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!

Fifty years ago today Apollo 11 was launched, its 8 day mission, to go to the Moon, to land and to come back safely. It was the culmination of a crazy race between the two superpowers, each keen on demonstrating its ideological and economic superiority. After the calamity of Apollo 1 in 1967, the capacity of NASA to get Armstrong and his crew to the lunar surface and back only two years later was remarkable, though probably foolhardy by today's standards. But it was an inspiration and in my estimation, the most significant feat in human history.

Everyone who watched the subsequent landing on the Moon remembers where they were that day. As a fifth grader, I sat with my classmates as grainy black and white images played on the school's TV, the full significance a little lost on us. As an adult I can better understand the enormity of what occurred and just how brave those astronauts were.

The launch

Japan's space agency JAXA's successful probe landing on the asteroid Ryugu is another worthy milestone in the human exploration of our cosmic backyard. Touching down on fast moving rock is nothing like landing an aircraft or parking a car. It takes great precision and skill and clearly the agency and Hayabusa-2 were up to the task. Ryugu is only a few hundred metres across and orbits the Sun at a maximum of 211 million kilometres and its path sometimes crosses between the Earth and Mars.

Hayabusa-2 blasted the asteroid with a copper plate and a box of explosives in April this year in order to loosen rocks and expose material under the surface, before its successful landing on Ryugu three days ago to gather up the rock and soil debris. Here is an image captured just 4 seconds after landing:



Remarkable, don't you think? Man's exploration of space may be our only shot at some kind of immortality, written robotically, though sometimes with human footprints, in the planets, asteroids, moons and empty spaces around us.

The wind last night was the loudest and strangest I have ever heard outside of a typhoon. The latter was a frequent visitor when I lived in Japan, but houses there are set up with shutters which, even though they bang and rattle, give a semblance of safety when the storm is in full swing. Not so here, my paper-thin walls and old aluminium windows a seeming invitation to chaos and the gathering Lords of Misrule.

The sound of the gale last night was both intense and melancholic, as if an angry depressive was trying to batter down the door. Moreover, it stayed at the same volume throughout and the morning, though sunny, seemed like the scene of a minor disaster area. A tree was across the road around the corner and everywhere, the desiccated remains of leaves and branches were scattered like shrapnel. And always I am reminded of Ted Hughes.

....The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.


from Wind

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.

Lately there has been a lot of fence-building in my neighbourhood. I haven't initiated any of it, my neighbours have made requests, and I have complied. Just around the corner, another neighbour once-removed is creating a dry-stone wall from rocks in her garden. This wall is much closer to the one Frost and his neighbour repair annually and ritually in Mending Wall.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:

Yes, Amy's wall is just such an agglomeration of shapes and sizes, all made to balance through skill and the application of a little mortar. The fences that border my garden are far less romantic, comprising pine-slats on one side and colour-bond on the other. Nor do they run the full length of either boundary, which are 60 metres and so quite expensive. Instead, they appear like two Maginot lines running into a Belgium here and a Belgium there. There is a strategy but it's all rather ramshackle.

Here's hoping the Panzers can't get through the gaps.

I am not often astonished by many things these days, at least not in the human realm, but watching a few Youtube videos yesterday, I was astounded as if for the first time. At first I thought that I was watching a hoax channel, or maybe even very poor satire, but delving further I found the material presented was in fact, deadly serious in intent. You see, there really are people who believe that the Earth is flat.

I am not sure what happened to these poor folk at primary school, then later at high school, when earnest teachers tried their best to teach science to them. Maybe they didn't pay attention, or perhaps the insane root was consumed at a later time. But at some stage, reason was taken prisoner and a strange madness descended. It is no coincidence that some of these people do not believe in the moon landing, that it was a hoax, perpetrated for what reason, no-one can fathom. Similarly NASA, who is characterised in the most machiavellian terms by these radical sceptics, is responsible for maintaining the illusion that the Earth is a globe.

Sure this is a very small band of lunatics who operate in an evidence-free environment. But the few can become the many, such are the dynamics of modern communication. That is the very material for building a new dark age, in which the truth is an entirely subjective matter. Heaven help us if the ignorant are holding the matches.

Seems plausible.

Large institutions can move slowly, for by their nature, they are complex. When JJ came to Australia about six weeks ago, the documentation that accompanied her visa indicated that she could now become a school student and enrol in Medicare, the national health provider.

She was fairly quickly inducted into the NSW school system, but the health care card was far more elusive. One government department was not supplying the required information to another, we were told, and I could well believe it. We visited a medicare office at least five times, each time with different quantities of documentation, but alas, no cigar. The matter was finally upgraded, since it is a serious matter not having access to health care, and today JJ received an interim health card in the mail.

It pays to be persistent but sometimes it also depends on the person across the other side of the desk, whether they are willing to make the extra effort to find the cause of the impasse. It also pays to smile and be grateful, the latter being in rather short supply these days.

At last, some serious rain! We have had months of semi-drought in the Mountains and the only rain to speak of has been a light sprinkling. But right now it is steady and likely to be soaking in the ever-so-dry-earth. Outside the birds seem energised and aware that water gets the whole shebang moving.

I just finished a longer than usual walk, my shoes and orthotics soaked through from the slosh of puddles. But it was very nice, the colours everywhere much sharper, sounds of road, rail and bush track more pronounced. Rain is a restorative for a country like Australia; we need to learn how to catch every drop and value it for the treasure that it is. A part of the essence of life, yet something we are complacent about.

from Old Man Rain

Old Man Rain at the windowpane
Knocks and fumbles and knocks again:
His long-nailed fingers slip and strain:
Old Man Rain at the windowpane
Knocks all night but knocks in vain.
Old Man Rain.

Madison Cawein