Someone needs to write about the wonders of swimming-pool saunas in Sydney’s Inner West. While we’re waiting, here’s my 14 lines’ worth.
November verse 10: In the sauna
Some days we sit and sweat in silence. Others, it’s as if the heat dissolves some barrier, gives licence. Chat can flow and minds can meet, perhaps with bonhomie and bluster, pre-cooked jokes, a rant or just a monologue on weed or booze, or mild debates about the news. Tattooed gym-boy, taxi driver, yia-yia, rap star, tattooed youth, an old guy with a missing tooth: all these bodies, like Godiva almost naked, shoot the breeze, and no one’s sent to Coventry.
Today’s stanza draws on a passage from Middlemarch in which Ladislaw, whose hair is ‘not immoderately long’, argues the superiority of poetry over painting. The first two lines are almost a direct quote.
November verse 10: Pictures and words Language gives a fuller image, all the better as it's vague. Paintings flaunt their frozen plumage, stare insistent from the frame in finished, silent imperfection. Neither love nor harsh rejection crease a portrait's botox brow. No worm forgives the painted plough. Life as lived is full of noises much diviner than what's seen (or, on occasion, more obscene). The air resounds with speaking voices: one picture can delight your eyes, a thousand words can make you wise.
If you’re in Sydney this coming Sunday – 27 November – you might like to drop in on this exhibition opening and book launch at the Shop Gallery in Glebe at 2 pm. The book is Rompitaj Labirintoj / Bung Mazes, poems in English and Esperanto by Kit Kelen (about whom I have blogged a couple of times).
I have the honour of being the English-language launcher, and will do my best to say something coherent. A different Jonathan wll do the honours in Esperanto. I’m pretty sure there will be music and nibbles.
The book, which I’m loving, is available for purchase at Booktopia.
I won’t name the podcast. I suppose if I had been listening with real interest I wouldn’t have got snagged on what is after all a common usage these days, but it was drilled into me in primary school that one lies down and lays the table, lay down and laid the table, and my mind evidently still replays the nuns’ rebukes from 1954.
November verse 9: Yelling at my phone
She said she just laid in the water.
I shouted at my phone: Laid what?
The language changes and I ought to
take it in my strides – why not?
Give someone an intensive purpose.
Let him join an army corpus,
answer questions someone begs
and buy the dozens that are egg's.
Sneak peaks aren't fit to die on.
The world's just right for doggy-dogs
but still wrong for slow-boiling frogs.
The planet warms, we may be dying.
As we near that final night
at least let's try to spell it right.
In case any of the references are obscure:
line 4: the correct idiom is ‘take it in my stride’
line 5: ‘to all intents and purposes’ means something; ‘to all intensive purposes’ doesn’t
line 6: ‘Corps’ is pronounced to rhyme with ‘core’. And in my opinion ‘corp’, short for ‘corporation’, should be pronounced as written
line 7: ‘To beg the question’ does not mean the same as ‘to raise the question’. In classical logic, it happens when an argument’s premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it
line 8: Apostrophes aren’t necessary when an s is there to indicate more than one of something. (Apostrophes are probably necessary hardly anywhere, but that’s another argument)
line 9: It’s a sneak peek and a dog-eat-dog world
line 10: The analogy of a frog that won’t jump out of boiling water if it boils gradually may be instructive, but I’d like to know if there’s any evidence that frogs are that stupid
The weatherman on ABC News the other night spoke of graupel, a lovely word that was new to me. It almost does the impossible and rhymes with purple.
November verse 8: Graupel
The heavens opened, down came graupel,
baby hail. The storm soon passed
and downstairs' lawn shone green, white, purple –
jacaranda, ice and grass.
A rattling downpour, hints of thunder,
then this calm nine-minute wonder.
For a moment we knew grace,
La Niña showed her lovely face.
Not so in Molong, Forbes, and Nowra.
There La Niña went to town
to rip and drench, to smash and drown,
then flashed her worst at poor Eugowra.
She's no god we must appease.
Code red: 1.5 degrees!
Added later: Photo taken from our kitchen window of our downstairs neighbours’ yard. The jacaranda blossoms don’t show up in this photo, but they were there.
I was going to have a couple of days break from versifying, but yesterday morning demanded rhyme.
November verse 7: Demo
We met outside the bank this morning,
placards, microphone and drums,
to amplify the climate warning:
No more cash for coal, you bums.
This movement’s male and white no longer:
cheerful, young, brown, female, stronger
than it’s ever been. Today,
though many heads were white and grey,
the ones from Asia and the oceans
led us, spoke of rising tides
and fossil-fuel based genocides,
derided short-term profit notions,
knew how to push the envelope
and temper urgency with hope.
The National Australia Bank, in spite of having a policy of not funding new fossil fuel ventures, is actually lending billions of dollars to Whitehaven Coal, which has no policy of cutting emissions and plans to mine vast amounts of coal for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile island nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are in trouble. The Move Beyond Coal movement has just finished an Australia-wide Week of Action targeting the NAB.
For decades newspaper cartoonists have laboured for metaphorical links between the Melbourne Cup and the US election that fell on the same Tuesday in November. This stanza labours a link between astronomical and political.
November verse 6: Eclipse
Here the streets were full of gazers,
faces to the shadowed moon.
No pyrotechnics to amaze us:
cosmic lightshow, gone too soon.
A woman said, 'It's good so many
came outdoors, when there's Sweet Fanny
Adams profit to be made,
just heaven's bodies on parade.'
But over there the lines of voters
braced themselves for Thunderdome
(though far too many stayed at home).
The climate, SCOTUS, former POTUS:
stakes are high this northern Fall –
this Tuesday’s poll could doom us all.
I had read just eight pages of Middlemarch, two mornings’ worth, squinting through sleep bleared eyes, when a kind friend lent me her copy, a beautiful two-volume edition from a German publishing house that is set in type that will demand less effort than the on I picked up from Gould’s bookshop.
In other reading this month, when the protagonist of Ian McEwan’s Lessons reads the novel written by his estranged wife, he finds to his chagrin that it is brilliant, and includes ‘high-flying digressions offered up to the ghost of George Eliot’ (page 243).
So far, it’s not so much high-flying digressions as sharp authorial observations on the side that are delighting me. For instance, in the first scene where the gorgeous, privileged Rosamond Price and plain, less privileged Mary Garth have a scene together, there’s this brief excursion into the abstract:
Plainness has peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign amiability, or, not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent: at any rate, to be called an ugly thing in contrast with that lovely creature your companion, is apt to produce some effect beyond a sense of fine veracity and fitness in the phrase.
(Page 130)
Part of the pleasure of this kind of thing is that it’s ironic. The narrator goes on to attribute to Mary the ‘vice’ of speaking with a satiric edge, a quality the narrator herself has in spades. There’s always a sense of the narrator as a character here, one who has a lot in common with George Eliot herself. In this example, it’s hard not to read the comment as springing in part from Eliot’s own experience of being seen as plain (‘horse-faced’, I dimly remember). The novel’s opening words, ‘To my dear husband’, affirm that George Eliot is a woman, and I guess she could assume that the English reading public knew who she was.
When I read Middlemarch in 1968, it was as part of an exhilarating immersion in literary classics. In the little notebook where I listed the books I read, it appears on the same page Racine’s Phèdre, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, and books by Pinter, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Descartes and Rabelais. So reading it now, with that tsunami well in the past and without my 20-year-old predisposition to awe, is like meeting it for the first time.
I’m pretty sure I picked up on the ironic tone back then, but I doubt if I understood that the affectionate mockery of the idealistic heroine Dorothea and her pragmatic sister Celia, of gorgeous Rosamond and her flibbertigibbet brother Fred, and of ‘plain’, sarcastic Mary all has to do with their youth. The narrator is in love with their lack of world-weariness, and I’m in love with them too, as I doubt I was the first time around, however much I loved the book.
Mind you, I’ve read to the Emerging Artist a couple of passages that gave me joy. She responded to the first with a noncommittal noise, and to the second, ‘Now I know I was right not to read past the first page.’ So it’s not a book for all tastes.
So far, Dorothea has committed herself to marry the dried up old stick, Mr Casaubon. Youngish Dr Lydgate has arrived in the area full of reforming zeal. Rosamond, whose beauty no man could resist, is determined to marry someone from outsides Middlemarch and Lydgate is a likely prospect. Fred is in love with Mary, who has been his friend since childhood. The older generation is rife with intrigue to do with religious intolerance, political ambition, greed, and owning-class pretensions. So far, it’s a frothy comedy of manners as told by an immensely erudite and morally serious narrator.
This morning, there was some dialogue worthy of Oscar Wilde. Mary is responding to Fred’s proposal of marriage, which we understand has been made many times before::
‘If l did love you, I would not marry you: I would certainly not promise ever to marry you.’ ‘I think that is quite wicked, Mary. If you love me, you ought to promise to marry me.’ ‘On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you even if I did love you.’ ‘You mean, just as I am, without any means of maintaining a wife. Of course: I am but three-and-twenty.’ ‘In that last point you will alter. But I am not so sure of any other alteration. My father says an idle man ought not to exist, much less, be married.’ ‘Then I am to blow my brains out?’ ‘No; on the whole I should think you would do better to pass your examination.’
(Page 162)
I hope they end up living happily together, rich or poor. I know their love’s path will not be smooth, any more than that of any of the other potential love matches.
This happens every Tuesday, though the musical accompaniment is usually Latin disco rather than Glee.
November verse 5: At the Active Seniors Class
Meek we are, like lambs to slaughter – not for killing, nor still young. Lead us on, we say, no quarter, keep us active, though we're bung. A back, a knee, a frozen shoulder, nameless aches from growing older, long in tooth and short of breath: we've miles to go before our death. 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger': that's the soundtrack as we squat, lunge, lift weights, tighten cores, get hot and sweaty. Can we last much longer? Then it's stretches, brief applause, and back to life outside those doors
No sooner had my last verse mentioned the joys of staying up all night than this happened. Please don’t read this as arguing that the solution to all problems is to call the police
November verse 4: When neighbours have a noisy party
I wake at two, hear thumping music,
sink back deep inside my dream
of old alarms. But meanwhile you stick
useless earplugs in, you scream
a silent (thank you!) scream, phone coppers:
Don't chase crime, be music-stoppers.
You pace, you read, drink water, weep:
the lads next door have murdered sleep.
And I snooze on, as some through warnings
scientists give on climate change,
through so much violence, so much strange
and deadly in our world. This morning
cops at last came, put things right.
Your vigil brought a silent night.
Me fail? I fly! 