Newspeak

Sorry for neglecting my poetic duties yesterday, but I have an excuse. I spent part of this week at a thing in Sydney, learning about corporate communication. Coming mostly from university and public sector experience,  I felt a bit like a yokel with all those slick, stylish corporate types from companies like Coke, Google, Qantas, Microsoft, and Cadbury (probably the first time I've been in a room with that many people who didn't assume that big business was somehow anti-social). I was somewhat startled by how completely unapologetic the editor of Women's Weekly was, and by a former director of all kinds of corporate outfits who seemed to be whingeing that ordinary people's expectations of boards and directors were far too high, and that governments had been unfairly pinning the GFC on banks and business when it wasn't really their fault. (In silhouette, he bore a striking resemblance to one C. Montgomery Burns.) Both made me think of that New Yorker cartoon where one member tells the rest of the board: “The figures for the last quarter are in. We made significant gains in the 15 to 26-year old age group, but we lost our immortal souls.”

However, I heard some interesting and encouraging things as well. A strong theme was that the days of spin and cover-up are long gone: honesty (or at least truthiness) is best; humility and courtesy will stand you in good stead. Another theme was the rise of technology and social media, and the unanimous view was that these will never replace face to face human interaction, and the data they yield will always require human interpretation. Assuming of course that communication retains its properties of subtlety, nuance, sentiment, sarcasm, and flourish - under the influence of social media, it may not. I also observed a tension in corporate communication between self-expression and self-protection. This, to me, explained why most corporate communication is so cripplingly dull.

I think what's wrong with corporatespeak is that it gets sucked dry of anything that might implicate those who generate it, or offend those who receive it. It ends up being hollow, tasteless, infinitely transferable. It's the dead opposite of what Duns Scotus called “thisness,” or what his admirer Hopkins called “inscape,” exemplified best in his poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Here it is, to make up for yesterday, and to banish from my palate the nothingness of corporate comms.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

More on judgment

This evening, I got talking to a 4-year-old I know. He told me about his pre-school, and his teachers. Then he told me that the Queen would be visiting his school very soon, and that she would kill all the naughty boys. I'm not sure whether this idea was the product of his own fervent imagination, or that of a mischievous schoolfellow, or of an ingenious teacher, but he seemed quite in earnest, and quite anxious about the royal visit. To me, another testament that judgment day, at least imaginatively, is not far from every one of us.

Die another day

Well, another apocalyptic prediction goes unfulfilled, though Harold Camping has cleverly countered his critics by proposing a new date: 21 October. That oughta hold ’em. It’s oh so easy to mock such fatuous certainty (especially after the non-event), but I wonder if instances like this one, not uncommon in themselves, are simply extreme manifestations of something more broadly present, and not altogether unfounded. After all, the end of the world is neither provable nor disprovable by observation: the only assurance we have that the world won’t end tomorrow is that it never has before. The absurdity of doomdsay predictions lies, I think, in the confidence of a fixed date and time, not the concept of the world’s end. The idea in Genesis that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth is not in itself absurd, but Bishop Ussher’s idea, that God created the heavens and the earth on 23 October, 4004 BC, is. Doomsday is not confined to the religious (remember Y2K?). Sometimes it borders on hysteria, but it has more to do with moral sensitivity than with emotional or rational responses to data. Almost any worldview with a moral imperative has an implied apocalypse; the end of the world as a natural consequence, if not a divine judgment, of human error. Climate change is the obvious modern example, but every age has its judgment day as the climactic settlement of its peculiar debts. At one level, there is something healthy about a sense that our lives are contigent, temporary, lived at the mercy of events beyond our control – and that our debts will have to be paid.

Let them sleep, Lord

According to a Californian preacher slash media mogul, the world will end tomorrow, May 21, at 6pm. Predicting the end of the world is a venerable occupation, not entirely without foundation, but mostly without vindication. Responses range from riotous shopping for candles and canned goods, to extraordinary poems like this one from John Donne. It's his Holy Sonnet number 7, published in 1633. 

At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God and never taste death’s woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For if above all these my sins abound,
’Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace
When we are there; here on this lowly ground
Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou hadst sealed my pardon with thy blood.

Afternoon post

Too busy to post anything substantial this week, so before another Friday arrives clamouring for its poem, here are some things I've been reading, thinking about, writing in the last sennight:

1. I read that Stephen Hawking thinks heaven is a fairy tale for those afraid of death. I admire his courage, but I find his flat dismissal of heaven bemusing, given the wildly speculative nature of his own exploration of the heavens.  Is a belief in other universes we cannot know or see so very different from a belief in heaven? (See Jon Stewart's excellent interview with Marilynne Robinson for more on this). I also read (a few weeks ago) a Sydney blogger who claimed that we now know enough about the physical universe to be pretty sure that it contains no such place as heaven. To which I think most thinking Christians, at most times in history, might reply 'Well, duh.'


2. I read that a strange conjunction of planets occured this week, (though I think I slept through it) and that astronomers have discovered as many as ten 'wandering' planets in the Milky Way: ie, planets that are adrift from any bright, particular star.  I've also been enjoying the immense moon. Though I'm in love with it, I have always resisted learning more about the moon. Part of my enjoyment comes from that startling wonder of seeing it where I don't expect to; finding it fuller or more golden or more luminously white or more cloud-haloed than I thought possible. If I knew its phases and motions, more than half the magic would be gone.  (I am also deeply annoyed about the whole 'moon landing' thing.  How dared we?)


3. I read an interesting post at The Millions about what Philip Roth calls 'the indigenous American berserk.' This is what impels the regular interruption of American pastoral by episodes of insane violence, and it's been happening since America began.


4. A wedding I went to on Saturday made me think that what I like about my country is how an Indonesian girl can marry a Malaysian boy in a big old gothic church in a big white dress and sing Welsh hymns, and how they can have a Chinese tea ceremony at their reception and also sing a duet from Phantom of the Opera.


5. I read that Donald Trump has withdrawn his presidential bid.  Not sure whether to be glad or sorry. And I think he probably represents indigenous American something, but I'm not sure what that is. (Whatever it is, it's not that far from berserk.)


6. I wrote and sent a proposal for an ABC Radio National 'Encounter' episode - another step towards radio stardom!


7. Last night, I thought about Jesus' words: 'what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet forfeits his soul?'

And that was my week.