Sweet especial rural scene

Driving through acres of Canberra as yet unsettled - hills and slopes blanketed with verdure under a wide blue sky - I had a vision of their future: razored of trees, plotted with a brick patchwork of leggo houses, threaded through with concrete driveways. I hope somehow these acres are spared that fate, but the hope is slim. That fate seems to overtake most empty spaces in the bush capital sooner or later. It’s odd to me that the more we know about our environment’s needs or our own social needs, the less we seem able to meet them. The more we learn about environmental degradation, the more efficient we become at doing it. 

The sense of loss that came with my vision - aesthetic as much as moral - is at least as old as the industrial revolution. It was behind the protest poems of Blake and Wordsworth long before it infused the environmentalist movement of a generation ago. You can find it in just about any nature poet of the past two centuries - and probably as far back as you care to go. I’m not familiar with Virgil’s Georgics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they contained a lament for the spoliation of land. 

On the eve of last century, Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote this poem because some of his favourite trees had been cut down. A small thing, perhaps, to cut down a dozen trees, but Hopkins saw more in it than that act. Uncannily, he saw the future. ‘If we but knew what we do.’ Indeed. The thing is we after-comers do know now, but we reck still less our strokes of havoc. This is ‘Binsey Poplars’, written in 1879.

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 
All felled, felled, are all felled;   
Of a fresh and following folded rank 
Not spared, not one                      
That dandled a sandalled        
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—   
Hack and rack the growing green! 
Since country is so tender 
To touch, her being só slender, 
That, like this sleek and seeing ball    
But a prick will make no eye at all,      
Where we, even where we mean       
To mend her we end her,        
When we hew or delve: 
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve          
Strokes of havoc únselve      
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,    
Sweet especial rural scene.

Only connected

EM Forster's 1910 novel Howards End is deceptively light and hurrying in tone. Beneath the rippling, bantering surface are complexities, ironies, deep problems of human society and spirit. The 1992 Merchant Ivory film, by contrast, has a rich, heavy grandeur in its telling but has in fact stripped out much of the depth and complication of the novel. I liked the film a lot, and I think on the whole the directorial decisions were wise. I can imagine it would have been rather messy had it tried to accommodate the novel's swirling contemplation of whole tracts of modernity. The central philosophical problems, experienced mostly in Meg's inward reflections, are merely skimmed: the dilemma of seeing life either steadily or whole, not both; the struggle to bring disparate parts of life and world together in a harmonious whole, embodied in the novel's persistent refrain: “only connect.” These lie too deep to trouble the film's gorgeous surfaces.

The novel's manifest aversion to motorcars, as one of modernity's avatars, has been entirely excised from the film, and along with it a crucial scene. On the way to Oniton for Evie's wedding, Margaret jumps out of a moving car and injures her hand. It's a key scene in the book's steady antipathy to motorised travel, but obviously out of place where that theme has been expunged. However, when we see Margaret at Oniton (Emma Thompson makes a delightful Meg) she has a bandage on her hand; a scene or two later, it's gone, without ever being explained: a mystery to anyone who doesn't know the book.

In fact I finished the film feeling that much of it had been more a homage to the book, or at least a continual respectful referencing of the book, rather than an adaptation. I wondered how much sense it would have made to someone who hadn't first read the book. They would no doubt have enjoyed the lavishly beautiful sets, costumes, photography, landscapes, and the fine acting of Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and even Helena Bonham Carter, who turns in a creditable Helen. But would the plot have been sufficiently illuminated, within the general brilliance of the film's lovely ambience? The whole film felt conscious of the ‘classic’ in whose service it was rendered. It took for granted the familiarity of its audience with Forster's world and preoccupations, and with his novel's status as self-evidently great. Such reverence is refreshing, where so many film adaptations seem to liberate themselves entirely from their source, but it was disconcerting to watch a film so clearly depedent on an external referent.

At the same time, as a devotee of the novel, I did find the film illuminating. I go back to the book a better reader having seen the film because it showed me patterns, connections, rhythms that I hadn't perceived before. The arrivals and departures on train platforms, the place of telegrams, letters and legal writs, the episodes of passionate abandon in outdoor places that mark Helen's passages in and out of polite society. The truncatory effect of the film condensed the novel's world so that I could see its connections, if not steadily, then whole.

Hold in the hollow of your palm

Saturday evening, after dinner. Listening to Yo Yo Ma playing Ennio Morricone’s rapturous compositions for the cello. Jonquils from this morning’s market filling the house with their fragrance. The dog patently losing her inward moral struggle to observe our ‘no barking in the house’ rule. Like so many winter Saturdays, this one was lovely but brief. Just enough daylight for a walk and the washing; the rosy dusk made melancholy by the thought that Monday comes quicker in the winter. Like so many Saturdays, I’m trying to find something to peg a poem to, but often there’s nothing in particular. Perhaps after all a poem should be its own occasion. This one, ‘Carapace’, is the last in my Selected Poems of Gwen Harwood, which happens to be on top of the pile of books at my elbow. I find it beautiful. I like the way the shape of it feels like the curve of a tide. In a small way it fits the sense of flux brought by an ordinary Saturday in winter. (In case you don’t know, a carapace is “the dorsal section of the exoskeleton of an arthropod or vertebrate.”) Enjoy.

Hold in the hollow of your palm
this carapace so delicate
one breath would send it spinning down,
yet strong enough to bear the stress 
of ebb, flow, metamorphosis
from skin to shell.
Seasons have scoured 
this beautiful abandoned house
from which are gone eyes, sinews, all
taken-for-granted gifts.
I hold
in my unhoused continuing self
the memory that is wisdom’s price
for what survives and grows beneath 
old skies, old stars.
Fresh mornings rim
the carapace of night with gold.
The sandgrains shine, the rockpools brim
with tides that bring and bear away
new healing images of day.

What Home could be

My favourite Saturdays are spent at home. There’s pleasure in housekeeping on these days, I think because I don’t have to do it every day. And after chores are done, there’s rest and solace. I’ve been beguiled lately by the images of home in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. In their little house in the big woods of Wisconsin, or on the Oklahoma prairie, there’s a sweet simplicity. Outside, wolves might howl in an immense darkness, but inside there’s a fire, a table, a book or two, and the music of Pa’s fiddle. Everything they have fits in one small room. Anything they need, Pa or Ma can make, or mend.  Life is rhythmic, simple, charming. 

Someone who never quite believed this picture, or never found it for herself, was Emily Dickinson, who was just a little older than Laura’s Ma. Readers of her poetry note the way she kept house and home at a conceptual distance from one another. Despite living out her days a deliberate recluse in the Amherst house she was born in, she once asked her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson “Could you tell me what home is?” This poem - fragmentary, grasping -  is a rare glimpse of what home seemed to her, or what she had learned a home could be. Strange at first, but lovely, vivid, blessed. In the end it’s beautiful, but unattainable. “This seems a Home - and Home is not.” The picture fades. 

I learned - at least - what Home could be -
How ignorant I had been
Of pretty ways of Covenant -
How awkward at the Hymn
 
Round our new Fireside - but for this -
This pattern - of the Way -
Whose Memory drowns me, like the Dip
Of a Celestial Sea -
 
What Mornings in our Garden - guessed -
What Bees - for us - to hum -
With only Birds to interrupt
The Ripple of our Theme -
 
And Task for Both -
When Play be done -
Your Problem - of the Brain -
And mine - some foolisher effect -
A Ruffle - or a Tune -
 
The Afternoons - Together spent -
And Twilight - in the Lanes -
Some ministry to poorer lives -
Seen poorest - thro' our gains -
 
And then Return - and Night - and Home -
And then away to You to pass -
A new - diviner - care -
Till Sunrise take us back to Scene -
Transmuted - Vivider -
 
This seems a Home -
And Home is not -
But what that Place could be -
Afflicts me - as a Setting Sun -
Where Dawn - knows how to be -

I think it would be fun to run a newspaper

Fairfax jettisons jobs as Ms Rinehart hoves into view and prepares to board (if you’ll pardon the pun). Broadsheets go tabloid. Murdoch goes free. The news about news these days is disturbing, but it seems to portend something even more sinister. Changes of form are in some ways the inevitabilities of the digital age; they don’t necessarily spell trouble for news qua news. The Guardian, for example, has wholeheartedly embraced the web and has not obviously suffered for it. But at stake is the whole idea of a free press, which we seem ready enough to surrender.

I would argue further that freedom of the press is just one of many institutions now under attack and indifferently defended. I read that only 39 per cent of Australia's 18 to 29-year-olds regard democracy as preferable to other forms of government. Hard-won freedoms, worthy institutions, proven principles are taking broadsides from mere clout and clamour, neither of which we seem to have the wherewithal to resist. We seem to have conceded that profit trumps anything civil society might put up.

Many, including journalists, argue that Fairfax needs a wealthy patron; nobody explains how such a patron might make the company profitable, or why she might want to absorb the loss it otherwise represents. A rep from the always irritating Institute of Public Affairs reaches the conclusion that Fairfax's product was no good, since people are always willing to pay a price premium for excellence. I don't know from which branch of economics his thinking derives, but it runs counter to the experience of most of the past sixty years, if not indeed the history of the world. He, unsurprisingly, sees Gina as saviour.

The tycoon these days is an ambivalent figure. To some a villain, but to many a hero: a job-creator, a wealth-creator, someone without whose lucre we would all struggle to stay afloat. It is this ambivalence that seems to provide tycoons, bigwigs, nabobs, and assorted fat cats with their opportunity to avoid the social obligations that John Maynard Keynes considered capitalism's saving grace, and to buy influence - which, given its proven unprofitability, seems to have a higher value than profit in Fairfax’s case. 

The Hungry Jacks mogul Gina wants on the Board beside her has said unequivocally 'newspapers are business,' and that they are a convenient tool for those with an agenda and the money to pay for it. These seem to contradict one another. On one hand newspapers become a crude exercise in marketing, generating profit by printing exactly what sells; or they are simply vanity publishing, printed at great personal expense to the owner. In either case, the freedom of the press is radically compromised.

A couple of new books tackle the subject of the influence of money on our society: Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy: the Moral Limits of Markets, and Robert and Edward Skidelsky's How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life. The Skidelskys posit an older iteration of the good life against the dogma of economic growth, but Sandel's book is more disturbing, bringing to light the monetisation of more and more in our culture. Everything - from your doctor's mobile number to carbon credits to vital organs - is for sale.

Market-think is so dominant now that it must be proved over again - in the very rubble of history's worst financial crisis - that the profit motive corrupts.  Indeed there are many things, as the late Tony Judt so persuasively argued, that only work when profit is not the motive, for example the uneconomical services a humane community provides to its ill and elderly, or, more germane to the present case, the unprejudicial gathering and reporting of news, supposed to keep a democracy informed and accountable. The 'free' in 'free press' is not the absence of a paywall.

We need to resist market-think, and defend vehemently the democractic institutions that have historically depended more on collective good will than on marketability, as Marilynne Robinson gently urges in When I Was a Child. But there’s the rub. Our institutions are weakened, neglected, disavowed, or, worst, corrupted. When a challenge like Rinehart’s (or Romney’s for that matter) comes along, there seems no real will to resist. With contempt bred of familiarity, we see no reason not to sell our inheritance to the highest bidder.

Beyond indifference, there's active mistrust. To traditional broadcast journalism, we prefer the net's narrowcast; we desert reputable journalism in favour of idiosyncratic brands of unsubstantiated opinion-peddling. And when idiosyncratic opinion pays for space in the mainstream media, as Murdoch and Rinehart do, we don't object. At the behest of tycoons, we dismantle the very institutions that stood the best chance of protecting us from the tycoons' piratical appetites. 

However, we shouldn’t expect human institutions – no matter how many abstract nouns go into their founding – to be impermeable or infallible. If the forms of collective action and intention move online, the principles of truth, freedom, and justice need not be left behind. High quality reporting and writing, and behind them, the motive of truth-telling without fear or favour, may seek refuge on the web if traditional media no longer support them. And the other side of that doubloon is that Rinehart may find she's captured a sinking ship.