drift, as if something at a core level has changed.

Of course, that could just be my too-reflective self which can way go way too deep at times. Any birthday ending in a zero is likely to provoke "abstruser musings" and recollections of where one is located on the great lifeline. Alas, that might also induce a little melancholy. Truthfully, I am happy to have come this far and done as much as I have and I'd like to think there is much more to be done still. Meanwhile, the opening stanza from Sailing To Byzantium, the well-spring of these thoughts.

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

A few posts ago I noted that there was no time like the present to be alive, if for no other reason than we have modern medicine and dentistry. There are lots of reasons really (life expectancy, poverty reduction etc.), but there are also huge downsides, like nuclear weapons and global warming.

Strangely enough, a Quora topic on this subject popped up on my email a day ago and it got me thinking again. Is all the stress and anxiety of the modern world worth our living in modern times, as one contributor argued, or is too high a price to pay? Is there another time and place that would be acceptable?

It may be that my current immersion in medieval studies is twisting my perspective, but the life of a monastic in the late middle ages might have its appeal. The lot of a monk in a large Benedictine House would not have been unpleasant, especially when compared to the ninety-percent who were toiling peasants. Food was grown and prepared onsite or nearby, the beds were warm and the place was safe. Moreover, as a member of the praying class, a monk was concerned with the spiritual welfare of himself and the wider community. Sure, there were many designated prayer and service times, including one at 2am, but that was part of the deal. You renounced the world to live a life of contemplation and prayer.

Even better, if one had the chance to be a scribe, then the opportunity to read some of the works of the ancient world would become a possibility, albeit at the rate of one slow page at a time. You might ask how sitting at a table painstakingly copying books by hand, being restricted to the monastery precincts, having nothing other besides prayer and contemplation, could possibly hold the attention or interest of someone born today?

My answer is simply this - there would be no problem at all. If you are going to live in another time then you don't take your modern self with you, you are born into the medieval world view, entirely. Gone is the Big Bang; hello, the Earth at the centre of the universe! Too big a sacrifice? How could you miss what you don't know about nor could even contemplate? The cocoon of religious certainty, the surety of where you had come from and where you were going, the passing rhythm of the seasons, might surpass the frenetic change and uncertainty of the contemporary world.

Yes, sitting at a desk in the scriptorium, copying a text by Aristotle, might be a pleasant enough occupation in another time and another life. Not everyone's cup of tea, I dare say, but even now, I hear the gentle patter of rain in the courtyard and the exquisite sounds of chanting from the church.

Ah, life before The Great Vowel Shift!

Nostalgia is a part of the present. I can't speak for the Romans or the Medievals but I am sure that a yearning for something lost has always been a part of the human condition. Such yearning necessarily involves a kind of self-deception, the beloved thing or time being screened through filters of memory, recalled over and over again. Apart from the simple errors of recall that we all make, confirmation bias ensures that the perception of a rosy past becomes even rosier, often at the expense of what really happened or how it really was.

There is a lot of this about in Australia at the moment. My guess is that whenever change reaches a certain velocity, or is perceived to, then folks reach for the good old days. Memes are generated and much hand-wringing commentary follows, the villainous present contrasting darkly with the whitewashed past. Consider -



Yes, I do remember this toaster, but with considerable disdain. The advent of the automatic toaster, though, not without its problems, rarely burns my fingers or the toast. I'm guessing that the manual toaster, like the one pictured, would still be sold and used if in fact anyone wanted to use one.

Another hot topic, particularly with baby boomers, is the one that bemoans how everyone (though especially young people) are lost in their mobile phones, even when travelling together on say a bus or a train. Surely, back when we were younger, folks talked to each other and generally made the travelling experience a convivial communal one. Alas,



The problem with recalling the halcyon past is that it makes our present worse than it really is. In recalling camping trips, corner stores, the childhood freedom to roam, the way a milkshake tasted (even the dented silver container!), the sound an LP record made, we forget the 1001 inconveniences, boredoms and plain unpleasant facts about the very same past. It makes our present less tenable if we are stuck in a groove of complaint. Readers of this blog will know that I am a great fan of many aspects of the past. It is just that I wouldn't want to live at any time in the past other than the present.

It's a balancing act really - appreciating what you have now against what might have been loved but has changed, often for good. There is perhaps one exception, and that is love that is lost. That is something that must be lived with every day.

"Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me"

This, the opening couplet from Edward Thomas's Rain are apt enough today in the Blue Mountains. I am not alone - Tom is tapping at his keyboard and shouting inane remarks into his headphones - but the rain is now falling steadily and a heavy grey cloud looms over everything. Magpies in the back yard are soaked through but still, in spite of what looks a forlorn sogginess, are vigilant for whatever tiny insect moves on the lawn. It doesn't strike me as a good day to be a bee or a fly or something even smaller, but the magpie thinks otherwise. Yesterday the Japanese Maple and Wonga Wonga vine were carpeted in a constant hum of bee song, but today a great and sensible retreat is in full swing.

I am sorry for the workman next door who has come to replace part of a fence. Like the magpies, he is sodden but also industriously digging into the now soft earth. Some people have no choice how they make their money, come rain or shine they have to labour. I think we forget how difficult and physical most work used to be, cosseted as we are in offices and climate-controlled cars. Something tactile and direct has been lost.

The Thomas poem I began with does not get any brighter. The poet contemplates his comrades and friends on the battlefields of France in WW1,

"But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain"

and so the poem becomes a lament for might be or is yet to come. Thomas himself was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917, so there is an element of the prophetic at work, at least for those who are left behind.

One thing usually leads to another in life, a chance meeting to a reunion, a podcast to a new book. Joining choirs had a similar effect - meeting new girlfriends, travelling and working overseas, recording music with a band. Robert Frost surely had it nailed in The Road Less Travelled, for way really does indeed lead onto way and often as not, there is no going back. It best not to have regrets.

So it was that a podcast on automata, an unusual subject, lead me to a short story called The Sandman, by E.T.A Hoffman, a German writer of the early 19th Century. In Scandanavian folklore, The Sandman was said to be character who sprinkled sand or dust into children's eyes to help them sleep and dream. But in this short story, the central character Nathaniel, conflates the mythical Sandman with an acquaintance of his father's from his own childhood, Coppelius. It is hard to be sure, because these are childhood recollections, but Coppelius is a lawyer who is also a practising alchemist and who comes nightly to the family home to work with Nathaniel's father on alchemy. The somewhat traumatic memories of these events and the subsequent accidental death of his father centrally inform Nathaniel's febrile imagination. We cannot be certain of the truth of what Nathaniel narrates as he appears to view the world through the prism of post-traumatic shock.

What has this got to do with automata, I hear you ask? Well, later, as a young man, Nathaniel leaves home to study at university and there falls madly in love with the daughter of one of his professors. But unbeknown to him, she(Olimpia) is an automaton. That is as much of the plot as I am going to reveal, but the story careers to a dramatic climax.

Such a story seems remarkably modern. Automata have been around for centuries and have been used to amuse and dazzle or even shock people. Their creators are clever in hiding the mechanisms that allow the object to appear as lifelike, as alive, something which can be achieved through machinery (as in clocks) or hydraulics or even direct human manipulation. If we accept that robots are just a more sophisticated kind of automata and that AI is merely adding a layer of 'thinking' to functionality and programming, then our present age is well and truly engaged with automata. Smart phones, companion robots and augmented reality are but a few of the modern takes on old practices, though their collective effect is likely to be far more profound.

There is much outrage at the present about the plan to project horse race advertising on the sails of the Opera House in Sydney. I agree that such proposals are crass and play into the narrative that everything has its price, no matter what the cultural significance of the artifact might be. Horse racing is very much a sport for gamblers so this only reinforces the suspicion that many have - name your price and it's yours.

How I wish such outrage was channelled at things that really matter! What about nuclear weapons and the threat of extinction? How about the generally anodyne responses to global warming or the plight of millions of war-displaced people around the globe? There are many big issues to get genuinely worked up about that exceed by factors of hundreds the matter of whether something gets projected on the Opera House. I don't like the fact that commodification is embedded in modern life, you know that I have bemoaned it in posts here and elsewhere, but getting a true perspective of what really counts is muddied by taking a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito. By all means protest, write letters and wade into forums, but bear in mind the relative importance of the offence in the grand scheme of things.

Surely, not over the top in contemporary Australia?

A little sunshine this morning has been an elixir for the soul. We have had a few days of cloudy, drizzly weather, with washing piling up and little opportunity to work in the garden. That's nothing to complain about, of course, because we desperately need rain and lots of it. So I hope it begins again soon, never mind the first world inconvenience. A greater good is served.

Wang Fan Chih (Mr Fang, Buddhist layman) lived during a period of turmoil during the late Tang in the 9th Century. Like many before and after, the Tang lost the "Mandate of Heaven", as insurrections, natural disasters and court intrigues took a toll. As a result Wang may come across as a little cruel or even cynical, but writers are creatures of their times. He seems to have been keen to prove the Noble Truth that "life is suffering" and in doing so, sounds a little like the original angry man. Or men, since he is probably representative of a group of writers at that time.

XIX

Life, death, like falling stars,
can flash so fast, or else come
floating, slow and silent, down.
First comers, dead ten thousand years,
in a finishing flash of sparks.
Next those dead just a thousand years, the Ma
and the bones they thought were stones are just
dirt, now.
And coming on, this flesh of mine, flown on ahead
of me
a hundred years and in the tomb, already

Some of you will know that I am a bit of a Sinophile, especially concerning Chinese history and culture. These are such vast subjects that mastery is probably impossible and most folks prefer to specialise in one era or another, or an aspect of this or that. I love going deep but am also a sucker for the survey, where the grand vistas emerge from lofty peaks. Sure, I forget a lot and often enough everything, but I thrive on context nonetheless.

I was very fortunate recently to source and download the collected poems of Hanshan (Cold Mountain), a legendary figure who is commonly associated with verse in the Taoist or Chan (Zen) Buddhist tradition. He is thought to have written during the Tang Dynasty but biographical detail is sketchy and frankly unreliable, as Hanshan may not have existed at all. Chances are that he is representative of a type of hermitic poet writing at the time. He is often depicted alongside Shide and Fenggan, two other monks with legendary attributes. Another source argues that Hanshan is real enough but was a gentleman farmer who, mired in poverty, headed for Tiantai Mountain and became a monk. Who knows?

Hanshan's verse had a directness and colloquial quality that contrasted with the more sophisticated urban poetry of many Tang poets.

'Mister Wang the Graduate
laughs at my poor prosody.
I don't know a wasp's waist
much less a crane's knee.
I can't keep my flat tones straight,
all my words come helter-skelter.
I laugh at the poems he writes-
a blind man's songs about the sun!'

So there, he writes. I can't write according to your rigid structures but my eyes are wide open to the world around me.

'I reached Cold Mountain and all cares stopped
no idle thoughts remained in my head
nothing to do I write poems on rocks
and trust the current like an unmoored boat'

slow snaking train-
valleys rise with spring mist,
such ruminations


old thoughts arise
enter the mind like ghosts,
waxing or waning moon?

I have been really enjoying The Great Courses, Great Minds of the Medieval World. A commonly held view today equates the medieval world with a backward, Church-dominated, gloomy period in which warts were a common facial accessory and nobody travelled further than the end of a muddy road in their own village, and then only to the dung heap. According to this view, people lived short, nasty lives, had awful diets, suffered plagues and couldn't read or write. What a joy!

Some of that is true but it's is only part of the story. Often those who come after a reign or period get to write the history and they are frequently none too upbeat about what has come before. The Renaissance gets all the good press, touted as a dynamic era of invention and inquiry, one in which the arts flourished under wealthy patrons, in which the individual emerged from the group, cities and architecture thrived, in short, a time when modern man began to emerge from the shadows, the slough of despond. Some of this is true too, though the Renaissance steals a portion of its clothing from the medieval world.

It is a long time from the 5th to the 15th century and the course locates Augustine and William Caxton at either end of this vast span of years. In between are some of the greatest minds that might be encountered in any period. I wont spend time here listing them - it is more fruitful to find out for yourself - for my point here is something altogether different.

It is a special kind of arrogance to believe that your own time is superior to all that have gone before. Sure, based on any number of metrics, the modern world is doing pretty well, if life expectancy, living conditions and opportunity are anything to go by. There are many others you can use. I certainly don't want to consult a medieval physician nor have a tooth pulled by a blacksmith or a barber. But we cannot know for sure that we are any happier, for people then had strong faith, worked according to the rhythms of the days and the seasons and had deeper community ties. You cannot diminish the tightly held world view of our ancestors, one which worked for them so well, without understanding their lives in the context of that time. Or without considering what has been lost.

In increasing life expectancy, we deal with degenerative illness; in becoming members of a modern capitalist economy, we get stress, anxiety, alcoholism and drug dependency. The increased speed of our lives has its unhappy downside. Strangely, more of the same is seen as a remedy to the very ills that are produced.

But now folks, something to cheer the soul! We may not believe in hell anymore but this rendering of Dante's Inferno by Bartolomeo Di Fruosino ties two souls together (one medieval and the other renaissance) for all time.