Bluestone and Mother’s Day

I’m trying to get into the habit of writing a weekly blog, rounding up interesting things I’ve watched, listened to, read or written in the past week. Hopefully this provides fertile ground for developing long-form pieces, and gets me into the habit of regular writing and publishing, even if I’m not entirely happy with what I write, or if I leave some things out:

So, here’s the first ~lo-fi~ version -

What I’m watching:

• The BBC/Hulu adaptation of Normal People, Sally Rooney.

What I’m listening to:

• Billie Eilish’s rendition of Bobby Hebb’s Sunny from Global Citizen’s One World; Together at Home concert.

• Mac Miller’s Circles

• Dope Lemon’s Smooth Big Cat

What I’m reading:

• This really sensitive photo essay called “Put out to grass: when animals are allowed to grow old”. Most of the subjects have been rescued from slaughterhouses or farms after cases of cruelty. Recalled for me how sickening I find factory farming, and how any kind of animal cruelty makes me uncomfortable even with the idea of being human.

• The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months, by Rutger Bregman in The Guardian.

• 10 reasons why COVID-19 favours a Trump re-election victory, by Associate Professor Timothy Lynch in UniMelb Pursuit.

• This charming piece on Bluestone and Melbourne by Stephanie Trigg, in The Conversation and in longer article form (before her book is published). It explores how bluestone has shaped Melbourne as a city - or as Ben Wilkie put it on Twitter, “the intermingling of human and lithic histories”. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. Melbourne and bluestone have always been synonymous in my mind; not because it constitutes so much of our built environment, but because - probably for reasons of synaesthesia - it reminds me of the character of the city: a little bit melancholic, calmer and cooler than Sydney sandstone, and strong and durable. One of my favourite things is the glistening and reflective light of bluestone streetscapes after it’s rained. It also reminds me of the stunning Parisian cobbled roads made up of intersecting concentric circles. I love the texture of these streets, and how they used to feel when driving or riding over when I lived in Paris in July 2012.

Parisian Bluestone, Yutaka Yamamoto, 2018 available on Instagram

And finally, something beautiful:

• I’ve been a fan of New York based artist and illustrator Mari Andrew for a long time. I even went to one of her private sketching workshops in Melbourne in 2018; it was a surreal experience to see an Instagram character assume material form.

• Today is Mother’s Day, and Mari posted this beautiful image from a year ago on her story. Like most of Mari’s work, I think it’s really thoughtful and touching and is particularly welcome for those who find Mother’s Day difficult, lonely and saddening for various reasons. It also adds complexity and dimension to the notion of motherhood, drawing attention to the negative space of idealised, affirmative concepts.

Mari Andrew, 11 May 2019, at https://www.instagram.com/p/BxUYs-Bh916/

Three Poetic Fragments on Love and God: Easter Sunday, 2020

My friend Tess produces a beautiful weekly newsletter called The Other Side, which provides a curation of wholesome, funny, and personal content. It’s a delightful reprieve from the endless blizzard of Corona-news we’ve become accustomed to. I encourage you to read, subscribe and share with your friends here: https://www.theotherside.community/

Today’s Easter Sunday edition included this beautiful poem called The Emperor by Matthew Rohrer, an American poet. It’s a gentle and cosy meditation on love:

The Emperor,
By Matthew Rohrer

She sends me a text
she's coming home
the train emerges
from underground

I light the fire
under the pot, I pour her 
a glass of wine 
I fold a napkin under
a little fork 

the wind blows the rain
into the windows
the Emperor himself 
is not this happy. 

I love the simplicity of the poem: its hardboiled, elemental words, the haiku-like immediacy of the present tense and the mindfulness of each moment, and the way a broad picture of their love and happiness is depicted through a focus on small, everyday phenomena.

Japanese White-eye on Persimmon, Ohara Koson (1877–1945)

It made me think of the below poem “The Earth Turned to Bring us Closer” by Venezuelan writer Eugenio Montejo. I’ve long admired the poem for its cosmic perspective of the Earth, the way it collapses and interweaves time and space, and how it movingly depicts life and love as music or a dream:

The Earth Turned to Bring us Closer
By Eugenio Montejo

The earth turned to bring us closer

it turned on itself and within us

until it finally brought us together in this dream

as written in the Symposium.

Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices

time passed in minutes and millennia.

An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh

arrived in Nebraska.

A rooster was singing some distance from the world,

in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.

The earth was spinning with its music

carrying us on board;

it didn't stop turning a single moment

as if so much love,

so much that is beautiful

was only an adagio written long ago

in the Symposium's score.

The last sunrise of the 2010 decade
Byron Bay Lighthouse, Australia
31 December 2019

The final poem I read today is called Rain. It’s by Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008), New Zealand’s most distinguished Māori poet writing in English who became the country’s second Te Mata Poet Laureate in 1999. I thought about this poem after flicking through A New Zealand Prayer Book. While it’s ostensibly about the natural world, a source of deep inspiration for Tuwhare, notions of love and the divine emanate from the poem:

Rain
by Hone Tuwhare

I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain

If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut

And I
should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind

the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground

the steady
drum-roll sound
you make
when the wind drops

But if I
should not hear
smell or feel or see
you

you would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain

Tuwhare’s words drip gently down the page like raindrops. For me, the poem captures the ambient, all-encompassing nature of love, and how it’s able to reach and affect us in so many different ways. Even when we’re not attuned to it, aware of it, or able to experience it, the love is still there.

On Easter Sunday, the religious readers of this post might also think about God’s love in this way.

Happy Easter, and please enjoy Julia Jacklin’s stunning rendition of “Don’t Let the Kids Win”.

Winnie-the-Pooh in the Time of Coronavirus

The protracted corona-lockdown has seen a lot of us - already riven by various internet addictions - spend increasing amounts of time online. One of the more wholesome things I’ve stumbled upon recently has been the Twitter feed of a devotee of A.A. Milne, the famous author and playwright largely known as the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. Operating from some unknown corner of the world, the account radiates delightful coronavirus-related content like sunbeams which pierce through the squalid, polluted clouds of Twitter.

The nostalgic, sepia-toned nature of E H Shepard’s illustrations makes for very wholesome viewing on its own; when they are accompanied by A.A. Milne’s quotes - which eerily describe the new norms of a world paralysed by coronavirus - it filters the strangeness of these days through a poetic, dreamlike lens. It would probably serve as a good communicative aide to young children in explaining (novel!) concepts such as social distancing, quarantine, and panic buying or hoarding.

The first tweet which caught my attention was this, which depicted Pooh blissfully ‘doing nothing’, a radical concept which our busy world has had to reacquaint itself with in order to (seemingly paradoxically) save humanity. The image was paired with the following quote:

“What I like doing best is Nothing,” said Christopher Robin. “How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh. “Well, it’s when people call out at you, ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say ‘Oh, nothing,’ and then you go and do it.”

Pooh enjoying social distancing and ‘doing Nothing’ in the woods, The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

In the next illustration, Pooh seems to be drinking in the sunshine on his state-sanctioned daily exercise, pictured with the below quotes:

The sun was so delightfully warm, and the stone, which had been sitting in it for a long time, was so-warm, too, that Pooh had almost decided to go on being Pooh in the middle of the stream for the rest of the morning

Or perhaps he(?) is meditating on the nature of friendship and social connection in an environment where physical contact is impossible:

Pooh began to wonder how Kanga and Roo and Tigger were getting on, because they all lived together in a different part of the Forest. And he thought, “I haven’t seen Roo for a long time, and if I don’t see him today it will be a still longer time.”

Pooh on an island in the stream, The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

One of my favourite still and quote combinations depicts Pooh hoarding jars of honey, a scene reminiscent of the panic buying and toilet paper hoarding which erupted across Australia and the world in early March:

“This is serious,” said Pooh. “I must have an Escape.”
So he took his largest pot of honey and escaped with it to a broad branch of his tree, and then he climbed down again and escaped with another pot... until there were ten pots of honey...

Pooh hoarding honey, The World of Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne

Below we see Rabbit leaving his warren to look after the young Christopher Robin. This is a fitting metaphor for our health heroes and essential workers (doctors, truckers, grocers, shelf stackers) who head out each day in spite of the health regulations to look after those who depend on them:

He came out of his house and sniffed the warm spring morning as he wondered ... "No, not Kanga's," said Rabbit thoughtfully to himself, as he curled his whiskers ... and trotted off in the other direction, which was the way to Christopher Robin's house. "After all," said Rabbit to himself, "Christopher Robin depends on me.

Rabbit faces the day to help others who depend on him, The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

We also see everyone’s favourite donkey, Eeyore, rebuke his fellow citizens for not being as enthusiastic about the new public health measures as he is:

Eeyore turned round angrily on the others and said, “Everybody crowds round so in this Forest. There’s no Space. I never saw a more Spreading lot of animals in my life, and all in the wrong places. Can’t you SEE that Christopher Robin wants to be alone? I’m going.”

Not social distancing, The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

And finally, we see a child enjoying nature with the mindfulness that many of us have started to rediscover, perhaps with the intention to never take simple pleasures and freedoms for granted ‘on the other side’.

And there would I rest, and lie,
My chin in my hands, and gaze
At the dazzle of sand below,
And the green waves curling slow,
And the grey-blue distant haze
Where the sea goes up to the sky...

Contemplating the sublime, The Island, A.A. Milne

Thanks for reading!

Stay safe and stay connected, everyone :)