For unto us

It's been a while since I posted anything. That's because we're expecting a Happy Event next winter, and I've spent the last ten weeks or so on the couch or hunched over the sink. Morning sickness is hideous, meaningless, and grossly misnamed; in my experience, anyway, there's nothing matutinal about it. Unrelenting nausea aside, we do feel blessed and excited. And this Christmas I'm thinking about the gestation of Our Lord, as much as his birth. I wonder if Mary felt sick? I wonder if her joints ached and her ankles swelled up and if she got kicked in the ribs by a tiny dominical foot? Riding that donkey can't have been easy. We know she cherished things in her heart. I wonder if those things were anything like Judith Wright's lovely meditation “Woman to Child”? Once the nausea passed, maybe. 

You who were darkness warmed my flesh 
where out of darkness rose the seed. 
Then all a world I made in me; 
all the world you hear and see 
hung upon my dreaming blood. 

There moved the multitudinous stars, 
and coloured birds and fishes moved. 
There swam the sliding continents. 
All time lay rolled in me, and sense, 
and love that knew not its beloved. 

O node and focus of the world; 
I hold you deep within that well 
you shall escape and not escape- 
that mirrors still your sleeping shape; 
that nurtures still your crescent cell. 

I wither and you break from me; 
yet though you dance in living light 
I am the earth, I am the root, 
I am the stem that fed the fruit, 
the link that joins you to the night.

Giftshop fail

I was looking for a gift for a little child in the art gallery store. I realised quickly that most of the gifts for sale there were not really aimed at children at all, rather at their hipster parents or well-wishers. A story about a bear finding a cute hat in an op shop, for example, might tickle a hipster's whimsical fancy, but wouldn't do much for her two-year-old son. That amount of overpriced quirk, of which children were the unwitting butts, made me uncomfortable, so I left.

I don't know what the opposite of a hipster is, I mused as I walked away, but it might just be a child. Of all human beings, children are the least capable of irony, the least pretentious, and the least detached. They are blissfully unaware of social codes and foibles, and they are avid and unquestioning consumers. The hipster parent might want his kid to love Wes Anderson films, but I don't know any kids (alas) who don't prefer Disney. The hipster parent might gleefully buy Augustus Finds a Deck Hat, but his child will every time prefer We're Going on a Bear Hunt.

In search of the same landfall

Most of us have come here from somewhere else, fleeing war, or just looking for a better life. But now we watch women and children, in search of the same landfall, drown within our reach. Like the Anzacs, our gods, they are war-addled and adrift, far from home. Unlike the Anzacs, they come in peace, for peace. But we don't know or own them, and so they perish. We pull their bodies from the water, and sail home.

This is “Beach Burial,” by Kenneth Slessor.  

Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs

The convoys of dead sailors come;

At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,

But morning rolls them in the foam.

Between the sob and clubbing of gunfire

Someone, it seems, has time for this,

To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows

And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,

Bears the last signature of men,

Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,

The words choke as they begin -

'Unknown seaman' - the ghostly pencil

Wavers and fades, the purple drips,

The breath of wet season has washed their inscriptions

As blue as drowned men's lips,

Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,

Whether as enemies they fought,

Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,

Enlisted on the other front.

One thousand monkeys

I couldn't agree more with this. It has always seemed absurd to me that in the world of work, money and value so rarely align. It's easy to get paid large sums to do work of very dubious value, and conversely, pursuing value very often entails quite deliberately walking away from money. Why? The answers are complex and historical, but that doesn't mean the phalanx of valueless jobs is inevitable or necessary. David Graeber, whose piece in Strike! has gone somewhat viral, argues that our finance-skewed economy creates these jobs in order to keep us occupied and obedient while we serve the interests of the 1 per cent. It's at least keeping us occupied, even if it also generates the rage and resentment Graeber says is a psychological scar on our collective soul.

On the other hand, the narrative of creative breakthrough has a lot of traction, perhaps because we know in our hearts the makework non-jobs we're doing don't really stack up against value-laden creative work. The story of successful escape - ditching your non-job for your foodie blog or your screen prints or your best-selling tree-change memoir - is everywhere, encouraging us to think that all we need to do is close our eyes and jump, and the dream will catch us. But is this real? How many people actually make it? Of all the people with talent, how many devote time and energy to seriously pursuing it? And of those, how many will ever make a decent living from it? Vanishingly few. Which makes the non-jobs we're mostly trapped in all the more ineluctable.

In the greenwood quires the thrush

Spring comes quietly but surely. The days are longer and warmer, the blossoms are profuse. We're not quite out of the chill, and no doubt it will get cold again, perhaps even freezing, between now and summer, but the calendar says spring, so spring it is. Winter now has notice to vacate. I've looked at lots of spring poems but the one that caught me was Robert Louis Stevenson's “A Spring Carol.” It has the requisite gush and flutter of spring delight, the panoply of plants and creatures spring calls up, but it also has a lovely, musy meter. The song of the meadow. Heartsease.

When loud by landside streamlets gush,
And clear in the greenwood quires the thrush,
With sun on the meadows
And songs in the shadows
Comes again to me
The gift of the tongues of the lea,
The gift of the tongues of meadows.

Straightway my olden heart returns
And dances with the dancing burns;
It sings with the sparrows;
To the rain and the (grimy) barrows
Sings my heart aloud -
To the silver-bellied cloud,
To the silver rainy arrows.

It bears the song of the skylark down,
And it hears the singing of the town;
And youth on the highways
And lovers in byways
Follows and sees:
And hearkens the song of the leas
And sings the songs of the highways.

So when the earth is alive with gods,
And the lusty ploughman breaks the sod,
And the grass sings in the meadows,
And the flowers smile in the shadows,
Sits my heart at ease,
Hearing the song of the leas,
Singing the songs of the meadows.