The harvest is plentiful

Critic Louis Menand has an interesting piece about College - as in why go. There's a lot of talk in America about College as both the symbol and the mechanism of social equalisation, but Menand (among others) questions its universal value, especially where that value is depreciated by universal application.  The post-war broadening of college entrance meant rich white boys could learn alongside black people, poor people, and women, but a corresponding broadening of disciplines and purposes, so that a college degree is not only possible but requisite for a 'beverage manager,' may have gone too far.  More alarming, though, is the revelation that while humanities and science faculties are shrinking, the fastest growing discipline is business. At the same time, business students and grads perform the worst on tests measuring the benefits of a college degree (ie, whether it develops cultural literacy and general knowledge, skills in reading, writing and thinking). Sic transit gloria I guess.

This connects for me with an anonymous quote I found in comments on Stanley Fish's NY Times blog: "American businesses don't know what to do with smart people, and smart people don't know what to do with themselves." Something about the way our society is geared now means there is a lot of unmeaningful work around for people who are qualified but not skilled (in reading, writing, thinking), and not much for people who are both skilled and qualified for meaningful work. Perhaps more accurately, the meaningless work is where the money is. Only the lucky ones get paid to read, write and think.

For those who've come across the seas

It took Australia roughly twenty-four hours to end the live export of cattle on boats to Indonesia. The public were horrified by images of brutal treatment in Indonesian abattoirs. They cried out in rage. Within a day, live exports were banned. 

I can’t help but draw a comparison with the live export of people in boats from Indonesia (usually) and the treatment of asylum seekers at our hands. There is public clamour, but no unified voice of outrage; the louder cries seem to come from those who object to sharing our boundless plains with ‘illegal’ arrivals, and those who endorse the mandatory incarceration of men, women and children in places like Maribyrnong, Woomera, and Christmas Island, for indefinite stretches of time.

Mandatory detention has been in place since 1992. For nearly twenty years Australia has wavered in and out of breach of the UN Convention (to which we are a signatory), tacitly approving hasty legislative changes enabling the breach. We have allowed successive governments to farm out to foreign regimes and private companies (specialising in prison management) the protection of refugees’ rights. We have broken several resolutions to at least get children out of detention, even if we can’t summon the moral gumption to release adults detained without charge for years at a time. We have tolerated and supported the deceptions, exaggerations, ignorance and bombast of those who use the plight of asylum seekers to float their own political boats.

Today is World Refugee Day. It is now not unthinkable that one day might be enough to release those seaborne travellers treated brutally by the moral lassitude of our leaders, by our indifference.

Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate

I came across this lovely bit of Samuel Johnson - not a writer I would normally look to for lyrical, psalm-like meditations. He's a century late for that exquisite moment when Donne and Herbert were unfurling their quiet splendour, and a century early for lush, Romantic introspection, or tender Victorian lamentation. And indeed this bit is not a lyric poem at all, but the last 26 lines of his long poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes: the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated” (published 1749) - which Walter Scott and TS Eliot both thought his best work. Considering that the poem's opening lines inauspiciously bid the reader “survey mankind, from China to Peru,” its closing lines come as a sweet shock. The theology here is probably a conversation for another post, but I hope you enjoy the poetry here this Friday morn.

Where, then, shall Hope and Fear their objects find?
Must dull suspense corrupt the stagnant mind?
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?
Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise,
No cries invoke the mercies of the skies?
Inquirer, cease! petitions yet remain,
Which Heaven may hear, nor deem Religion vain.
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice;
Safe in His power, whose eyes discern afar
The secret ambush of a specious prayer,
Implore His aid, in His decisions rest,
Secure whate'er He gives, He gives the best.
Yet when the sense of sacred presence fires,
And strong devotion to the skies aspires,
Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resign'd;
For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
For patience, sovereign o'er transmuted ill;
For faith, that, panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind Nature's signal of retreat:
These goods for man the laws of Heaven ordain,
These goods He grants, who grants the power to gain;
With these celestial Wisdom calms the mind,
And makes the happiness she does not find.

Upon the moon's meek shine

I did manage to get up this morning at about 5:20am, put on my glasses and my uggboots and stumble blearily down the stairs to watch the moon turning from white to red. Like all things lunar, it was slow and beautiful and mysterious. A web search for “eclipse” turns up a deal of guff about vampires, but it also turns up this splendid poem by Thomas Hardy. How indeed shall we link such sun-cast symmetry with the torn troubled form of Earth?

Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.

How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?

And can immense Mortality but throw
So small a shade, and Heaven's high human scheme
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?

Bloom, waterlover

Here's a man who knew what water was, and what words were. Happy Bloomsday!

“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”

From Ulysses, by James Joyce