We took JJ down to Darling Harbour this afternoon to join her friends on a harbour cruise and fireworks spectacular. She is not likely to forget it. Back home, the house was like an oven and even now, it feels like someone is smelting iron just around the corner.

I will retire before midnight, not counting its passing as of any consequence. But the entertainment and explosions are a nice thing for the kids and the tourists. They speak volumes, also, about the Emerald City.

Happy New Year! May the next decade auger better fortunes for life on Earth.

The months long street protests in Hong Kong, shocking as they are to outsiders, might well provide a kind of beacon to those young people who are terrified about climate change. For some time now there have been largely peaceful protests in Australia, with a few outlying acts of civil disobedience. But thus far they have failed to sway the opinion of the Federal Government, whose mantra of growth and fiscal rectitude remain its only dismal rejoinder. That, and the irrelevant notion that we are only minor emitters of carbon, comprise the piss-poor response from this supine generation of politicians. It is a wonder that younger generations have been so peaceful in their protests.

But that may change. If you feel your very life is threatened by the inaction of your elders, nay, that they are complicit in over-riding both the science and the legitimate fears of millions, then I think that there is every possibility that the nature of protest will change. Young people are equipped with the knowledge and skills that could make a campaign of industrial and economic sabotage plausible and potentially devastating. I do not advocate it - my methods are peaceful - but I understand that groundswell of feeling that might unleash it.

Listen up in Canberra, and elsewhere too!

This time, thirty years ago, a group of teachers and students from Castle Hill HS had already embarked on a six week tour of the UK and Europe. They were a performing arts group comprising senior students and staff, who had been working for almost two years at both fundraising for the trip and developing and rehearsing material to perform. It was a fairly unique undertaking in scope and daring but it was very successful. The performances (a mixture of performance art, mime, short sketches and story-telling) were adaptable for a range of age groups - the same show could be tweaked and performed in the same space before an adult, high school or primary school audience - and also left room for improvisation if needed.

I raise these ancient facts because the other day I stumbled upon my diary from the trip, which set me to thinking. Where were all the students now? I'll wager that most of them went on to successful lives, these six weeks having given them a chance to grow from children into young adults. I wondered too what had become of the others who were so important on this trip. I had lost touch with my two colleagues (both remarkable educators in their own distinct way) when I moved schools at the end of 1991. That is just what happens. My thoughts also flew to another gentleman who was significant during this time, the coach driver, Barry.

Barry had been flown in from the UK when our original driver was found to be unfit to continue. I am pretty sure that he gave up his Christmas to take command of the coach and steer us from Switzerland to Austria to Germany to The Netherlands. And then, around the UK. In the course of doing so, he became a companion. We had dinner and drinks together, shared a room on one occasion and talked often. I tended to sit at the very front of the bus in that seat that is adjacent the driver, the one that gives a spectacular view out the large front windscreen. So, we came to be the front-end boys, so to speak. I was sad when his duties came to an end and I think he was too.

But, whilst searching FB yesterday, I found the same Barry, alive and well in Stoke-on-Trent. I sent a message and I hope that this might be a happy reunion for us, after thirty years. Who knows?

Barry at the helm



My younger self at the Firth of Forth Bridge.

I was disappointed to learn the other day that my step-daughter JJ was subjected to a racist rant. She was travelling home by train from the city on Christmas Eve with a friend and the two were chatting quietly in Thai. I know that they would have been speaking quietly because this is her default setting and her friend from school is equally shy. Apparently a man in hi-res(what else?) took umbrage and told them to speak only in English. He added that this was doubly important because it was Christmas Eve.

So the remark was both racist and stupid, two conditions that are often quite comfortable with each other. It is a shame that I was not present because I would have taken the matter up vigorously, and to his cost.

Being a foreigner in another country is difficult enough. The times I experienced racism in Japan (not often, but now and then) were humiliating and bewildering in equal measure. We should look beyond our skin colour or nationality - they are accidents of birth. Alas, it seems that no measure of education can inure a person against these kinds of lapses. Fear of The Other is still strong and may grow stronger given the mileage that populists get from invoking such fears.

But, meanwhile, let us all appeal to our better natures.


the silence
between his hockey stories...
a banana
thrown on the ice
to trip a black player

Chenou Lui

Like a great many yuletide traditions, Boxing Day was invented by the Victorians. It has nothing whatsoever to do with pugilism, but rather, as a day on which servants took home boxed presents from their masters to give to their family. It was a charitable gesture - the rich would give presents to the poor at Christmas, or, at least, the day after, which they had off. This probably emerged from a sense of duty, both Christian and civic, attitudes which informed so much of this period.

Boxing Day today has lost the meaning but retained the name. It might be better to call it Bargain Day, since it has become yet another excuse to go shopping and buy more things. In fact, it is the biggest retail day of the year. You know where I am going with this, so I will say no more.

Outside of the Christian Churches, very little remains of the actual Christmas celebration. Yes, there are still carol singing events, concerts with Christmas themes and TV programs that touch upon the original intent, but for the most part, this is forgotten. It is simply a time for retailers to tempt you to open your wallets or rack up debt on credit cards or worse (such as payday lending), and spend. Then spend some more, no matter what. More recently, the festival has been invaded by foodies and their sybarite friends.

On Monday night at midnight at a large shopping mall in Sydney, a dozen or so people were crushed and five ended up in hospital after balloons filled with gift cards were released from the ceiling. The intention, of course, was to promote the shopping season with a fun give-away. But it ended, sadly, in a crushing melee of shoppers desperate to get their hands on a prize.

I think this sums up what Christmas has become, and why the Churches should try to reschedule the whole event to another time of the year. Let the pagans have their traditional winter festival back, allow that to become a handmaiden to consumerism, then quietly go back to basics.

So on Christmas Eve, I leave you with this poem by another of my favourite poets, Thomas Hardy.

Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth!

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

the toad fire squats -
patient on haunches for wind and heat,
bloodying the moon

Black gum-leaves fell from the sky yesterday. They were whole, still veined and intact with those characteristic galls on the surface, but entirely scorched. They must have been subject to an incinerating heat momentarily before being rapidly ejected by an huge updraft high above the fire-ground, than carried by the prevailing westerlies into towns dozens of kilometres away. I haven't seen the likes of them before - ashes, embers and dust, sure - but never whole leaves. It speaks to the intensity of the fires and the weather that we have such a dismal rain, so wholly unwelcome.

They are spooky too, coming unbidden, as they do, from scenes of chaos and destruction. They drop like omens of the calamity we are bringing on ourselves. Of all the threats that might bring homo sapiens undone, and these vary from war to famine to disease, or cosmic interventions like asteroids and gamma ray bursts, it is human rapacity and short-sightedness that may ultimately do us in. I hope not, but how much hoping can a man have? That well is almost dry.

Tomorrow has been gazetted as a catastrophic day for fire in NSW. As noted in my last post, we are surrounded by gigantic blazes on at least two sides, both of which have grown since my last mapping of them. A catastrophe is a very serious matter, at the higher end of that hill named disaster, so for that reason I would quibble over the use of the word. It suggests not only that something very bad can happen but also that it is imminent. People are panicked when they should be merely concerned and alert to any potential danger. I think the designation extreme is quite sufficient, but then, who am I to argue.

Ann wants to go to the temple at Annandale tomorrow and I have an extra shift announcing a program at 2RPH in the afternoon. So we will be heading out early (if the trains are running) and will hopefully get back in the evening to a house still standing and in good order, presumably. Fires, in hot and windy conditions, often create their own weather and so, can be unpredictable. The firies are exhausted from weeks of battling multiple conflagrations that seem to have no end, under circumstances that are exceedingly difficult. We owe them a gratitude that goes beyond our ability to express.

Smoke is hanging over the Blue Mountains like a foul mist, insinuating its way into every cranny. Even though all our windows were shut, I awoke this morning to the sharp hint of smoke in the air. Looking outside, it was difficult to make out the roadway and beyond, our neighbour's house appeared to be floating on a thin cloud.

It is no news, of course, that we are ringed by fires at many points of the compass. To the north, a massive fire at Gosper's Mountain squats like a giant toad just north of the Bell's Line of Road. To the south, a huge conflagration at Green Wattle Creek threatens havoc. Given the right conditions of heat and wind, both of these fires could go rogue through the vulnerable ridge-line of townships that comprise the bulk of the Blue Mountains population.

There is no getting away from it. When you live in a national park, then the risks and the benefits are symbiotic.

Anyway, X marks our approximate location here in Hazelbrook. For better or worse, here we go.

Books have a way about them that tell stories that other media like kindles and tablets do not. Apart from their contents, which can be replicated, a book has a personal history that is apparent in its construction and use - how and when it was read, where it was kept, who owned it and where it has been since. School texts are different but essentially still tell that same story, albeit under different conditions. When I was teaching, books in our faculty typically had a school stamp inside the front cover with a list of the names of students who had used the book. The list usually grew longer as the book grew tattier and more prone to graffiti and other misuses.

Yesterday I received a second hand copy of Larkin's The Less Deceived from the UK. My original copy had gone walkabout and rather than buy a new one, I went for pre-loved, as they say in the motor trade. The book was in good condition, about 25 years old and had a tell-tale plastic laminate cover that is often a clue to where it has come from. Inside the front cover was, yes, a school stamp and a single name in the entry section. I am not going to reveal the name of the school or the student, which would be unfair without consent, except to say that the school is an independent school in Surry (a large pile in beautiful grounds) and the student is now a well-known London socialite.

I found this out in a few minutes thanks to Mr Google and toyed with the idea of sending the former student a message on Facebook (she has at least two separate pages). Then I thought the better of it, for what would a wealthy London gal(and former reality TV star) want with such information? She probably thought Larkin was an old fuddy-duddy. Then again, after a quarter of a century of adult life, a messy divorce and children, well maybe she would like to have another read. I don't know and I am not going to find out.

Bushfire

Shirtless he came gently down
To where the furthest boundary
Met the fire-ground, then crouched
To hold the still warm, floating
Knuckle-dry earth,
And poke the entrails
Of a bike.
There he found
The ghost-shadow of a tyre,
And shards of fencing
Laid like funeral bones
In smashed patterns
About an endless pyre.
The air, a fluffy screen of ash,
Seemed like incense to the
The puncturing screams ,
A rising sense that something lived
Still in the shattered space,
Something between
A life and a death.

It came on fast they said,
Roared like hell’s own train unfurled,
No time for thought, or breath
Just ignition and the foot flat down,
The giant heat and race to
Be somewhere unburning.
So on returning, there was a
Kind of second death, an
Untrod alien land, seeming,
Making unbelief much easier
Than believing.

I know quite a few smart people, even some who come close to being brilliant. But I have to say, for a mixture of practical and theoretical knowledge, it is hard to find better than my skin doctor. This is the fellow that I go to twice annually for a skin cancer check, the same who has wielded a canister of liquid nitrogen above my quivering skin, on occasions. He is a good doctor and I have asked him many specialised medical questions and seriously, he seems to know everything. He is a polymath and also, I found out only today, a poet too.

In fact we spent most of the consultation discussing poetry and he produced a volume of verse, which he kindly presented to me. How many doctors do you know who whip out their Collected Verse after a physical examination? I know of no other. He claims as an influence, Charles Bukowski, a German/American poet and novelist but I suspect the voice in his work is entirely his own.

Here is a short one.

Architect

Let me survey
Your every boundary
Line nook and cranny

Lets compare plots

These crazy properties
Of our love

Thinking over what I wrote about the late Clive James this morning, I began searching for a recent edition of his collected poems. He has written a lot of stuff ( including an original translation of Dante's 'The Inferno'!) and as I waded through one impressive tome after another, I came across Somewhere Becoming Rain, a volume of his writings about Philip Larkin. Readers of this blog (surely none -ed.) will know that Larkin is my favourite poet, someone I return to over and over again, so I bought the book online and look forward muchly to its arrival.

You know how 'way leads onto way', at least for me, so soon after these musings my mind was racing back to Yorkshire in 1990. I had just arrived in the delightful medieval town of York with a busload of Australian students (long story!) and was free to roam its precincts for a few hours. Having come into the UK via Hull, I was twitching to get my hands on one book, 'The Collected Poems' of Philip Larkin. I say twitching because Larkin had been a university librarian in Hull and my requests for a 'small diversion' via said campus were most rudely denied.

Entering a bookshop on or near The Shambles, I rushed to the poetry section and found a couple of volumes of 'The Collected Poems' sitting neatly on the shelves. It was an expensive outlay but I bought a copy on the spot, then decamped to York Minster, where I read "Church Going" in one of the crypts of that colossal pile. Eccentric, geeky? - you decide!

Larkin has had some bad press in recent decades, mainly because he liked Mrs Thatcher and was found with a box of old porn magazines under his bed. Somehow this makes him less than a great poet in certain quarters. The same feeble analysis has been brought to bear on any writer, artist or actor who has dared to transgress some ludicrous arbitrary standard set up by gate-keeping po-mo dullards. I would rather have my soul sucked from my living body by a dementor than endure an hour of their prattlings on some forlorn campus.

But I digress. James on Larkin sounds to me like a delicious and irresistible attraction and I hope the book wings its way here soon. Meanwhile, consider this wonderful poem by PL, composed in the early 1950's. It is full of the kind of subdued wonder, yearning and regret that Larkin makes his own, so often.

Maiden Name

Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it, scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two,
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since your past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laiden.

The passing of Clive James, after a long fight with leukemia, leaves the world short of yet one more erudite, witty and very smart human being. James was a wordsmith par excellence, as handy with an essay as a poem, a memoir as a monologue. Despite emigrating to the UK at age 21, he never appeared to lose his accent or his irreverence, though he might have done just as well without them. He was a member of that post-war wave of cultural exports for whom Australia (at that time) was too small and too parochial to blossom in. Much has changed here though few of them ever returned.

I found a poem this morning that typifies James capacity to write well-formed verse, but which takes as its subject something quite whimsical. And rather characteristically, it is not a little subversive in outlook.

Diamond Pens of the Bus Vandals

Where do bus vandals get their diamond pens
That fill each upstairs window with a cloud
Of shuffled etchings? Patience does them proud.
Think of Spinoza when he ground a lens.

A fog in London used to be outside
The bus, which had to crawl until it cleared.
Now it’s as if the world had disappeared
In shining smoke however far you ride.

You could call this a breakthrough, of a sort.
These storms of brilliance, light as the new dark,
Disturb and question like a pickled shark:
Conceptual art free from the bonds of thought,

Raw talent rampant. New York subway cars
Once left poor Jackson Pollock looking tame.
Some of the doodlers sprayed their way to fame:
A dazzled Norman Mailer called them stars.

And wasn’t Michelangelo, deep down,
Compelled to sling paint by an empty space,
Some ceiling he could thoroughly deface?
The same for Raphael. When those boys hit town

Few of its walls were safe. One cave in France
Has borne for almost forty thousand years
Pictures of bison and small men with spears --
Blank surfaces have never stood a chance

​Against the human impulse to express
The self. All those initials on the glass
Remind you, as you clutch your Freedom Pass,
It’s a long journey from the wilderness.

2006.

Vale Clive James

When you think of a Victorian Christmas some common images come to mind. It is impossible not to think about Dicken's A Christmas Carol on the one hand, with it's morality tale of greed and redemption. On the other hand, it is also easy to picture the origins of many traditions that are still with us, such as the hot Christmas dinner, the games, the carols, the decorations and Christmas cards.

It is the latter that took my interest, since this year I wanted to find some good quality, older-style Christmas cards, perhaps to send. Soon enough in my search, up popped a lot of Victoriana, much of which had surprising themes. In fact quite a lot of what I saw was bizarre and would likely never be sent these days, except as a joke. I began wondering who these Victorians really were, if not the stodgy moralists that many claimed them to be.

Here are a few examples.



Dead or drunken robins appear as somewhat maudlin subject matter. "May yours be a joyful Christmas" beneath the image of a expired bird strikes me as the kind of card you might send an enemy or a mother-in-law, at the very least. 'Oh yes,do have a jolly Christmas,' it whispers in menacing tones, 'Perhaps it will be your last!' Of course the dead robin might be a reference to Cock Robin, in which case a nefarious sparrow should be lurking, having done the deed with a bow and arrow.

And speaking of lurkers, the cat in the second card awaits the the moment when all three birds are pie-eyed. Talk about spiking the punch with a view to a kill! What a cheery scene!

Birds also feature in this apparent pointer to torch-bearing Brownshirts parading in formation. It is hard to see how 'jollity' might ensue after removing this card from its envelope - more likely, a lingering apprehension.



The 'hearty welcome' in the following seems like a prelude to the unspoken 'but really I hate you'. Who might have sent this one? Perhaps a psychopath.



The intentions of the sender are fairly clear for all to see in the next card, never mind the 'Merry Christmas' beneath the ghastly image of murder and theft. Best to send this one anonymously!



Unfortunately, reprints of these excellent seasonal cards do not appear to be in the offing. I will have to look elsewhere if I want to surprise my friends and family!

It was Hamlet who noted that the times were out of joint. He had good reason to say so. His father had been murdered by his uncle who had then taken his mother to wife. The ghost of his dead father was abroad and making a commotion and he, Hamlet, was expected to do something about it.

Fast forward to the present day and the times seem to be out of joint, again. The certainties that upheld the order of things in the Cold War are gone, leaving us only with a fragmented international polity. Populism is resurgent in many countries and there are populist leaders whose self interest involves undermining the status quo and filling the void with nationalist hot air. Sounds a little bit like the 1930's, don't you think?

Worse still is the untethering of public discourse from evidence-based truths, the ascent of false news and alternate facts and a distressing disregard for the work of scientists. I am tired of presenting arguments to folks who believe outrageous things and whose minds are closed shut by whatever rabbit-hole they have burrowed into.

Yes, deep thinking can be tiresome and challenging. My wife laments that I do too much of it. But truly, I wish more people would take it up.

calm, the lady-beetle pool,
gums have strong arms, it seems-
the sinking moon rising

I read on CNN yesterday that the flat-earth theory (surely bollocks -ed.) is spreading around the world, mainly through social media. At first I took these folks being out to take the piss, as they say. To be contrarian for its own sake, the set the cat amongst the pigeons, this can bring joy to some. They get a rise out of seeing the incredulity that their arguments evoke.

But no, they are deadly serious and have a long list of arguments to bolster their woeful cause. These are similar to the kinds of arguments used by the Moon-landing hoax people (it will come as no surprise that these groups have overlapping membership) and rely heavily upon misrepresentation, feeble reasoning and a healthy dose of conspiracy theorism. There is no point in having a discussion, even at a primary school level, with them. Their minds are closed, they have the truth.

If ever we live in wayward times, this is one of the proofs.

A hot and windy day. A day so dry you want to reach for water every hour. Ice cubes melt hastily as if their constitutions are are insult to the elements. Yes, it's definitely the weather that one might call bushfire weather, though I don't want to say it too loudly. Touching wood, I note the latest notification alert popping up on my phone. Nothing close, nothing pressing, yet.

The State of NSW is beset by blazes as any number of maps will demonstrate. The Blue Mountains is a favourite spot for fire, its towns snaking along ridge-lines and spilling into valleys, making it almost uniquely vulnerable. There is no getting away from backyards that sit square into bushland, whole streets set up like nine pins. Its a fact of life, though when push comes to shove, it seems more like a truth buried deep at the back of the mind, only retrieved when days like this come along.

Yes, things could get ugly, fast. A change of wind is due this evening which will cool the air, though maybe at the expense of containing fires. As I write a fire truck roars down the street. Wither?

"No, you cannot come here
this is no time for a tryst,
Ash is falling from the sky
and birds don't sing
I have packed my wedding dress
and my mother's candle sticks

Don't you watch the news?
The State's on fire,
The highway's cut every second day.
We're sitting here
Writing wills and lists
and memoirs that might be our last."

from Bushfire, by Kate Llewellyn


Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

I should have further added, since it is of enduring importance, that today is Armistice Day. That dreadful conflict in Europe was a precursor to the next awful conflict in Europe, the latter being even more world-wide. That war led in turn to the post-war outcomes that ushered in the Cold War. And on it goes.

The Great War was perhaps the worst of all though, fought largely in trenches, conditions that destroyed the souls of men and brutalised the world thereafter. By any standard, it was incomprehensible.



Lest We Forget.

You would have to have been hiding in a log, or maybe practising asceticism, to have not heard or seen that we are well and truly in bushfire season. The drought, warmer than average temperatures and strong winds have combined to make November one of the worst opening periods in a long while, with potentially greater hazard ahead.

You never know really just when or where or even how a fire might suddenly threaten you - they can appear out of no-where and travel at great speed. They create their own micro-climate as they go, making predictions often impossible.

Tomorrow is gazetted as a catastrophic alert for fire in Sydney, the Hunter and the Central Tablelands. A catastrophe exceeds an extreme episode, apparently, and creates circumstances in which property and life are at a great risk. Hazelbrook and the Blue Mountains are within this triangle of death and neighbouring Woodford had a foretaste of what might soon come only a few days ago.

There is no point in dwelling on these matters. Fire is a part of the Australian landscape and has been so for thousands of years. Living in this national park is a risk, as it is a joy. NSW has already taken a battering as the following photo from a mid-north coast town of Harrington shows. Dante, had he seen it, might have written such a ghastly image into his great work, The Divine Comedy, as prose.



Addendum:

The photo below was taken on Friday in Woodford. The actual spot is a mere 900 metres from my house in Hazelbrook, but the wind was blowing from the west, so there was no risk to us. My point is this - you can never know where fire might strike, nor the exact circumstances of its path and progress. A wind from the east would have completely changed the outcome. My heartfelt thanks to this brave RFS volunteer.

big November sky
blue, but for a tea-stained cloud-
bushfire!

summer's baying wind
cannot shake the creases
from his beige jacket

The pursuit of happiness is not a modern phenomenon. But its present-day iteration has become almost pathological, with any number of attractions, distractions and lifestyles promoted as happiness-inducing. Alas, such happiness that is derived is often fleeting, followed, often as not, by boredom, dissatisfaction and a search for the next hit.

This comes about in part from a misunderstanding of how happiness arises or even what it is. A modern motion is that happiness is a goal in itself, to be sought after as often as possible. This is a fundamentally flawed view, for it is rare that such a goal can be achieved (happiness being an abstraction) and it sets folks up for one failure after another.

Simply put, happiness for the most part is a bi-product of pursuing meaningful goals in life. It arises as we engage with pursuits that give us purpose and a worthwhile sense of self. Sometimes it almost creeps up on us, slipping ghost-like into our bodies as we go about our day.

The current Dalai Lama noted, “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” That is wise advice. I would add that those "actions" are considered actions, ones that engage an individual intentionally with the world.

I have said before that consumer capitalism is a poison and a significant part of the problem. Any system that tells you that happiness is derived from spending, then more spending, in order to acquire more and more stuff, is morally corrupt, because it is consciously propagating a lie.

In his letter to Timothy, Paul famously said that "the love of money is the root of all evil" It is a problem for all ages but especially the present, where money and its allies are very nearly an obsession. The deeper the obsession, the greater the dissatisfaction.

I cannot fathom the paradox.

A question that pops up from time to time on sites like Quora goes like this. Humans went to the moon and back in the late 1960's and repeatedly into the 1970's, so why did we not go to Mars? Or back to the Moon? The simplest answer is usually the best and it runs - because the money dried up! NASA had a decent chunk of the American GDP through the Apollo program and once the Soviets had been bested, the funding was seriously pared back. No more lunar missions and certainly, no Martian adventures, for the meantime.

There were other reasons too. The technology that took men to the Moon was simply not up to a Martian trip. Take your mobile phone out of your pocket and look at it. Congratulations, your processing power is vastly superior to that available aboard these missions. The Moon is a three day journey each way. Mars, at best, will be a 21 month round trip! That is a massive difference in scale and difficulty and much else besides.

So now we are in a new space race, one in which Mars is a strong candidate for human exploration. There is a lot of anticipation and hype. Sure, technology has come a long way since those early days. There is talk of a manned mission before 2030, a mere 11 years away. A lot of work is being done but there are huge problems to overcome. The main one is simply this - how do humans survive in space over long periods of time? Zero gravity and radiation alone present serious long-term obstacles. The cocoon of the Earth protects and sustains us. Space really just wants to kill us.

A remote exploration of the Red planet still seems to be the best bet for now. Maybe we need a few more decades of innovation before we dare send people on such a dangerous mission. Robots can build living environments and perhaps even begin terraforming the surface, if that is possible. There is no point in sending folks to their certain deaths just for the sake of planting a flag. Or leaving a footprint.

"No, no, no - back to earth!"

Finally, Uluru is closed for climbing. No more the frantic race to beat the last chance, yesterday. I hear that the ascent was on many folk's "bucket-lists" ( I have a bone to pick with such lists!) and I also read today that people knew it was disrespectful to climb the monolith but cheerfully did so anyway. Ah, such jocular self-condemnation!

I suspect that if a group of people regularly attempted to climb St Peter's dome, or abseil Westminster Cathedral, there would be a big media to-do and lines of police ready to make arrests. That is the one important difference. Respect is an aspect of power and the dominant cultural group usually holds most of it.

But something positive has come about, even if it is decades late in arriving.

the bee drinks-
never mind the Spring gale,
the churning pool

Yesterday Ann added to her list of recent achievements by gaining her NSW Driver's License. In doing so, she leapfrogged the whole provisional license stage, largely because she already held a Thai license. I can also report with considerable pride that she passed both written and practical tests with a 100% correct record, something of a rarity I am told.

She is a very goal-centred person and works very determinedly on tasks until they are achieved. This is one of the key differences between people raised in Asian cultures (specifically, East and South East Asian) and the increasingly sorry state of how Westerners approach education and much else besides. I won't go on.

Well done honey.

I have started to settle in to the presenter's role at 2RPH, having now produced programs for The Australian, The Newcastle Herald and Features Forum. Each program has slightly different criteria and the computer needs to be individualised for each program. My role is to establish the running order on the monitor before the program goes to air. After that we are live and anything can happen, though I am required to mitigate any glitches or disasters. That's the theory.

Even though I have spent many hours on microphones and spoken in front of audiences, I still get very nervous in those opening minutes. This is the time when a lot of things happen in a particular sequence (such as program intros and time calls) and it falls to the announcer to get it right. I enjoy the thrill of it and generally I have been getting most things right. Now, I just need to sound a little less flustered on mike in those first five minutes!

My view.

The View

The view is fine from fifty,
Experienced climbers say;
So, overweight and shifty,
I turn to face the way
That led me to this day.

Instead of fields and snowcaps
And flowered lanes that twist,
The track breaks at my toe-caps
And drops away in mist.
The view does not exist.

Where has it gone, the lifetime?
Search me. What’s left is drear.
Unchilded and unwifed, I’m
Able to view that clear:
So final. And so near.

Philip Larkin

It may be that Mr Larkin was experiencing a mid-life crisis. It may be that his choices in life ("Unchilded and unwifed") left him with regrets about falling short or being unfulfilled in some way. But I think really that, given what he has written elsewhere (see Dockery and Son) Larkin just wanted a good jumping-off point for a poem. Anniversaries are often worthy places to be more reflective and the higher the number, the greater the introspection. I don't think that this is law of any sort. Ninety-year olds may have reached a place of wisdom where regrets dissipate, like the years. Middle age reflection is more prone to sadness - "Where has it gone, the lifetime?"

I find myself somewhere in between these positions, not really having regrets, but seeing the time ahead as growing shorter. At 61 the view really does exist, but it is not a landscape full of flowers. Rather, one of mildly sunny uplands, diminishing in brightness, perhaps a little greyer than greener, hoving into view, though slightly out-of-focus. That will do really.

the moon lounges
in the crook of a grey gum,
momentary lodger

The debate over immigration to Australia has grown increasingly acrimonious over the past two decades. Ever since the Tampa Incident, which I viewed from Japan with disgust, the broader focus has shifted to so-called boat people. These are the poor folk who venture forth in run-down and often dangerous boats with the intention of seeking a better life in Australia. They represent a very small proportion of people who seek asylum in Australia, yet they exercise mountains of newsprint and worse, are grist to every conservative politicians mill.

A recent article from The Guardian (8/10/19) highlighted this fact. Over the past five years, 95,000 people who came by plane requested asylum. Last year, over 24,000 sought refuge, though something like 84% were refused. Many are probably deemed to be economic refugees, which is just another way of saying people who want to work and get ahead and see Australia as a good place to do it. Many may be exploited while they wait assessment and legal challenges to rulings.

All countries want to have control of their borders but the manner in which this has been politicised and subsequently mishandled is appalling. Too many feeble-minded politicians and others with no moral fibre to speak of, together with their lackeys in the media, will beat any drum that furthers their ambitions. I am guessing that refugees with air-tickets will be the next big scare, with a conga-line of indignant toads lining up to say something tough, or just plain nasty.

The Enlightenment Project seems to have sputtered to a halt. It took a beating in the 20th Century with the advent of fascism, communism and the atom bomb. Post-Modernism dissected and dismissed it. Trumps ascendancy mocks it. Populists everywhere are reading the last rites. Yet still I hope.

Not fit to purpose.

Those of you who read this blog (surely no-one!-ed.) will know that my wife and I have been in a visa process for over two and a half years now. Ann's initial PR application was submitted in February of 2017, a temporary visa was granted in March 2018, her daughter's (dependants) visa shortly followed that and yesterday, both were granted permanent residency in Australia.

This is a cause for much rejoicing. The process is long and difficult and expensive, though more onerous yet is the sheer difficulty of proving genuine love and commitment to sceptical strangers. It is the job of immigration officers to test the bona fides of applicants and that is perfectly fair. It is not unreasonable for them to demand a high standard of evidence. What is hard is the finding of that evidence where there is only flesh and blood, words and actions, beseeching thoughts that cannot be translated onto a neatly typed page or rendered as a legal document.

But here we are and I am grateful for the impartiality and fairness of Australian immigration officers. Congratulations to my wife Ann and her daughter JJ. A new dawn today.

A few days ago I was watching the evening news with my usual one eye when a familiar face popped up in the midst of a rally in the CBD. It was the very visage of my friend Martin Wolterding, who was in the process of being dragged by the police from his location in the middle of the road to another place, off camera. Martin and many others were involved in a climate change rally which was disrupting traffic in the Broadway area, sufficient to provoke the cops into needlessly aggressive action. It doesn't take much to get the police riled up and Martin ended up with a swollen arm and a nasty bruise to his side.

You might think that this is the lot of protesters - they will bounce back and be ready for a rally the following day! But Martin is a 75 year old academic who just happens to be passionate about climate change and there were many others of a similar age present too. This is an issue that crosses barriers of this kind and understandably so - survival is something deep within all creatures. Do we really want a planet that becomes increasingly uninhabitable over a relatively short space of time?

The sacrifices are not so great that they cannot be achieved. Still, I have my doubts. My reading of human history and psychology suggests that we will fall short, sufficient to bring disaster upon us. Happy to be proved wrong though!

Exhibit A

spring rain--
in the thicket
a discarded letter blows

Issa

Listening to podcasts occupies a lot of my walking for exercise and commuting time. The list of interesting topics is pretty much endless and I have alluded in previous posts to some of my favourites. Things come in and out of fashion and so does my capacity to listen for extended periods to any one genre. After splurging somewhat on political and historical material for a few years, I have recently turned to science podcasts. Lately I have also been listening to this kind of content on Youtube channels. A big shout-out is due to Isaac Arthur and John Michael Godier for the excellent work they do on their respective channels.

Specifically, I like those that find a kind of comfortable intersection between cosmology and the hypothetical, things that are within the realm of real science but also explore more exotic fields, places more liminal, if you like. I have in mind topics like the Fermi Paradox, Kardashev Civilisations, Dyson Spheres, Boltzmann Brains and so forth. While some of these cross over the boundary into science fiction, all have genuine roots in actual science, meaning that they have the potential to be possible, never mind the odds.

I confess that they can be difficult to understand. Most of the creators of this material are very, very smart people and while they target a general audience, being on one's best thinking behaviour is de riguer. There is no room for switching off. It is hard not to take a mental nap now and then because the material discussed can be difficult to process and retain. Even when I do understand it there is the problem of remembering. I have read at least a dozen times about the theory of Boltzmann Brains but I could not give you a coherent and detailed account of them now.

It is exciting to push yourself to the outer edge of your mental capacity. The pursuit of knowledge is a worthy goal in itself; it requires no justification, only the desire to know more before the lights eventually go out.

Yesterday Ann told me that she had had computer problems. Her PC was stuck on a white screen when booted up, with an endlessly spinning ball the only sign of a pulse within. I hadn't heard of the white screen problem before but upon investigation, found that it was amongst those that had a deadly classification. I mean, it was one of those that carried the moniker, screen of death. There are, apparently, white and blue screens of death and perhaps even a black one, though there does not appear to be a hierarchy of death-dealing amongst them.

What was even more interesting was her solution. Dusting. She claims that a Thai language site she went to suggested dusting parts of the computer and to this end she removed some screws and commenced cleaning inside. I am guessing from her description that this meant removing the battery pack and perhaps the lid of the RAM storage unit, but in any event, whatever she did worked and her PC was restored to rude good health. I can find no such advice at any English language site, where the preferred solution is no less terrifying, to wit, booting up in safe mode and carrying out all manner of complex operations. I have done things like this before, but I have always felt like a man with no medical qualifications operating on a hapless patient.

I was never one for tinkering under the bonnet, though once a friend and I pulled parts from the motor of a wrecked Ford Cortina. I remember wondering at the time how we might put them back again if we had to. The car was going for scrap, so we never did. My friend became a mechanic, I became an English teacher. Together, we could probably just about have read the repair manual.

The failure of humans to move collectively and decisively to curb greenhouse emissions in an attempt to moderate global warming is astonishing. The science is in and it continues to come in, a mass of data that points in one direction. There are no serious challenges to it, notwithstanding the nonsense from some politicians (who should know better) and a small but vocal group of deniers. The consequences of inaction are deadly serious, ranging from a massive disruption to economies and lifestyles to a complete collapse of civilisation as we know it.

Yet these same nay-sayers are happy to use all the fruits of applied science with nary a quibble. They drive cars, use mobile phones, watch TV, use the internet, turn on a light switch, cool things in refrigerators - you get the picture - every aspect of modernity is somehow mediated by the application of science, which comes from the efforts of scientists. This is an extreme and dangerous form of cherry-picking. It is double-think, or not thinking at all. That a 16 year old girl needed to stand in front of a room of world leaders and tell them the unvarnished truth is sufficient to ring alarm bells. Greta Thunberg pointed out the bleeding obvious to folks who are supposed to be leading the planet to a better future.

One theory about potentially advanced civilisations in the cosmos is that they must pass through 'great filters' in order to survive. The splitting of the atom would almost certainly qualify as one such filter, one that is still unresolved on our planet. Despoiling the environment, changing the environment in fundamental ways, may be other filters that we are now coming up against. I hope that we can take on these challenges honestly and diligently, but the problem of knuckleheads remains. Is there a critical mass of the stupid and the stubborn beyond which action becomes almost impossible?

One brave soul.

The autumn basho of the Grand Sumo Tournament in Tokyo has finished with a very unorthodox run to the line. The final tie-breaking bout was between two sekiwake rikishi, Mitakeumi and Takakeisho. Both have won the title before and unimpeded through the absence of the two yokuzuna, found themselves at 11-3 before proceeedings began yesterday. At the tie-break (12-3 apiece) Mitakeumi overcame the wrecking-ball that is his opponent's tachiai to force him from the ring soon after the bout began.

It was a very interesting tourney all round. There were some curious decisions by the gyoji, a lot of false starts (matta) and excellent performances from some rank and filers, notably Okinoumi and Tsurugisho. Sadly, Georgian Tochinoshin has been demoted to sekiwake, where he will need ten wins in the next meet to regain his ozeki status.

Can't wait. I really enjoy sumo. An acquired taste yes, but once acquired, then one is smitten.

Tom's English class are studying a poetry unit at the moment. It happens to be a rather difficult unit, comprising sonnets and odes and the like. Readers of this blog (surely just you!-ed.) will know that I love poetry but I think its early introduction at this level may leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth for many students. Tom confesses to hating it already, which is a blow indeed.

The whole of Year 8 have an assessment in which they must visually present a poem in the style of those being studied. Knowing that Tom was unlikely to rise to the challenge of finding a poem, I composed a sonnet yesterday. I had been wandering up from Thai Town on Tuesday in the rain when I noticed more and more broken umbrellas in bins and in the gutter. The rain had brought them out and the wind and had done them in. This is my first sonnet so I hope you will excuse its amateur faults.

Sonnet

When icy rains come after sunny skies,
Then brollies of all kinds are in the air.
But when in whipping winds the pennants fly,
A thousand shattered frames lie in despair.
They cluster in the bins along the street,
They fall from grace in gushing gutters there
And whether eye or foot or hand they meet,
The message is ‘we are beyond repair!’

Yet once they snuggled gladly in the hand,
Or found a place in bag or case or tray.
They were the dripping leaders of the band,
Fond spindly masters of a liquid day.
Now like discarded skeletons they lie,
Closer to the grave than to the sky.

The autumn tourney of the Grand Sumo has reached the half-way mark in Tokyo with a number of surprises already. The basho began without ozeki Takazasu and yokozuna Hakuho withdrew with an injury shortly after the commencement. Georgian ozeki Tochinoshin is clearly carrying an injury and seems uncompetitive at the moment. If he fails to win 8 out of 15 matches, he will face demotion to sekiwake, again. (And in late-breaking news just in from Tokyo, the remaining yokozuna Kakuryu has just withdrawn from the rest of the tournament. He had suffered three defeats in a row, so something was up with his body, evidently.)

Size obviously matters to a large extent in sumo, but two much smaller rikishi are challenging this notion, at least at the present. Both Enho and Ishiura are giving away dozens of kilos to their opponents every match and yet they both have winning records at the time of writing. Speed, skill and cunning seem to be their stocks-in-trade and audiences delight in their victories. If you stand Enho at 98kg up against the heaviest rikishi, Ichinojo, at a (slimmed down) 224kg, you have some idea of what the little people are up against. Yet compete they do.

Yesterday one of the bouts ended dramatically with the gyoji (referee) nowhere to be seen. The poor fellow had taken a tumble at a critical moment, falling from the dohyo into the first row of the audience. He emerged somewhat dishevelled, the bout having ended. Never mind, there is a reserve gyoji at the ready and at least five other judges(shimpan) at ringside! If the match is ever in dispute, they all emerge for a mono-ii (discussion), something which happens more often than you might imagine.

Enho and Ishiura

The baptism of fire that was promised me when I took the announcer's chair for the first time has proved to be a scorifying one. That, at least, is how I felt after I had done the first presentation of The Australian at 2RPH. Mistakes are easy to make, for there are crucial timing issues at the beginning and end of the program. I did my third shift yesterday (though on a different newspaper) and it went passably well.

Announcers at 2RPH are also program producers, so manipulating the studio board and computer are combined with choosing news articles for the readers, keeping an eye on the clock and making sure the whole thing is coming together as planned. I guess I will get used to it but it will take time. And frankly, it is a little scary. I probably need more of these kinds of challenges.

Massive and unseasonable winds continued through the night, worse in many places nearer the coast where thousands are now without power. There are lots of fallen trees about too, including a large branch from a callistemon by the side of our house. It had been looking somewhat precarious for a while, but the wild gales overnight provided the final push. The rest of the tree is healthy and should survive the weather, I hope.

Wind has a habit of driving many creatures to distraction. I remember as a teacher when windy days often meant that kids in my classes would be mildly unhinged, much harder to settle. Today it's the turn of the neighbourhood birds, who are frantically bombing each other, swooping rapidly from branch to bush to roof, as if drunk on the sheer energy of each gust. Of course, it being spring, they may have other motives. Meanwhile, on the washing line, the clothes are performing a kind of Danse Macabre.


Afternoon On A Hill

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!


Edna St. Vincent Millay

The wind is up today and along the highway, bright red signs proscribe the lighting of any fires. Living in a national park on the driest continent in the world is a little like residing on top of the biggest tinder box known to, em, collectors of tinder boxes. But it would a mighty tinder box indeed. My point is, bushfires are a constant menace and have wreaked havoc in the Blue Mountains many times. Strong winds and higher temperatures are two of the most obvious ingredients for a conflagration to occur. Each town has its own fire-fighting service (RFS), but in the worst possible scenario, everything could go up in flames. Still, we are in better shape than those poor souls who live at the edge of an event horizon near a black hole.

On a less bleak note, my darling wife Ann passed her DKT (Driver Knowledge Test) for the state of NSW this morning with an 100% correct score. If you take a minute to think about the fact that she studied for the test in English (from a data base of 900 questions!) and sat the test in English, then you can imagine how proud of her I am. The next step is the actual driving test, planned for a few weeks from now. She has a Thai Drivers License but it can only be used in Australia for a finite period.

Most of the plums are now in bloom and the jasmine is not far behind. The air is full of birds clamouring for insects and bees are blindly intense amongst the tossing florets. Soon enough these whipping gusts will strip these fruit trees of their flowers, leaving little for the rosellas.


"I saw the sap stir in the wood,
The fire put out its leaves of flame;
Brilliant as summer flashed and fell
The rose intolerant, the flower.
The darkness stirred like dust on air,"


Rosemary Dobson, from The Fire.

"For He knows how we were made, He remembers that we are dust." Ps. 103:14

The idea of being nothing more than dust does not appeal to the modern mind. Are we not the crown of all creation, the most successful and advanced species the planet has ever known? Have we not become the very masters of nature, capable of not only explaining complex phenomena in the universe, but also having the capacity to leave our home world? Yes, and yes, and yes again, but...

The memory of the dust from which we have come - call it star dust if you wish - is essential to the balance we need to strike between our success as humans, such as it is, and our mortal frame. The entrances and exits from life are there for all to see, and while we have a preference for birth over the other, neither are options. From the first cry to the last breath is really a short interlude.

We are dust indeed and that's the wonder of it. What better retort to the growing hubris and narcissism of the times, what better grounding in the face of so much pointless clamour, than to know our true pedigree? And if God knows that too, remembers it, then that is a comfort beyond measure.

'Let you not say of me when I am old,
In pretty worship of my withered hands
Forgetting who I am, and how the sands
Of such a life as mine run red and gold
Even to the ultimate sifting dust,'

from Sonnet IX, St. Vincent Millay

If my body was a motor vehicle, then it would have been traded in some time ago. There are very few cars on the road that are of a 60 year vintage and those that are have usually been lovingly restored. For worn-out brakes, gammy suspension and a smoking engine, not to mention all manner of dings, read sore joints, clapped-out shoulders, a bad back and so on and so forth. The truth is, such a trade-in would soon be on the way to the wreckers yard.

But my mind is as nimble as ever and perhaps more adaptive and malleable than at any time in the past. Sure I forget things and I have more of those annoying tip-of-the-tongue moments, but my capacity for learning and critical thinking remains intact. This being Father's Day in Australia, I think I can take this one short bow at least.

It is also the first day of spring and the weather has turned, on cue, to warm and sunny, as if by Divine fiat. I did my walk this morning in a t-shirt for the first time in months, which is an energising feeling. Unencumbered, one wants to walk faster, if only the knees are willing! It is a glorious day for anything outside though. I cannot put it better than e.e. cummings.


in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

On Friday I attended a lunch for 2RPH volunteers at the Glebe Town Hall. The latter is a magnificent pile dating from 1880, beautifully restored in 2018. The event itself was delightful, mostly in that I could mingle with people I had not had a chance to meet at the station yet. My shifts on alternate Thursdays and Fridays do not afford much of a chance to meet anyone other than my own team (who are just great!) and sometimes folks from the preceding and following shifts. Of course, I am not there to socialise, but to work, but it's always possible to do both at the same time. Well, usually, anyway.

2RPH has been short of announcers and has recently been trying to promote the idea amongst its somewhat reluctant "reading" cohort. It is understandable really, for the announcer, who is also the producer, needs to master the technical side of running a program (computer, board, timing, crosses, announcing etc) and also allocate reading material to the readers. Those who read only have to read the material they have been given and do not need to worry about how the program is going.

So it was with some trepidation that I put my hand up for training as an announcer. The board and computer are not that difficult, but the combination of other elements make it a challenge for the beginner. I will do a practice session by myself in a week or two and then a real live shift the week following. I think that keep calm and carry on will be the mantra for that program and all that follow.

Friday's luncheon.

sunlit curtains,
bees in shadow puppet play
with dark blossoms

In China, the Communist Party is trying to impose culturally normative values on the population through the proscription of 'bad personal behaviour." Doubtless this has something to do with China's rapid rise as an economic power and the change in circumstances, for the better, of millions of people. While it may well be 'glorious to grow rich' as Deng so aptly put it 30 years ago, the act of growing wealthy and chasing the filthy dollar, or yuan, can detach people from their roots. It can also change attitudes and behaviours for the worse, for affluence has its own price.

In China this is a double whammy, for not only does 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' have to deal with the contradiction of having swallowed capitalism almost wholly, but a society steeped in centuries of Confucian ideology must deal with the most rapid changes it has faced in hundreds of years. I doubt that President Xi would be interested in a Cultural Revolution 2.0, which wreaked disaster on China the last time, though he may be interested in reinventing Mao as a kind of wise ancestor.

Most of the proscriptions on behaviour are perfectly understandable, with no spitting, shouting and general anti-social behaviour apparent. But there are a few curious examples too, such as "No square dancing that disturbs others". Perhaps an innocent square dance is just one step away from an insurrection in the minds of the authorities. Strangely enough, there are no injunctions against the mass display of umbrellas, wet weather or not.

only the moonlight,
my eyes dark though the glass
blossoms suspending

Sometimes I feel like I have been washed up on a familiar shoreline, on a beach whose low breakers gently push me onto the sand. I feel this way sometimes when I have spent time with my library, the vast majority of which is in my garage. It used to be a much bigger collection but moving back to a smaller house and having a larger family to accommodate made its relocation and culling essential. The core of the library remains, with a lot of plays, novels, poetry and history books apparent, amongst a motley selection from Christianity, Buddhism, Psychology and Cultural Theory.

I love to pick up and dip into a book I haven't read in 30 or 40 years, finding a kind of peace and also an abiding joy in unfolding the dry pages of memory. Little gems spring out too - a train ticket, a receipt for a chocolate bar from a now defunct confectioner, a political advertisement that I cannot remember cutting from a newspaper, all re-purposed as bookmarks.

It is not really nostalgia and I cannot give it a name. I mean, the feeling I get, like sunshine in winter through a solitary pane of glass, a warm, unsought after spot that unclutters the mind and offers solace. I don't get that same feeling from my kindle, for though it holds many wonderful books, it does not array them in all their dusty, page-worn, lop-sided glory. Books knock up along-side each other like students in an old school photo.

Oh, I do so hope that books and bookshops make a comeback one day, when the gimmickry of technology begins to bore, when people seek a more tactile immersive experience.

Some years ago when I was teaching in Japan, I had what you might call my favourite classes. I didn't play favourites of course. It was just that some classes were more fun or more pleasant to teach than others, which is only to be expected.

On Wednesday afternoons one such group of kids rocked in the door about 4pm, their bicycles forming a line outside the front gate. They were three grade 5 elementary school boys from Sanda Shogakko, who had belted up the hill after the final bell, full of enthusiasm and ready to study. Imagine such a scene in Australia! Sorry, but I can't.

One of the boys, Junpei Yamaguchi, was the son of one of our Japanese friends, Shuko. We had first met Shu in the playground of the school during a special school athletics event. She had sauntered over, introduced herself and then asked us to write the lyrics to a song she had composed the music to. We did, but I digress!

Last week the grown-up Junpei came for a short trip to Sydney and I met up with him for lunch and a touch of sight-seeing. Junpei is now in his twenties, has a job with a a firm named Takeda in Hiroshima, and is planning to get married next year. His English is pretty good, for which I must take at least a little credit.

Spending the afternoon with him not only jogged my forgotten Japanese from its hiding place, but reminded me of one of the happiest times of my life.

Thanks buddy!

"Now listen, you who say,'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, car and make money on business.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 4:13-14)

I was reflecting on these New Testament verses last night, how deep and almost nihilistic they seem (though James does go on to urge us to put our full trust in God) and also somewhat stoic in tone. Epictetus would have probably agreed and then added,

“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions."

Together, these two positions mock at the contemporary vogue (though it is ageless) for having control of one's life, of being the captain of one's destiny. The thrust of modern education, of business school ideology, of media commentary, is that you do have control of your personal circumstances, even if the world around seems impervious to those efforts to manipulate. Thus an illusion of control is established, where we are led to believe that our reach is far beyond what it really is. You can see the consequences for this kind of thinking - anxiety, frustration, anger and depression - over not being able to rule over the opinions and behaviour of others, nor of coming to terms with chance events, the laws of nature and just plain bad luck.

So we ask 'why did this happen to me?' when the furniture of lives is abruptly upended. It can happen to anyone at anytime, as James reminds us. How we respond to calamity is strangely within our power, however. Our thinking is the key; all else follows, for better or worse.

Alas, when a light dusting of snow falls in the Upper Blue Mountains, a percentage of Sydneysiders lose their collective minds. I encountered a large number of these folks as I was driving back from Penrith, the roads clogged for kilometres by their over-sized vehicles. I knew full-well that most of the snow this side of Blackheath would likely have melted by early afternoon, the sun now becoming warmer as we prepare for Spring, a sure hazard to the thinning layer of snowflakes. But I wish them well and happy hunting.

Snow brings on deep thoughts and I think that a melancholy might result from gazing too long into its omnipresent whiteness. It can erase the detail and colour from a landscape as much as add to it. I think living in snowy climes might have the effect of inducing withdrawal from the world and going deeper into the self. I remember feeling as much during the cold Japanese winters, a hot sake an adjunct to the process of ongoing reflection. Mr Frost may have felt so too.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."

On a lighter note than my previous posts, my family have had a few outings recently. By family, I mean the new and improved version, which now includes Ann's daughter JJ. I think its important that we do things together, all of us, sometimes, notwithstanding my son Tom's desire to cloister himself with computer and mobile phone.

So we have been to my friend Wayne's 60th Birthday Bash on the Central Coast and my Mum's stupendous 90th Birthday Luncheon at Dee Why. Here are two pics that show the two gangs on their respective occasions.

In recent months I have been reading a lot of short fiction, stories that are sometimes no longer than a few pages. Most recently I have read Bernard Malamud's The Jewbird and yesterday I finished the last paragraph of James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues. Set in the same city (New York) and at a similar time, they could not be more different. The former might well be called magical fiction, for a talking bird of the Hebrew faith is the central character. Sonny's Blues is far removed from this world, located in the tough realism of being black in Harlem, though told with an often beautiful poetic, intense language.

All this is leading me to another short story, Updike's A & P, which I was halfway through when news came on the TV that another gun massacre had occurred at a Walmart in El Paso. I stopped to watch (not in disbelief given the frequency of these events in that country), but really out of a desire to try to understand why someone would do such a thing. We have much tighter gun laws in Australia, thank goodness, or else people with mental issues and /or irrational points of view might well be doing the same here.

Looking at the images that came out of El Paso, it struck me that the America of Updike's short fiction was a very different place to that inhabited by the innocent folks of that unfortunate border town, who were going about their own very mundane business, only to struck down by the delusions of another. That someone was heavily armed, not because it makes any sense to be so equipped, but because of another delusion that equates owning guns with liberty.

The A & P is really an innocent tale of male rights of passage perched on the cusp of the revolutions that were about to engulf the West in the 1960's. It pits the dawn of the new with the mores of the old. I am not saying that either is right or wrong, for only time will tell in that respect. Suffice to say that humans have a way of throwing out the baby with the bathwater where revolutions are concerned. May Aristotle's Golden Mean be a guiding principle.

I first came across Okra Smugglers in an online post, purportedly claiming that the painting was of Renaissance origin and demonstrated the lewdness of that era. I am not an art expert but even my amateur eye could tell that this work was not from the Renaissance (though I can see where one might be deceived by its looking not unlike a Bruegel) and was clearly a recent work. In fact, it is a painting by the contemporary Polish/American artist Henryk Fantazos, a fitting name for a producer of such fantastical works.

In fact, it is the curious intersection of the surreal with the real that leaps out of Fantazos's paintings, a dreamworld rooted in the unnervingly familiar. It has been described as an allegorical realism. Okra Smugglers is one of the oddest of such works - firstly, the idea that okra need to be smuggled is strange, secondly, the means of smuggling - in the leggings of the gentleman in the accordion outfit, and most alarmingly, the pants of the young woman gazing out at us - is positively bizarre. Methinks that they will be stopped at the first customs outpost, the contraband spilling from their bodies.

Oh, and another giveaway - the man on the left is wearing a sun-dial wristwatch, locating him firmly in the modern era. "We are running out of time," he seems to be saying as he taps the watch cover. Yet his fellow still has a way to go with bucket of okra.

In an interview, Fantazos said that he wants to paint the images that come to him without censorship, unmediated by other considerations. He also said that "the grotesque is the proper language for depicting our times." As such he is an interesting painter and I encourage you to look for his other works.

My mother turns 90 tomorrow, a ripe old age even by modern standards. In some ways its remarkable that she has made it so far given the many health challenges she has faced over the 10 years. I know that looming large in her thoughts was the fact that her mother, my grandmother, died quite young at 60. Strokes tended to kill in those days and had modern medicine been available, she may well have lived a much longer life. Her loss was a great blow to my mum, for it left her alone and far from her land of birth. It is a testimony to her fortitude that she stuck with it and raised five boys. So tomorrow is an anniversary of many sorts.

I cannot shake from my own thoughts (though it is only tangentially related to the previous paragraph) that humans are not long for this world. It might be just a feeling, a part of my occasional melancholic reflection on the state of things, but is is informed by much wider reading over many years. It is therefore not just a feeling, but an educated guess, which stays with me.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.

Frost had apples in his sight and thoughts of the apple harvest, but I suspect at some deeper level, we are alike in our feelings about the modern world. Are there enough thoughtful and energised people to stop the rot? I don't know.

I came across Schizotypal Personality Disorder when I was studying for a counselling diploma some years ago. It was not a condition that was within the remit of your common or garden counselling therapist, being something that probably required a referral to a more highly qualified practitioner.

I had to dust off one of my journals the other day because I kept encountering individuals on websites who seemed to exhibit some of the characteristics of a STPD profile. These symptoms include strange beliefs or magical thinking, abnormal perceptual experiences, strange thinking and behaviour, paranoia, to name but a few. I am talking specifically here about folks who think that the Moon Landings were a hoax - that they were actually filmed events created in a studio on Earth.

In considering how anyone could possibly ignore the overwhelming evidence for the legitimacy of the Apollo project, I had to take into account that some of these people are just trolls. But there were too many of them, some armed with the most preposterous hypothesis's, to suggest that trolling was the sole cause.

NASA and many other qualified people have taken great pains to answer the often ludicrous and childish questions that have emerged, principally about photos taken on the Moon. All exhibit a painfully low level of science education and perhaps even less common sense. For example, the oft asked question, "Why are there no stars in the photos from the Moon?" is one that your average Year 7 student could answer. One wonders how wilfully stupid anyone could be, unless they have a mental disorder. Cue STPD.

I don't wish to be mean, but these people are stomping on the dreams and memories of many others who derived great joy and inspiration from the Apollo project, a project which set out to put a man on the Moon, and achieved that goal in 1969. You can quibble over whether that goal justified the great cost, that's fine. But to deny it ever happened is the worst kind of self-deception. It's also just plain nasty.

Real man, real moon.

If you are a national newspaper and you are covering an event of such import that your choice of words, what is said and what is seen, is critically important, what are you likely to do? In the case of the New York Times and the day that Man landed on the Moon, the 21st July, 1969, they decided to employ a poet to express in verse what prose could not do. So, they turned to Archibald MacLeish, veteran poet, Pulitzer Prize winner and all round polymath, to find the words that would express the solemn and unprecedented nature of the event.

MacLeish had been previously engaged by the NYT when Apollo 8 had successfully entered lunar orbit. On that occasion he had indeed used prose, a heightened, erudite and resonant prose.

"To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers."

You can quibble with the masculine pronoun now, but it was the norm, then. Aside from the extraordinary Poppy Northcutt, who was working as an engineer for technical staff on that mission, it was very much a white male world. That doesn't lessen the achievement a whit, and much has changed nowadays for the better. But I digress.

Macleish actually penned a poem for the Times for the Apollo 11 landing and it appeared on the front page of the NYT. Here it is.


Voyage To The Moon.


Presence among us,
wanderer in the skies,

dazzle of silver in our leaves and on our
waters silver,

O

silver evasion in our farthest thought–
“the visiting moon” . . . “the glimpses of the moon” . . .

and we have touched you!

From the first of time,
before the first of time, before the
first men tasted time, we thought of you.
You were a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives–perhaps
a meaning to us…

Now

our hands have touched you in your depth of night.

Three days and three nights we journeyed,
steered by farthest stars, climbed outward,
crossed the invisible tide-rip where the floating dust
falls one way or the other in the void between,
followed that other down, encountered
cold, faced death–unfathomable emptiness . . .

Then, the fourth day evening, we descended,
made fast, set foot at dawn upon your beaches,
sifted between our fingers your cold sand.

We stand here in the dusk, the cold, the silence . . .

and here, as at the first of time, we lift our heads.
Over us, more beautiful than the moon, a
moon, a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives–perhaps
a meaning to us . . .

O, a meaning!

over us on these silent beaches the bright earth,

presence among us.




Finally, on this day when this writer reflects upon the significance of something that happened five decades ago, and who feels as inspired as ever, I reprint the classic photo of Buzz Aldrin, on the lunar surface. What brave men these!