mystique of the proletariat

So Many Particulars

2012-01-17T13:09:00.000+11:00

One part Lucian, one part Brecht, three parts Arrian. And as Oscar would say 'all garbage all the time.' However it tickled my fancy, so read it or ignore it as you wish, I have already moved on.

Euoi, Euoi, Saboi!
The ecstatic raging followers
Of the loud roaring, ivy wreathed
God chanted and danced, and the songs
Reverberated the forest glens
And quiet coverts of the wide flooding
High banked river Indus. Icy cold
Waters tumbled from glaciered vast
High mountains. Closer to the world
Encircling river than the laughing
Shouting drunken god the myriad
Companions did march. Strong Herakles
Cursed and kicked the barren ground before
The most steadfast Sogdian rock.
Macedonian soldiers grew wings,
Flew up the cliff face in the murky night,
And so conquered what stymied Herakles.

Nothing could stop, no one could stop
The conquering god-king Alexander.
Not the wide fast flowing rivers,
Not the lazy streams flowing to marshes,
Not the dizzying gorges, not the cloud
Gathering mountains, not the howling
Jangling deserts, not the walls of island
Proud Tyre, not the mysteries of sand
Blown trees of the oasis of Siwa,
Not the massed cedar built long boats
Of purple clad Phoenicia,
Not the fire worshiping magi,
Not the mud built bitumen mortared
Walls of Babylon, of Susa,
Of Persepolis, not the seven walled
City of stars Ekbatana, not the
Rabbis of Jerusalem, not the Gates
Of Persia, not the battle fleeing
King of Kings, not the tattooed
Boulder hurling liberty loving tribes,
Not the craggy walls of ancient Thebes
Where only darling Pindar's house remained,
Not the foot stamping naked Buddhists.
Nothing could stop, no one could stop
The god-king Achilles reborn.

Naught but the sorrow of the hosts, the ones
That marched and fought and explored and said
Finally this far and no further,
For we are tired and our dear ones
We miss, our wives, our children, our aged
Fathers and mothers. For we have been
From home for as long as Menelaus
Before the walls of windy Illius.
This far we go and no further.

Only thus was Alexander stopped.

Golden throned Hera

2012-01-06T14:19:00.000+11:00

Hymn 12 To Hera.

Of golden throned Hera I sing!
She was born of Rhea.
Queen of the deathless ones
She is foremost in bearing.

Sister and wife
Loud thundering Zeus.

Glorious she is,
And all the blest
Of high Olympus
Stand in dread of her.

And they honour her
Equal with Zeus
Who delights in thunder.


Hera is an old god, attested to in Mycenaean tablets as E-ra. Her name
is open to interpretation. Maybe related to Hora, or season, to show
that she is ripe for marriage. One of her roles is the Goddess of
marriage. She is often represented (as is Demeter) in a three fold
aspect. The Girl (Pais), The wife (Teleia, which also can mean the
perfect, the fulfilled, without blemish), and finally the Widow
(Chere). In this she shows a history the live of women. Is it also
representing the yearly cycle spring, summer, winter? Every year she
regains her virginity by bathing in the sacred stream Kanathos, in
Samos her anionic plank was washed in the sea.

Chadwick sees her name as being the feminine version of the word
hero. Or maybe it is the feminine version of master, that is
mistress. Regardless her temple at Samos is the first enclosed temple,
dating back to 800BC. Before this she is represented aniconicly as a
pillar in Argos, and a plank of wood in Samos. Argos being one of the
cities she loved best, the others being Sparta and Mycenae. 

Was she a remnant of earlier matriarchal religion and society? Rather
than seeing myth as 'other people's religion', it may be better to see
myth as other people's history. Was her marriage and subordination of
Zeus, as well as her frequent opposition and jealousy to Zeus an echo
of this great overturning? Do not the frequent punishments that Zeus
feels he has to mete out to his wife point to the period of struggle
that must have arisen from an overturning of matriarchy, and could the
overturning have proceeded any other way than by violence? I do not
know enough to be able to give an firm answer, but my 'feeling' would
be yes, this is what happened and the marriage of Zeus and Hera is a
record of the rise of the patriarchy.

We can look at for example her hostility to Herakles, her hostility to
the many 'affairs' of Zeus, and also his response to her infidelities.
Many beatings and once even tying her to a cloud, with anvils on her
feet. The punishments of her lovers, Kalypso, complains in book 5 of
the Odyssey about the unfairness of the male gods taking lovers, and
punishing the females for doing the same thing. Could we also see
echos of this in her various epitaphs, such as (Iliad 8.209) Aptoepes,
fearless in speech, as well as Neikei, fond of quarrels or strife. How
many women toady to are referred to in these shrewish terms? Does all
this point to Hera as being a woman who is oppressed and yet still
striving for her freedom?

Cows are sacred to her, as are peacocks. She is also often shown
holding a pomegranate or an opium poppy. The pomegranate, as well as
being the symbol of Kore, is the symbol of the ancient Great Goddess.

In my translation I down played her beauty and tried to reinforce the
idea of her being equal to Zeus. I hope I did not do too much violence
to the originate poem.

The Barren Sea

2011-12-31T12:31:00.000+11:00

Hymn 22 to Poseidon

About Poseidon I begin to sing!
Mover of the earth and desolate sea
Lord of the Deep!
He Enfolds Helikon
And wide Aigai

The honoured gods divided
Amongst themselves the world.

And two fold is your share, Earth-shaker.
Tamer of horses and saviour of ships.

Hail Earth-holding,
Deep sea dark maned Poseidon!
Blessed you are, and generous of heart.
Give aid to those who sail upon the sea.

Poseidon is in some stories the senior brother of Zeus, in others he is the younger brother. Regardless of seniority the brothers Zeus, Poseidon and Aides (with the initial A sound being aspirated, that is pronounced with an H sound - therefore Hades) drew lots.

Zeus won the sky, this can be seen from the etymology of his name, from the PIE Deyus; the day or *dyeu to shine (this is better seen in the Roman name Jupiter which means something very much like the sky father.) Poseidon won the seas, the origin of the name is more problematic, and can mean something like the Husband of the Earth, or (to me more likely) Lord of the Waters. Plato, in his dialogue Cratylus, thought the name could come mean Knowing many things, from Polla eidotos or Polla eidon, but from my amateur efforts this seems to be a going backwards and trying to find the name given in the past from the present. Some others authorities feel Poseidon is an older pre-Greek name, found on Mycenaean tablets at Knossos as po-se-da-wo-ne (Mycenaean alphabet was syllable based, not letters), so from at least 1100 BC. He is associated with Demeter, and is not yet the sea god, but is already at this stage the earth shaker. An obviously important aspect in Ancient Crete. Maybe he came to Greece as Anatolian God of Horses.

The third brother Aides, whose name means 'the unseen', won the kingdom of the underworld, which he ruled with Demeter's daughter Persephone.

It seems as if many of the ancients thought that the earth, was like a plate that floated on the sea. Is this the source of the idea of Poseidon being the earth-holder? I can not say for sure, but intuitively this seems to me to be the case. The sea that Poseidon has rule over is of course the Mediterranean sea, with Okeanus being the river that flows around the entire earth.

One word that caused me considerable consternation was the word atrugetoio. Many of the words of the ancients are remarkably elastic, having many different uses. One thing I have learned in this past year or so of vainly trying to make sense of Ancient Greek, is that there are many Greeks. Many variations on the language. With only a short step back one can see that this is true. The language covers the time frame of, of let us say, 800BC (about the time of Homer and Hesiod) to, again let us arbitrarily say, about 350AD when Constantinople was consecrated. Even here we are talking about long time periods. Constantinople was founded on the location of Byzantium which was first colonised in about 560BC, something like 890 years earlier. England was under the rule of the Normans, in China it was the height of the Song Dynasty, and in France Aberlard was castrated in the equivalent distance, which would be sometime about 1120AD, 890 years ago. The ancient Greek language was spoken over a long period of time, and over a large area, from Sicily to the banks of the Indus. All of this points to a diversity of Greek. And so the basis for my confusion concerning the word atrugetoio.

Once I understood that this was the Homeric version of the genitive case, I was able to make some sense of what was said. The first, and most common translation I got for this word was unfertile, unfruitful. It did seem a bit confusing to call the sea unfertile, but understandable as well. I do not, unlike some commentators, feel that the Greeks did not understand the idea of the riches of the sea, one only has to read some of the old texts, dig around into the cookbooks to understand that sea food was very important to Greek culture. I would think we would have to look at the sea from the eyes of the navigator, the sailor. Or as Coleridge said; in what has become a clichéd construction, "Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink". Autenrieth, in his Homeric Dictionary had a reference to the word meaning restless. This seemed to make sense to me, as a restless ocean can not be harvested. Atrugetos, a later form of the same word is defined as having the prefix 'A' meaning a negative with the word Truge, meaning a crop, harvest, vintage and the like (with hoi epi truge meaning the grape-gatherers.) So this leads us to the literal meaning of not-harvest.

Other dictionaries, while agreeing that Atrugetos is an epitaph for both the sea and the air (aither) explain the word as meaning restless, unwasting. This can easily be extended to mean barren, desolate and the like, and is seen in the Iliad (1.316) (They) sacrificed to Apollo prefect hecatombs of cows and goats on the barren sand beside the sea. Here it describes the sandy beach. Being elastic the word also came to be used to describe death as the 'fruitless night' (of sleep.) My Pocket Oxford Dictionary seems to want to please everyone and uses the definition of unfruitful, desert; ever-fluctuating. In the end, after much tossing and turning I came to land upon desolate. Creating the image of the sea (from the eyes of the nautes) as being a howling wilderness.

Helikon, the mountain of Muses who taught Hesiod how to sing, and home of the fountains Aganippe (as a cult aspect of mare-headed Demeter it means something like 'the mare that destroys mercifully') and Hippocrene (from hippo meaning horse and krene meaning fountain.) Helikon is sacred to Poseidon, maybe in his role as Lord of the Horse. Also sacred to Poseidon is Aigai, mentioned in the Odyssey 5:398 'Content that Odysseus was suffering in the open sea, Poseidon lashed his horses and made his way to Aigai.' also in the Iliad 13.19 'Poseidon strides towards Aigai with the countryside trembling under his feet.'

The final interesting confusion to me was the description of Poseidon as being kuanochaita, or dark blue/purple haired. Kuanos is the word to describe the blue enamel which was used to adorn armour, or lapis lazui, also the dark blue of the ocean and the blue corn flower. So with so much to choose from I had to go with deep sea dark maned. (Although the punk in me wanted to give him purple hair.)

The image is from http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/K2.1B.html

The Raptor and the Ravens

2011-12-23T14:42:00.000+11:00

A Raptor
Lives in the area.
I watch her
Wide brown winged
Effortless
Still flight.

Flying slow and low
Over the burnt
Summer sun grass.

Suddenly she swoops
And seizes.
Embraces the sky,
Something black
And struggling
Her talons.

Suddenly from
Out of nowhere
A murder of ravens
Chase and harass
Her.

Until she drops
Her burden.
Rapid the robbers
Devour.

I speak with my prodigy.
What can this mean?
What can you foretell?

She stands silent
For several minutes.

All of your work
All of you efforts
Will be gobbled up
The rapacious ones.

Phoibos - the bright one

2011-11-24T04:22:00.000+11:00


Number 21: Apollo

O bright one! 
The swan beats 
time with wide wings, 
And
Loudly sings 
of you 

and settles 
the river bank 
beside
The ever flowing
River 
           Peneios. 

Of Thou;
The sweet sounding singer 
carrying  a clear toned 
lyre

First and last, 
Always 
She sings. 

Hear my rejoicing 
In you,
             Master.
 
I appease you with song.

Straight away I liked the image of the swans flapping wings to bring about a successful landing on the river bank. Singing and keeping time with wing beasts. All in honour of Phoebes Apollo. Phoibos, the bright one. Who was, in revenge for a mocking Eros who was bragging how he was a better shot with the bow, was shot by an arrow of the butt of his humour. Apollo fell in love in Daphne, and like the equally cursed Kassandra, she scorned him.

Daphne, fleeing the lust of Apollo, prayed to her father, Peneios, one of the potamoi. The Potamoi were the 3000 river gods, sons of Oceanus (Okeanos) and Tethys (Tethus). In a short sighted attempt at protecting his daughter, Peneios turned her into a laurel tree. The laurel became sacred to Apollo.

I could not refuse myself the small echo of Heraclitus, in describing the Thessalian river bank where the swan settled.


Hear my rejoicing 
In you,
             Master.

This line caused me some pain. The word in Greek is Anax.

Anax is from an earlier word wanax, which is found on Mycenaean inscriptions, meaning Lord or Master. This word can be found in Homer, and is used to describe Agamemnon, anax andron, leader of men. (Iliad 1,442). Xerxes and Darius are called Lord King. In the tragedy Persians by Aeschylus line 5 we see anax Xerxes basileus. This word is also used in sense of master of the house (oikoio anax); and in a descriptive and telling Homeric simile from the Odyssey (10,216) 'As when the dogs fawn about the lords during a feast.' All of this seemed to me to show a hierarchal relationship. So, as I was forced by dictionaries to choose between lord and master, I chose master. Lord, while fitting, and being the more traditional translation, had a Christian connotation that, for various reasons, I was happy to avoid.

Master has a brutal simplicity, or if you prefer a simple brutality, and this simplicity is able to quickly describe the master/servant relationship of the Deathless Ones (athanatoi) with the Brotoi, the Clots of Gore.

Pleasant enough it is in our easy chair to, while glowing in opium dreams of Swinburne or the more austere Nietzschian tumult, to romanticise the relationship the Greeks had to their gods. To the Deathless humans are mere playthings. Zeus wanted to depopulate the Earth, he brought forth as a conspirator Momus, a scoffer, the personification of reproach, blame and disgrace, or spoke to Eris as the personification of strife. Or maybe it was Themis. It all depends on what you read and take to canonical. Themis being one of those untranslatable characters. She is a Goddess of Order, of 'Doing the Right Thing.' In the Cypria it is the pity that Zeus feels for Gaia that is the origin of the Trojan War. `There was a time when the countless tribes of men, though wide-dispersed, oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed earth, and Zeus saw it and had pity and in his wise heart resolved to relieve the all-nurturing earth of men by causing the great struggle of the Ilian war, that the load of death might empty the world. And so the heroes were slain in Troy, and the plan of Zeus came to pass.' And Plato agrees `That it is Zeus who has done this, and brought all these things to pass, you do not like to say; for where fear is, there too is shame.' Regardless of how it was brought about we can clearly see that the Gods are only to happy to commit any number of crimes, murders, rapes, kidnappings etc using humans as toys. Leaving a trail of abused and broken mortals in their wake.

Like all good tyrants the Gods cheat when it suits. In a musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, Marsyas had played Apollo to a standstill, with Apollo playing the lyre against the flute of Marsyas. Apollo fearful of losing to a mortal challenged the satyr to play his instrument upside down, and then again while singing along. The flute playing satyr of course could not do these things. Apollo celebrated his victory by flaying Marsyas alive.

So quickly we move from the epiphany of the wide winged swan to the ever present threat of instant death, for the Deathless Ones will brook no insolence. They know their power and are not afraid to use that power, depending on the whim that strikes. Leaving the author of this hymn to beg for the attention and pleasure of Apollo. Like the Homeric fawning dog at the banquet table hoping to appease the master, and so gain a crumb of affection or dinner. Much like the members of the 99%.

Or said much much better than I ever could - Rilke First Duino Elegy (coincidentally) Duino is just outside Trieste where Joyce was living at the time.


Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.

Klutotechnes

2011-10-26T00:48:00.000+11:00

Homeric Hymn 20 - To Hephaistos

Sweet voiced Muse
Celebrate with song
Hephaistos, famous
For his cunning devices.

Along with flashing
Grey eyed Athena
He taught the groundlings
Glorious labour.

Formerly
They dwelt
The hollows,
Of mountains.
Like fabulous monsters.

And now:
Thanks to Hephaistos;
Renown for his arts,
They learnt
The many skills that allow
An easy life. Maturing
The cycles of the year
With their own families.

Be gracious Hephaistos.
Deliver prosperity and wealth.

Hephaistos was the Greek god of (for lack of a better word) technology, artisans, smiths etc. Technology being from a Greek word techne. As a noun it means art, skill, method of doing things, including soothsaying. It also has to 'bad' meaning of cunning. As a verb the meaning is pretty much the same, to make by art, to execute skilfully, also to contrive cunningly. Hephaistos is described as being KLUTOTECHNES - famed for his skill.

As a nod to the reality of the type of work, Hephaistos was lame, walking with golden leg braces he made for himself. Robert Graves says that smithies were often made lame to keep them from running away, I do not know enough to comment on this, however I do know enough about the harsh reality of hard manual work to see the obvious link. It made be hard for us to understand, but metal working would have been seen as something much like magic for the ancients, agreeing with Arthur Clarke's third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Some say that Hephaistos was the child of Hera and Zeus, while other tales have him born parthenogenetically from Hera alone. Either way the child was ugly, and in embarrassment Hera threw him from Olympus. He lived under the sea in the grotto of Thetis (later the mother of Achilles) for nine years. Later Hera was reconciled with him, and he returned to Olympus, and given Aphrodite as his bride, who later cockculed him with Ares. In revenge Hephaistos made a strong net of golden thread capturing the illicit lovers, and causing much laughter among the other gods.

Hephaistos sided with Hera in opposition to Zeus, and he was again cast out of Olympus, falling for nine days, landing on the island of Lemnos, which in antiquity was the site of volcanic activity. (Later the island was used as a base for the ill fated Gallipoli campaign in 1915.) After Zeus relented in his anger Dionysus was sent to retrieve him, and getting him drunk her brought him back to Olympus on a donkey, this being a popular scene in Athenian vase paintings.

Hephaistos shared a temple with Athena, as she was the goddess of cunning in warfare. Some suggest that the name Hephaistos means he who shines in the day time, while Athena was a moon goddess, with the owl as her symbol. Every year, on the last day of the Pyanopsion (in November), there was a joint festival, where the Arrephoroi, young girls (aged 7 to 11) set up the loom that would be used to make a peplos for the statue of Athena. The festival was also in honour of artisans.

The Old Men of Argos Huddle in Terror

2011-10-06T02:27:00.000+11:00

From Aeschylus tragedy Agamemnon, Line 1020.

Over the weekend there were two football grand finals on television. On the Saturday Geelong and Collingwood struggled in a close run thing for three quarters until the Cats skipped away and won the game. On the Sunday Manly defeated the Warriors. On the Sunday night, for reasons which had nothing to do with football, I was unable to sleep. Having not much else to do, I read the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. More exciting than football, the creative spark forced me from my bed. I am not fluent in my translations, one could compare my technique to a person attempting to solve a cryptic crossword. My lack of skill or fluency does not stop me, for my main goal is to learn and to gain fluency. In this instance the only way to learn is to read.

This piece is from Agamemnon, the first part of the Oresteia. A wonderful, brutal, strange and powerful work. Agamemnon has just returned home from the long war against Troy. Home to Argos and to his wife Klutaimnestra, who has set herself on killing him. She feels she is in the right, as he sacrificed (murdered) their daughter Iphigeneia. She was sacrificed to allow the Greeks to launch their campaign against Troy. For ten years the war dragged on, and for ten years Klutaimnestra, the wife of Agamemnon and mother of Iphigeneia, nurtured her hatred and desire for vengeance. Who could blame her? Even the old men of Argos agree 'blame is present against blame, difficult it is to judge. He endures who is enduring, the killer has to pay.'

Using flattering words, a warm bath, and a krater of drugged wine, wielding her sword and a net, Klutaimnestra rolled out the wine dark carpet for the returning hero. She stabbed him twice and killed him. Splattered with blood she plunged the sword a third thrust to convince herself that the deed had been done.

This passage is from one of the songs of the Chorus of Old Men. The old men sense that something is amiss, but unlike the audience they do not know what is to come to pass. They are fearful for Agamemnon as he strides across the barbaric carpets. He seems to be taking on the manners of the East, of the Trojan king Priam. Klutaimnestra appeals to his vanity by telling him that the feet of a hero should not touch the dirt. The old men see this an affront. The red carpets flow from the palace doors and across the stage. The Phoenician carpets call to mind the wine dark blood which has flowed across generations of the House of Atreus and which will soon flow again. The old men are scared and they sing a long passage, of which I cut out a bit to make a (hopefully) nice little poem. In ripping fifteen or so lines out of a much larger poem I can only do violence to the original, but I have endeavoured to minimise the harm.

Robert Browning is not much spoken abut these days, but he was insightful in many ways. I agree with him in the spellings that he uses, for instance I much prefer Klutaimnestra to Clytaemnestra, Kassandra to Cassandra. He did some very literal translations from the Greek. He did this in opposition to current ideas about the beauty of the Greek language. In this he showed ancient Greek to be a highly flexible, and at the same time sparse language. This sparseness, which is increased by the heightened language of the tragic form, is a peg that allows the translator to hang any garment desired, be it gaudy or plain. I think this was the point that Browning tried to make in his, even to this day, despised translation of Agamemnon.

As a example let us look at the last line of this passage (line 1034), in Greek it reads, Zopuroumenas frenos. From the dictionary we find out that Zopuroumenas means kindle into flame and frenos meaning midriff, or breast and by extension heart, mind, sense etc. (As an aside Zopuroumenas can also mean kindle into life, as in the quickening of the embryo.) In Browning we get 'the enkindling mind.' From E. D. A. Morshead we get 'my soul is prophecy and flame' which Robert Fagles in turn translates as '...and the brain is swarming, burning.' Which is best? Which is most correct? Which is nearest to the mind of Aeschylus?

The Old Men of Argos Huddle in Terror.

Once upon the earth
One's life blood black.
Can anyone with charms
Sing it back?

Once there was one who rightly knew
How to call back the dead.
Fearful Zeus struck him
Thunderbolt dead.

Had not the deathless
Arrayed our portion
Against another,
Bright laughter
Would burst forth.
Outracing
My heart.

Now
However
The lower gloom
Beneath the darkness.
Sick at heart,
I murmur and grumble.
Unable to hope
For that opportune day
To unravel, and so
Bring to an end.

Kindled my heart leaps into flame!

The pic is from http://www.theoi.com/image/F6.1Artemis.jpg

Polytropos

2011-09-14T14:16:00.001+10:00

Hermes is fast becoming one of my favourite of the ancient Greek gods. Why is that? He is, like Ulysses, referred to as polytropos - being of many turns. Tropos is a word that has several meanings. Many of the words in ancient Greek had to perform many tasks. Most of the definitions of tropos centre around being a turn, a mode, a fashion or a manner. From this we get our modern, maybe overused word trope; meaning a figure of speech.

Versatile. Cunning he was, a thief and a watcher in the night. He stole the cattle of Apollo and built the first lyre from a tortoise shell and the guts of the stolen cattle. A rover and a drover, the bringer of dreams and of good luck. As he is messenger between the gods and mortals he becomes the guardian of boundaries and the guardian of interpretations. He protects harlots and thieves and crones. In his mode (or trope) as messenger he helps travellers and runners. He is often shown as an adolescent in the art works, alluding to role as a guardian of transitions. It was in this role as guardian of boundaries that he suffered the sacrilege referred to as the Destruction of the Hermai. Statues of Hermes had been set up in many places in Athens. These were simple blocks of stone with the head of the god, as well as his exaggerated phallus. These markers were also rumoured to ward off evil. On the eve of the ill-fated Sicilian Expedition unknown vandals smashed off the penis, as well as (even worse) mutilating the face of many of these statues. This was understandably the cause of great anxiety in the city, and in retrospect should have resulted in cancelling the project, which become in many ways the Stalingrad of the ancient world.

Hermes may be an old god, for he is mentioned in Linear B inscriptions found in Knossos and Pylos as e-ma-a. Others traditions say that he may been an import from the East. Although to my thinking it is best to think of the Eastern Mediterranean as being a single culture. Regardless of his origin he was worshiped in the more remote, wild places such as Arcadia. As such he was the patron of farmers and shepherds. Amusing to me to think the laconic dry witted farmer type gave rise to the smooth talking interpreter. From his early shaman origins he would have been involved in divination, of crossing between this world and the other. Evolving into the trickster dream bringing god, and giving us the words hermetic and hermeneutics.

Also it is interesting to compare Kriophoros Hermes (Ram Bearing Hermes) to early Christian imagery of the Good Shepherd. But that is another story for another day.

Polytropos indeed.

Homeric Hymn 17 - To Hermes

Of Cyllenian Hermes I sing! Slayer of Argos,
Guardian of Cyllene and of Arcadia
Rich in flocks of goats and sheep.

Luck bringing messenger of the gods.
Own child of Maia, daughter of Atlas,
Who had intercourse with Zeus.

Bashful she shunned
The crowded tumult
Of the deathless ones.

Into her shaded cavern
Came the son of Kronous.
To the young fair haired
Cutely trimmed new wife.

They made love in the dark
Of the night entwined in her hair

While smoothed limbed
Hera slept sweetly.

They escaped the notice
Of the deathless gods
And the mortal ones.

Of you I rejoice,
Son of Zeus and Maia
Of you I begin,
And so pass over
To other melodies.

Rejoice!
Joy giving guide,
Bringer of good luck.

pictures are from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:0007MAN-Herma.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hermes_crioforo.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Good.Shepherd.Vatican.Museum.jpg

Apis the Egyptian brought medicine

2011-08-20T02:13:00.000+10:00

Homeric Hymn 16 - To Asklepius

I begin to sing of the Healer of diseases Asklepius
Son of Apollo, born through Koronis, daughter of Phlegyas,
In the Dotian plain. A great joy to the mortals,
Soother of the evil pains.

Rejoice Lord, my prayer to you is my song.

Asklepius was god of medicine. His father was Apollo and his mother Koronis. One tradition relates that she died in childbirth, and Apollo took the baby from her womb. The flames of the pyre parting, allowing him to tear his dead lovers belly open. Another, more brutal, tale tells how after intercourse Koronis spurned Apollo for another. He then killed her, maybe with his hands, maybe with his bow. In both variants the child was torn from Koronis and given to the centaur Chiron to be raised. This Caesarian birth also explains the god's name which means something like 'cut from' (or then again maybe not.) The child was taught medicine, and so became a great doctor. During his adventures, Athena gave him some of the blood from the right side of the gorgon, which gave the power to raise the dead. Blood from the left side, being of course deadly.

With this power came the downfall of Asklepius. Maybe he was killed because raising the dead angered cloud-gathering Zeus, or maybe Hades fearing his kingdom would be emptied had a word to Zeus and angered up his blood. I prefer the version where he was killed for charging money for raising the dead. For the warmth and light of the sun, then plants that grow from the fields, the rivers that flood and revitalise the land, and this and more are freely given by the gods. Not, as in Christian thought, because the gods love us, but rather it shows how much more powerful the gods are than us puny mortals.

And in anger for killing his son, Phoibos Apollo killed the Cyclops who had made the murderous thunderbolt.

An Argonaut, Asklepius was married to Epione, the soother of pains, and they had six daughters.

Hygeia - goddess of hygiene and cleanliness
Meditrina - the serpent bearer (goddess of the healing power of wine in Roman times)
Panakeia - goddess of cures (literally all-healing)
Akeso - goddess of healing process
Iaso - goddess of recuperation
Aigle - whose name is Radiance.

They also had three sons.
Podalirius, Machaon who. as unsuccessful suitors of Helen were bound. As soldiers and surgeons they raised thirty ships to fight at windy Ilium.
Also Telesphorus, the possibly Celtic, dwarf whose name means bring to fulfilment.

Asklepius had a staff with one snake wrapped round it (not the staff of Hermes, the Caduceus which has two snakes, and is sometimes mistakenly used as a medical symbol), this may symbolise the 'straight' path of health, compared to the contortions caused by illness. Temples built to honour him were similar to, and very different from, modern hospitals. Snakes, sacred to Asklepius, and used in treatment, slithered the wards where opium was used to allow surgery to take place.

the pic is from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Asclepius_and_hygieia_relief.jpg

Nepenthes

2011-07-16T23:18:00.000+10:00

image from http://www.minervaclassics.com/tthhconc.htm

Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda thought.
She ached with their sorrow, she straightaway threw
Into the wine charming herbs. Then they would be
Drinking soothing sorrows, allaying anger
And the forgetting of all evil.
She in the krater mixt and all gulped down
The wine. And not for the whole day through
Would tears fall down their cheeks. Not even
If his Mother or Father fell down to death,
Nor is his bother, nor his beloved son were
Hacked to pieces shining blades in front his eyes.
Such was the knowledge of herbs the daughter
Egg hatched of cloud gathering Zeus, learnt from
Poludamna, she who overcomes many,
Wife of the Egyptian Thonos. A great many
Sorts of herbs bring forth the corn bearing land.
Many are mingled and overcome disease,
Others overcome and bring misery.

All the Egyptians understand and are healers
For they are all of the time of Paieon.

Remains of the temple to Menelaus and Helen in Sparta - image from http://www.panoramio.com/photo/51879369

Helen is a favourite character of mine, not because of her alleged beauty, although I must admit that would surely be part of it. She was the daughter of Leda and Zeus. The cloud gatherer raped Leda and she gave 'birth' to two eggs. Out of one egg came the twins Castor and Polydeuces or the Dioskouroi. From the other egg came Helen and her sister Clytaemnestra. Clytaemnestra is an even more interesting character than Helen, and will hopefully be the topic of a later piece. Suffice to say she is one of the strongest women in Greek mythology, and her tale is the subject of the wonderful Orestia trilogy of Aeschylus, who died in Sicily when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it, hoping to crack the thick shell open.

We all know the tale of Helen. How Zeus wished to kill off the humans, and so allowed Eris, the personification of Strife, to roll the apple of discord inscribed with the one word Kalliste (the dative, or indirect object superlative of the word fair or beautiful, so it means to the fairest) amid the three goddesses Hera, Aphrodite and Athena. To settle the argument Paris was asked to be the judge. He was bribed with the hand of Helen in marriage. And this lead to the Trojan war.

What intrigues me in all this, is the tale told by Herodotus (book 2, 120) that Helen was never in Troy, but rather in Egypt. Ten years of war and sorrow and death followed. Much like the WMD and the war in Iraq. (As an aside I hope I live long enough to see the secret papers of the Australian cabinet released, petty maybe - but we all need a goal.)

This section I have translated is from the Odyssey, Book 4 starting at line 219. It tells of Telemachus searching for information about his long absent father. He goes to Sparta to speak with Menelaus, and the discussions of what happened during and after the war make them sad. Helen then adds some drugs to their wine, and this seems to be some type of opiod which defeats their sorrow. So strong it is that one would not even shed a tear to see their children hacked to pieces in front of them. Pretty strong stuff indeed.

Some points to consider. Poludamna means 'she overcomes many' - overcoming disease or overcoming life. The Greek word used has many meanings, but they seem to revolve around the idea of taming, and is used to describe making a wife. The word Nepenthes is something like soothing sorrows. I used the word charming, as it is one of the epithets Homer uses to describe Troy. The word Chalko (the ch is pronounced like in the Scottish loch, and the O at the end is the letter omega, long or big O - so it is the long O sound) means copper, but is used in this situation in the same way we would say a person was gunned down.

Unless you are a Greek geek you will probably not enjoy this as much as I enjoyed translating, but either way I hope you enjoy.

Kubele

2011-06-28T01:31:00.000+10:00

Here we see Cybele (Kubele) being pulled in her cart by lions, in a image taken from http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Cybele.html

Hymn 14 to the Mother of the Gods

Sing clear tone Muse, daughter of Great Zeus.

Sing the mother of all
Mortal and immortal.

She is well pleased with
The rattle of seistron
The clashing of shields
The wail of flutes, the cry of wolves
The roar of bright eyed lions
Echoing across wooded mountains.

Rejoice in the goddess and sing your song.

The Mother of The Gods. Identified with the Minoan Rhea, and the Greek goddess Gaia, among many others. A complex series of tales and rituals surround this goddess. She is the source of the extraordinary poem by the Roman poet Catullus, a powerful work that talks of the frenzied rituals of the goddess, and the remorse of the self castrated acolyte.

Cybele seems to have existed in the pre-historic bronze age eastern Mediterranean region, and extended across most of the cultures of the time. Even in Rome, where she was brought during the Second Punic War (about 204 BC) to fulfil a Sibylline prophecy. This was seconded by the oracle at Delphi. As the Romans defeated the Carthaginians, it must have been true.

As a goddess of ecstasy the Great Mother existed across much of Bronze Age Europe, only to be overthrown by the Sky King Gods. With a series of names and attribute, she is far too complex a deity to discuss successfully on this blog, I will leave the discussion here, and leave any more research to the reader. Remarking only that the pathway from a primitive communist, matricentric society to our present patriarchal existence could only have been physical violence.

Erida - Goddess of Strife

2011-06-21T11:49:00.000+10:00

A couple of paragraphs from the Iliad. Two sections where we see the external nature of war. Of how the feelings of soldier are manipulated by larger forces. In this case the will of Zeus, but let us see it as a metaphor for our society, where War seems natural and opposing your neighbour passes for society. I used more words in these translations, as it was important to create some context for the passages, as we are only dealing with a few lines out of over 15,000 in the epic.

Book IV of the Iliad, Strife and Fear and panic stricken rout arise with Strife and discord. A love of the sound of battle of the clots of blood. She spreads discord and strife among Charming Ilios and the Danaoi. Strife starts off little and then grows; until, with feet striding the land her head is in the heavens. And I am reminded of the blood lust of my fellows and the generals and politicians and the perverters of language, and the mockers of democracy and how we must honour our dead by keeping the wars going. So strife feeds on strife and storms the very gates of heaven, suffocating in blind remorseless fury, the children of the poor.

I am sure one who is smarter than I am will find a deep misogynist strain in Homer, and his feminising of discord. As for myself, I struggle with simple translations.

Book 4 starting line 439

Some are called forth by Ares, some by iron eyed
Athena. So arises Fear and panic stricken
Terror. And Strife who desires cruelty,
Sister and concubine of Ares destroyer of men.
Small she is, to start, armed, but soon
Her head rises to the heavens. Across the land
She strides. She spews strife to all sides
Equal, as she goes among the tumult,
Increasing the lamentations of men.

Book XI of the Iliad. Those who feel that history is made by great men, and that history appears as a series of wars and violence will find much to hardened their positions by reading this epic. It seems to me wrong to discuss the Iliad with modern eyes, as the poem seems to me to be denying modernist ideas of free will. In the beginning of book eleven the Achaeans have suffered badly at the hands of the Trojans, and many are dejected. It is the plan of Zeus that the war continue. He sends Strife down to the encampment and she screams and fills the hearts of the army with hatred, with love of battle, sweeter even then the thought of going home.

Book XI starting line 14

And then Erida rose to her full height -
Eyes dripping blood. She called out great
And terrible. Penetrating into the hearts
Of the Achaeans. At once war become
Sweeter than going back in the hollow
Ships to the beloved land of their families.

Can we see our own throwness in the works of Homer? Torn asunder from our beloved land we are captivated by our supposed freedom. The power of Capital toys with our lives, in a similar way to how Zeus toyed with warring Greeks and the Trojans. He set them to strife and even goaded them to second effort when they began to falter. This was his plan, Zeus wanted to depopulate the Earth. War was his answer, and it was only too easy for him to find willing accomplices in their own extinction. As it is only too easy to find today many who wish for war, and forsake multilateral solutions and worship at the cenotaph. Empty tombs of the empty lives of our dead, honoured by old men. Or as Lenin said there was no crisis from which the bourgeoisie could not escape provided the working class was prepared to pay the price.

We are not as superstitions as the ancients, but we still sacrifice our children on hard stone altars, praying for a wind that will blow an invisible hand onto our scales, allowing us to fight our enemies, and to gain great wealth. It is, of course, wrong to see Capital as a supernatural power. Yet for the vast herd that roams the land having no understanding of what drives them, no grasp of simple history, of how the world became this way, having nothing but disdain for the workings of the scientific method, knowing nothing of the intricate web of interconnected wealth which builds up the foundations of everyday life, and of thought itself, they act and move as if controlled by far off gods who drink and love and mock the tiny ones who live not a true human life, but rather a shadowy passing of time. Lacking above all curiosity and imagination.

And yet both the Gods of the old days, and the Wealth of our modern age, are nothing if not our creation, the common structure and therefore the common inheritance of countless hands and hearts and minds.

The image is Achilles getting new armour from his mother. He is going back to war Why? His friend was killed, and the only way to honour his death is to add to the pile of death.

War and Anti War

2011-06-14T13:52:00.001+10:00

I was reading an only moderately interesting book about the Trojan War. Among the cliches of a conflict of cultures and the battles of East and West, I came across some good quotes from out of Homer.

So like a good little geek, I had no choice to look up the original, and make a stab at translation. Mucking around a bit with what I ended up with, lead me to this two little pretend imagist works posted here.

These lines are Odysseus speaking to Agamemnon. Things are not going well for the Greeks. Odysseus lets his captain know that this is the lot of soldiers, and they will have to fight until they die. He seems to be pointing to the cruelty of the gods and their callous disregard for human life. Maybe we can see the gods as standing in for the historic and economic forces in our lives, and how it can seem to the unexplored mind that war is natural and a normal part of life.

When in fact we all know that it is possible to end war.

(Iliad Book 14.86)

This Zeus has assigned.

We are to endure,
From insolence
Into grey age,
Painful war,

Until we perish.
Everyone.

In this second quote, Odysseus is even more clear as to who should wear the blame for the war. It is clearly the work of the gods, and Zeus in particular. He seems to see the war as a toy of the gods, and the death of the many as being of no importance to the deathless ones.

(Odyssey 14.235)

Along this hateful path
Far sounding Zeus
Led many
Knee bent men
To their death.

The image depicts the battle about the body of Patroclus, and is from a greek vase. More can be found here
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Images/BattlePatroclus.jpg

A free and frank city

2011-06-04T03:24:00.000+10:00

The Suppliants: lines 399 - 408

Herald:

Who is the ruler of this land?
To which one shall I announce
The proclamation of Creon?

He has mastery of the lands
Of Cadmus, since Eteocles
Died under the blows of his own
Brother Polynices, outside
Thebes of the seven towers.

Theseus:

You begin your tale
Falsely, stranger,
Seeking tyrants here.

Not for us the authority
Of one man, rather we are
A free and frank city.

The people rule and are ruled
In yearly turns. And what's more wealth
Will not grant you the most, for even
With the day labourer are they equal.

Theseus killed the Minotaur. He became one of heroes who brought the Greeks into the light, into the world of the city.

I was struggling my way through the final chapter of "Politics in the Ancient World" by M.I. Finley, when he quoted from the Euripides play "The Suppliants." Anything to have a break from the arid style of the former Master of Darwin College, Cambridge. And anything in these dreary days of apathy across the Angloshpere that speaks to progressive ideas is a boon.

Knowing that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and with more enthusiasm than fluency, I dove into an attempt at translation.

I used ruler as opposed to tyrant in the first line, as I wanted to see this brief exchange as a critique on our own democracy. Euripides himself was both a supporter and critic of democracy. This is as it should be, criticism and self criticism. I thought it was important to use the world frank to describe the free city of Theseus. The phrase in the original is eleuthera polis, which means free city. I thought I had to go deeper, as it seems as if free is a heavily loaded word, one which means many different things to different people, one that over the years has lost some of it's lustre. A few of the synonyms for eleuthera included free, liberal, open, unencumbered, open to all, as well as my final choice of frank. One of the positive features of Athenian democracy was the idea of frank speech, even if only in theory. A citizen who was to speak before the assembly was expected to speak truthfully, including being truthful with themselves. This what is meant by the motto "Know thyself." How much this was actually followed in daily life I dare not say. Australians only have to look at their own mythology of mateship and the fair go to make their own conclusions as to how moderate and self aware the Ancient Greeks really were.

Beyond the 'woolly' idea of being able to speak frankly in the assembly, this simple exchange allows us to sneak a peek between the curtains, into a window on Athenian democracy in action. The people rule and are ruled in yearly turn. The citizens are expected to rule, to take an active part in the actual running the government, as well as debating and voting on policy and strategy. Ruling and ruled in turn. Beyond what we learn from Euripides, we know that Athenian democracy included payment for work done for the state, as well as the use of lotteries to allocate positions. Citizens were questioned before they took up their appointed roles, and reviewed at the end of the yearly appointment. We also know, if only negatively from the constant complaints of the literate aristocrats, that democracy in Athens was for a time extended to the lower classes, the rowers and the day labourers. Side by side with the well born the day labourer was expected to speak, and his speech was expected to be heard. Again as to how equal the assembly really was, I dare not say. It does seem as if the sheer expense of the political contest, as well as the large size of some electorates, act as a ration card for political activity by the great majority of people. Lotteries also seem to have an advantage, in that it would be harder for positions to ossify, as they do in our current regime. Lotteries and fixed terms form all positions would end the idea of people being in parliament as a career.

With the current impasse in politics in the West, any idea that extends the ideas of democracy is worth thinking about and discussing.

Pic from: http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/gallery/theseusminotaur.jpg

Postponer of old age

2011-05-17T03:34:00.000+10:00

Hymn 10: To Aphrodite

I will sing Cyprus-born Cytherea.
She gives to mortals tender gifts.

Upon her lovely face, ever smiling,
The mischievous bloom of beauty.

Hail Goddess of sweet-tiled Salamis,
Ruler over sea girt Cyprus!

Grant me charming melodies.

Your song sung, I shall
Recall still others.

From Canto One by Ezra Pound
In the Cretan's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, oricalchi, with golden
Girdle and breat bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicidia. So that:

Aphrodite the foam born goddess, rising from the severed, flung away
genitals of the God Ouranos. She arose from the ocean Chaos, and
danced across the foamy salt sea waves, grasses and flowers grow where she steps. Born fully fledged, she never had a childhood. The cuttlefish and the sea urchin are sacred to her, for even down to our so called enlightened times many of us still think of seafood as an aphrodisiac. Myrtle, roses, poppies, doves and swans are also sacred to her.

She has many names and functions, many more than the concise, accepted
into polite company versions of her myth are able to encompass. Some
of her names include; The Eldest of the Fates, The Black One,
Man-slayer, and Aphrodite of the Tombs.

In Sparta she is Aphrodite Ambologera, the postponer of old-age. Also
we see Aphrodite Morpho, the well-formed, here she is in fetters and
wearing a veil, a vain attempt, an altogether simple-minded plan to control the goddess. Another temple is Areias, meaning warlike, or devoted to Ares. Sexual passion and the blood-lust of battle both being seen as impetuous, as action without thought. Unlike Athena, the Goddess of Strategy in War. In commercial Corinth, as well as militaristic Sparta, she is seen as a defender of the city, as a warlike Goddess.

Like all the ancient gods the tales of Aphrodite a mass of contradictory stories and attributes. She is ready for battle, she is beautiful, she is cruel and she is sentimental. Like all things she is a mixture, and when the stew is no longer stirred, it will separate, and separation means death. Copper eyed Aphrodite, the laughter loving goddess with quick glancing eyes, riding on a swan across the sky.

the pic comes from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aphrodite_swan_BM_D2.jpg

Helper of the hospitable

2011-04-26T01:03:00.000+10:00

Ares, the hated son of Zeus & Hera. Thracian God of War, as a Thracian
was he seen as being outside the ordered world of the Greek polis? Was
war then seen to be a barbarian activity, as an outside force to be
shunned and feared? In Sparta they would sacrifice puppies to Ares, and
they had a statue of Ares in chains, on theory that if the Lacedaemonians
kept Ares is chains then they would forever keep their martial spirit.
In a similar way Athens erected a statue of Nike Apteros; that is wingless
Victory, so she could not leave the city.

Ares whose war cry was as loud of 10 000 men. Lover of Aphrodite (does
this show Greek fear at the irrational, disruptive and eventually
destructive nature of sexual love?). In a typical example of the
ancient Greek love of dichotomy, Ares was held in opposition to
Athena, in that she represented strategy, rational thought and
intelligence applied to war, the just war, warfare to defend the
polis. Ares on the other hand was an anthropomorphic shadow of
bloodlust, of the dashing off into the icy cold din of battle.

Ares would side first with one city, and then with another. He
represented the love of battle itself. His sacred animals were the
vulture and the dog, as they would feast upon the not always dead
bodies of the battlefield. His attendants are Deimos, dread fear
personified, and Phobos, panic stricken flight, the supreme at war
goddess Enyo, destroyer of cities. Also in attendance to Ares would be
found Eris, the personification of Strife. Eris took delight in battle
and in human bloodshed.

Some have Eros born of the union between Ares and Aphrodite, for
myself I would agree with Hesiod and make Eros one of the original
gods. For it is desire that allows us to remake the world anew.

This poem was a fun one to translate, lots of operatic language and
imagery. The first five of so lines are a list of attributes for
Ares. Reminding me of ALP's mamafesta (a feminising of the word
manifesto) starting on page 104 of Finnegans Wake. Of course Joyce had
to take it too far.

I tried to show the Greek desire for a well ordered life, for the
following of custom, for knowing what is to be done, and what should
not be done. If one followed the customs of the polis, in particular
the custom of hospitality, Ares will grant victory. But for the
heretic, for the one who disdained the mores of the people Ares would
be a tyrant, meeting force with force.

I can make no claim at being a classical scholar, I am at best a vain
poseur, and I am sure that my translations can not fully illuminate
the thinking of people who lived over two thousand years ago, but as
always I hope you will at least grant me my petty pretense. For I at
least had some fun writing this poem, and even more than that I was
able to learn a bit more about the world around me. And as we slowly
meander our way to the eternal void what more can any of us hope to
receive.

The image is of Ares & Aphrodite and it came from here:

http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/K9.3.html

Homeric Hymn 8 - To Ares

Surpassingly strong Ares,
Prevailing with chariots, crested of gold,
Strong willed, Shield bearing, City protecting,
Clad in shining bronze, Strong hearted,
Untiring, Mighty with spear,
Bulwark of Olympus.

Victorious good-at-war Father,
Helper of the hospitable,
Tyrant to the hostile.

The well-ordered he leads to the light
Bearing his sceptre of courage.

He sets spinning his fiery bright
Shield above the clouds, across
The seven-pathed constellation.
There forever his foals,
Full of fire, steer him.
The third firmament
Above the orbit.

Hearken champion of the ones who bleed,
Giver of courage to the youth,
Kindly pour down your radiance
From on high, giving sustenance
And warlike courage. Allow that I
May be able to rout sharp cowardice
From my thoughts, and bend my deceitful
Soul back to it's senses.

Restrain my anger and blood-lust,
Restrain my charge the icy din
Of battle. - But thou courage give.
Blest one, let me abide without harm
Within well-ordered peace;
Shunning ill-will, tumult and
The call of the queen
Who is violent doom.

SOS

2011-04-11T00:51:00.001+10:00


The local theatre group, Sorell On Stage put on a production of the
play 'Beyond a Joke' at the local memorial hall. So we packed up the
children and headed out to see the piece. This is as much me having
a conversation with myself, and trying to solidify some thoughts, as 
it is a review. Either way it was a good opportunity for me to get 
upon my hobby horse and ride the queen's highway. 

What is Art?  

Many people, mostly smarter than myself, have wrestled with this
question for a long time. My own fragment of a contribution sees art
as being primarily a social activity. Colour, Line, Melody, Speech how
ever one describes art, however one looks at art, it all comes down to
our species being, our socialness - zoot politikon as the philosopher
would say. Even the archetypal Proustian character, after sleeping
through the day and sitting alone at night in his sound proofed room,
typing his life into art, is working in a social context. Indeed this
tension between the individual and social drives much of what we
call culture. 

Why Social?

Going back to the very misty olden times plays were performed in the
open air, in public places, and the clans and tribes would
gather. Music, dance, painting, and poetry. All this and more come
together to create theatre. Even a modest production requires many
hands and many heads. As the German playwright Bertolt Brecht once
famously asked, 'Who built the seven towers of Thebes?' 

Why Theatre?

More than other art forms theatre shows us clearly the social nature
of art. In the charming agricultural proscenium auditorium memorial
hall of Sorell the local theatre group performed Derek Benfield's 1979
play 'Beyond A Joke.' A Sweeney Todd blood fest of modern life. A
quiet couple, in a quiet house surrounded by many blossomed trestles,
in a quiet village. Tradesmen enter, but do not leave. The son in law
over hears a conversation between the husband and wife and assumes the
worst. Was it only a series of unfortunate accidents, or was there
murder at the heart of this cosy family? In the best traditions this
question is never resolved, allowing my wife and I to have an
illuminating conversation with our children concerning unresolved
tension.

Why Local Theatre?

Art is more than smooth lines, more than cut and dry grammar, more
than tightly controlled hexamatres, more than even what the creator
knows. If Stern was correct in his opinion that writing, properly
managed should be but a different name for conversation; then small,
local, intimate theatre can be seen as the acme of art. When we
consider the affection masters of conversation such as Dickens and
Joyce had for amateur theatre, we can gain a greater respect for what
is being done by these small regional groups.  With thin budgets the
play becomes the thing and audience is happy to be swept away in
clouds of suspended disbelief. Functional lighting and simple set
designs allow the conversation to sparkle and minor mishaps and slips
of the tongue and miscues are overlooked in the same way that a chat
over the water cooler is filled with wicked grammar and slang
shorthand where information is readily passed from one to the
other. Understanding that the city is the place to be, we must also
admit that big budget block busting productions give the appearance of
extravagant baroque art, but are all too often no more than thin and
insipid conversations full of sound and fury.

What of Errors?  

Portals of discovery, slips into new realms, a brief glance of the
future, at what could be. Nothing to be feared. Feared only if a
smooth lamination is your only goal. Honest roughness beats a basket
of contrived sleekness any day.

In short not the play I would have produced, but I am sure my choice
of titles would only lead to empty seats and even more empty
wallets. I confess to an enjoyable afternoon where even more than a
play we got to see a community come together. Parental joy (again a
social activity) when the children laughed and listened intently and
broke their necks for a clearer view. An afternoon of light hearted
murder comedy of errors. That then I scorn to change my place with
kings.

Potnia Theron

2011-04-06T02:18:00.000+10:00

photo from http://www.utexas.edu/courses/larrymyth/images/2E-Artemis-Actaeon.jpg

Hymn 9 to Artemis

Sing Muse, of Artemis,
Sister of the far worker.
Virgin spitter of arrows,
Fed at the same table as Apollo.

She refreshes her horses
The waters of reedy thick Meletos.

Swiftly through Smyrna
She drives her golden chariot
To Klaros rich in vines while
Apollo of the silver bow awaits
The arrow-pourer.

Hail Goddess! At the same time
Embroider lyrics. Of you I sing.
And now I shall pass over
Into another mournful song.

this one from http://albertis-window.blogspot.com/2011/02/diana-of-ephesus-keeping-abreast-with.html

some words on Artemis

Artemis has many different guises, she seemed to start as a fertility goddess, as in Artemis of Ephusus and later takes the role of the virgin mistress of wild animals. She is quite cruel in her protection of her sacred animals, and in the protection of her virginity.

When I read of Artemis and Apollo and the serenity with which they can torture and kill us mortals I am reminded of Rilke's Angels from the first of his Duino Elegies. (which was written in Trieste while Joyce was writing Ulysses.)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

Ekatos - the far shooter, a name for Apollo, the younger twin brother to Artemis.

Iocheairan - This word is commonly translated as arrow pourer. Ios is the word for arrow as well as the word for venom. I combined the arrow and the venom of the snake and made the image of the mistress of the wild beasts (potnia theron) spitting arrows, as a snake will spit venom.

Bathuschoinoio - combining Bathos; deep, used in many metaphorical ways as well, including the connotation that is still current, profound, and schoinos which means reeds. Coincidently schoinos can be used to mean arrow or javelin.

Meletos a river, which may have been near to city of Smyrna.

Kleros - a site sacred to Apollo, where there was once an oracle.

Humnos - a hymn, but also a word with wider intimations, a simple strain or melody but also a hymn, an ode to the gods, but also a mournful song. As all art has an element of sorrow I used to translation of mournful song.

Again I am no scholar in the classics, but a vain and puny amateur who gains enjoyment trying to make sense of the word about us.

Helios

2011-03-31T23:15:00.000+11:00

Hymn 31 - to Helios

Begin your song of radiant Helios,
Muse Calliope, child of Zeus.

Cow eyed Euryphaessa
Glorious child of Gaia
With starry Ouranos.
Married Hyperion
His own sister.

And she brought forth
Beautiful dear ones,
Rosy armed Eos
Fair haired Selene
Tireless Helios.

Resembling the Gods,
He brings to sight both mortals
And the deathless ones,
Mounted his horses.

Terrible the glance
His eyes from out
His golden helmet.
Rays radiate from him,
Radiant, glittering
Hair falls his forehead
Gracefully captivating
His far-shining face.

Beautiful clothes
Delicately made
About his body
Shimmer the breath
Of a breeze.

With his stallions
And his chariot
And golden yolk
He established
From Heaven
To Oceans edge.

Rejoice Lord!
Of your own will
Bestow to me
A life welcome.
Beginning with thou
I celebrate with song
The mortal race of demigods.
Whose deeds the goddesses
To mortals pointed out.

the photo is from http://www.theequinest.com/horses-of-helios/

Selene

2011-03-20T02:14:00.000+11:00

Homeric Hymn 32 to Selene

Sing Muses of the broad winged moon
Sweet sounding, song knowing
Daughters of Zeus, Son of Cronus.
Her heavenly radiance from her deathless head
Encircles the earth, as her golden crown
Gleams upon the gloomy lower air.

When she rises from Oceanus river
Bath dripping wet her flawless skin,
She dresses in far shining garments. Divine Selene.

She harnesses her radiant neck arching horses,
She drives her impetuous full maned foals.
In the evening, in the fullness of the month
The full moon becomes as it must.
Her beauty increases as the glow waxes across
The firmament. A token and a sign for mortal lives.

Once upon a time, the son of Cronus mingled
Her bridal bed, and she conceived and brought
Into being a daughter, Pandia.
Most beautiful of the deathless ones.

Rejoice queen! Pale armed divine Selene
Cheerful and fair haired. Of you and your
Tidings I begin. The deeds of divine
Heroes I now celebrate in song,
Pupil of the sweet mouthed Muses.

Dioskouroi

2011-03-13T14:43:00.000+11:00

Homeric Hymn to the Dioskouroi

Bright-eyed Muses, fall into song
Concerning the strapping sons robust
Of Zeus. The Tyndaridai.

Born of fair-ankled Leda.
Beautiful shining children.
Kastor who overcomes horses
And Polydeuces,
Sea-green incorruptible.

Upon the summit of Taygetus
The cloud-clad son of Cronos
Mixed in love, mingled in friendship,
And she gave birth. Two children,
Saviours upon the mortal
Ones who haunt the earth,
And of the quick-going ships
That speed stormy winter winds
Of seas implacable.

And from their ships
They call upon, they invoke,
With white sheep, the sons of Zeus.
Poised upon the stern, upon the stormy sea.

With the strong gale and the waves of the sea,
The ship begins to slip under the water.

Suddenly! They come to light.
Nimble golden brown wings
Whirring, thrilling. At once the trials
Raised by the winds are brought to an end.
The squally waves calmed,
Glassy is the white-salt sea.

The signs are good, the toil is over.
For they saw, and they rejoiced,
Their sufferings are over.

Hail Tyndaridai!
Quick-riding horsemen.
Always will I remember,
Always will I sing.

Kastor - the beaver
Polydeuces - very sweet

Kastor and Polydeuces - the twins. The pair that we call Castor and Pollux. Sons of Zeus, hence the name Dios-Kouroi Sons of Zeus. Brothers to the City Destroying Helen and Clytemnestra. Sons also to Tyndareus. Their mother was Leda, who spawned an egg and from this egg came the sons, one of whom was immortal, and the other was mortal. This leads to some conflicting accounts of how they shared the immortality, some tales say that they alternated days between mortal and immortal.

The pair had a special cult in Sparta, and some say this is the origin of the Sparta system of having two kings. This may or may not be true, it may be that Sparta came up with the idea of two kings and then looked for a religious explanation. Either way the sons were protectors of humans, and in particular they protected sailors, in the quick-going ships. This is the basis for this hymn. The Disokouroi protect the ship, arriving at the last moment in response to the supplications of the navigators. The pair are identified with St Elmo's fire, and this is how they appear in the poem. They calm the seas and the sailors are happy.

Amometos - Blameless, but here I gave it maybe a bit more, and used the epitaph given to Robespierre, sea green incorruptible. It sounded nicer.

Okyporos - The swift-sailing, or fast going. Describing the ships that the sons of Zeus protect.

Ameilichon - Implacable, or more literally, not gentle.

Echapines - Suddenly, how the twins appear to the supplicating sailors.
Ephanesan - To bring to light, to show, but also to shine. This sudden bringing to light represents the twins appearing at the last minute to save the sinking ship. It has connotations of an epiphany, in this cause the sudden coming into being of the power of the gods.

Chouthos - The colors yellow-brown, this describes the wings of the Disokouroi. It is also the word that is used to describe the bumblebee. Later it is meant to describe the thrilling, humming sound (I assume of bees). The twins are like busy bees flying here and there around the top most part of the mast, remembering how they were identified with St Elmo's fire. Here I wanted to try to invoke the bussing humming sound of the static electricity glowing on the mast in the storm.

the pic is from http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/dictionary/Dict/image/dioskouroiLIMC.jpg

Book Launch - Margate Train

2011-02-23T10:55:00.000+11:00

IP and the Train

Typical treacherous Hobart weather. Up with the rosy dawn clear and cloudless. The radar map showing a thin weak cold front moving across the state, west to east. The funny little book shop Freight Train Books on the Margate Train ran it's first event, a reading by three authors from Interactive Publications. David Rieter, Lyn Reeves & Anne Morgan.

David chats with local art lover

Each of the authors has recently published a book. David began the reading from his novel "Primary Instinct", a slice of life, fly on the wall series of satirical nuggets diarising and lampooning the educational system. With the problems of literacy in Australia and Tasmania in particular this is a timely nudging us into the serious debate which we desperately need. Not the periodic moral panic which masquerades as debate we usually have in this country. Rather a serious adult conversation on how this country (indeed all the Anglosphere) can reverse our current slide into irrational stupor. A debate as to how we can use education as an opportunity not just to create narrowly focused experts, but one in which children can be inoculated with the spirits of curiosity and imagination. Skills that will allow them to still be expanding their knowledge of themselves and the world well into their old age. The end of labour, to paraphrase Aristotle is to gain leisure and goal of education is to teach us how to best use our leisure.

And then from the third in his junior fiction series Project Earth-Mend. As if on cue wild wind and squalls raced down the mountains, horizontal across the wide brown-eyed cow paddock. And the site was lashed with a short sharp rain shower.

Ann Morgan reads from The Sky Dreamer

Glasses of wine on offer and local cheese and a score or so of children. Next Anne Morgan read "The Sky Dreamer", her moving children's story about the young boy Liam and his struggles after losing his big sister. Lovingly illustrated by Céline Eimann, and honestly written by Anne this little book should be in every school library and in as many houses with children as possible. Learning needs to be more than simply building a workforce as we move into a more technical economy. Education needs to be about how to deal with life and loss and sorrow. More than just school, more than the family. The social production of the individual. This aspect of education as something more than the three R's is behind Aristotle's statement that neglect of education does harm to the constitution.

Simple things sometimes move me, the simple sight of the young children listening to the author reading from her work, while the younger ones played game games as little ones will. I thought about all the tales and stories and life lessons spoken taught down the generations unrolling deep into the past in and around this small community. This tiny bay of meeting sea and land. Intermittent afternoon around and the mountains, darkened with mist with the rain clouds, hurl gloomy clouds and glaring winds. And I went a couple of days later, with the children, to the museum. And we stood silent, sad, scared in the exhibiting convict days gallery, and saw the displays of chains and whips and uniforms and all that went with the transportation times. I thought about the generations, about all the tales told in languages now lost. Then Anne reads her story and the children look and listen.

Lyn Reeves captivates the little ones.

Lyn Reeves tailored her reading from her recent work "designs on the body" for the large number of children around. And offered up her well moulded poems with rhythms like the squally afternoon, where the fast moving clouds race and the shadow retreats across the wide eyed cow paddock, flooding the wet grass with the energy and light of the sun, dancing and sparkling off countless raindrops on countless blades of swaying in the wind grass. Lyn read of dogs with funny names and of wing drying cormorants and of bathing her infant son. From "Primal Sense"


                         Vertebrae ripple
beneath my hands like birdsong.

For the hungry artists.

Books for children, and books about teachers and books by teachers and the opportunity to speak and talk, and for the children to be given the chance to grow and learn and listen. Both physical and mental there is very little more important than the education of children, so much so I can easily agree with Aristotle when he writes "Those who educate children well are more to be honoured than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well." Hopefully the parents will also be strong teachers for their children, this would of course be the best situation. And of course a time for chatting and for discussing the works presented. A glass of red and some art and cheese and fruit all on a squally typically treacherous Tasmanian Sunday.

Hymn to Demeter

2011-02-14T02:57:00.001+11:00

Hymn 13 - To Demeter

Flaxen haired goddess
Demeter majestic.
You I celebrate in song.
You and your daughter,
Persephoneia, beyond beauty.

Hail and Rejoice Goddess.
Preserve our city.
Attend my song.

Only three lines, this is basically a small section taken from a much longer hymn of Demeter, which hopefully I will be able to translate as I gain more experience and confidence. Only three lines, but it gave me lots of pause for thought. As people used to say about the Australian cricket, it was the best because of the short and sharp nature of the Sheffield Shield Competition. Each games was important, each innings, each over was important. So with this little three line poem, there is in fact no place to hide.

This translation is as much, if not more so, for me than it is for the general reader. So I go only beg your indulgence in my exercises.

hukomon - fair haired. This seemed a fair enough translation, but after looking deeper into the descriptions of Demeter it seemed best to go with flaxen-haired, as Demeter is a corn goddess.

koure - this means Demeter's daughter, more generally it means daughter. But it has overtones of the young daughter on the cusp of sexual life. A maiden is how we often see it defined in dictionaries from the early 1900's. I will leave it at daughter, but as I understand things, this word; like most words has deeper meanings.

perikallea - peri-kallea simply means very beautiful. Peri means about, around. This is what it means when used in the word peripatetic, where is describes Aristotle teaching his students, as they walk around the grounds of the Lyceum. This word is also defined as simply very, which is a fine word, but is one without much punch, so I decided to use another meaning of peri; beyond. And Koure (Demeter's young bride virgin daughter) is then described as beyond beauty. It seemed to be the correct intensifier.

The final word which I enjoyed was arkhe - this means simply to begin, to lead off. Further investigation gives meanings such as to govern, to lead, to command. After much thinking I went with attend, as this gives a dual meaning of leading, but also of paying attention. Maybe not the most correct translation, but for the poem it seemed the best word.

The image comes from here: http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/K3.2.html

Ambiguous

2011-02-13T07:41:00.000+11:00

Dawn the thin twilight
Naught as night, not yet day.
Transported by dreams
Shaken false awakening
Half awake half asleep.
Clouds half cover the sky
Torn gray smudges interact
With the new gathering blue.
Low air and thick and heavy
Water vapour mingles.
Quilt covered body parts
Warm, exposed is to chill.
Merge we two into one
Side by side.

And birds start to chorus
And the child sings
Made up songs in bed.

Hymn to Herakles the Lion Hearted

2011-02-04T00:57:00.000+11:00

Birth of Herakles

Jean Jacques Francois Le Barbier (1738-1826)

Homeric Hymn 15 - Herakles the Lion Hearted

Hear me sing of Herakles, divine son, the finest
And bravest of all born from this earthy compost.

In Thebes, of the spacious dancing gardens,
Alcmena mingled with the storm cloud covert
Son of Kronos. Carried and bore him.

Even the gods themselves could not
Conceive his wide roaming across earth and sea.

Bound to the arrogance of King Eurystheus.
Much wickedness he performed, much he endured.

And now fair he sits on snow capped Olympus
Dwelling in delight with Hebe of the well turned ankle.

Rejoice in the son of Lord Zeus
Exult and grant us happiness.

Afterword

I have no right to inflict my attempts at translations upon the world. Nothing to justify but simple enthusiasm and passion for the ancients and for poetry in general. This I think will have to be sufficient. I understand my faults and weaknesses, mainly in that I can only do this translation like a lazy and ignorant school boy. Painstakingly fighting though lexicons and slowly identifying the inflections and parts of speech and then slopping it all together with a vague hope for inspiration.

I have not tried too hard at creating a word for word translation. I have not tried to capture the rhythms of the original. This is to me a pointless endeavour. The techniques used by the ancient oral song-stitchers are far too alien to fit into modern English poetry. All I have done is to render the Greek into a close approximation of how I understand the poem to flow. Unlike working in chemistry, there is no single right answer as to how a poem should be interpreted. I am banking on this simple fact to be my armour against any errors and flaws I may have planted. As this is not meant to be, as I said, a word for word translation, any errors can be seen as adding elements to the poem, maybe even pointing out new interpretations. Errors are, as Joyce has suggested, portals to discovery. While I gladly admit to not being expert in the nuance of Ancient Greek.,I do feel I am able to work my way through the poem and come up with some words and lines that capture something of the spirit of the original.

I was happy to fracture the standards of English poetry in an attempt to capture some of the strangeness of the distant past. I was more than happy to create lines that seemed to, to quote the often heard complaint raised by the professional academic poet, suffer of poeticism. This seemed to allow for the wide gap that exists between our modern Anglophones, and the world view of the ancients. The Greeks had a musical language and a poetry based on alterations of long and short vowel sounds. A Swinburne would be able to approximate these song lines, but I am not able to do so in a way that I find convincing. So I fell into a simple free verse outline to hang the translation. In the end I felt looseness of technique would be the most useful path to follow. I do not think we can understand fully what life for the ancients felt like, but I am sure that our present worship at the altar of crass stupidity and short term material gain was not in the Ancients program.

To be able to show something of the abyss that stands between us and the long ago past, I had to attempt to recall the dramatic elements from my all but forgotten Catholic teachings. Even with (or maybe because of) the playful sexuality of the work, and the hints of darks acts performed, the simple style of the Bible seemed to me a fitting structure for the work.

There were several words in particular which caught my attention, and seem worthy of brief mention.

leontothymon - leonto-thymon lion hearted - obvious in it's description of Herakles as having no fear, of having the heart of a lion. Also used to describe Achilles in several places, including book 7, 228 of the Iliad, in this instance the word has changed shape and is thymo-leonta, but the idea is the same.

kallikhoros - kalli-khoros. The Greeks liked to mash words up, and so here we have the word for beautiful combined with the word for dancing place, and in this we can see a similarity to our word chorus. This was a common epitaph to describe a wealthy city with wide open spaces. I envisioned this word as describing wide green parks, open spaces that allowed dance and theatre.

michtheisa - To mix or to mingle, properly of fluids. Extended to mean to join battle, as in hand to hand combat, or to have intercourse with. A well rounded patriarchal admixture of violence and sexuality. I liked the images of Zeus and Alcmena mingling to conceive Herakles. Light-bearing, rapacious Zeus concealed himself as a dark storm cloud, and impregnated Alcmena. Hera, the wife of Zeus, was jealous of the many children Zeus had spawned with mortal women. This is the source of the enmity Hera felt towards Herakles, and also explains his name of Hera-kles, glory of Hera. Either this name was given to further enrage Hera, or it describes the power and majesty Hera held over Herakles. Either makes sense, but I do get a certain amusement in the idea of the mortals teasing and enraging the Queen of the Heavens. In the end Hera was reconciled with Herakles, and after his death she adopted him. Herakles crawling out from between her legs in the ceremony of adoption which imitated childbirth.

athesphatos - a-theos-phatos - 'not to be said even by a god', unutterable. A very nice word indeed and one that stands for unutterable, awesome, ineffable, and such connotations. I used a wordy convoluted phrase, because it seemed to be more 'alien' and also because words such as awesome have lost mich of their mysterious qualities.

kallisphyron - kalli-sphyron - beautiful ankle. A common epitaph used to describe the beauty of a goddess. It can also be used to describe foothills, and even the furthermost part of a land. Unlike the Spartan women who wore dresses with a slit up the leg, earning the nickname Phainomerides - the thigh flashers.

My favourite word found in this poem was epichthonion. Epi-chthonion literally it means upon the earth, but in connotation it means something like the life on earth, and is also a phrase used to describe going under. I was quite intrigued with this word, as it expresses the complex and apparent contradiction of being the vegetative life giving force, as well a being the grave, the pit of the dead. This idea allowed me to bring in the word compost. The compost pile where I throw the scraps is alive with potatoes and pumpkins spreading out from the warm rotting mound. A rotting mound that brings forth new life seemed to be a good way to describe 'being upon the earth.'

Hoi aristoi kai hoi polloi

2011-01-26T00:30:00.001+11:00

Friday was a typical indecisive Lower Derventio sort of day, sweeping showers chased off in the arvo by a southerly change. The clouds ran off. Replaced with a squinting sun and blue sky shy time. Pup deep sea diver footed fell cheap as poms bowled twisters and lobs. Pick pack pock puck. Lilbet street jags a cold syllogistic knife thrust from down below the water into past the townie hall and the Victorian mourning style layer cake GPO. Went on an art trail

Up the hill into the depths of the local cool scene side of town and lots of tidy little shops and cafes and wine bars commingling with the old long term time rickety shop fronts. The theme of our discussion.

For commerce and art bedded down strong in the old sleepy redneck imagined Hobart town. Diamond dogs barked by the river at the opening of the new gallery, at great cost, with an adventurous festival of art and music over the town ways. But we are not to concern ourselves with mona at the moment, for a more simple street art time was to be invented. Forty some odd shops up the mainline north south access allowagreed to allow local artists to decorate shop windows, to aerosol resolved neglected brick falling downs. Competing the smell of oil and burnt metal, of hot chip oil and curry and the grunt of internal combustion, and this afternoon sun squinty and crying. While down Bellrive Marsh and Bollinger set upon smacking a record ninth wicket partnership. A shout in the street, Stephen said, shrugging his shoulders.

It would be hard to do justice to all the various art works which were exhibited on this walk up window shopping front windows lilbet street. And with such a large amounts of work there was to be no arching narrative to unit all the works, aside from the obvious patterns created as the works are to be revealed in a serial manner. To the grand pattern making animal this is more than enough. I did not take down names, either of the artist or the works, this is only to be a collage of sights and thoughts which past as I walked the works.

So around and about hung a loss collection of punks and teddies and hipsters and bohoed and all the other cliches hurled about. The sun was warm and in the shadows it was cool. The street itself as the gallery in the laughternoon setting sun and the songs of traffic and community as a undulating background musical hall. Diving right in. Playground paintings of the memories of long gone childhood. A good crowd showed and walked and talked and made a rolling democratic community. The surrealist walking about and chance juxtaposition. Water lilies cut and shape formed plastic recycled plastic cups vast waste of bottled water while the world dies of thirst Cornell style constructions of oddment boxes. Desire and Mystery. Sleepy record shop window diorama of sleepy eyes. Installations and ease on down paintings and drawings and cartoons and found objects and murals a fat and wide range of activities all resettled in a living breathing gallery. Locals wending the blustery change crowd of maybe 40 or more art types. Central Oz scenic splashy of bold colour orange below the strength sapping sun. Skate crowd shop graffiti art works displayed thin tiny splatter of dots creating a new life under the works. Lilbeth street rises from the water line to the ramshackle tattered all but falling around old curiosity shop old buildings. And a chatter of network. The steeple of the brick dusty church thrustpoints into the skyways. Acrylic computer screens and thematic human enthronements all in one way or another auto biographic splendour it all coheres pyre epiphany what we have built all about our selves and the way in which we iterate. A common element. Photosphere. The random groupings as ideas and concerning around come to the surface. Again I think of Nadja of the walk around. Cycles of decay and rebirth. Don't follow fashion hand made dresses watch the parking meters individual. Another form of making and of communicating colour line and all such like. Kelp instruments full ghostlier church, and the found the glanced at and found in the corner of the reflected glass or best of all reflected off the shallow side of the gutter puddle. And beauty resides in the accidental. One more vine rises from the floor an auto bio tile. County woman's gift shop. Naive displays of shop keepers and the curious jumble of this and that. Fine line paintings of birds and empty phonies bulky and mute and built area rounding. Built up worlds of imaginations insubstantial as a cyclone, naive as a child. Avatars of polly chars. Turkish daylight prison head of little guys in prison. Knives and Tats. Cardboard proscenium depths of city silhouettes. Cider gum print lavish french clocks. Nature nurture destruction of tas and tanguy biomorphic and all closed in antique seller. Imagined house of impassible angles. Stairs growing out of the rock the gallery of all outdoorsy becomes the art itself. Plasticine skull reconstructions. Carpet cop it shop photoshopped images and fish feet. Rock and roll blaring jokers beer garden. Graffito wall aerosol paintings quiet back alley parking lot midnight toking spot. IDE stripped bare. Found children wild uncensored genius drawings. Postered porn images. Colonials confronting tramping the bush twelve feet tall wall. Blood shot eyed and distorted cartoon pix of hot rod dudes. Painting the same image over again and repetition is to our age and apache hair. Reflections of images the images fractal sexuality repetition as recollection to the greeks half ten years after. Chronos and Gnosis. Jewels in choc shop winda rich lush flora tas in the bottlo. Reflecting dances of shards of light dancing across the sleek and smooth parked surface of the cream appointed auto. Reused fabric painted. Parthenon collage. Edwardian PO impossible paintings earthy yellow brown. Slipping into the early evening let us get our supper bartime.

This is no more than a quick overview of a listing of the many works of art. And any emphasis put on a work or an artist, or not as the case may be has less to do with my interest or enjoyment of any pieces of work , but more has to do with my agility to get a good look at the works, chatting, not being able to hear and the like. In all it was a splendid idea and one that there should be repeated. The walk, the series of chance meetings, and of the various introductions to the pieces worked to inspire imaginings. It is always nice to see art in the community. People are more open and accepting of art and difference than one may assume from the media. There are a great many forces at work in our age that seek to create division and misunderstanding. Anything, like this art walk, which seeks to combine and create understanding should be supported in anyway that one is able.

Tragedy

2011-01-19T22:41:00.000+11:00

English teachers that speak of 'rashness' as being the tragic flaw of Oedipus are just plain silly. I have been thinking about things, as I shovel about this coyle. I have been thinking of questions around tragedy. What is tragedy and what is the tragic? I have been forced to use, as a starting point, the fragments I can remember from high school English class. Many thoughts and points are able to be brought to the fore, to be garnished and gnawed upon. Spat out or savoured in turn. All this thinking and all these thoughts have been aided by my special circumstances. Working in a used book store gives me access to a great many interesting books, and also allows enough slow times for me to be able to read some of these books. More importantly working in a book store allows me to amuse myself with the idea of being a 'cultural worker'. A role I am sad to say is the closest I can get to calling myself qualified to make any sort of comment about the nature of tragedy being not a flaw, not a character breach or defect, but rather a manifestation of the ignorance that forms the scaffolding of everyday life.

The high school English teacher voice in my memory requires me to understand the tragic flaw of the tragic hero. I find in my traffic light waiting time that this idea of the tragic flaw may be a stumbling block to understanding. Aristotle speaks about Hamartia - the tragic flaw. The Greek New Testament uses the word to mean, among other things, sin. The Philosopher speaks of Hamartia as errors made in ignorance, or by accident. When one combines the concept of Anagnorisis (recognition, particularly self recognition) we can see that tragedy is based on the solitary actors ignorance and smallness in the face of the uncaring immensity that is the external world. It is this ignorance that makes the actors in tragedies appear to be controlled by external forces.

It is the not being able to fully grasp the external world that causes tragic characters to make their all important fall. In this way we can see Oedipus does not have a flaw of rashness, but rather he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. When in his ignorance he thinks he is doing the right thing by fleeing, he is only hastening the inevitable. This lack of control which causes the actors to appear to be little more than playthings of fate is another expression of our ignorance.

The first idea that we should chase out of our heads is the idea of the tragic flaw as being a lack of moral fibre, as moral weakness, or sin. This seems to be mistaken, and is a typical of Christian readings. Hamartia is used in other works of Aristotle to mean an injury caused by accident or ignorance. This exposes one of the founding elements of tragedy, indeed of all of life, put bluntly - we do not know. In the case of Oedipus he is obviously ignorant of his true nature. This because his adoptive parents had lied to him from the start. How much of our lives are based on the small and large lies that our parents and our society tell us? Oedipus more than most, but very few of us can truly say that we know our own history. Even less can we say that we know what will be the outcome of our actions beforehand.

As they are meant to be performed on stage tragedies must deal with action with actors making decisions, allowing the plot to be a revealing of the consequences. To allow the ephemeral, when for a moment ignorance is pushed away. Ignorance and activity, the engine of both tragedy and real life. Agamemnon, cursed down generations for the crimes of an ancestor, ignorantly goes to embrace and is killed. Clytemnestra does not act in ignorance, in the sense that she does not have all the facts. She is trapped by a terrible set of circumstances, and is left with no alternative. Brutalised and raped by Agamemnon, forced into marriage, her first husband and infant son murdered, she must kill Agamemnon to avenge the sacrificial murder of their daughter. She must kill to allow herself to breath, to live, to put to an end to only the sharpest point of her anguish. In turn Orestes must kill his mother, who killed his father, who killed his sister. What a bloody household, all based on the crime of Tantalus, that of killing and cooking his own child to test the Gods. The gods use the House of Atreus as a warning to others not to doubt. The extravagant events control the actors, the actors do not control events. In a very real sense this is a type of ignorance, as events are moving around the actor, and the actor has no control. I think it was Heidegger who referred to time as the horizon of being, here we can amend this postulate and say that it is ignorance which is the horizon of being. As an aside I recall reading a report into work place conditions, and a conclusion was made, it not being overworked that leads to stress, it is the feeling of lack of control.

Many arguments can of course be put forward to refute my point, and I am sure that many of the arguments will be overwhelming. Including my clumsy style and inarticulate way of explaining my ideas. One can say I that cherry pick from the competing versions of the texts of the ancients, that I take parts of the story from one source and another part from a different source. This may be true, but it is not true of all human thought, even if only by accidentally mixing up of conversations or readings, indeed this blending of thoughts is one of the pathways of transmission. A solid and easy line of argument would have to wrapped in the idea that there is no simple way to describe all the stories that are called tragedy. There will always be exceptions and elements that do not fit correctly into any schema. I am happy to stand by my thought that ignorance of true events, and the lack of control of the unfolding world give rise to the tragic actor forced to make choices. Choices which are often between two compelling goods. When they make these choices they do so in an attitude of ignorance. Either they are ignorant of the true situation, or of the thoughts and plans of the other actors, or more abstractly they are ignorant of the external forces which shape and control everyday life. Marx described this buffeting by world historical forces as follows "[People] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

Tragedy

Late Afternoon approaching winter
Reddening chill slap across the face.
Low cold sunlight limp long thin shadows
Gray of pale trees swaying the wind.
Smoke rises from Yasnaya Polyana.
The cold hardens the mud and allows
Movement on the roads. And old man stands
One side of the rutted hardened track,
Watching the smoke rising, tears falling,
Anger impotent. Manuscripts torn and burnt,
Tables, chairs, beds, chopped and splintered
All burnt for warmth and contempt. The old
Man stands the side of the road, silent
Tears his hungry hut. Bodies of soldiers
Buried the clear glade desecration.
A feeling of superiority nurtured
By command. Up jumped the troopers.
In a battered ad-hoc armoured car,
Embellished death head cross.
The soldiers laughed and knocked down,
Knees down the frozen ground, the old man.
Shouting orders the old man and his wife
Could not understand. The old man
And his wife implored the invaders,
Who did not want to understand.
Only laughed and pawed the old woman.
Broke the door, chair, all the windows,
All the plates and cups in the house.
The old man cried and begged mercy
Leave us be, we are old. Pawing
The ground and he grabbed one soldier's
Knees. Think of your own gray father,
Your old grandfather, we have nothing,
We care nothing of Stalin, leave us be.
His wife was bleeding from the mouth.
And he wailed all the louder shaking
And impotent. A laughing rifle butt
Ended his talking, started blood flowing.
She flew to his side and the soldiers
Took bottles of home made wine, and two
Chickens throttled and stuffed into
A bag as dinner. Pots and pans
For cooking. The armoured car drove
Rattling and menacing away.

Down the road children huddled,
Wounded soldiers suffered,
An ancient monastery. Look here,
We shall not attack the old and pathetic
They shall soon pass, but here we find
The future, the ones who shall mature
And cut our throats while we sleep. Let us
Free ourselves of this vengeance. With cans
Of petrol and hand grenades the soldiers
Laughed and toasted the fearsome
Cries of screaming choking agony.

Where are the snows of yesteryear?

2011-01-04T03:17:00.000+11:00

Another year over, a new one just begun. A new year of blogging and poetry.
As one gets older one gets to indulge in rounds of 'I told you so', as if
any sane person needed to be told that, for example, invading Iraq was not a good idea. And this rapidly turns into schadenfreude, or to use the term that the Philosopher would have used, epichairekakia. Yes, I do confess to a feeling of delight watching politicians and sundry hob knobs twisting in the wind of historical necessity.

Long term historical movements bring the greatest amusement, for example the turmoil of the Catholic Church, as years of abuse come to the fore. The long term 'blow back' caused by the US supporting Muslim guerrillas in Afghanistan. And then years later to see these groups fight the Amis to a standstill. This is the type of schadenfreude I enjoy. The unrolling of history.

Petty? Maybe.

Cruel and unfeeling. Never! Any feelings are always coupled with a deep sadness for the terrible loss of life. Any feelings always burn with angry at the terrible lies and distortions, the steady loss of our freedoms and rights, and the stupid complicity of all of us.

So I write poetry and do this and that about my life, working, raising children and so it goes. When a young lad I wished to be a published author. This would be a good thing, or so I thought. Now I look upon the rows of shelves in the markets, and at all the books published, I am glad I have never carried through with this dream. I can blame no one but myself for any failings, indeed I do not blame anyone for my not being a successful author. One would think that the sheer volume of works produced each year would allow for one more book of poetry, or one more small novel, and if I really wanted to go down this road I could very easily.

A half assed internet search gave me a number of over 500 000 books published in the Anglosphere, which turned out to about 1440 books a day, or one a minute! And so much just overwhelms and drowns us in a sea of market based editorial self censorship. Corralled into a particular form, typecast and constricted suffocatingly tight of mind forged manacles. Even the authors who are interesting and thoughtful, are they serving a need for the elites, acting as a 'safety value' of dissent?

Of course leads me into this blog. I have a need to write. It is almost like a disease. Even though I may not be very talented, and often I am unable to properly express the ideas bumbling around my noodle, I am still going to write. In this I want to follow a line of ephemera, which is why my external contact is via this blog and more importantly poetry (open mic) readings. This generates feelings and thoughts of immediacy and inevitable transience. The poem is written, and maybe it is read aloud and maybe deposited onto this blog, and then is forgotten as I and all things around me move, which brings us to this effort...

And so this poem is a welter of pretence and derivation. The title and first line allude to Villion, Shakespeare and Hopkins. Two sections concerning my back yard, nauseous with a sense of place. The first is daytime the second section is night time. And the two sonnets hinge on an unwobbling pivot, a half emerged quote from the Phenomenology, included in it's entirety.

Sense-certainty itself has thus to be asked: What is the This? If we take it in the two-fold form of its existence, as the Now and as the Here, the dialectic it has in it will take a form as intelligible as the This itself. To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date.

Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Eager morning, wide couple colored sky.
Matrix of cloud and pure sun massy blue.
Sparse white cloud tea rising morning, my eye
Scans and prowls damp landscape of dawn break dew.

Shadows of clouds and glittering sunlight
Compete and tumble across the distance.
Dull shadows of gray clouds, of middling height,
Obscure ridgeline farmland of shadow dance.

Garish sun reflects the water surface,
Bouncing, redoubling the burning glow.
Ninety two million miles of empty space
Birthing energy so that all needs grow.

Write what I see just beyond my window,
Recording can not be, to truth, a foe.

Into the dark, past split wood stacked three tonne,
High pressure clear night, bright Venus shining,
Pouring ash the turned earth garden begun.
Sea birds and lap wings calling combining

Far off single dogs bark and howl, I close
My eyes and listen to the songs of the trees.
Grand murmuring sonatas. Winds compose
Long slow songs of history and unease.

Epics written across a thousand years
Sung one thousand rustling chorus leaves.
I listen the songs my eyes fill with tears,
The outer space wind, my heart grieves.

Everything. The Earth, the Sun, the Moon moves,
As careful standing on the one spot proves.

Away with words!

2010-12-19T22:30:00.000+11:00

Went to the end of year event for the tasmanian writers centre.

Two writers read from their most recent works. Geoff Dean and Paul Tully.

It was a fun night and both artists read well, I wished the second piece went
longer, but nothing to fuss about.

These events are interesting to me, as for various random reasons I no longer read new works, so with book reviews and events I keep more or less in a state of misunderstanding the world about me.

Beyond the obvious problems of discipline, the pleasure of being autodidact resides in the ability to roam widely over the various spheres of human endeavour. I have been making an investigation into the ancient cynic school. The saying of Diogenes have been recently smacked into my brain pan. And then I stumble into this reading.

So I kicked around a bunch of impressions and crumbs of error.

Night of Geminids. Iron duke rivulet under common concrete falling down and around click clack footsteps echoing slap upon the brink of brick pain mint. Pooring stream from down the dark clouds table top gathering of mountains. The rill is exposed just by the shop that sells shin splint gouging running shoes. The natural is made artificial the natural is carved and formed by the rent apart rational.

Silent over watch potion the entire history of this town. Long alone dead pale as white fellas ghost watch over the land. Endless tears fall and fill the lyre bird introduced gullies and tumble run down into the high street over covered tiny poxy sewer stream. Over and above nature the creek channelled and aggregate concrete made into the shape and plastic path and wonder wanted for the men of the purse tightening city and of only note counting commerce. Long away along dead spat upon sailors and looked down upon whalers and convict atains watch out over the wide estuary raising flags and firing cannons as warning alertings for again the summer run of flash rumpus core rehabilitated into characters of the new mythos and the city and smart smugglers and extortionists and this is what you get or need.

Night after Geminids streaking lines fine across the dark night sky long into the morning. Low Ligny roof wine dark down wooden walls and beams iron strong wood. Wit and running light touch along the wave splashing beach. Big crowd of many people and the low murmur of voices and settling into seats and tables and ability to hear. Rough Huon river pine valley. Hard to hear all the grunts and twitterings and choral murmuring.

Old blanket man poor on a park bench of cops and cars and this is the underbelly soft of church ill dreams, nightmares of the press ganged working people here and there and in all manner of nations far flung upon the sea side beech. Hunger - desperate time rewindings and bindings again. Trains tramline river bridges cover rhythm street thoroughfare. Worry. Security. Sniffing druggy headed hang dogs. Hang the Dawg. The sun and the air that is criminally vulgar. Blind man palsy sight.

Failed at strange unexpected as the same time twice only and not in any other way so to add it all up...

The voice of a woman. Fifty dollar note lady bluster. White light white heat golden frond. Money brings as much grief, as much mayhem as frozen down dead dog tails.

Under pass unable to tossings and turnings asleep newspaper doona. A citizen of the world self sufficient Malone and a crisis of faith. What is to be done? The essence of tragedy two ways both right both wrong both lauding death. No flaw, just the role of human, just a human choice over flowing with ignorance and the darkness. Or the muse to the Helicon rhapsodos 'Wicked rough sleeping Shepard, vile belly alone...'

Gnomic with gold rum glasses and a mirror shiny clean window reflection to see one's self as one really is, to understand. This is the foundation of speaking the truth, this seeing correctly. Poverty as the road is no longer the road to self sufficiency.

Ice popping glasses and the pouring lungfish of organic red wine, and then the next tale. Matching depression to second sight the poets dream of the seer. Full sight in the detail. Deep fried dog turd. Shocked turn away around a mocking modesty and dreamy visions of long alone thyme. Together book ends of dank under flesh like the grinding error of Cassino and the blasting destruction of civilisation; even the fear of the lord could not perturb the stings of falling tumbling earth shattering bombast. Pugilist aching rambles round and about home and dreams to the future. Freedom of the Press, freedom to speak all based on free from fear and favour on seeing how one really is to be and has been.
Dangerous muddy waters swirl rising and more than just a hard boiled roman a hiding a biography of Hobart in a time and a place no longer around. Again to this sense of place. Revealing a memoir. Bringing out the second site the unveiling of what really is, the struggle to speak truly. Wandering the city streets and back alley cop ways with a torch, a way of seeing and a citizen of the world weapon.

Thick lactix devil milk dripping and a brooding violence just below the poetic service before the stitching up of words and words are snitched together. Prologue of gaunt ten pound shop steward dripping magic molten metal flames and injuries. Night whores of ancient knee trembling tradies, apple cherries from the dark Stygian Isle of black war. Coal smoke and the hydro town mountain brooding above the surface of violence. Past town ingrained into memory and fleeing supple suddenness of a whipping gale.

And a slow descent into the dark and flashing light.

Eye Candy

2010-12-09T23:21:00.000+11:00

I have taken lots of photos - digital cameras facilitate this greatly. I get bored and so I made some into a standard wallpaper size (1024x768). All of 'em snapped in tasmania.

Orielton Lagoon

Monogamy is a trait of birds and humans. Seven Mile Beach

One of many rainbows, I guess if it rains all the time...

After the rain.

Kelly Steps - leading onto Kelly Street. Accidently?

Wall of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

A big introduced bee gathering from an introduced plant. - Where the bee sucks, there suck I.

The Apple Isle.

Poetical Manifestations

2010-11-23T02:53:00.000+11:00

This document is not a well thought out plan or campaign. It is not a
critique or any sort of guide. It is a ramble shambles, a sort of
hobby horse of the kind one often finds drunkenly stumbling along the
queen's briar patch of a highway. It is at best a handful of poetic
fragments that vanity wishes to be recorded. It is at best derivative
and repetitive, and yet...

The revolution MUST be made by the shattered scattered broken remains
of the present capitalist militaristic system. Peace is not the absence
of war, peace is no longer opposing the progressive.

What the thirty years since the Thatcher Reagan era has killed is the
very idea of cooperative spirit. Substituting a broken down ladder of
aspiration.

And now our society is made up of monads randomly colliding the void.

1. Sound over Sense. Meaning is lost and disjointed. After years of
writing technical documents I have learnt that precise language is
no stop to misunderstanding. Why bother. 'All things counter,
original, spare, strange;'

2. History states what is. Poetry shows what should be.

3. Fear not contradiction. The small petty minded feed upon tiny
glitches, slips of the tongue. Ignore them, they are of no
consequence. 'The wise contradict themselves'

4. The pedant abhors errors. The seer adores error. 'Errors are the
portal of discovery.'

5. Aspective not Perspective. Hills mock the straight line.

6. History is the contemporary. The Ever When. The All at Once.
Economics is home-life. History and Political Economy must be
the domain of the poets. These things are too important to be left
to historians, or even worse politicians. '...a higher thing than
history'

7. Reserve the right to use any word needed. If the word or conceit is
archaic or poetic, so be it. If the reader needs to consult a dusty
old reference book, how can this a bad thing? Art should allow,
should force the reader to make links.

8. Think not of Euclidean lines, but rather the Mandlebort set.
Think of frost crystals forming on the window pane. (How long
is the coast of Tasmania?)

9. Creation is the tension between what the author meant and what the
reader understands. 'I go back to the top of the slide'

10. Truth is always progressive. Art is always progressive. Beauty is
always revolutionary, as Beauty must be the truth. The truth is
constant revolution. 'The cold knife thrust of the syllogism'

11. Socrates knew only of Eros. The great daemon that conveys and
interprets. Old the creative, the vegetative urge that comes
before and causes all things. The lighting that steers all things.
Plato is fit only to be mocked.

12. DIY becomes Do It Ourselves. We must band together. For protection
from the capitalist culture mongers, to extend experience and
knowledge. Truth is always social. Beauty is always social.
'O Multicolored mind, deathless'

Drifters Cafe & Caritas Poetry Event

2010-11-14T23:57:00.000+11:00

Sharp windy, slow setting night walking.

Saturday last, I went out into the city, to the Drifters Internet
Cafe. Nestled off the side street down stairs the market dock
Salamanca shade of Wellington side of town. A relaxed venue for
listening to a poet. Poetry for Pakistan, a fund raiser for the
Caritas Pakistan Flood Appeal. A series of readings had been organised
for the appeal, but this was the only one I could attend. I was lucky
to be able to make it to this reading. More formless than planned out
this document is my attempt to understand what I learnt about the
event.

Ghosts of the Galapagos; the poetry of flight. A series of new lyrics
by Paul Healy. Fog lifting revealing panta, revealing all things, the
picton bridge, the blue heron. I arrived late, mid poem, and began to
quiet sit and poured myself a glass of water. And set myself to
listen. And ordered a cup of chai, frothy in the modern style with a
shake of cinnamon on top. High vaulted and perfumed poetry.

A simple quiet venue, with a small attentive crowd. I was at once
swept up with the flow of the poets words, his skill at 'making', his
simple and confident reading style. As advertised the poetry was a
series of lyrics around the theme of flight, about bird flight. This
ordinary, everyday idea separated itself and allowed multicoloured
ideas to flourish.

I was, with the poem about the lame gull who was able to gain the
choicest food, struck with the scientific cold harded factual manner,
in that compassion may not be the best reaction in many a natural
relationship. The human desire to place our values, and with good
intentions to intervene is not always the best course of action.

Songs of loss and desolation, of joy and astonishment. A dialogue of
nature and a lesson in what is being done in our state. A tale of
chemical warfare in the forests and Tasmanian devil facial tumours in a
poem called simply '1080'.

Everywhere images of the wonder and of the erotic generative spirit of
nature. Will to Power, nature struggling to create and manifest across
many forms. From the rushing diving collared sparrow hawk making a
kill, to the blue heron still on blue rock shading the water to tempt
the little fish, to the unlikely pigeon in some plot of dead land
neither bush nor city highlighted in a ray of setting sunlight, to
clinking currawongs in the Styx Valley sounding like far off church
bells, the images of flight blended with a scientific understanding of
the environment, and created a strong series of lyrics.

The poet confessed his surprise at some poems which seemed to come all
at once, as if formed from the ether. This is of course the result of
study, and practising technique. Leave the reader hanging, the poet
offered as advice, using his own work for examples. Add a strong grasp
of the English tradition, and a love of the classic forms of
poetry. The comparison thoughts that sprang to my mind while words
described the spine tailed swift flying 5000 feet in the sky and
'rides the summer thunder wall', of course was Hopkins, followed by
the ol' Will-of-Wisp Yeats. Scrambled into the forgotten linkages of
the Heraclitian Gyre.

A poem about the Pied Butcher Bird described the harmony of white and
black and gray camouflage colouring, there is a unity in
diversity. Pied Beauty and a similar eye for natural detail as
Hopkins, and while I can not agree with the poet's program of reviving
the classical forms of English poetry, I will agree that the study of
poetry is worthwhile as an end in itself. A rigorous understanding
and appreciation of the various forms of poetry, allow vast fields of
poetic imagination and inspiration to spring to life. Ripe fruit for
the poet to feast upon. Even for the experimental poets it must be
accepted that 'no verse is free', and for all poets that creation is
social creation.

So while there was a strong spiritual element that I could not agree
with, I am only too happy to quote Lenin, “Intelligent idealism is
nearer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism." and
leave the subject closed.

Listening to the ABC local radio in the morning, I was at once struck
with the passion and pleased to hear the poet speak of the importance
of supporting young poets, and the need to create a space for young
poets. This is to me very important and if I can add a slogan to the
argument, it would be 'More mentors, Fewer English Teachers.' While I
readily accept that poetry comes in many shapes and sizes, and is
indeed a raw creative purgation involving language, practised by a
wide and diverse section of society, I do find it amusing to hear
academics discuss other academics as having a 'demotic voice.' Allow
me to step off my soap hobby horse box, and commend Paul Healy as a
poet, and even more importantly as a mentor.

In Change Repose

2010-10-27T02:50:00.000+11:00

I have been busy and neglectful, and I have not added any poems or what not. As I have not been writing anything of any intent lately, my hand has been forced and I have dug up some younger and older poems. This one is some sort of a love poem, and with echos of the dark philosopher. As the sun never ending explodes and consumes - expanding endless fire and then contracting the crushing gravitation, as the sun even so is our loves.

I think this was written sometime in the mid nineties.

Nothing is true of this poem any more, all the persons real or imagined are now dead, past along; fit only as a feast for the birds and dogs.


Single Step

There is...
    Upon a flat seascape. A plot of sport, of salt
This is where the ship went down
Twisted metal. Flouncing oil.
The very real fears
Of the wounded.

And I am reminded of your smile
Restrained
Your laughing neck. 
A mocking toss of the head.

And what we call love.
Bound
Discreet
    We Overlap.

At times I collapse within you.
At times I recoil.

Place and Experience

2010-09-24T12:50:00.000+10:00

Last Wednesday went off to the Lark Distillery to hear some writers addressing the theme of place & experience. (Experience being the name we call our past mistakes.)

Whipping windy rain and whipping wind I potted down the hill from North Hobart to the coitus centre shore line. Having a few intrudes to slaughter I wandered around the docks and parking lots and slipping away alley ways. Thinking of Dr Swift and the rain shower over the city of Stella and their pet sweet sick letters, I wondered about the city centre and more and more killed time, feeding my door mouse air plane head.

Went up to old Jam Factory where once upon a time over one thousand people worked. All that is over now. The needs of rationality destroying the local and the particular. The docks once busy with whores and sealers and whalers and sailors and drunken colonial triad sons thriving and molesting the colony.

The walking tide slapped and swirled around pulsing the estate of marine cold timey milky making critters. The wind whipped nano-shards of slushy ice all around and I was only to happy to get to the wagram unwobbling pivot warmth of the dark wooded lark.

The University of Tasmania had run a poetry contest themed place and experience and the winners were to be announced. Four poems were read; three from out of state - so proxy's spoke instead. Jillian Pattinson won the prize with her poem The Still Point. The title of this poem inspired by Eliot.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.

Stillness and a search for answers for something that shall remain, I could see why the judges awarded this poem the first prize.

A found poem based on diving instructions which was amusing at first and then to my tastes rolled down into not so amusing territory. I did not take notes so I can not remember perfectly, but one poem, as introduced by the reader, used white space to denote pauses and so add musicality. The poem was well written, but in the end no more than a catalogue of the images the poet saw while walking in the bush.

So after a bit of minor disappointment, I was thrilled to hear Robyn Mundy and Danielle Wood read.

Robyn Mundy read of her experinces in the Southern Polar Regions. The excerpts from her novel 'The Nature of Ice' were beautiful and terrible at the same time. The blue ice of the Antarctic, the raw bleeding feet of Douglas Mawson. I was inspired to investigate more the ability of beauty to exist in the most terrible of places and times.

Danielle Wood then read from 'The Shack' a charming bit of work investigating themes around development and change in a small Tasmanian sea side town. By coincidence I had just visited Opossum Bay recently and my partner had remarked how it looked like there used to be a bunch of holiday shacks and now it was cheek by jowl with Mc Mansions. How could I not enjoy this reading which spoke of the very thing!!

And then I won raffle! A bottle of gin, which was nice as it was my birthday! All in all a enjoyable night.

Reticulum

2010-09-03T16:06:00.000+10:00

Into the Heraclitian fyre. Reading a book on microbiology, specifically about the structures within cells. It seems the endoplasmic reticulum has taken on more roles than when I was in high school; well it is good to see talent rewarded. Reticulum is defined as from a latin word for network, more poking about gave other meanings and uses of the word reticulum, including the stomach of a cow, a constellation, even a snood. So I jammed all these fragments into a notebook poem. Entered it into a contest and did not even rate a mention. So here it is...

Upon false bridge, above the bloody sand
Trident fisherman taunts and turns vaunting twists
While sea monster fish men fight clumsy.
Thrown, the weighted net expands and flies
Across the distance, bringing victory
And defeat. The one event contrasting.

I take the dog for a run in the dawn
Twilight early morning and the red sky
Burns and glows the bodies of sinners
Stoking the deadly judgement fires
Beyond the obsidian smooth lagoon.

Shallow filled of the retreating ice,
More ten thousand isolating years ago.
On the shallow ridge line to the south,
Red lights blink automatic guiding planes.
Surrounded always a thin spiders web
Network of roads and highways of commerce.

The brush again and over again rolls
Thin net long hair covered for service.
The tides roll daily back and forth gentle.
Hungry and exhausted flights of sea birds
Rest rare salt marsh fringed glasswort and pig face
Winged far Siberia. Calling in the night
Feeble and tired and the tiny sea star
Ejecting live surprising birth only three
The entire world and across the waters
Low and flat toxic algal bloom lagoon
Ignoble west flank black line barrack causeway
Blinking away dreamy sleep lights Sorrel.

Low in the south west sky the rhombus
Thin hair cross hairs of an eyepiece.
Cattle low and wander the green pasture
Eating and fourfold digesting unknown
Cattle thoughts as myriad folds catalyse
Blind countless transactions and combinations.
Endless the surface. Wide transformations
Are performed and the suns energy released.

Waking the first light frost of morning
I arrange the kindling and split logs,
And touching a match bring warming fire.
On the pitted surface the suns energy
Forges frothy warmth and cosy home house life.

Driving visit historic Richmond gaol
And the rooms of punishment that brought
Civilization the land without the fall
And the wrist binding tripod cat o' nine tails
Extended the love of Christ and the shorn
Hair of the women fleeing rape and the coffin
Sized black rooms of silent aloneness.
The children are too fearful to enter,
After almost two hundred years of silence.

200 Decades of Poetry

2010-08-24T17:11:00.000+10:00

Recently I went to a seminar organised by the tasmanian writers
centre, 2000 Years of Western Poetry, given by Christpher Wallace-Crabbe. a few days later i went to a poetry reading at The Lark Distillery. 2000 years from Homer to Beowulf all the way to Les Murray, as dizzy as a ride in the tardis. Seamus Deane described Finnegans Wake as 'a transcription into a miniaturized form the whole western literary tradition.' With this permission i conflated these events and threw in some personal stuff into one (hopefully) rhythmic layer cake piece, not so much a review or critique as an impressionistic or maybe expressionistic diary note.


Prospect of princess parry and den mark it well while southern
whales wild in wide oak leaf shadowed river valleys give sea salt
birth and eye hugger-mugger torque haysi cosmic fantayzee jive time
hobby hobble horse down wide fit for governor boot blacking venereal
log truck careening one up one down roads to marengo darkened stolid
timber beamed low head bending hougoumont dripping blood dropsy hell
o' beans joint old fashioned counter turn and her long blue thin cold
in the night wooly ursula taperings.

 And it was spelt old fashioned - but pronounced abomination.

    Plink pop now the tide is turning and the light is failing and the
hosts of invading star fish are hidden from view divertimento river
knowing the matzo flat salt marsh islands of north west bay will
slip slide away under the lapping wave waters and the hurly burly of
pellmell havoc and arriving on end of lines reef fish into the oak of
oath value of no more tears and then thick rich aromatic tieing shoes
inventory of pockets and history of pens and pencils and lint and
little balls wadded of paper more now than at any time and an old
woman walked up the tome staircase and a young family huddled and
conspired and smoked the giant chess board fountain square never made
it to the nor'west passage never at all tried but was too old and the
snow and sleet ice blizzard were too numerous many to be over came.

    Whippington of all whipping wind end of winter winds tumult the
streets and i look down the park done the stairs dun the street to the
low heavy arcola door and the invite of grain based drip droppings
after the sundry all dawn intensive at the trumpet blowing bugle song
slow and of dead comrades legacy history of fangled metric readings
(to break the pentameter, that was the first heave) of visions
transferred to ten many add the rise of capital itself and the rise of
the city and the poet could be that one that wanders around to explode
the city in a constant new appraisal of constant new engagements.

    And the satyrs and the sibyls all siren faulty attempts at candour
and of the cloud burst over above around the city streets busy with
the pleasing hum of 'em of gossipy gossiping old Irish washerwomen one
each side the river and gossiping and wagging overt the fading of hue
of light and the rising of the bats two thousand aeons of poetry and
rushing and wild riding past the makaris and buoys and gulls and
outhouses that glide us on our ways names rattle and hum and a helter
skelter treasure hunt of voices all at tumult once clam bakerings and
clamouring for attenzione multitudes within hoboken leaves of grays
hobart both without space and across tim tam time tinny more as a way
things be done than as a tink inna itself.

    Poor potsherds of poetry grand sweeping and the rise and break
down of the universal synthesis distilled into a few short paragraphs
like archaeologists digging and calm breaking in and out of diggings
to phyre inspiration and research to imagined readings for if the
first duty of the singer is to sing the urevent is to listen.

    Cups and nut blank note books of chai verde and penciled middlings
and scrapings and lite sandy bay which ways with fruit and various in
a rend about way the sundry attempts at legumes and all the things
that could be wanted - food drink and made comfortable.

    Mea cuppa daze latter atom upsy duke of work neither up nor down yon
hill wise way and the plank and the frog and toad and the one that
goes dawn with the growing drawn of the sun and the old bone budding
grove jena wise grain groan graven impalage holds all of our absolute
rattle tattle freedom and absolut freedom and terra hazy daisy i
enter and drink and raffle and sit myself down.

    Many times with two poets reading it becomes like a contest a two
house raze and peepee come up to me and they expectation plead wonder
ask how 'twas it? how 'twere it? lah lah eh and i chaw out me pierce
and that be that. 

    And then (sum say) - so if you speak highly of poet A- ergo all
that twerp nite means you did not like B-.

    Disb NOT the case.

    Simple minds nourished on the lies that piss for culture in this
our age can only see competition and dichotomy and difference and all
your san franciscos will fall into this error but we should understand
that one thing does not negate the udder.

    Sarah Day generated a charming solid suspension with her poems a
feeling was generated while she was reading of time moving slow of
folding vast distances and ages even across language failures simple
and with an eye for the imagist detail light and luminous.

    Christopher Wallace-Crabbe spoke second and spoke well clear and
with the light touch with a seurte as one would hope to hear from a
poet who has published over twenty volumes of poetry in a career
running since 1959.

    Both poets wended their way across border lands of the particular
and to use this as a jumping forward base for wider explorations all
the poetic fames including love & death and the endless cycle of
rebirth and transmission across time and space generations both poets
spoke to and from a deep educating understanding of traditions of the
storms of yestertempest of the leaves that wither weather the
superstitions of birds that migrate the changing seasons.

    Tight control of language of the words and the why and wherefores
simply used and with no flamboyance political without militant fist
clenched marching. Questioning and slicing doubt and no overturning.
Compassionate.

    And after all this afternoons of wild squalling spittles and of
sugar dusty mountains and afternoons of rainbows and child delight and
sally forth to sea froth tidal salt shallow splashing as spray the
causeway.

    -- and so ends my catechism.

Fish That Fly

2010-08-16T02:09:00.000+10:00

An old poem - a response to the idea of the of Intelligent Design. there are atoms and and the void. the world is matter in motion.

& sum creatures
Look about the world
One thousand loveless eyes
& sum creatures
Without effort
Effortlessly
Turn shit to soil.
And some creatures
Grow larger fabled
Unforgiving elephant.
Rain forest of love.
Fish that fly birds that swim
Ours a remote world is.

& she spoke her building hands
Spreading across the table
Each of us we age we grow

And the infant desires to nurse
And the infant desires love...
Love a rain storm of love
Now clear clear jet clear
Night is upon us.

Roses

2010-08-01T01:53:00.001+10:00

It is sometimes hard to write with a family and job and et cetera - so this took about a week to write and in the end i just the said the hell with it and called it quits. Poss is TS Eliot, as in 'old possums book of idiotic cats'.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The Hollow Men

yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper,
...
To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.
Canto 74

The photo is from the cascades female factory

The roses are slow to rouse themselves
Tight buds build slowly to blossom
As the afternoon light creeps off
To bed later and later each day.

This is poss, how it ends, not a bang
Nor a whimper. The cracking sound
Of ice, the crackling rain forest
Fire, a sudden belch of methane.

The echoing murmur of the wealthy
Perverting discourse of lies and doubt.
This is how it ends, fearful
Unable faceless desires

Not a bang not a whimper not swaying
From the lamp posts. Spasmodic crisis
Looping collapse makes bird song still,
Ends the soft mouse rustling grass.

Yet another failed poem

2010-07-21T10:27:00.000+10:00

Sent this off to a contest for Father's Day Poems. The structure is more Tonka than Tanka, as the third line is not a pivot for the stanza, and the number of beats is not 100% in the 5-7-5-5-5 schema, but pretty close. I tried hard not to create the image of victimhood. Leading into the unknown forest, it is up to us to find a way...

A Lesson Learnt

Drunk and abusive
Our Father disrupted
Our childhood
Abused my mother and sisters
Shattered our sense of self.

With my own children
I remember and have learnt
All a man can do
Is to break the cycle.
Of domestic violence.

Gallery Opening

2010-07-13T13:58:00.000+10:00

Echoing church bells clang out five
End of work week ending the day.
Out they pour from shops and walls,
Work sites, to queue the pub bars,
Cash point, hole in the wall.

Daylight of children
Wide parliament tour
And museum wanderings.
With the setting of the sun
With the rising of the wind
I wandered old shop town shore front
Factory warehouses transformed.
Flowing tide climbing the stairs.
Old grain silo segmented homes.
Working harbour view. Side step
The head feeding night dark park.
Splashing beef blood red wine entry.
The newly moved gallery home.

And an exhibit of two young local artists was being opened at
the Colville Gallery. Still new to town, I thought it worthwhile
to investigate. And I am glad that I did.

Aquinas taught that art must have three elements to be
beautiful, Integritas, Consontia & Claritas. These are sometimes
defined as Wholeness, Harmony & Radiance. Wholeness and harmony
seem to be easily understood in relation to a work of art, and
it is Claritas - Radiance that is more problematic. Claritas
must be the ineffable and must refer to something internal
and organic being emitted from the work under consideration.

This construction seems however to lead us into a circle of
confusion. To be beautiful the work must radiate. But what
is to be radiated, and how? Maybe we can find a more easily
grasped concept in the works of the Victorian English critic
and oft named hedonist, Walter Horatio Pater. For in his
masterly work on the Renaissance, besides leading young men
astray, he used the concept of a 'lovely strangeness.' After
the storms and stresses of modernism, our age should not find
the idea of strangeness in art to be too confronting. Beauty,
after all, will be convulsive or it will not be at all.

In the works on display we can get an idea of both the
strangeness and the loveliness. The works of Matthew Armstrong
were all landscapes of our naturally artificial world. However
none contained any images of people, only the tatters and
droppings of humanity. All of his works were set in a twilight
atmosphere. These two facts worked to inspire a charming feeling
of wonderment in the viewer, raising questions rather than
offering boxed answers. Is this meant to be set in the rising of
dawn, or the passing of the day, does the lonely country road
beckon one forward with the sky glowing home fires of love and
affection, or does this road and this sky lead us into certain
oblivion? This allowing and encouraging the viewer to supply
elements to the work is to me an important element of any art.
For to tie up all the loose ends and offer up final denouement
is the work of a mind too caught up in the dominant bourgeois
shop keeper error, where all things fetter under a certain type
rational control and all stories come complete with closure.

Turning to the other wall, we see the works of Chris Bennett,
again a young local artist. Chris' work does not have the
metaphysical twilight blue palate of Matthew's work. But
his works equally emitted the lovely strangeness, were
equally concerned with light and tensions unresolved. In
contradistinction to Matthew's Chris' works all included human
figures, with most of his figures questioning the viewer. In
'The Lull' a couple sat together and ninety degrees apart in a
room lit by an external light. These paintings for the most part
were works of the inside, of humanity's built environments. In
'11PM' a questioning face appeared as an apparition from a
darkness vaguely reminiscent of Rembrandt shadowy world. The
'Indistinct Horizon' was almost a fugue in in black and
white, an individual sitting on a public bench looking over
an endless sea and sky pregnant with pure white nothingness,
while a silhouetted trash can turns into a possible momento
mori tombstone.

Both artists had very solid technique and understanding of
composition, so the elements of wholeness and harmony can
be easily seen, whether in the rich dark green detail of
the obscured row of plants in the foreground of Matthew's
painting 'The Domain', or in the slight and powerful blue
brush strokes touches on the bottom of the lamp post in the
'Indistinct Horizon'. The question than revolves around the
idea of claritas, which we see that both artists were able
to radiate a lovely strangeness, charming and compelling the
viewer to engage with the works on display.

In all I can only hope that both artists have long and fruitful
careers and I will look forward to seeing more such pieces.

Devonport - Deloraine - Conara - St. Mary - Bicheno

2010-06-27T23:09:00.000+10:00

Driving through the North East side of Tasmania. Too many of these poems end becoming anti war poems. It sucks that I have to do this rock drill anti war thing.

Early mourning shill
Scent of wood fires.

Meander on the Liffey
Bloom home steam Manchester train falls.

Counting the possums split open
The green verge of black road.

The influence of the city extends
Into the smallest one dirt horse town
A smut on the graph of the highway
Out here Coca Cola rocks the forest.

Salting about juice annoying each other
Mother confused by friendly service.

Ravens feasting the spilt open devil
Thin black ribbon between train tracks and river.

Strange distorted faces out the rock wall
Fallen over trees dressed in raggedy moss.
Green blue waves glimpsed random holes of trees
Alongsdide the ocean Break o' Day.

All these hamlets little towns we pass
New South Victoria Tasmania
It matters not, we see the same stone ghosts
Pale and cold. The sorrowful digger rifle
To the ground slouch hat head down grieving
Immense chasm of grief a generation
Lost or more accurate thrown away.
Est e Forge. How can we? Remembrance.
We do not even remember the whys
And wherefores. Knee deep in mud built trenches
Alongside a young man his bottom jaw
Torn apart eyes rolling in terror.
Epiphanies staring across a chasm
Of grief and sorrow. Fourteen Eighteen
A generation slaughtered as if the world
Is too small to share. Sent home to forget.
As if one can forget the brave young ones
Shrieking in terror in the mud and lies
Entrails spilling lungs searing of poison.
Home to a lack and shell shock and the dole.
Home to the same parties and policies
Home to the pimps and whores who grew so much death.
Lest We Forget! There is not enough to share.
War to build more more war and more destruction
Greed and cynical anti communism.

Into East Devonport

2010-06-12T12:10:00.001+10:00

Into Tasmania, looking around East Devonport

A pot of beer
A pint of port
In this old port town.

Gusting shreds of rain squalls
Round and round breaking the quiet.

Beach of rocks and rain water flowing
From the streets across the sandy flats
Constant rattle hymn of ocean waves
Teen age lairs of empty condom bottles
Three yellow black cockatoos mock ignore
The two running screaming laughing children.

Cement factory looming and noisy
Fright herds in away the capital
Engorging never stood and never will.

Staring dog on a leash blinking blackness
Quenching ocean constant thrilling roar
One two ten seconds one two ten seconds
Repeating red warning lights charnel
Estuary beckoning beacon sign.

And the ship as tall as a carpeted
Apartment building as wide as a parking
Garage lifted and lofted bounced about
The humbling power of the ocean
Scouring the shore land mixing vital
Minerals into the vast salt soupy
Briny krill wash of the great sweet mother.

Scorpio descends uncoiled shiftless clouds
Binary night of day long showers.

Long low sorrowful bass wail blast
Of industrial ship rugged up against
Bracing blasting wind cold ruggedly
Merchant sailors rough rugged hands calloused
Torn knuckled and Bolsheviki hands
Arthritic and abused and thrown away
Aside hands. Maritime Workers Union
Hall monument to past away sailors
Sufferers chapel. The first radio
Southern hemisphere transmission.

East Devonport Bowls Club painkilling
Into the night innuendo laughter.

Flashing tough spectacle images
A disordered mind remote control
Lumping from scene to scene advertisements
Con you into thinking you're the one
That doesn't smoke the same cigarette as me
Drunken druggist compelled control
Mod urn of piled spectacle over priced
Vaccination and accusations
Hung parliament of transported agreement
Let all parliamentarians go hang
That wing should only exist to support
The out in the street wing not the back room
Loitering wing of well paid communions.
The disordered mind twists and mash up turns
This is our left wing wight sad to say.

The young boy toss throws one eon smoothed rock
My young son into the shallow puddle
And the dog chases pounces upon
Unable to purchase a bite smooth
Worn rock over time and he struggles.

Piddle paddle puddles reflect
The incandescent houses the city.
Long low stentorian great ship groans
Thunder heave hoes into view and I watch
As it sail shudders dissipates long way
Into the jet ink black cold uncaring
Night of enhancing jet black ink cold night.

The wind rattles and rustles and whispers
And thistles the aluminium frame
Skeleton plastic construction work place.

Bonza bait for sale
Lapwings chitter chatter
The golden rain night.

Port Melbourne - Bass Straight

2010-06-04T15:10:00.000+10:00

Crossing the Bass Straight in a big old boat. Closing in on our goal.

I knew we were meant to be together
For we, know what I mean, hate the same things.
Timidity of the capitalist class
Fearful any changes to the flow of cash
And yet rushing salivating to follow
The path finders pushing to over
Produce then equalising back to fear.

What is rational for the individual
Becomes irrational for everyone.

As the down steady rain pelts the earth
Bogging the grassy dirt and sliding off streets
Of hand made bitumen tiny rivulets
Form and all find their way to the rivers
And creeks and streaming brooks embracing filling
The ways of water and constant the water
Rises and over flows the normalising
Banks the constraining banks the confining banks
Slowly at first cautiously searching for low
Spaces to explore and exploit until
With an unstoppable rush the water
Overflows and scours the riverbanks
Filling all depressed places eroding
The sides destroying humbling all
In the path sapping houses and neighbourhoods
Entire towns tossed apart and denuded.
Even so does the capitalist class
Rush into the low places where money
Can be found where gain is to be made
Regardless without thought irrational.

Pretence of inner city living
Gazebo in memoriam ANZAC
Bronze brick subscription great war diggers
Home to homeless barefoot avoided
Encrusted black single feather headband
Failures of our rulers. Discarded
Cast aside abused ignored soldiers
The incurable widows orphans tossed
Onto the pigsty scrap heap the shadow
Of fabulous wealth of endless theft.

After two hours or more crossing
The calm wide light encircled bay
Dreaming of maybe ancient encampments
Forty thousand years ago and the Yarra
Slowly meandered a flat dry plain
Hunters and small gorups built and spoke their tales
After the ice age after the ice melted
The sea rushed into the rip filling shallow
The land hiding the encampmetns the middens
And the meltiung ice caps the rising seas
Recalls Utnapishtim or Noah's flood
The strong waves of the ocean bob cork
Towering ship large apartment building.

Black sky black ocean cloudy starless moon kiss
Pitching and yawing yawing and pitching
Slow and anaemic steady breathing rolling
In unison sympathy with the gentle
Sleep rhythm breathing of children snoring
The slow tidal rhythm of countless lunar
Cycles the long sonorous song calls
Hiding massive southern right humpback whale.
Dread the fear that any time I would be pitched
Off tall second floor scuppered bunk bed.

Hiding in plain site thick working class beard
Searching out quiet herbal smoking dream.
Saints win clinking glasses and television
Sing soggy scraping knifes and forks on plates
Slave coast titans claw back a surprising
Come from behind win o'er the southern storms.

The black dog alone in rowed kennels
A middle aged dyed blonde women sings
Popular disinterred love silly songs.

Shuddering ship
Vibrating engines
Resonance
Shuttering ship
Radiant children
Dissonance.

Bairnsdale - Sale - Traralgon

2010-05-28T21:36:00.000+10:00

More travelling through Gippsland Victoria quiet and nightmare dark history and i can never wake up from. like a vampire it infects me and slowly drains me dry. from a letter written 1846 by a squatter Henry Meyrick. the quote was found on wikipedia.

The blacks are very quiet here now, poor wretches. No wild beast of the forest was ever hunted down with such unsparing perseverance as they are. Men, women and children are shot whenever they can be met with … I have protested against it at every station I have been in Gippsland, in the strongest language, but these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging … For myself, if I caught a black actually killing my sheep, I would shoot him with as little remorse as I would a wild dog, but no consideration on earth would induce me to ride into a camp and fire on them indiscriminately, as is the custom whenever the smoke is seen. They [the Aborigines] will very shortly be extinct. It is impossible to say how many have been shot, but I am convinced that not less than 450 have been murdered altogether

Gloaming growling wind
Grey oligarchies
Solitary

Barnacle sale paragons

And what is the great bourgeois dream?
Nothing less than something for nothing
Gold from death from tossed aside lives
Sleazed extorted used discarded.
The great alchemical dream of gold
From base nothingness. As the chairman
Of the Chamber of Commerce admitted
In the Fin Review, I chanced to glance
At one pot clouded Friday afternoon,
In fact we resent paying wages.
Worship of the criminal
Of the strong man who takes what he wants.
Something for nothing. To diddle
Staff out of money to offer poor
Service at best to place the onus
On the outsider the customer
Anything else. Enterprise translates
To pure theft and nothing else no honour
No social good no care no forward.
Something for nothing. Something for nothing.
The bourgeois dream taught to our children.
Climbing the ladder of aspiration
Living the life of ownership
We have lost more than optimism
Grasping after wealth after things
We have lost the cooperative
Spirit for the home owner lives in dread
Fear of it all failing crashing down.
And this fear makes all weak and confused.
Something for nothing. Responsibility
Falls to the individual
While producers laugh cashing cheques
The hungry are allowed to starve
The weak are thrown aside those who are ill
Deserve to die they are not pure of heart.

Asbestos lead cadmium coal
Let the workers chew on that
Let the workers spit out gold.

Is this how we are to teach our children?

Compassion suits the poor
Greed is the strong Christian man.
The world is too small to share.
When uncle Toby was vexed
And his dinner spoiled
From a simple fat buzzing fly
He let the fly out the window
This world surely is wide enough
To hold both Thee and me.

Misty foggy clean evening tide
Osiris to my right hand side
Saggy telephone lines beside
The wide highways black glinting
The oncoming car headlights.

Slack sloughing Orion to the front
And off the my right side.

Mimic English names Avon River
And you can guess the rest.

The telephone is out of range
The petrol stations are all closed.

Late rising lazy old dying
Crone wan moon mother sickle.
And then I read Malcolm died.

Into Gippsland - Orbost - Bairnsdale

2010-05-20T21:41:00.000+10:00

Further the trip from Canberra to Hobart, crossing Gippsland Victoria in the night. Nothing, empty rolling hills and trees and road trains.


Nothing Really Matters.
    Burst into tears.
Beautiful.
And the children.

Thermal wing spreading 
Slow circle raptor.

Flattened tree artefacts 
Of previous weather.
Flash flood knocked 
Over down the trees.
The small river bed.

Man's calming hand
Of productive rolling
Distance.

Sapphire Coast
Cherry Lane
Old Dam Road
Yellow Pinch Dam
Cabbage Tree Creek.

Tin woodman rusted solid
Wise old timey farm
Machinery. Engine.

Pink rock face cutting
Burning orange scar
Eight hundred and fifty
Million years ago
The iron rusted out
Of the ocean
Deposited here.

Bald Hills
Gipsy Point
Sandpatch Point 
Pambula
Mallacoota
Glissando.

Clichéd looking
Fishy typecast
Matey crossing
The pub side
Of the road.

Dead fox. Clues of ocean
Gaps of the forest trees
Quarantine Bay 
Thirty thousand dollar
Fishing contest.

Constant changing sand islands
Mouth of bay river.

Two ravens shiny
Fly lazy over the highway.

Falling over porch
Verandah house
Faded peeling.

Park mocked outlet
Bored youth tedium
Rural life boredom
Idiocy. Past Bombola.

Constipated olive drab pained
Tanks burnt up strictures
Off the ground.

Timbillica dark lyre bored gully
Dreamy blue
Gray and white
Rapid change
Settling son.

Spit and instinct mortared
Ant hills dart dash hilly
Road side radiant city.
Hobble muddle this dance.

Kangaroo & wombat
Yellow warning sign
Dinted and abused
Teenaged air guns
Fifty kilometres more.

Victoria Empress of India
Queen of England, this exotic 
Land named. And Canada
And Africa and gentle they 
Lived a land without religions
A land without ownership.
Hard and even brutal but 
Never in gathered mobs 
And given weapons and told
To kill or be killed to make
Greater wealth for the already
Wealthy well to do well off. 
Not the lash nor the stock
Nor the gibbet nor the court
Nor the brothel nor the clap
Nor the bible nor the bottle.
Not even influenza. 
And so 
Defenceless gainst gammon veterans 
Of gaols and ships and wars
The brutalised the psychotic
The rational the learned 
The hypocrite the religious.
Naked against the white man
A tragedy still not acknowledged
Naught but jeers and contempt.
A nation afraid to look 
Into the mirror called history.

Farmers burning heaps.

Genoa
Mallacoota
Wilderness Coast.

The GPS says the next turn
Ain't for some 180 kilometres.

Century old trees burn
Infected injured crying out
They are weakened and so 
Fall over scattering younger
Trees levering out root balls
Exposing to the light and air.

Here the fires were more recent. 
The earth is still black. 
The trees are still.
Still whimpering in terror.
If one is quiet one can hear
The silent fear as the wind
Rustles the leaves.

Axeman's track.

Sunset stop.
Truck stop.
Truck driver coffee 
Slop shop selling bait.
And for the truck drivers
It don't have to be nice.
Just get it in ya
And back onto the road.
It is a form of rationing.
Not like the coffee 
Served up in fine china
For the lawyers
Or accountants
Or doctors
Or politicians.

A pair of eight pounders
Desert rat sandy drab
Lest e Forge 39-45
 
Xmas decoration
Road train lit up
Articulated trucks
Power hurtle highways.

Bonang
Marlo
Newmerella
Andante
The Snowy
Swan Reach.

Kioloa - Bega Valley - Eden

2010-05-15T19:10:00.000+10:00

Moved from Canberra to Midway Point in Tasmania - wrote a series of poems about the move, thinking about Ginsberg's Fall of Ameria - Poems of These States So I called them Songs of This East Coast. Not as good as Ginsberg but hopefully you will like 'em. This was updated and extended. Maybe for better, maybe just to be more pretentious.

Kioloa - Bega Valley - Eden

Sunny days and half moon nights
Redundant tree left on the flank of the navvy cut
Bright iron rust red wound wound scar rots and crumbles
Into damp dust bits of chiseled hand. Slowly eaten 
Slow death realizing life of moss and lichen and fungi.

A thin new young shoot struggles to the sun
Smooth young growth raises holy sun embracing
Tendrils twisting out dread stump dead heart
Magical wood over full vigorous life force.

Young big capital town couple exorcise
Annoying cash card buying and celling
Love new day sun dog walking dawn and dressed
In like mien them that weak heard parlay hard
From top to tail poseur. Two flitter boys scouting
On by past and stop. Query and examine
Mob of kangaroos round floret emerge.
And the locals despair mostly their need.

Black burnt slated serried gum trees 
Resting cows black on curds and whey grass
Vine and creepers out of control.

Day dream word flow spewed disorderly mind
Too too many as that possum would say 
Adjectives to disturb flowing ideas
Allowing gain of prizes and praises
Pound for pound swimming burnt and piled high
Slabs of ply upon ply interconnected
Images punning on board joke grouchy
Variety. Disoriented mind.
Accreted images growing coral wise
Turning back upon itself again again
How long the coastline? How long a piece of string. 
Constant flux and change the coastline moves each day
With the pulling shape of the sun and moon
With the winds and waves. Pointing peninsula
All islands and blocks of land in constant
Change and constant growth and regress. Even
The way to measure changes the shape and size.
And the mountains erode and the hills erode
Turn into sand and dirt and rolling down 
And the waves scour the shore and tree fall
Into the tidal swaying sand rub forming.  
One connection to encounter one more
Firming tap turning of random collage
High speed global digital network village.
And then back home to begin again again.
Forced mental state transformed into a lie.

Corrugated chicanery runs
Schoolboy sick from calico visioning.
Mottled cows knee deep mottled weir
Brown and white. 
                 Knee deep of beer stained ochre
Hathor desirous of killing all
Drunk with slaughter too drunk to stand
Sun encasing horns murderous mourner.
Drunken mother sleep. Rainy sun showers.

Uterine matrix of land and sea.
Oyster farming bogs knife sweep scuttle.
Egrets mating plumage white brown regret.
Fiddle pint roofs. Dust clods destroy weeds.
Old propped up frame farm buildings fading down.

Bell miner chiming forests.
Temperate rain forest.
Turquoise water menstrual mud flats 
Interzone play of here and now.
Puddle of ponds. Ducks and bitumen.

Patterns of leaves through light
Falling seizure on dot and dash
Drowsy and nauseous afternoon
Rain eroded flanks of hill 
Gully scars smoothed over time.

Infinite perspective
Objective scar high tension
Lines receding vanishing point.
Retinal eye burning green.

Alchemy

2010-05-10T01:02:00.000+10:00

Thrice great Hermes - Linear B from Pylos - TIRISEROE - Magic is closer to science then religion is. And fairy penguins rule.

Magic investigates the world
In a way the religion does not
Alchemy transmutates Chemistry.

Naked they worship transcending
The fleshy world of the sinner.

The beach surf fisherman pulls in his line
Thoughtless the hook snagged a fairy penguin
Struggling bird reeled onto the cold wet sand
Dear children distress animals in pain
We hurry along smooth stones to gather.

On closer inspection the surface
Is covered with countless
Cratered a miniature moon
Pitted with thousands fine
Three or four larger
Diagonal scratches.

A monkey quails.
I fall asleep
The living room
Floor my daughter
Thumb in her mouth
Special corner
Favourite blanket
Rubbing her face.
Eyes shut.

The trees have eyes and the trees are dancing.

Rising falling Doppler car pitch
The constant roar of waves
Crafting sounds pencil on paper.

Strange broken sleep
In strange bedrooms
Loud whirring and humming
Trucks and cars and trains
In new bedrooms.

Just past the round about
The War Memorial
Crows squabble the eyes
A dead kangaroo.

A fine mist
A dead cockatoo
On the traffic island
Mist fell on his face.

Can one die of mediocrity?
Is such a thing even possible?
To die of commercialism.
His cigarette hissed
Contacting the surface
Rain gathered puddle.
Mist beaded into drops
Grey flicks of his hair.
Whiskers on his face
Constant fever thinned.
There are flecks of mud
On the hem of her white
Muslin skirt. Black blocky
High heeled shoes.

Misty gum flat ridge lane
Woolshed community hall
Thin windy weedy mist
Reedy creek snow gum motor
Cycles thin misty covering
Mountain top hiding between
Here and there. Twenty dollars
A week at least on postage.

Green wide valley spread out
Beneath rain soaked hill rounds
We followed emergency crews
For miles in the rain the sedan
Into the guard rail the ute
Into the tree. Small crowd gathered.

I write for myself not for publishing
To arrange a range of thoughts
To formulate and experiment.
To publish to repeat is in a way
To ossify mind forged manacles.

Yellow plant stacks railway sleepers
Shadowy ghost rodeo wind turbines
Far off misty ridge line water tanks
Shades of green after drought breaking rain
Outcrops of rock moss and lichen growing
Orange bright cuttings.

Vastness

2010-05-06T08:02:00.000+10:00

Nature is vast
Feeble we are.

The photo is from NASA site

Vast this intricate imaginary.
Pale this insignificant vessel.

How much like nothing
This single self
Of species being.

To understand and grasp
Tallow seep into the pores
Invasive of dark corners
Generations.

Low ground dicksonia cover
Damp temperate rain forest
Small shoots of bright green
Where the leaves echo the boughs
And the boughs repeat the leaves
With a swimmingly mathematical
Percussion of endless pirouette.

On the frippery slippery
Sea side slope the rocks
Are rolled smooth and cold
To the touch salty to taste
Rounded and silent millennia
Abstracted to novel designs
For new ways of seeing
And translating the world.

And the young ones argued
With their parents. If you
Wish to live your life as
Small ones, as timid mice
Who jump in fear and tremble
At all that is new and different
Than that is your own look out.
We however we wish to raise
Our children to be expansive.
To not live always in fear
Or petty hatred.

A feeble speck on the heaving
Ocean, or as Algy said, the Great
Sweet Mother. Posturing
Pretence of the city dwellers
Urbane struggling for reception.
As if nature is something to be
Overcome, or something that must
Be bettered. Something must be added
To make nature more enjoyable.
Thou hath conquered and made the world gray.

A shiny dead fish under the surface.
Wasteful.

Pulses of overnight rain
Tattered shattered clouds
Toying moon near full mother
Mosquito coil smouldering
Sub tropic memories.

Misty muddy toes in a tidal pool
Tiny fish scooting, the children
Laughing chasing learning.

For over three billion years
For over three thousand million years
The silent microbes built alone
The earth the very air we breath
The vast towers of iron and steel
All and more made of silent
Process progress.

Disappointment

2010-05-01T00:59:00.000+10:00

Capital tends to corrupt and demean all things - in this we have sold our house to get away from the ownership society, which was nothing but a right wing con to take our money from us, and to make working people too fearful to revolt, and to try to make the concerns of the ruling class the concerns of the slaves.


Death comes when the tide is low.

Morning of disappointment and delay
Family sorrow and disappointment.

Mud babies made mawkish delays
And confusions of names 
Placed into the homeless
Busted penniless womb.
An embryonic effigy.

Child of placental error
Mother of freedom.

Always must one smooth away
Impressions left of sleep
And never musty messed up
Pick up that which has fallen 
Nor shall one ever eat any beans 
Or pulses or expose irrational numbers.

One must break from heartier costumes.

Disappointed at the flooding 
Of the tides 
    Pit of the stomach
    Homeless
    Helpless.

Living in spare rooms
Living on kindness.

Diptera.
A large black fly buzzes
Erratic kitchenware.

A wilderness of disappointment
With the present state of affairs.
Disappointment with the sexual act
Disappointment even with the ocean.

Tiny fish school 
A stream and flow
The tidal pale.

Washed up 
Vomited out
Ejected the sea
In her smooth white hand
This white smooth piece
Of pitted whale bone
Vertebrae elaborate 
Of design and texture.
Pouted sand pitted a silent
Terror of months years decades
Held cold dark pressure.

The tiny child hand
Reaches the wet sandy
Beach explores both
Nose and tongue.

Loud lout snore thing 
Shifting of gears
Top to bottom 
Snoring snares 
To catch unawares.

Fancy 
Dreads dance up on
My mind creek 
And crack dissipate.

Tinkling stars of spirits
Annotated parade of tourists
And their dogs.

Settlement Eve - The Witch of the Beach

2010-04-29T02:45:00.000+10:00

Standing at yet again a cross roads of my life. went down to the cross roads (with my black dog cloud) fell down on my knees...

After four months the deed is all but done.

Purging new watery stomach illness.
Lunar flood and ebb, endless tidal rolls.

The flooding tide is exuberance.
The ebbing tide is melancholy.

Myriad shakers whispering over years
Of seashore and her myriad names and roles.

Fashioned a thigh bone unearthed dead child flute
To enchant with listless drowsiness the cruel ones.

The wailing sailing ship rolled industrial seas
And the crew felt jilted by the Boston and London
Owner masters. We need to increase our share.
For are we not the ones who toil the stony
Seas, who climb and fall monotonous motion waves?
Did we not, just last week, farewell mates young and true?
Sun burnt, wind burnt, cold burnt, salt burnt the crew flared
In impious revolt, and hacked about and threw
Christian captain headless over wave splashed side.
Face down the sand the entrance to the inlet.
Earth of the sun made his corpse swell and hotter he grew.
And vigorous came shining greenery and plants,
And ingenious came signing birds and stowaway
Creatures, soon he was covered with sandy life.
On the crew sailed on to fabulous islands
Of the Brazilian freedom coast where lived legion
Squads and ships of freebooters and ragamuffins,
Building families, enlightenment wealth promise,
Made for all in harmony and with equality.
Wisely had the masters insured again lost loot.
Boston and London slept no gains. And the caution
To this day still sleep guards the inlet. Dreaming songs
Remembering cloudless bells to jingle the sea foam
Rolling endless up and down ocean sand shore.

The old woman tosses and shakes her long wet hair,
The gardens of kelp swaying the turbulent seas.
Feared by some she dances and leaps playful dolphins.
Wandering sand songs and bells and haunts ancient
Walking the beach she reads and deciphers fortunes
To come, births and deaths into the future. The shape
Of the foam the sounds of rolling swells and sea shells.

Driving and Waiting

2010-04-27T23:41:00.000+10:00

selling the house and moving interstate leads to many delays


Action at a distance is magic...

A morning of last minute 
Tedious back forth rushing.

Pained the warriors of Madagascar
Will not eat hedgehog, fear of timidity
Being swallowed so transforming arms.
Nor any that died fighting or was speared.

Croaking frogs sing - jealous husbands kill wives
Innocent. With only a knotty tree witness.

On the road - waiting
Magpies sing warble the second sun rise.
Cloudy and rainy - gray cloud rainy.
Endurance Place. Ashkanasy jogging
McDonald more cop lands. Last chance laughing.
Bright yellow flowering artery side.

Dead magpie. Three pigeons. Telephone wire. 
Lines of road work or digital spirit levels,
More beeping trucks banking up. Fresh hill of
Cantered trees. Red wine bottle brush humming
Yellow and black fine haired social insect. 

Industrial protective films. Sol dies. 
Pink belly winged birds cross dual carriageway.
Far off wind turbines spin on far off hill. 

Redwood left sheep sharp station creek run
Mount hoarding house agony ponds
Pebbly beach. 

Around about midnight piss down rain storm.
First day night at the bench hours. Buckets
Of tears slashing the keys lashing all things.
Fleshy frightening and tumble foundlings.
Cold coffee left out cause twitchy bites
Of buzzing small insects. Dawn breach rising.

Too much rain for a rhythm falling 
Too much noise to hear. They called to join.
Too much rain splashing and slashing wind
Too much noise to make a melody.
Blood sucking insects they swell and next feed.
Too strong a storm for a rhythm to emerge.
They called her over. And now crest fallen,
Tear welling, her panties around her ankles,
The older girls laugh at the cruel joke sprung.

School stream school - nearly one in the morning.
Weapons drawn? Will this knight ever end?

Tensions of twisty mist tissues swirling
Around abort the saddle bank maintain. 
Strange matrix of land and water, rivulets
And tuft of grass. Dead turtle the roadside.

Metal Box

2010-03-28T20:46:00.000+11:00

Packing the house - and just the general day by day. things come into being and then pass away.

The metal box pops and cracks
Early mourning son warm wealth.

Disturbing dreams. Injured children.
Black night black dog slaughtered
Sacrificial meal.

Nectar gathering bees buzz hum
Pleasing flowering vines.

Mislaid keys hiding keys
Dog harness whispering.

Belly bulging moon mother
Mother to All of the Gods.

And needless they support the troops arguing
That freedoms are advanced by murder.
No No No. For that thank the dissident
The ones who stand up and out, who face jail
And worse flying the face of the old ways.
Where were the soldiers of 1967?
Where were the coppers the Day of Mourning?

Squat brown and black gargoyle beetles
Meander and plumb the extravagant
Exposed floral genitalia
A new bud appears. Faint crimson hint
Held tightly folded protective embrace.
The wide brimmed artichoke leaves wilt and droop
The worrying, the eviscerating sun,
The corrupting sun, the humiliating sun.

Black wound licking dog. Crone aware black dog
Howling meating place of many roads
Grandmother of the threshold, the crossroads,
Protector of pregnant women. When black dogs
Bark and wander the night, she is close at hand.

A raven verifies from north to south
Vision and fast and low she flies
All the while imitating the cries
Of a nearly born infant.

Before sunset - before night falls
The bulging moon smother.

A tiny leave falls, or a piece of a leaf
Falls transforms into a butterfly
Or a moth and the fantails piccolo
And posture display shattered clods move
And expose the expectant moon.

Harsh the echoing house is empty
Quiet is the clanking clattering kid sounds
No more are the triggers to memory.
The house is empty.

Cosmonauts

2010-03-25T12:40:00.000+11:00

Packing up the house. and the process of making live a poem. the external to the internal and then externalised again.

I guess Amy Winehouse will not
Sing for the returned cosmonauts
No! No! No!

Clear night dropping down high pressure
Shimmering Scorpio. Orion,
The Southern Cross. Too soon to see
The Milky Way. Wrong time of year.

Rhodomontade - vain and empty
Vaunting over perfect morning
Giggle & Hoot; Bubble & Squeak
Boasting Faustbuch. Many colours.
Hunger eased. The Waste of the West.
Western waste. Rapped up ding shan tithe
Wise she undresses the shower.

Close a wasp flies. Far off a plane.

In the mornings of plane delaying fog
The mist rolled blanketed smothered closed hugged
The land frustrating false public servant
Passengers. Come the forenoon the fog rose.
Dreamy blue sky. The scattered staggering
Line of plants spread and arced to the Eastern
Sun rising light and warmth. A single rose
Red at the summit a purple collar
Flush of leaves. Shocked red stain. Jangle of green.
Symbolic fraying and browning edges.

Too am wake up calling standing
The back yard steams of breath fading
Thin clods mixing to dissipate.
Old bills old receipts warranties
Household product old purchases
Old cards and paper mementos
Acknowledged measured examined
Sundered unto the steaming tip
Heat generating money mount.

Repulsive gnome faced polyp want
A croaker gargoyle champagne
Add victors vomit froth misery
My telly lie box bone dig it all
Sex set tip top. Elect trickily.

Meandering Shelters

2010-03-23T03:05:00.000+11:00

selling packing the house - delving with lawyers and banks and agents and all sorts - it's a bourgeois town. got a copy of 'The Golden Bough' for the trip. so we are almost there - just a few days to go.
this is, like all poetry, an autobiography. the last few days in a few lines.



I - Rex Nemorensis

Early Morning
Patty cakes &
Car tunes
    Slight aroma
    Burnt edge
    Burnt toast
    Butter Honey
        Thick rich scent
        Coffee's on 
        Blurry growl
        Opens her eyes
        Closes her eyes

Kookaburra sings
Chattering braying jackass 
She holds enfolds the snake 
The serpent in her strong beak
Breaking bones upon the branch

Deep dewdrop night
The trees show 
The first blush
Of autumn

Butterflies spread
Their wings 
Warming
Themselves

Chauntering 
Chattering 
Singsonging
Obsessions

The dog sits
East West Axis
Sphinx wise

EMERGENCY ISSUE RESCUE FLAGGED

No scanning of prison staff
And they are calling all the time
To see if we are okay

II - Laughter none

Puddles of bubbles and sinks
Of slops of last nights stew

Dreamy blue sky 
King of the wood
Runaway slave
The mirror lake
Mortal combat
Forest husband

The purple bloom of Iola
The crimson crush of rose petal
Spilt blood and fleeting beauty
Point to an ancient 
To a deep sorrow

A sad philosophy
Goods of the spindle

III - Violet Stained Dawn


Admixture is more everyday than Purity
Purity is blockage a dead end
The way of death constriction
A closure a resolution
    Purity is a narrowing
    Purity is delusion
Admixture is the everyday
The contact which brings 
Renewal

Thin clear night wine stars electric sky
Sparkling

Overnight 
High Pressure System
Clear clear jet clear
The earth gives up heat

The hollowed out immature dragonfly
Hangs Christlike across the fine
Lines of the spider dew drop web
Early morning low angled sun
Refracts the drops of water
Forming spherical rainbows
Around and about the corpse
    Regeneration
Allowing the spider
To live another day

The light and the water mix
And rise and form a billowing
Blanket over the creek

The night time gentle weeps
The crimes of day light.

Roos

2010-03-20T03:24:00.000+11:00

not much happening here - just walking the dog and thinking. the pic comes from
here


The closure of the naval
Communication centre 
All cordoned off
After last years cull 
(400 killed)
The new developments around
This end of town.
Even so gray roos 
Now mob the covert.

A flat thumping sound.

Extravagantly exuberant growth
Phalanx of grassy hedgehog 
Flower dactyl spears 
Haphazard racing embrace
The sun. Rays fall through
Afternoon oblique curtains 
Angles drop indirect light
Formless the wall 
Over her bed.
Above her head.

Acrobatic bull fighters 
    On the delta wall. 


 


Detritus of last
Months heavy rains
Dirt pacted path
Of years of home
From work walks.

Snapping wing sound grass
Hoppers taking flight
Far off the prop thin
Sound of a slate sky
Obscured plane
The wind rattles the dry
Leaves imitating 
The watery flowing.

Green drought 
Just dig
Your hands
    A little bit
Dry as...

Merry Round Go

2010-03-19T07:40:00.001+11:00

Disorienting
When my eyes watch
The solid pavement
I look up and feel
Like I am falling

Tendrils of mist twist
Above the small creek
Symbolic gyre of new day

And round and round
Of antebellum St Kilda
Skittish sea shield caldera
Depression of 2 thousand
Year old isolation isle

Packing this packed age
Of my life - rolling
Knife and spoon and fork
And cup and dish newspaper
Political gossip everyday
Tragedy sorrow

Weathered and silent

Smeared fire smoke cloud
Hazard reduction

In her dancing dress and
Her urine soaked under things
She loves the evil ones.

Cyclone

2010-03-15T15:29:00.000+11:00

with the kids at the beach, thinking how full of crap are the theists. how bereft of
imagination are there small brain pans which can not conceive of millions and billions of years of evolution slowly twisting turning the world into the one we see now. the grandeur and the depth of the universe, the smallness of our existence. am i to really belief this is only 4000 years old? but how can one argue when it is of course satan who planted fossils to cause us to doubt.

Low tide as clouds of sand rise the wind
Whirling across the face of the beach.
Dripping of wet sand warm from my hand
Clear green soda bottle transparent waves
Roll swell and fall onto the slabs of black
Basalt millions of years ago laid down.
High tide and I recall a childhood tale
From Flinders earliest fossils found
How the thin fingerling of cyclonic
Rains sauntered far flung Carpentaria
Down the rising gulley wadi dry creek bed.
Crashing the water flows over the rocky
Tableau blocks, actualises countless
Tide rolling and surging back timeless
Tiny rivulets of miniature fractured waterfalls.
Constant like this for millions of years.

Disappointment

2010-03-12T00:25:00.000+11:00

Apparently there is a disconnect between our desires and the external world. this is clearly seen in the realm of the commodity, how all things are engulfed the cash nexus. seems like i am adding nothing new to the discussion, and yet it needs to be said over and over again. or maybe the poem itself is a Disappointment, i know i am not very happy with it.

Woolgathering mornings of coffee and shivering
Inane frail sunlight. Overcast of overnight rain.
Playing sing song episodes of fancy. Sun and shade.
Pale mild eyed lotus eating of melting butter
And viscous honey milk swirl of slightly smoky bread.

Days of rain mean the creek behind the house is in flow.
Fingerlings pierce and dart the bent over shore side grass.
The sun falls in parallel lines alternating light
And dark as the surface constant flowing blades shift.
Fluffy clouds disperse and evaporate the afternoon.
The wild new green grass over recent hillside fire.

Walking with the children in the humid afternoon.
The others in wide directions of moving one two
Three four, unknown unknowable. Dirty shiny clothes
Sweating and puffing to never again see never more.
No response no acknowledgement no feelings social.
This is how commodities freedom communicate.
And the row shelves of tin canned packaged food and drink
All worldly goods bear odious white paper labels
Of Arabic numerals and laconic symbols.
This is how commodities are presented.

And in the library excitement of knowledge fails
As story time lack of imagination and funding
And smug narrow minded babbittry of risk averse
Satisfaction scrimps and steals from future generations.
And the rows of books collecting hundreds if not more
Years of human knowledge and striving, numbered and priced,
Odious and laconic. A type of rationing
As strong as any program of war communism.
Frayed and torn covers, splitting plastic jackets, brittle
Cellophane tape, mouldy yellow brown of Bovary,
Seeking approval unsteady underlines of students.

This is how commodities are presented
Disappointing in the particulars.
Disappointing in circulation.

IWD

2010-03-07T09:21:00.000+11:00

Next year marks 100 years of International Woman's Day. The text of the poster says:

"8th of March is the day of rebellion of the working women against kitchen slavery
and "Down with the oppression and narrow-mindedness of household work!".

From a recent report by Australian Bureau of Statistics:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures show that while woman have taken on more paid work, they still do about two thirds of the housework, while men do two-thirds of paid work.

or as was written in 1844

"The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women's progress towards freedom, because here, in the relation of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation."

From the Sydney Morning Herald today:

In a separate study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Australia lags behind countries including Rwanda, Sweden and Cuba and is on a par with Afghanistan, coming an equal 32 in the percentage of women holding lower house or single house seats in parliament.

Soft Blue

2010-03-06T15:02:00.000+11:00

the bus the botanic gardens the recent rain. and sum idears i have bean kinking around - a type of cinematic flatness & the multiplicity of aspects. the object alone.

The unschooled children squeal in delight
At the copper tarnished eastern water dragon.
Intent on observation she splashed the water.
After recent rains the plants green riot grow.
Piecring sun absorbing new green growth colour.
Yellow tinted spreading open simple rules,
Red shading around the edges, best for acute
Angles of twilight morning evening. A leaf falls
Mute on the floor of the elevator. Rich, almost
Indescribable, green the listless shiny shoe gray
Invested carpet. One single leaf repose.
And the bus stopped and three passengers got off.
One young man boarded. Endwise of three passengers
Bump jostled shoulders the novice. And turned sudden
In anger, greasy dirty look thrust, knife quick flash.
Mournful mother her face away in sorrow
Eyes open of prominent tears and trouble.
Flat white clouds too thin to puzzle the sun.
Hooded long hair. A nod and sits. Did you seee that?
Flowers rising from ocean flows of comet chaos.
Howled kitchen faults across a wall, grappled Da.
I told him to get off me. To get off. You fat fuck
I said, and he kept wailing on me. I had my knife.
Brightly coloured rags of commerce flutter red yellow
Green beads of water on the blades of grass blue.
Terrible as an army with banners. Mist shrouds the gully
A place gray of shadows and damp quiet darkness.
Triangle torso scratched into the burnt brick wall.
Acquitted. Mental problems. Could not remember.
Damp down gully, childhood prophecy episode.
And it was five months fuck around with remand and bail.
In the end I got off. The old man slouches makes himself
All homewise and invisible wholesome chews around
Poured aggregation canyons of efficiency.
It was the style. A grammar of disturbance.
At the time. Fought in the kitchen. I took my knife
Out its hollow. If you do not get off; let me leave,
I will open this. Stick it in your gut. He backed away.
Tales of chemicals prescribed and street bought.
So they called the cops and I had to go to that place
Behind the old library every week, it was...
Near the old school? No the other face. Oh yes I know.
Had to do a pee test every week. For six months, I had to...
What, for drugs? Saluting feeding the beggar birds
Two buskers play guitar, a fountain, fast food
Cooking, cigarettes, short denim pants. The old woman
Drags her tartan sundry trolley and curses, the old
Man uses his cane to activate the traffic lights.
Tried it the once, it was too intense, I gotta go...

The Grammar of the Lotus

2010-03-02T17:50:00.000+11:00

Came across this book when i was in the local library, and i just loved the name. The Grammar of the Lotus: a New History of Classic Ornament as a Development of Sun Worship.

Written by William Henry Goodyear (1846 - 1923)

London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1891.

It was easy enough to find. http://www.archive.org/

Enjoy!

Forest Of Error

2010-02-18T00:33:00.000+11:00

wrote this a while ago, at least two years ago. for a project which was alas absconded. so out of a perverse sense of fun i 'ave maria druggt it outta those jaws of dem serial mice, and 'ave plug plonkt it down here for all to enjoy


Halfway through this the journey of our century
I found I was estranged my way
Hard against a misty wood glum
I stumbled slumbering

Not with God
Or angels or daemons or 
Satan or magick or Buddha
Or Yoga or Zimmermann

    The wind sang to me...
    With Avarice has
        No one a painted
        Paradise

Not for their eye nor heart
Nor mind nor soul

    CONTRA NATURA

Corpses alone
Are brought to banquet
With Avarice

And all along the wide 
Fine road is now over 
Grown darling buds 

Vampirism
Chewers of Flesh
Gnawers of Bone
Dispensers of Life & Death

They mock and flog
    The OTHER

And i am all alone in
This spreading oscura
Alone this wide cold
Universe of nothing
But nothing - endless
Cycles of Nothing

Houses of whores
    Of pink brick 
    Golf course roos false
    Collanades & meat four
    Times a day (or more!)

Out with piggy wives
Clutching forks and knifes
To eat their bacon

    And 51% of people
    Surveyed are not wiling
    To pay any more than 
    A tenner a month

Never gets any better than this
This is as good as it gets

Ratcuntprickdog
Costellohowardr
Uddbushblairpu
Tinpalin

And they wonder why
The young have no 
Respect

Wars and rumors of wars
Matthew 24:6
And the blood up lust 
Of the non combatant


    And i am alone
    This spreading wood
    Of mine olde 
    Glum gloom

        And the wood dissolves
        And i stand at the gate
        Of a great city

At this great city
Stinking already of
    Greed and Death.

The Aboot

2010-02-02T22:35:00.000+11:00

The scarab is the rising sun.
As WSB says - once one becomes one whose head expands, and the cut up method is applied directly to brain, den furniture summer times comes earl well gushing wise inn. dissa one was ywrit served a copra yearns ago. agony, and now seams more kneaded.

Abort the abbot about NOW.

The internal interval of the integral
Integer (digit insertion) --

And how bored bone she stood stand
Stock drip drab still earing
A fainting swooning swan lub dub
From the Lord Kelvin plutocrat
FROM HELL
Or this pitter patter of
FATHER

Debilitatingly boren
Abound a browned
Boreal forest of
Bubbling methane bog
Tyger sorrel soup sup
Orbit
Obit
Mob gym gun dodo doco
Spinish dock DUCK.

My stoma ache
Be horn dance piping
The hokey pokey
And my nik nak neck
She be cloak clocked.

Transition

2010-01-21T00:17:00.000+11:00

My attempt to create a materialist mysticism.


As the flaming embers of the roaring
Fire burn and rise high in the air
Tumbling and panicking before the storm.
Caught within the uprising vortex
Gyre and gimble mass of heated air.
High into the air, drifting without
Reason, without instinct, caught
In the wild battering chaos.
And then long away in another time
Unknown to the roaring fire flames
Storm, the ember falls, flutters 
To the ground. Falling onto the right
Conditions, the tinderbox of dried
Out dessication, igniting, 
Flames dancing. Even so do the ideas
Of the lost, dead, burnt books flutter
Fragments and half contextualised 
Critiques of second hand hearsay 
Across the generations to flame
The old errors into new growth.
Like the singed leaves, the smoldering
Strips of bark fall onto the slopes
Of watered hills, even so do the half 
Forgotten ideas fall, fertilising
The rich soil of enquiring. 

A body of matter cannot disappear completely. 
It only changes its form, condition, composition, 
Color and other properties and turns into 
A different complex 
Or elementary matter.

Summer Hot Heat

2010-01-10T17:39:00.000+11:00


On the shore seashore
Where ancient tetrapods roamed
Age old dreams explored
Wet sand drips her hands

Sea side towers of Narragansett
Minarets of Kialoa
Extraordinary lines rise the foam
Unutterable song lines rise the foam

At the dawn of Western Literature (i)
A woman; worse than death, brings labour into the world
Eternal Eve at the mouth of Hell lies spread legg'd
And screaming bringing forth endless sinners.

At the dawn of Western Literature
The gods petty and childish made her
A commodity to be passed around
Guilt, Wrath, sexual abuse at the first.

On the shore seashore
The rolling endless waves splashed
Destroyed her tower
Rising tears broke forth her eyes.

And these same waves crashed
Beaches of Viet Nam
Of Papua, Malaysia, Korea
Timor and Borneo.

i)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_literature#Classical_Antiquity
Ancient Greek society placed considerable emphasis upon
literature. Many authors consider the western literary tradition to
have begun with the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, which remain giants in the literary canon for their skillful and vivid depictions of war and peace, honor and disgrace, love and hatred.

proletarius

2009-12-30T00:29:00.000+11:00

proletarius, literally child producers. the ones; in ancient rome, who had no wealth, only their children. proles -is means children or offspring. so regardless of what you think, it is what the great majority of us are, those who have no wealth, and who need to work to allow the reproduction of every day life. i know if i do not work, i will after not many weeks be seriously in the poop.


The proletarian leaves the house
And drives alone, or maybe takes 
The bus. Engages in small talk.
How is the Weather? Today is 
Tuesday, almost half way through the
Week, I hope it rains. And into
The office, the factory, the shop,
The hospital, et alia. Cocooned
With noise or barriers alone
The proletarian does an
Alloted amount of work within
A well measured amount of time.
Inequality of pay comes 
About due to the supply
And demand of specific skills
Of the individual worker.
Some are worth more to the bosses
In one particular place and time.

In this manner human, social
Activity is carried out.

The Two Thieves

2009-12-28T04:26:00.000+11:00

A good thing about home schooling is forcing the children to watch docos on telly. we watched a show about a painting by Picasso, and then one about ancient Egypt. The two shows urged me to write this poem.


The broken bodies
    Of the thieves
    Taken off the cross
    Thrown upon the ground
    (discarded and broken)
        Turning from yellow
        To blue - as if death
        Was overtaking.

And
    The cannibalistic virgin

And
    The bird call of
    The first sun rise
    That began time.

Cycles & cycles of time
The all-at-once
Spasms of disconnection
Most of us can not even
See Orion.

Walk Against Warming

2009-12-14T04:42:00.000+11:00

It was an interesting weekend. Obama gave his speech for winning the
Nobel peace prize. A speech, he wrote himself, and a speech which
nodded in the direction of King and Ghandi. A speech which then
admitted that, as President, as Commander In Chief, he lived in a real
world, one in which evil exists. Tired and banal words wrapped up in
some sort of archaic morality in which we are to accept war as a
rational activity. Could non violence have stopped Hitler? This is
hard to say as it was never tried. Did the West get itself wrapped in
duplicity and counter duplicity, leading to an uncontrollable
situation resulting in World War Two? I am no professional historian,
indeed I am but a small insignificant person, no more than a speck in
the relentless cosmos that is (for all practical purposes) infinite in
time and space, but this does seem a likely scenario to me.

Did non violence in India face down the greatest empire the world has
ever seen, one on which the sun never set?

Did non violence in the United States overturn 100 years of terror and
lynchings?

So we can argue left and right if Hitler could have been stopped with
non violence or not. While a pleasant diversion for speech makers and
cocktail party chit chat this is of course this is an argument which
has no answer. We can, however, safely say that Hitler and the Axis
Powers stood firmly within that rich tradition of racism and bogus
moral superiority, of violence and war as methods of diplomacy, which
we call Western Civilization. A tradition more honoured in the breach.
A tradition the West shows no glimmer of backing away from.

So as the first weekend of the Cokenhagen talks wound round and round
we took the kids off to the Walk Against Warming Rally at the grounds
of Parliament House. A fair crowd (some 1500 according to the papers -
so maybe more like 3000 in real life) for quiet old Canberra showed
up, which was heartening, we spoke to some vegan activists, and some
of the various socialist newspaper sellers. King Coal showed up. Two
stilted birds added a note of the festival to the rally and of course
scared the little ones.

The papers wailed as 900 climate change activists were arrested in
Copenhagen, and hollered as 900 were arrested in Queensland in a police
crackdown on drunken behavior. One arrest due to the political passion
of struggle against mindless consumption. Another arrest for the pure
and simple experience of over consumption, sanctified by our current
age. With the same amount of arrests, I know which paddy wagon I would
like my children to be riding and singing old timey unions songs in.

So I wrote a short poem.

Peeling paint.
Melting ice cream.

Maggie chases the galah across the
Glowing early morning twilight.

Walk again.
Nohopenhagen mumble of words words
Words stress dance the whirlwind
Stage.

Peace to War Inert Award Ceremony.

Bright blue cloudless
Contrail widening
Sky.

Deep green manicured
Lawn of Authority.

Brown frail hills
Roll treeless desiccation
Across the shimmering
Distance.

Bright red police car
Of a thin blue line
Of repression of Black
Skin of dispossession.
Army of occupation.

Pure white parliament
Power obsoleted the pale
Sandy bland smoothness
Of the new.

Byrds of a feather
Suffer together.

The elected trick evening drone
On and on stinkly blue
Glowing and radiating your
Turn will a-come. Whistle
Blowing marchers
Whistle blowing
For action
Until blue in the face
Of climate change crap of
The other party, upset
Unsettled
At being labeled
Pour diddums denyers like
Some sort of anti-semite.
Ole King Cole
And a cheep olde soul
Was Kev,
Fattened with public monies
Destroyed of climate
Science crap main political
Faction opposition, loyal
That is. Black gold.

The whole world in his hands.

Tyme of alto buildings

Same sex marriage laws

2009-12-06T02:24:00.000+11:00

In response to the weak attempt by the ACT government to pass
legislation to create equality in marriage arrangements, and Kevin
Ruddocks threat to overturn the legislation a day of action was
planned. So we went to the rally held in Garema Place at 13:00
Saturday Nov 28.


Mourning of Intoxication.

Dawn of Father Light, restraining corrupting.
Night brings only shades and our imaginings.
'Tis the wide son of the further that breeds crimes.
'Tis the desiccating sun that is our times.

Dawn Kouros embodying light and reason
Well proportioned, naked, the despotic pose 
Becomes freedoms step, a motion forward. 
Weight on both feet,
Rigid arms straight down, 
Hands into fists clenched.
Like the young recruit fresh faced, no body hair,
Without fear marching into battle, the first time,
So Apollo Kouroi straight ahead looks
Into the future, into history. With dawn
Comes the armed brotherhood,
The Rule of the Father.
With the evening comes love 
And the bosom of family.

Up with the six A.M. kids
Eggs coffee a soiled nappy.

At night the pool extends to the verandah
The hard vane trauma of firtoomunch wotka.

Dog barking, magpie swooping
Hazy smoke, smokie hazing

Dust storm of inconsiderate drivers
Road side fresh five ybuck fruitiers.

Crimson red carre pechschwarz carre
Grunanlage publick park car
A white truck, a motocykill.

Battle swap, petrel sanction, varchar wishie,
Washy restaurant, Icy higher, furniture
Swap sharp az god in dandy is good az new.
Medical clinique, apothecary,
Spawning returning goods, eclectical
Grounds for divorce droning across the back
Blox of bel canto, pitiless infanta
Protesting the hari whipping window 
Upon the open weir a hoarse an iamby
Kinny kinnt kin all tight top curled wooly.
Dear telephone tower principessa tour.
Rocky Point parks constriction construction.
Puffed out shirt sales on the Lake of Artifice.
Trailing personal trailer load becomings.
Crane and wight and read all over. Fair off
Arod the bank of sluggish light and earning
Spill away fooky craven members sty.
The rest indies fail falling on a green
Gabba one chained pop top humid swinger
Tweedy yearns inna sweep cleaning row now.
Popping huevos rancheros splatter oil.
And then he, and then he, and then he said...
Tirty tree degrees already. Get it?
Frijoles refritos. Deep fried tofu.
Parlement parlez-vous of open green space
Mighty zonal tuba mirum mighty
Trumpt blast and triangles, plucked violins
Strings of gutted canine black as your hat
Dig doggie dog long side bitey bite machs.
Color full grate feetie and them have formt
Round and round and go around again about.
Psalm three retort public park land and hand.
The Artes Centre slouching haggling miners.
Tin red lead bauxite hard water carne wash.
One da hell de krista kollage. C.C.
C.C.C.P - dunna tempt thieves. ((or rapist)
Walking home the police advise; (walk in pairs,
Stay in the light, avoid paths with heavy growth,
Keep your hemline just below the knees.)) 
Don't take any wooden nickels. Keep an eye
On your drink. Alert not alarmed. Blame the victim.

A series of speakers spoke about the recent laws passed in the
ACT. Laws that, while mild in themselves, have caused both the Liberal
and the Labor Governments to use the extraordinary powers the
commonwealth has over the territories to repeal the legislation. So we
are of course then faced with the very unedifying spectacle of
watching the Labor Party (once a member of the Socialist
International, once a leader of the non aligned pact) siding with the
Christians to repeal laws and curb human rights within the ACT.

Dies Irae

Kevin Ruddock has aligned himself, and therefore the ALP, with not
just Christians of any old sort, but the most vile type of Christians,
the ones who use the 'Word of God' to oppose the rights of others. The
type of Christian who is happy to see women die rather than have
abortions, or even contraception, the type of Christian who would
rather millions of children in the Third World die of easily cured
disease than have one blow dried hair on one perfumed Christian head
upset. The type of Christian who is happy to find forgiveness in their
heart for the assorted adulterous liars, pedophiles, confidence
tricksters, war mongers and out right hypocrites, who happen to be of
the same faith, while the poor child forced to crime or drug addiction
by soul destroying poverty (the type of poverty Jesus urged his
followers) and alienation should be dealt with by the full weight of
the law.

These are the same type of Christian who allow years of sexual and
physical abuse against children to pass uncommented on, but feel that
their morality is being attacked when two men or two women chose to
marry, and so will organise as a political force to oppose the rights
of those unlike themselves.

Kevin Ruddock and his pals line up with the insurance companies and
finical institutes to fleece countless homosexual couples, so that
even after the finality of death the greedy will attempt to steal the
funds of the deceased, and the deceased can have one final humiliation.

Or maybe Ruddock, and his illustrious predecessor John Coward, are
caving in to the terrorists. For if the terrorists so 'hate the
freedoms' of the West, maybe it is a good strategy to lessen freedom
and even to curtail rights in some instances, if only to keep the
terrorists from launching attacks on our soil.

Or maybe it is just simple fear and bigoted loathing that motivates
such activities.

Lacrymosa

A series of speakers discussed various issues and problems raised by
the legislation and the various parties responses. Amnesty
International feels that marriage rights are a human right. I have no
reason to disagree. A speaker from Gender Agenda spoke about the
problems that all marriage laws face, first and foremost in Australia
begin that there is no legal definition to define a Man or a Woman. A
member of the local Quaker groups spoke movingly about equality that
ended with an epiphany on her fathers death bed, that in the end all
that matters in this world is love. Trust the Quakers to say the right
thing, after all it takes them 100 years to make a decision and when
they do they are 100 years ahead of society. There were several other
speakers, and i must apologise for not noting them in this essay as i
had to attend to my three young children.

So to all the religious out there who will be appalled; I was in fact
thinking of the children, as I want my kids to grow up full of an
actual love, not blindly informed by the everyday hatred and narrow
mindedness that is palmed off as love in our current incarnation of
Christendom. Rather the type of love that knows that if Jesus were to
return, he would not be a well dressed bourgeois, but rather he would
be the ragged hobo that so many walk past and over holding tight to
their wallets, muttering 'get a job' under their minty breath, he
would be close to the hookers and junkies and AIDS sufferers. The
Others that those who falsely masquerade as Christians feel the need
to, at best, ignore and to mock and humiliate as a matter of course.

Anything that can extend human rights must be seen as a positive, as
it extends democracy, and the extension of democracy benefits
everyone, even those who abhor democracy. Indeed one of the hallmarks
of our current age is the suppression of democracy, mainly in the name
of security, but parallel with that there has been going on for many
years now a bald faced full frontal attack on all aspects of working
class culture and identity. Only by pushing the bonds of what freedom
and human rights are will society progress.

If my neighbor wants to marry a lounge suite, how could that in any
way affect my love and familial relations? If my neighbor marries one
of his or her own sex how is that even my concern? The only reason to
deny same sex marriage rights is outright bigotry, or if one is so
insecure about their own relationships that they feel the need to deny
others the same rights. And when governments make bigotry policy we
can see why the One Love group seeks to make 2010 a year of action.
And when governments make discrimination law, we must support this and
similar campaigns, as it will only make our world more luxuriant and
better for all.

Schwanengesang

2009-11-20T01:09:00.000+11:00

The Argument

The new head of Opera Australia said "I think we've become conservative and predictable to the audiences that we're playing to..." A few days before this comment was spewed forth by the Daily Liar, I went to the ACT Heats of the National Poetry Slam, a few days after I went to the ACT Writers Centre Poetry Awards. How well do these words fit in the ACT poetry scene?

Schwanengesang

So first I stepped into the 2009 ACT Heats of the National Poetry Slam. This was held in the foyer of the National Library of Australia.A very showy and in many ways an appropriate venue for the ACT heats of the SLAM contest. There was a jolly fair crowd in attendance, with beer and wine being served. Speaking only from my constrained vantage most people seemed to have had a good evening.

I am tiring of the idea of the slam, and do not intend to perform at any more slams. This evening did nothing to dissuade of my growing antipathy towards the very idea of a slam. It was nothing to do with the poets nor the poetry, although as in all open venues, there are pieces that one likes more than others.

Three people (all male) tied for first place - so this gave us a 'slam off.' And each of the winners had to read a second poem, and so be judged. After this a winner was declared. Now the winner gets to go to Sydney to battle it out in a contest to see who is the best slammer in Australia.

While not disagreeing with rap being the 'dominant' form of poetry these days, whatcan one say when the hip hop lifestyle is for sale at any suburban shopping centre, when all sorts of Disney advertising and misogynist Hollywood content is pumped out daily to a hip hop beat? Is this a dominate form or a form of domination. Malcolm McLaren once repeated the comment that the forces of production extend until discontent itself becomes a commodity. Mild mannered suburban children act out in safety the life and death struggles of the urban poor old skool rappers straight out of South Bronx or Compton.

Two rappers tied for first place,last years winner was a rapper, is this not also conservative and predictable? Is this giving the 'young people' what they want? Do slams encourage the idea of poetry as entertainment? There is no need for me to answer these sorts of questions as I have found myself on the wrong side of many of the arguments that have raged around me.

Twenty poets and twenty three poems, a wide mix of poems showing a rich spread of styles and voices, weighted towards the rap poets. There is very little to compare to a rich flowing litany of words. The bounding repetition of our age, the boundless songs of survival.

Interlude

Bright blue Morning
Yellow tipped
Garish red
Bottle brush

The long crack song
Of the damp gully.
Uncontrolled screams
Of the Currawong.

An aeroplane flies over head.

Rhythmic back and forth two
Stroke lopping the poppies.

A bridge above
A tunnel below
A drying creek

A barking dog.

A family. Four children wait the bus.
Two boys chase and pretend to wrestle.
The elder sister sits
And swings her legs
The younger sister orbits the tree
Gathering bark.

The little boy crouches the
Upturned trolley and laughs.

Reading the paper
Fiddling with phones
Starving out windows.
Tumbling hills of green

Drinking coffee in cafes
Hanging colourful flowers
Cheques cashed
Payday advances.

Congregates. She puts on her glasses.
Makes a fist - It was him or me.
Staff step outside for a cigarette.
Ever make love in the back seat
Of a car?

A leaf falls from the tree, in front of me.
Three junkies scream a rolling fight
The doorways and alleys of the flats.

Two golden coins into the roughened hand
Of the pensioned off ex garbage man.

Majura,

Nine days later I was at the ACT Writers Centre Poetry Awards, now called the Michael Thwaites Poetry Prize. An Officer of the Order of Australia, academic, Intelligence Officer for ASIO, Member of Moral Rearmament, Poet and author.

Conservative and predictable?

The judge was a local poet, well published, has worked as a teacher in NSW and ACT. This method of only one judge, which was used in the previous year at least, is to my mind not a good method. Poetry as we all know is very subjective, and so from the point of view of poet the system appears as a random number generator, which takes as an input a poem and gives as an output a judgement.

The self selecting of judges in the slam format also has some problems, but it has the advantage of a well worked system. Five judges, the highest and lowest scores are set aside. The final score being the total of the middle three numbers. This stops the single person liking or disliking a particular poem, and so biasing the judgment.

The entries were judged for:

Emotional force.

Vivid and sharp images, language etc.

Original language.

The judge also talked about making the familiar new, and the unfamiliar familiar. Visions of Ezra Pound splashing in his bath tub, painting on the wall with the soap bubbles, 'make it new' (in clear and common language) danced through my head. To be honest I thought all of the poems failed on the use of original language, but as to being vivid and clear in image making, all poems were of a very high order. Leading us back to the wildly subjective 'Did this poem move me' as criteria for winning or losing. In which case there is no need to worry about how well formed the metaphors; as I can
think of many instances where a poorly crafted poem may have an emotional impact worthy of a positive judgment.

Which of course is a wandering Yorick way of saying the entires should have to be looked at by a panel of judges, at least three. This will keep a single judges mood (good or ill) from unduly awarding a prize.

For the first time! (what can a singer do but sing?) the winners of the prizes were asked to read their works. In complete opposition to the NLA Slam night (where only three out of twenty contestants were female) all three winners were women. Two were able to read their poems, the first prize winner was not able to make it to the event. Even more interesting was the fact that of the two winners, both of them were older women, at that age when many women speak of becoming invisible, so it was good to hear some words from different poetic voices, and it was good to see the ACT Writers Centre reward these poets.

All of the winning poems could not be faulted. Each was a well crafted, coherent, forward moving song full of images of everyday life, of the called to mind dead ones. Sharp crystals prised out from under the floor boards. The three poems were all worthy winners, but I could not suppress the feeling that they lacked the urgency that our present age demands.

Friends, art, tranquilty.

Lucretius used to speak of the life of tranquility (tranquilitas,) being grounded in friendship (suavis amicitia) and intellectual curiosity. Both events allowed me to hear new voices and think new thoughts, but not to the extent I felt I was being pushed, nor did I feel in any way confronted. I was able to talk to some friends and met some new people.

Epicureans were well known for abhorring any sort of strife or violence, so in this way we can always thank conservative and predictable art groups for allowing us to avoid undue confrontation.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

2009-11-04T21:49:00.000+11:00

I really like this poem. from the internet archive.

Poetry and Prose at the Pub

2009-11-02T01:43:00.000+11:00

Poetry and Prose at the Pub

A new event has appeared on the Canberra arts scene. Poetry & Prose at
the Pub. To be held on the last Sunday of every month at Kingston's
landmark Filthy McFadden's Irish Pub. This was to be, in a nutshell,
'a new opportunity for ACT writers to showcase their skills in a
relaxed environment.'

Organised by a teacher at the Canberra Institute of Technology, this
event was somewhat outside the norm. An event meant to be family
friendly! Using the organisers words "There are several terrific
poetry slams around town but they all happen in the late evenings and
do not always suit people with families,” Lorese said. “These
readings will be open to everyone, the venue is family friendly, and
the readings include prose as well as poetry."

So I trundled on down to the pub last Sunday for an inaugural gutful
of art. An admittedly small audience, but it was a raw windy rainy
spring time day, and as grandmothers around the world say 'from a tiny
acorn comes the mighty oak.'

Most of the afternoon carried a light subversive anti authoritarian
feel around, but it is hard to be a fascist and enjoy Joyce at the
same time, for at his core Joyce chaffed at fetters, and kicked
against the pricks of his outrageous fortune. raising bootless cries
to heavens, non serviam! Forever blowing what little coin he had
chasing the green fairy.

Poetry and Prose at the Pub carried none of the competitiveness of
slams, and also none of the stuffy, awkward formalism of other types
of readings I have attended. This was a purely open mic affair, anyone
who wanted to could read, and several audience members joyfully took
the opportunity.

I have been slowly coming to the conclusion that I can no longer read
at any but open mics, as I am daily growing more weary with the idea
of the competition, with the idea of winners and losers. Jerry
Seinfeld observed that at a funeral most people would rather be in the
coffin than giving the eulogy, so it seems to me that calling anyone
who is able to get up in front of a room of strangers and read a poem
that they have written a 'loser' is at best wrong, at worst being able
to do no more than dent peoples confidence. Poetry as we all know is a
very personal, emotional affair, and as such does not deserve the judgement of the drunken rabble.

There is no need to create more hierarchies, as forces already are
busy extending hierarchies in all directions.Almost as much as the
judging and grading of poets I resent the arbitrary time limits of 2
or 3 minutes. The Poetry at the Pub limit was based around a word
count - which allows for the poet to compress or extend time as he or
she feels the piece warrants. I would like to see a situation where
people would be able to perform freely, and would be only too happy to
give up the microphone, as they were attending as much to listen, as
to speak, as they had a feeling of community.

All I want is an interest in language and a pleasure in the rhythmic
creations. Where the line of verse is like the at once sweeping, now
thrusting brush stroke of the painter captivated by a beautiful image,
or the softly swaying musician swept away in a spark of creation, or
the gymnast rising from the floor and leapflying across the air, or
the child who throws the cup up and down into the sink. A poetry which
is intimately bound up with politics, as all working people, all
women, all minorities are pushed against everyday. This is when
politics becomes more than a pale spectacle, but rather a constant
fighting back, everyday. By acting as health and safety officers,
planting gardens, planting trees, using public transport, attending
rallies and meetings, home schooling, standing in the cold and wet
passing out leaflets, volunteering at the local halls, laughing we can be building community and a new world every day.

But I digress.

AMOR MATRIS, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true
thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of
any son that any son should love him or he any son?

I was given the opportunity to read a section from 'Finnegans wake' -
not an easy task! When the audience members laughed it was hard not to
stop and have a good laugh myself.

Starting on page 483.

Kickakick. She had to kick a laugh. At her old stick-in-the-block. The
way he was slogging his paunch about, elbiduubled, meet oft mate on,
like hale King Willow, the robberer. Cainmaker's mace and waxened
capapee. But the tarrant's brand on his hottoweyt brow. At half past
quick in the morning. And her lamp was all askew and a trumbly
wick-in-her, ringeysingey. She had to spofforth, she had to kicker,
too thick of the wick of her pixy's loomph, wide lickering jessup the
smooky shiminey. And her duffed coverpoint of a wickedy batter,
whenever she druv behind her stumps for a tyddlesly wink through his
tunnilclefft bagslops after the rising bounder's yorkers, as he studd
and stoddard and trutted and trumpered, to see had lordherry's
blackham's red bobby abbels, it tickled her innings to consort pitch
at kicksolock in the morm. Tipatonguing him on in her pigeony
linguish, with a flick at the bails for lubrication, to scorch her
faster, faster. Ye hek, ye hok, ye hucky hiremonger ! Magrath he's my
pegger, he is, for bricking up all my old kent road. He'll win your
toss, flog your old tom's bowling and I darr ye, barrackybuller, to
break his duck! He's posh. I lob him. We're parring all Oogster till
the empsyseas run googlie. Declare to ashes and teste his metch! Three
for two will do for me and he for thee and she for you. Goeasyosey,
for the grace of the fields, or hooley pooley, cuppy, we'll both be
bye and by caught in the slips for fear he'd tyre and burst his
dunlops and waken her bornybarnies making his boobybabies. The game
old merrimynn, square to leg, with his lolleywide towelhat and his
hobbsy socks and his wisden's bosse and his norsery pinafore and his
gentleman's grip and his playaboy's plunge and his flannelly
feelyfooling, treading her hump and hambledown like a maiden wellheld,
ovalled over, with her crease where the pads of her punishments ought
to be by womanish rights when, keek, the hen in the doran's
shantyqueer began in a kikkery key to laugh it off, yeigh, yeigh,
neigh, neigh, the way she was wuck to doodle-doo by her gallows bird
(how's that? Noball, he carries his bat!) nine hundred and dirty too
not out, at all times long past conquering cock of the morgans. How
blame us?
Cocorico!

The end of the night. The two (HCE & ALP) attempting to make love, a
muddle of yorkers and trumpers while Luke spies on the pair. The
rooster crows and the hen laughs it off, it is time to wake. Time to
feed puss and get some kidney from the butcher for breakfast. The
ideal books for the ideal insomniac.

After I read a woman read a section from Ulysses.

Ithaca. After the interlude at the bus shelter, after the scene in
Kirke's absurd venus in furs brothel.

Bloom is home.

Two o'clock in the morning, tired, with lemon soap in his pocket. His
bones aching, one last catechism before sleep. In the half light of
drowsiness, before the depths of sleep over take cut and dry grammar
and go ahead plot. Before Finnegans Wake.

The end of the day.

In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and
reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?

Satisfaction at the ubiquity in eastern and western terrestrial
hemispheres, in all habitable lands and islands explored or unexplored
(the land of the midnight sun, the islands of the blessed, the isles
of Greece, the land of promise), of adipose anterior and posterior
female hemispheres, redolent of milk and honey and of excretory
sanguine and seminal warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves
of amplitude, insusceptible of moods of impression or of contrarieties
of expression, expressive of mute immutable mature animality.

The visible signs of antesatisfaction?

An approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation:
a tentative revelation: a silent contemplation.

Then?

He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each
plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure
prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

The visible signs of postsatisfaction?

A silent contemplation: a tentative velation: a gradual abasement: a
solicitous aversion: a proximate erection.

What followed this silent action?

Somnolent invocation, less somnolent recognition, incipient
excitation, catechetical interrogation.

A very pleasant way to pass an afternoon, heard some new poets, met
some new people. What more could be wanted?

What do I wish? Success and good luck!

Would I return? To quote - Yes.

Along Ho!

2009-10-27T06:47:00.000+11:00

Writing poetry on the bus and thinking about how the media controls everyday life, i came up with this. And how the military learned some lessons from Viet Nam and did not learn others. Seems they learned more about domestic control than about defeating insurgents.hegemony it is sometimes called.

Enjoy the free wallpaper. click on the picture to open it up and then copy it using your favorite method.


Along Ho! Whale of amore
Came inaudible from the valmy
Eart myself. Being there low (like
The worry songs of Ella Peartz).

The sound waves profited true 
The grind, true the winds stone.
The greater maker moundy muddy stoney,
Sandy stone, Limey stone, the sanity
Wound looms aboit the ground water.

    Torn and striped and exploded
    And poisoned. Gaia criet
    Out and amid the noiz of 
The city state rapid in Tet valleys
Band snuggly bunny hard again the wood.
Earth embracing seas poy signposted;
Ore the chitter chatter of the cafes,
Slight clinking of gripe and mendacity
And shite - eat it all up gringos.
Father forget them and all such like
Christ like quotes and we canny let 
The Wymen Volk out front army front
And centre line. And if it is so 
Horrible...

The jarring clashing coin upon coin
Ringing all around falling dead 
To the ground. Counting, amounting,
Not many here the cries and thems
That dew, well they are all
Marginalised, spat, vomit upon.
The power of the stated airwaves
Of the opinion stages.

Every telling is a taleing

2009-10-21T08:33:00.000+11:00

here is a recording of joyce reading 'Anna Livia Plurabelle'

Calypso

2009-10-18T23:41:00.000+11:00

Went to the coast and stood on the beach and thought about calypso's island. I thought it was a good poem when i first wrote it, but now i am not so sure. Anyway have fun with it...

Sly eyed Odysseus sighed seven years.
Longingly the salt sea breaking waves.
Eons of pebbles and broken shells
Run tumble up and back the beach.

The unprizable sun relentless
And the blinding burning sand
Fuels and fires wasting sorrow.
His longing for his wife, his son
His home, his place...

Dissembling tears. On the foam embraced sand,
Fair braided nymph, enchanted island, she sings
Songs as sweet and light as the Bell Miners call.
And the air is dusky dim with aromatic dreams,
Faint spices of cypress and eucalypt trees.

Tears for Penelope
Tears for Telemachus
Tears for long dead comrades.

The All-Seeing Slayer
Ungracious gods! with spite and envy cursed!
Still to your own ethereal race the worst!

Did ever goddess by her charms engage
A favour'd mortal, and not feel your rage?

In the evening,
As when the sun goes down, the rosy-fingered Moon
Outshining all the stars, her light spreads
Over the salty sea, over the many-flowered fields.
Odysseus returns treacherous
To the daimon and her enchanting haunt
Her soothing oils and calming wine.
The obscure pair
Clamor'd the livelong night.

And with the child of morning...

And so away wretched man
You came here half dead and alone!
It was I who raised you back to life gave you
Health and strength gave you love
And two children. When Zeus mocked
And scorned and cursed you, when
Zeus killed all your crew, alone,
Forsaken in the wide sea, it was I
Who brought you back. Now Zeus relents.
And you! Fie! on Zeus and Fie! on you.
Go I say, be on your way.
Back to your puny wealth, to your
Flocks and herds to your wife and women
Skilled in many arts. Back to your men
Skilled in rowing and destroying.
Back to your blood feuds and your vanity.

Zeus Penelope Laertes
All goad you into hate. It was I gave you back
Your tears and sighs your silent whispers.
You could have stayed with me.
We could live forever never weakening
Never forgetting or trembling gray.

Go back to your loom loosening wife
Now near forty and gray and tired.
I foretell only death and killing,
A great massacre in your house.
And you shall teach your son, barely downed
With whiskers, to kill in anger, to slaughter
The giggling chits, and you and your son
With be coated with blood and filth
And you will win your puny crown.
And Heros shall gain renown and be
Sung of and down through generations.
For what?! A splash of ribbon, a lie
Or a plot of land. It is absurd!
Odysseus you may be a many witted man
But you lack imagination.

Free and forever
Together as One
We could have lived
A bower of bliss.

Go I will not stop you, it is commanded
I shall give you all assistance I can
I will give you food and wine and fair wind.
So take this not as a curse, but rather
A vision terrifying of what I see
For I can see your future devious man
Forever and ever on shall you fight
Over nothing and kill over illusions.

Epiphany
Insatiate are ye Gods, past all that live,
And it were the Americans what parked
Dear tanks by the flesh pots
And tar pits burning of ruined
Babylon.

The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette

2009-10-03T13:43:00.000+10:00

Was looking after the little girl (soon to be three) on a damp cold wet early spring sort of day. (woke up to the baby crap of the century!!) we watched a short doco about this painting on telly. i was thirsting for an opportunity to be even more derivative - and so this is what i came up with.

The location of the beer garden in the painting is very near to where the French army buried the many massacred after the suppression of the Paris Commune.

The painting itself is an attack on all that came before. The very idea of painting outside, the way colour is used (there is no black for example), the eccentric perspective, the play of light. It is a very radical piece, and one that does not mention the squalor beneath the surface, the poverty of the lives of his models. Renior was concerned with Beauty, In this way he was able to forget the many dead buried just near this working class locale.


The afternoon yellow light sun 
Falls through the trees, through
The leaves, through the thin woody 
Sprays, the strong wooden boughs 
Dividing and quavering the light.
The afternoon light yellow falls
On the corner of the table, 
Flashing an emerald green. 

Ambiguous sunny Sunday afternoon
Of carefree dance and sparkling
White wine like electricity garden.

As the crouching stalking domestic
Cat follows and chases the small 
Brown mouse or twittering yellow
And gray bird, until she loses 
Herself in the thick scrub and 
Wild grasses of the set aside 
Nature reserve. As the young child
Chases the bouncing balloon caught
In the light breeze, or the teasing
Wagtail, until the child loses itself
In the wild grasses and thick scrub
Of the reserve over the fence.

Even so do the dancers of late
Afternoon carefree yellow
Sunlight youth forget 
Themselves,
Their day to day cares,
The endless listed payments,
Pointless busy work waste.

Even so 
Do beer garden dancers
Forget themselves,
Their history.

Hephaestus

2009-10-02T02:38:00.000+10:00

Hephaestus, the greek equivalent of vulcan, was the 'god' of technology (if such a thing can be spoken about). he worked with fire and metal, and made a great many fabulous things, including some robot helpers. he worked with his hands, and was lame. he was rejected by his parents. i thought to myself, is this a way of seeing our relationship to technology? all this working of metal and etc has made us lame, unloved, unlovable. following on the poem pretty much wrote itself....

Hoplites. Attic black-figure lekythos, 510–500 BC, found in Sala Consilina. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lekythos_hoplite_Petit_Palais_ADUT01575.jpg


Cunning limping god, born without fire
Borne without father, aegis riding sky
Who brings life along the surface of the
Sea, aegis riding sky holding storms.
Unloved son thrown from the heavens.
Forced to forge the manacles to confine
The fire sharing mild of light. Forced to
Wed the copper eyed lover of laughter.
Unloved child, cuckold husband. Thrown
Down from high, falling full nine days
And at the windy time of the of ninth
He landed alone an unknown island.
Into the world, cast aside his parents.
Born by no father he was abused by
Dread son of Cronus, false fabricator,
Suckled of the goat, fed honey from bees.
Storyteller, inventor of lies. 
When he landed, shattering his legs,
At the going down of the sun, and the 
Spreading into all places of shadows,
At the windy time of the day, after his fall,
At the meeting of women, his wounds
Were tended with virtuous plants,
And his pain was eased. All the night
The hoplites, danced naked, clashed shields.

        The rock flamed and made liquid magic.
Thin arabesque of gold and silver,
Rings with sparkling precious stones,
Tendriled undulating arm bands
Of sharpest copper and shiny bronze,
Chains of purest gold as fine as spun 
Silk and worked with tender scenes,
Gold as if from hay spun into threads,
Terrifying neck piece of power and diadem.
To bejewel his wife. Countless vast 
Spears and arrow heads of dread orbit
Flew deadly true, chains and locks
Equal revenge and justice. The red hot 
Metal into the icy barrel plunged. 
The steady rhyming of hammer blows.
Painful memories. Legs broken and swollen.
His feet back to front, his mothers taunts.
Nine years cared for nine years in healing.
Cunning limping god of roaring rearing flame.
Lame and hunchbacked the forge, with anvil
And adamantine hammer, that forged helpers 
Of metal uncomplaining to assist his work.
The clear uncaring flow of heat and sound
And constant pain made him halting and 
Slow of speech. Those that scorned him
Despised not his creations. But with gold
And precious things he fashioned a cage
Of mind forged manacles, down the ages.
        
        Over time, over time, over countless sleeps...
The few grew, more and more, over time,
Became many and put nature on the rack.
Tore out the smoky secrets of the caverns,
Mocked the sun and sky and moved them
In portion and rank. The technique passed
Down and over the generations. No longer
Divine, no longer sacred, known but a few.

        And this new extracted knowledge spewed
Wealth and greed, mendacity and ignorance.
Towered cites grew and spread, tendrils
In all ways and time, an incessant hum.
Until even the far off terrible mountains
That border Sinia have become polluted
With the detritus of a restless knowledge,
That knows no soothing slumber, no holy
Days for home and meditation. Only more.
The busy hum of children men and women
Flitted across the lonely Sahara dunes,
The cold windswept plateau of Tibet.
The rough groans and piercing screams
Of trucks and chain saws echoed the giant
Tower trunks frail wild rain Amazon.

And so the gods retreated, turning their backs
On nature, on history, and on the logos.

Even the fiery mountains have grown cold.

The Crisp of the Crackling is in the Chawing

2009-09-12T23:23:00.000+10:00

I wrote this after reading something about pig farming. It always shocks me when i read about the incredible cruelty involved with this sort of caper. It was hard to find solid numbers about husbandry and water usage, waste etc so all these numbers are quite conservative.

The title is from Finnegans Wake.


    ABS estimates up to 320 liters
Of water used
    Per kilo of beef.

38 percent
    Water is for livestock
    And pasture.
10 percent all grains
    (Including rice)
Only 3 percent grain
        Alone.
Another 6 percent 
On fruit and veg.

The vegescarians are out 
Inforse - sending the willy 
Billys up them spine bone
Of the conifers. Thus who
Are haphap happy to divers shout
Lick spittle lips of breezy
Distended belly moan
Falsifatted lies to unscrew.

130 times the amount of waste 
Livestock to humans. Mostly untreated.
Exempt from regulations.
    How much shit would a piggy shit if 
    Piggy could shit. (23 litres (on average))
                      Hobbled and feverish...
    150,000 of them crowded together.
     
Abducted liver of duck duck goose,
Brains of sheep, the lungs of lamb,
Holes of hungry cowboys
Filled with textured tripe and sinew.
(Finger licking, down chin dripping juice).
Or still silken knickered jam
Tart of firm tofu.
Scorning boosers of greasy spew.

Antibiotics by the score.
    Deforestion.
        Desertification.

June twenty two, 
Nein ten more than,
Phortie Won.
Invade CCCP - reinforce
Militarism - Democracy 
Can not survive. Like in 1792.

"From this place, 
And from this day forth 
Begins a new era 
In the history 
Of the world.

And you can all say that you were 
Present at its birth."

Crackling open rich farm land
Commune bones and vampyre wise
Drinking down the rich marrow
Dripping greasy chin.
Cracking open the bones.
Rich stem cell providing 
Marrow.

Sordello

2009-09-04T18:28:00.000+10:00

Considered by many to be the hardest poem to understand in the English language. Make of it what you will.

Pounding Allen

2009-09-01T01:57:00.000+10:00

Allen Ginsberg and Ezra Pound. The old and the new. The racist and the Buddhist met in Italy. Many people have told this story. This is my version.

 
High High High Hare

Queen Jane visits uncle Ez
In Venice.

Playing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
For him.

1967 
Viet Nam
    A dozen or less
    Months afore 
    Police riot
    Daley windy city.

Who prophets from War?
Cherchez la cash...

Depressed
    Down. Silent.
    Sad. What is a life?
    A handful of 
    Moments, maybe a chiler 
    Or twain.

    What is a life?
    A gutful of lies.
    A phraud.

Very sad to look back...
Il poeta
Too late
Too late...
    I arrived 
    The certainty 
    I know nothing.

He rolled a spliff
She called him
    A big lovable dog
    Hairy with sloppy kisses.
Want to wash your hands?
Do you need any money?
He replied.
    And he passed on the pot.

Hare Hare
Krishna Krishna
    Deepening
The sorrow
    Fading aquamarine.

And after all this 
I understand I am 
A MORON.

Follow the money.
NOT the jews (not Naomi).
Stupid suburban prejudice.
But...
    Follow the money.
    Who profits from war?
    Bankers Usurers Parasites.

War
Profit
Litany.

...or shells fragmented to 1000s
Of flesh piercing needles.

The Double Thunderstroke

2009-08-31T08:55:00.000+10:00

The US Army works with Hollywood to 'advise' on war movies. Stallone met with Kissinger and changed the tone of Rambo movies. And on and on it goes, and we all know how it turns out. In the west we want to be able to do what we want when we want. We mistake this for FREEDOM. In the third world our individualism leads to negation to the point of death.


The epitome 
Of bourgeois glorification
Of the individual
Reaches it's direct opposite...
    Total contempt
    For humanity.

In the cinema,
A one man army
Kills without feeling,
Without restraint.

Made actual.
Millions dead,
Sent to the grave.