I woke in the night to the sound of rushing air and rattling windows. When I had gone to bed some hours earlier the night had been very still, as it has been for weeks now. We have had very mild temperatures for this late autumn and the only nocturnal sounds came from possums scampering across the roof or hissing at each other.

The act of waking to a change in things reminded me of the drought a decade ago. Months of dryness had accustomed us to a certain soundscape both in and outside the house. One night I awoke to an odd noise, one I had almost forgotten - water gently moving through gutters and drains. Recognition took a while, perhaps a minute or so.

I have become far more acutely aware of noise over the last couple of years. Recording programs for 2RPH from home has made me far more sensitive to the total sound environment about me, from screeching cockatoos, magpies strolling on the tin roof, trucks on the highway and diesel trains lumbering down the line. And of course, the many, many power tools!

from, Autumn Wind   John Clare

The Autumn wind on suthering wings
Plays round the oak-tree strong
And through the hawthorn hedges sings
The years departing song
There's every leaf upon the whirl
Ten thousand times an hour
The grassy meadows crisp and curl
With here and there a flower
There's nothing in the world I find
That pleases like the Autumn wind.

 It is little wonder that many people retreat into a world of personal concerns when the wider world seems so grim. Attending more closely to matters of family and friends, houses, shopping and holidays is probably easier than dwelling on the the wars in Europe and the Middle East, the potential for war in East Asia, the threat of climate change - well , I could go on. Good news is in short supply, while cute dog and cat videos abound.

It is emotionally wearying to focus on the relentless cycle of awful news with the knowledge that more is to come, going on endlessly into the future. There are, of course, people who take an interest in current affairs - some of them are camped on university lawns as I speak - but is not necessarily a balanced interest. Balance seems to be out at the moment.

I'm not sure where its all heading but I continue to hope that adults are still in charge and that, despite appearances, they are talking to each other.

 My son Tom and his girlfriend Emma moved into their first rental apartment at the end of last week, drawing a line, I hope, under their former dependency on Mum and Dad. At 18 years of age, it is still quite young to be taking on the responsibility of paying rent, shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing - doing all the adult things that neither of them have done before.

We have tried to help as much as we can with donations of basic items, furniture and a refrigerator. I think that it is likely to be a challenge and hopefully, a moment to take stock and grow up. I feel a sadness too, a sense of loss, that is only too natural.

I wish them both the very best of luck. Of course, they are daily in my prayers too.

 My last post was not a shot at folks who claim to be 'doing it tough.' There are undoubtedly people with large mortgages, loss of employment, illness, divorce or separation and so forth who are struggling and have been pushed into their lot by circumstances, many outside their immediate control. And of course there are many people who live on welfare payments or who have fallen into homelessness, for whom the struggle has merely increased. They have always had it and likely will always have it.

My observations are society-wide. Affluence, the steady increase in the standard of living, has brought with it a mindset of prosperity in which having nice things and doing nice things are just how it is and how it will always be. Politicians of all-stripes have encouraged this expectation, fearing that the electorate will not tolerate anything less, or that the opposing party will not exploit any weaknesses in the rhetoric.

And let's not talk about the obsession with property prices. The almost daily serving of property news seems to me to be a good metric for measuring the underlying anxiety that consumerism must surely produce.

I think that we will learn the hard way that acquisitiveness does not create meaning in our lives. Rather it just clutters and confuses, leaving little joy in a long trail of things that promised much but delivered very little.

 Pretty much everywhere you look these days in the media, the talk is of a 'cost of living crisis.' I don't ever recall hearing the phrase used in the past, even during periods of high inflation. 

This is at least partly due to the tendency of media organisations to exaggerate any troublesome event - storms become 'rain bombs', for example. There is a crisis around every corner and an editor ready to beat up an item.

Sure, the CPI had been unusually high over the past few years, but we had inflation in the seventies and few obsessed over it the way many do now. Is it just the news media that is responsible for incandescent language?

I think not. Back when I was a kid, homes were modest, with a single bathroom. Children often shared bedrooms. There was a single TV with four free-to-air channels. There were no streaming services to subscribe to. You saw it on TV or at the movies or you didn't see it. You heard it on the radio or you lashed out for an LP to play on the one family stereo system, or you didn't hear it.

If you add in all the subscription costs to streaming services, plus the the cost of the internet, plus the cost of all the devices, plus the extra cars parked in the drive, plus the takeaway/home delivery meals, well I could go on and on, then part of this 'crisis' is manufactured in ordinary suburbs all around Australia, living beyond their means.

I don't want this to sound like old fogeyism, but I doubt that people are any happier or less stressed. The stats certainly tell us otherwise.

Researching material for inclusion in 'Writers from the Vault' (2RPH Monday 6.30pm) leads me down a lot of rabbit holes. If I can't find what I am looking for, then I will always find something else. And that something else leads on again. I enjoy the process after the initial frustration passes.

Yesterday I was at the 'Victorian Web' page and found a long essay* about Christina Rossetti. Of course, I was off topic by a mile, but it held my attention because the piece in hand was looking at aspects of poetry theory, specifically tractarian ideas on the subject. (The tractarians were a movement in the Anglican Church which pushed for the return to certain old rites of worship to be reinstated.) 

The essay notes that,

Poetry can provide "a solace for the mind broken by the sufferings and disappointments of actual life; and it becomes, moreover, the utterance of the inward emotion of a right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give" (English Poetic Theory, Warren)

Another commentator has explained, "the inner emotion that is purged is not so much pity and terror as a yearning for something beyond." That yearning is the theological analogue, we might say, of Wordsworth's "something evermore about to be." "Poetry has its source in a powerful emotion natural to all men, an emotion that rises up to seek expression and in expression finds relief. That emotion is religious: it is the desire to know God." 

Both are interesting points. Even if you leave aside the religious aspects, the idea of poetry as being a 'solace for the broken mind' seems very true to me. I write some poetry, a paltry output really, but the sense that I am writing something out of myself as a kind of purging seems truthful.

*Pre-Raphaelite Aestheticism and Pre-Raphaelite Sacramentalism in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti
Anthony H. Harrison, Professor of English, North Carolina State University

I have been twice to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and both times been deeply moved. It was hard not to be angry at the sheer absurdity and wickedness of Nazi ideology, though I preferred to depart with sadness. Having studied this part of world history in some depth, I was never short of context for what occurred, but knowing more about what happened and why it happened is not necessarily helpful when confronted by old photographs, family heirlooms, letters and diary entries. Those, and the empty spaces where once a family hid.

I had thought that the Holocaust that occurred during WW2 would unlikely be forgotten, taking a place in deep memory alongside huge historical events such as famous battles, incidents and people. It is a different kind of memory for sure, for its is hard to explain in any rational way and is unendingly grim in nature.

But I think maybe I am wrong, for only a couple of generations from the event and its consequences, the re-emergence of antisemitism is a real thing in many parts of the world. I won't catalogue the examples that I have read about. In one way I am not so surprised for, even if we look at the emergence of Israel in terms of what occurred 80 years ago, there has always been a legacy of hatred towards Jewish people. It's a very old thing indeed and its has taken a war against Hamas to bring it back to the boil. Never mind what you think about the current Israeli Government (and I take great umbrage at it), antisemitism has deep historical roots that may never be expunged.

I was wondering why was getting so many Anne Frank posts on my FB page. Perhaps it just a reminder that we need to heed the lessons of the past, lest we stumble into the same ones again in the future.

I am pessimistic about this though. Learning history is not what it was and too many people are ignorant of the facts. The internet buzzes with mindless nonsense. What's to be done?

Memory is a funny thing. It is possible to put something down in one room and then completely forget that you had done so. And yet I can recall very specific events from my, say, early in my schooling days. Perhaps it's the importance we attach to such things that matters most, allowing the mind to develop it's own hierarchy of memories.

A few posts ago I mentioned that I had thought that I had bought a particular volume of Thomas Hardy's poetry only to be a total loss as to where it was. Being a recent event made this even more perplexing, so I began to second-guess myself and consider the idea that I had dreamt the purchase. After all, I could find no record of having bought it, nor could I find the book.

So I bought another online. Just before it arrived I was looking through my library when I noticed the spine of a book that had fallen to the back and was barely visible. Yes, you guessed correctly. It was the Hardy poetry book.

Is there a lesson in this other than the fact that I now have a copy of this wonderful poet to share with someone else?

Sunday Before Advent

The end of all things is at hand. We all

Stand in the balance trembling as we stand;

Or if not trembling, tottering to a fall.

The end of all things is at hand.

 

O hearts of men, covet the unending land!

O hearts of men, covet the musical,

Sweet, never-ending waters of that strand!

 

While Earth shows poor, a slippery rolling ball,

And Hell looms vast, a gulf unplumbed, unspanned,

And Heaven flings wide its gates to great and small,

The end of all things is at hand.

I have shared poems by Victorian poet Christina Rossetti before. Many are religious in nature though she also wrote a wide selection of secular verse. The one above is clearly of the former type, yet it is possible for anyone, no matter what their beliefs, to gain something from 'Sunday Before Advent.'

Consider the opening proposition, 'The end of all things is at hand' which is repeated twice again. You don't have to be a Christian to take a note of the state of the world and the kind of pleasures that blind people to how dire things are becoming. Money, technology, distraction of all kinds are leading the human race into seriously dangerous territory, the withdrawal into ideologically squabbling tribes only compounding matters. It's not that having things and wanting things are bad in themselves, but the elevation of the material into the realm of the 'only good' puts them out of balance, creating a new kind of slave class.

Do they know if they are 'tottering' or 'trembling'? I don't know.

 If you have a smart phone or even a not-very-smart-phone, then you will probably be familiar with the predictive text function that can be activated for text messaging and the like. Often as not, it is the default setting and you are obliged to wade your way through menus and sub-menus to turn it off. But who wouldn't want an AI program that helps when you misspell or mistype words, right? Everybody loves a helper.

Except when it not a helper. And that seems to be most of the time with my predictive text function, which offers up absurd or plain incorrect alternatives and is impervious to learning from my most frequent mistakes. Because I am two finger typist and a one-finger messager, I often get simply words around the wrong way, if yuo get ym dritf. But the program never learns from these simple errors.

Worse, it often inserts preposterous guesses, such as 'lesbian' for 'I've been' and is very poor on verb agreement. How many times have I had 'has' rendered as 'had' and much worse besides.

Much is made of an AI revolution and the threat that might bring to organic life, should the former develop some level of 'digital sentience.' But I think the problems that are inherent in predictive text programs augurs well for us. Just imagine a text from a central AI unit to commandeer all smart phones going horribly wrong (for them). The self-destruct button will always be a possibility if instructions turn to gibberish.