Officially winter begins tomorrow, though it feels very wintery already. The nights are dropping close to zero and each morning sees a layer of shining frost on the grass. Lately, the wind has had an Antarctic chill to it, piercing even the thickest coats. Curiously, I have seen people, mostly young ones, wearing t-shirts and shorts, as if to make a statement of their seeming invincibility. People with tattoos also seem to wear a minimum of clothing, appearances stealing a march on comfort, apparently.

Tom is home sick today with a head cold and the nation is beset again with news about Covid-19. There is very little respite from this subject which is covered from every angle, over and over again. I think that a collective tiredness to the mere mention of the topic is becoming apparent and this may account for some of the vaccination complacency that has been reported. Of course, there are some people who genuinely fear potential side-effects, even if these, at their worst, are far less severe than the virus itself. Then there is a small group of libertarians, conspiracy folk and plain knuckleheads who object to any program that might impede their freedom or belief systems. I don't really want to expend the energy needed rebutting ludicrous assertions.

I am happy, though, that my volunteer job at 2RPH is becoming normalised after 12 months of restrictions. We can now sit in the same studio together and my second job as a reader on the Newcastle Herald is restarting soon. Of course, this could all be thrown into chaos should Sydney succumb to the blasted pestilence in a similar way to Melbourne. I am learning, slowly, to accept that stuff happens and that there is nothing I can do about it.

Totality

Coatless I gaze

In sullen cold,

A lingering Scorpion

Above my head, a

Wide moon in the fold,

And the every-angled heavens,

Ablaze,

A night to be bold, sure,

Though few could tell,

How solid ground conspired,

To throw terrestrial shade -

The inching darkness,

First a fingernail,

Now a thumbprint

Made,

The ancient glimmering dust,

A reddening pale,

That hangs and floats and howls

To be itself again -

A catcher of dreams

And ark of night.

Beyond the trail

Of stars and dust

The shrouding rust

Declines and fades,

Leaving the porcelain face

Unchanged.

Small mercies, perhaps,

Thinking of how things must go,

Though a billion years of light

Remains.

The Grand Sumo Summer Tournament in Tokyo is now finished. Terunofuji, the remarkable comeback kid has now won back-to-back tourneys, defeating fellow ozeki Takakeisho on the final day. I have written about Terunofuji before - the man who thought he was washed up and wanted to retire - but is is worth repeating. His achievement is extraordinary and doubtless he is celebrated in his homeland, Mongolia.

The continued absence of Hakuho after knee surgery continues to cast a cloud over the championship. We are all hoping that he has another basho in him before the inevitable retirement announcement. I remember seeing him as a very young wrestler back in 2006. Even then, there was a quality about him that presaged great things - yokozuna the following year, and 44 titles (yusho) to follow. What an amazing champion he is.

Day 15 of the most recent basho did not pass without some high drama. Terunofuji may have won the crown at the last, but he suffered a defeat by Takakeisho in his regular match. This triggered the play-off (both wrestlers being at 12-3) and his subsequent victory. The two shots below tell the story of two different outcomes on the same day, only a few minutes apart.

Yesterday Ann and I went to Home Affairs in Parramatta so she could undertake her Australian Citizenship test. She had been studying hard for weeks, reading and revising pages of the sometimes arcane information that comprised the various sections of the examination. I read through it myself and confess that there were a few things I didn't know or had forgotten. I suspect that many Australians would likely fail the test.

But she passed with 100% and I am very proud of her. In a few months she will receive her official documents and will be an Australian citizen. JJ will become one too by dint of her being under 18 years of age. Hopefully my myriad and complex dealings with Home Affairs have now come to an end.

On the way back I spotted this plaque and spent some time in its midst, considering the great man. The like of him will not come again.

When I first started teaching in Sydney's west a colleague in the English Department gave me a small blank notebook, the kind that has a smart faux-leather cover. I must have told her that I liked to write poetry because I remember it had an inscription to that effect. I filled it fairly quickly with old poems that I had collected on scraps of paper - juvenilia really - lines that I would blush at reading today.

Shortly after I bought a much weightier tome, one that might accommodate a couple of hundred poems. From then on until about mid-nineties, I'm guessing, I wrote all the final drafts poems by hand into this book. They were close enough to the finished product, though some would need reworking at a later date. Writing is always an endless process of editing, is it not? In any event, I hoped that one day I might publish a slim volume of the best of this collection- say 30 out of the 200 odd that I had written. This was not a delusion - I had received encouragement to do so from a number of learned quarters.

Alas, somewhere in between house moves in the late 90's, this volume went missing and has never since been found. I suspect it somehow got put into one of the book recycle boxes that were destined for a charity shop. I was so devastated - this was, after all, my magnum opus - that I could not write another long-form poem until a year or two ago. Twenty years had passed. By that time I was feeling that the haiku form that I was using was just too restrictive. So, for better or worse, I have begun writing again.

These days we have copies of copies. It is hard to lose anything for good. I guess if I had bought my first PC a little earlier, those 200 poems might have found their way onto a floppy disk.

The Turning

The tree by the gate is turning,

Last of the brood, green leaves

Now burning in the sun-

Brittle cast on bones

That grieve for the loss-

Brethren pause and dawdle 

And toss about at any stir,

Their veins dry as shale.

‘Leaf-litter’, I heard said,

Odd, that artefacts of life,

Should seem so stale, 

Confused with human junk,

Missing the point instead.

It’s the yearning, now pale,

Unredeemable, yet returning

To that venerable place

Where once it happily bled.

 

There is a much about the journey of life that involves some kind of suffering. Even if you are born in a safe, prosperous country, of able body and mind, in a reasonable, ordinary family, then adversity of one sort or another will come your way. It is an ancient grievance, a topic and study for philosophers and theologians.

The modern remedy is usually to seek out happiness in whatever way one can. The pursuit of happiness is a given these days - the spin doctors will tell you that it usually resides in owning things, in superficial alteration, on keeping up with others. There is much work to do on the self, goes the mantra. Of course, this advice often has the opposite effect, creating lonely, competitive people who don't understand why the medicine doesn't work, or why it only takes effect for a short time.

There are a zillion books on the subject and I suppose most of them have some merit. Reaching a modicum of happiness is not an unreasonable goal, though, as I have written about before, it should largely come as a by-product of pursuing other goals, such as the immersion in the moment that can come through a much-loved activity or job. We can't get enough of those moments but there is no such things as a continuum. They are discreet and proscribed by time and space.

So it was interesting when reading a Schopenhauer essay on suffering a night or two ago when I came across the great philosopher's thoughts on happiness. Striving for it is in vain - that way lies anxiety, depression and disappointment. Rather he notes, one should try to reduce the amount of suffering in one's life. Only by identifying and defusing those things can cause us to suffer can we begin to approach something like a state of happiness, though we may not recognise it as such. 

Not all suffering can be eliminated, of course, though how we think about what causes us to suffer is as much the problem as the solution. That's what CBT is all about. The Stoics had a crack at that too. But just reimagining the whole shebang that is 'the getting of happiness' is worthwhile, a project more doable then striving for something that is largely intangible.

We are back in steam train season. It is not uncommon to hear a heaving sha-sha-sha-sha-sha accompanied by a loud blast of air, as a locomotive climbs the long hill up to Hazelbrook and beyond. For two days now, the renovated and magnificent 3801 has been pulling carriages up and down the mountain, with the assistance, I might add, of two diesels. I wouldn't begrudge the old girl some help on the continuous climb from the plains.

I was out cycling an hour ago when I noticed people gathering on bridges and overpasses and guessed, rightly, that she was soon to make a reappearance. I didn't have a camera, but nevertheless post this great photo taken yesterday afternoon (courtesy of Ken Wallace), as the train makes its way back down the mountain. On the right are the Hazelbrook shops.

Ann and I fronted up for our first AstraZeneca shot on Thursday. The weather was wet and windy and the makeshift marquees that had been set up months ago for testing and vaccination groaned and shook at each gust.

Now, two days later, we have both had fevers and headaches, but they have subsided and hopefully that is the end of the side-effects, fingers crossed. At the time of the shot we were briefed thoroughly on all that might go wrong, though it was thought unlikely to. The media beat-ups make the risks seem far greater than they are.

We are very lucky to have sufficient vaccine in  Australia and effective, though not full-proof, public health systems. For once, there had also been effective government management in both here and New Zealand. We are also blessed with ocean borders.

It behoves us therefore to offer the maximum support that we can to those countries struggling beyond their capacity to cope. This is a wealthy land and we have an obligation to help, to be generous, to exceed all expectations. I have my doubts about the current generation of politicians and their narrow focus. But I do hope, nevertheless.

And even as things begin to return to normal in some parts of my life, others remain somewhat weird. While conspiracy theories and their ilk do not touch upon me personally, they continue to proliferate and mutate.

At first, I thought the originators of these fictions must be pranking, using social media as a conduit for outlandish tales and speculations. Some folks like to test the credulity of their peers. Teenagers are prone to consuming nonsense, but they can be forgiven because they are kids, after all. 

But increasingly I realise it is adults who are creating and believing this evidence-free blether and no amount of fact-based refutation can shift them. Often, they deny the facts, claiming these are part of the said conspiracy. It is a circular argument that brooks no logical intervention. And yet all of these people once sat in classrooms in which they learnt, presumably, to think and argue rationally.

What's the harm, you might ask? Why not let folks entertain such fantasies? The problem is, as I see it, that the withering away of the real and the rational will inevitably lead to a greater ebbing of faith in things like government and allied institutions. In a world in which the most bizarre things can be believed, anything can be believed. And that is a dangerous world to live in.

I encourage critical thinking and asking questions about the socio-economic and political order. I am all for crap-detecting. I built a teaching career upon it, amongst other things. But planting a flag in a dung heap and saying you have found gold is quite another matter.