Saturday, February 19, 2005
Grape grazing
Paris set out last night for his annual visit to cousins in the Yarra Valley who have him over about this time each year for the Grape Grazing festival. Apparently, or so he tells us, the place gets 'innundated' (I told him that was an insensitive choice of words!) with 'chardonnay sipping pinkies' (a breed of human he despises) and he and his cousins take great delight in 'pissing on them from a great height'. This is a less charming side of Paris we prefer to let him indulge away from 'family'.
It did give Farouk and me an all too uncommon chance to chat into the small hours about the state of the nation. Farouk is very perturbed of late: he has read about the horrendous circumstances of Cornelia Lau, an Australian woman with a psychiatric illness detained without treatment first by Queensland police and later at the infamous Baxter Immigration Detention Centre because part of her persecutory hallucinations was that she was an 'illegal immigrant'. Though one must wonder whether that was an illusion! Some might suggest that Australia itself is presently caught in a great national hallucination, and the back of the cubicle door got it right: "It's alright to be paranoid if the world really IS against you!"
Farouk is an alien, you see, who takes great delight in sitting on the ground playing in the dirt - a 'new Australian' who came to these parts precisely because in his native land liberty is taken lightly (literally). He views these events with foreboding and the insight of a culture where nationalism has grown into the greatest of evils. He tells me he genuinely fears for Australia.
My sense is otherwise: not fear, not apprehension - what's the right word for the genuinely empathic response to tragedy? How did Alan Paton feel when he penned the title, Cry the Beloved Country?
It did give Farouk and me an all too uncommon chance to chat into the small hours about the state of the nation. Farouk is very perturbed of late: he has read about the horrendous circumstances of Cornelia Lau, an Australian woman with a psychiatric illness detained without treatment first by Queensland police and later at the infamous Baxter Immigration Detention Centre because part of her persecutory hallucinations was that she was an 'illegal immigrant'. Though one must wonder whether that was an illusion! Some might suggest that Australia itself is presently caught in a great national hallucination, and the back of the cubicle door got it right: "It's alright to be paranoid if the world really IS against you!"
Farouk is an alien, you see, who takes great delight in sitting on the ground playing in the dirt - a 'new Australian' who came to these parts precisely because in his native land liberty is taken lightly (literally). He views these events with foreboding and the insight of a culture where nationalism has grown into the greatest of evils. He tells me he genuinely fears for Australia.
My sense is otherwise: not fear, not apprehension - what's the right word for the genuinely empathic response to tragedy? How did Alan Paton feel when he penned the title, Cry the Beloved Country?
Sunday, February 13, 2005
It's been a long time
... but it's amazing how long it takes to write a poem ...
tsu
any port in a storm? the place
to find fresh fish! I saw the foraging kids
cloven from the beach
the Causes of the Terrestrial Convulsions
Lisbon, All Saints, 1755
what is metaphysics? A dark ocean without shore and lighthouse
nami
certainly different from a pulse; understanding
why two waves introduced into a medium
with perfect timing might produce
a point of displacement
“the pumps of the entelechy, its push and pull,
are attraction and repulsion”
Run, climb, clamber, mount -
that's what the Geographic Survey says!
The contemplation of such dreadful events is edifying [lehrreich]
On the feast of Stephen
