Poems of every day life: Geoff Goodfellow

Great poem by Geoff Goodfellow on the lessons learned from everyday events

Reversing
Geoff Goodfellow

I was reversing out of my driveway
     & signalled to a bloke
to move his car which was in my way

he was a young man twenty-
maybe twenty-two   lots of bottle
blond hair       tousled and spiky
7 his care was about as old
as he was

he was parked in a No Parking zone
& it pissed me off
 as I turned out I drew alongside him-
rolled down my window & growled
   can't you read you idiot         it says
no parking

he looked at me momentarily & said
chill out dude

I set the car into drive
took a left turn       slowly-
and drove down the road laughing

he was right
                      of course.

Geoff Goodfellow is an Australian poet who lives in Adelaide. He has been writing poetry for over 30 years and published 10 books of poetry.  His most recent collection Waltzing with Jack Dancer: a slow dance with cancer  is a record of his survival from throat cancer.

His poems detail the lives of ordinary everyday people whose lives are overlooked and forgotten, including those who occupy the margins of Australian society. These are the voices of people often not found in contemporary Australian poetry and literature.

He has also written and read poems for trade unions.

An article on Geoff Goodfellow from the Age is here.
His website is here.

Anzac Day: remembering Joe and Albert and the horror and pointlessness of war

 cartoon by Leunig, from The Age

“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining… .... The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.”  

Chris Hedges

Here in Australia it is Anzac Day. April 25th. 

The day the nation remembers, both the landing (or more accurately the invasion of a foreign country) by Australian and other troops at Gallipoli, Turkey in 1915,  as well as Australians who served and died in all wars and conflicts (well some Australians, as they won't mention Aboriginal people who died in the Frontier Wars)

Thinking about the day brings to mind James Scott's fine book Domination and the Arts of Resistance in which he writes of the public rituals, performances and ceremonies- parades, memorials, state ceremonies- that the powerful use to distract attention away from the strategies they use to retain power. War and ceremonies celebrating war, of course, being among those.

I will spend the day reflecting on the horror and tragedy of war, and of Australia's history of fighting in other country's wars. I will think of my own family members who fought (and suffered) as a result of their war experiences. They had no interest in the glorification and memorialisaion of war.

And I will think of a former neighbor of mine. He fought in New Guinea in WW 2 where he saw the horror of war. He told me once that "war is just ordinary men with families and children killing other ordinary men with families and children...... unnecessary killing that’s what war is”. I wonder if his message will get spoken this Anzac Day.

A piece inspired by a conversation I had with him on the eve of the 2002 invasion of Iraq is below.

The piece was written in 2002 a few days after the Howard government's imperial ambitions resulted in Australia going to war in Iraq as part of the coalition of the willing. My son is nearly 18 now. We have moved and don't live on that street. I don't know if Joe is still alive. The Howard government is long gone, (although his disciples are back in power). But Australian troops are still in Afghanistan. Afghani children still die at the hands of  Australian and Coalition forces. 

As Chris Hedges reminds us- war is an addiction- it gives life meaning for those consumed by it, as well as for the political and military elite who speak in lofty tones and soaring rhetoric of honor and defending freedom and who knowingly send young men off to to die. What is the meaning of all this celebration of war?

Stories that go untold: Australia and war

Our street is always a cacophony of activity. From my office window I see it all. There are usually children everywhere. My son and I often count the number of children. There are 19 living on the street he tells me. Then he proceeds to tell me their names and ages and what year they are in at school.

They all play on the street, run in and out of houses and invent new games. They fight, argue and entertain themselves for hours. Their games always reflect something of what is happening in the wider world, of things they hear and see. In recent times the games have taken on more shooting and war like qualities. Goodies against baddies, policeman capturing baddies, ambushes, hiding from the enemy, shooting the enemy, people being shot. But I ask myself how can they not be affected by the terrible images of war.

Early on in this war of liberation (how I ask myself is it possible to liberate a country and a people by destroying both) my 6 year old son asks me “Daddy will we get bombed? Is Iraq near us?”. I try my best to explain that no we won’t get bombed and that Iraq is along way away from Perth. I try to show him on a map. He thinks about that for a while and then wanders off to continue his play. I ponder my son’s question. What must it be like for the children of Iraq who are being bombed? What would an Iraqi father say if asked the same question. 50% of the population are under 16. I am haunted by their faces and the images of children , the collateral damage, the casualties by this so called war of liberation. My son is safe but not Iraqi children who die in their hundreds under American (and Australian) bombs and bullets).

Joe is a noticeable figure on our street. Every day around 5pm Joe shuffles gently and quietly down the street. It is his daily circuit around the block and Joe always passes the front of our house. I am often sitting here in my office and I see him slowly wander by. Usually he has his walking stick. Joe’s gait is slow but determined. He is ever watchful of all the activity taking place on the street. I see him pause to watch the children- my son, the neighbors 2 boys and other boys from the street. Joe is one of those people who watch children play, perhaps remembering his own children at that age or his own childhood. Joe tells me he is 85 and has lived in this neighborhood for 50 years. He bought the land and built the house 50 years ago It cost him 160 pounds to build his house. Paid by a war loan he tells me.

It is Sunday afternoon and I am standing out the front deep in thought, an eye on the children who have gone down the local park to play footy. My 6 year old son has put on his new footy boots and gone with the older boys to play footy at the park. I am melancholic, pessimistic, depressed at the state of the world. And haunted by the terrible images coming out of Iraq. Of women and children shot by Coalition forces.

As Joe comes by we start talking. I ask him how he is. He talks to me of the daily events of his life, of his daily walks. I tell Joe I am thinking about this terrible war and the innocent lives lost in Iraq. “Ah War is a terrible thing” Joe tells me. When he speaks of war I listen. You see Joe speaks with authority about war . He has been there. He has seen men die. Men shot. Men blown to pieces.

You see Joe fought in WW2. He spent 4 years in New Guinea fighting the Japanese. He saw men die horrible deaths. Joe does not speak of war as honorable, as ethical, as just. It is not about big geo political agendas and plans. No war is just ordinary men with families and children killing other ordinary men with families and children. And of innocent men, women and children in foreign countries being blown to pieces in Australia's name. Simple as that. “Unnecessary killing that’s what war is” Joe tells me.

Joe’s words cut through all the bullshit of our political leaders, of our media commentators and all those embedded and other journalists. He speaks a simple truth. War kills ordinary men and women in their thousands, even million and they die in terrible horrible ways. Soldiers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, lovers, brothers, sisters, children. Just like us.

Joe speaks a truth like journalists such as Robert Fisk and Chris Hedges who tell us of the brutality and terrible nature of war and of the hypocrisy of political and military leaders.

Joe's words remind me of a fundamental truth: that most political leaders and commentators who adore and promote war have never been to war. Like John Howard who seems to have some romanticized and sanitized view of the honor and dignity of war fought for just causes ( like securing USA military interest, imposing American might and advancing American -and  Australian- corporate profits) Or George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield who send others off to die while fiercely avoiding military service himself.

Joe tells me that he drove tanks in the war. In the jungle the tanks could not do much. They could follow paths and tracks and support infantryman some time. But in the jungle they were of limited use.

One day he was told that someone else – a superior office - was going to command his tank. Joe was not pleased at the time but an order was an order. He had to drive another tank, further at the rear. Joe told me that later that day the tank he was supposed to be in was blown up by some enemy mines. He saw it blow up in front of him. Saw his friends and colleagues die. His voice trailed off as he told me. It was as if he was contemplating the fortunes and misfortunes of war. That he was alive but others weren’t and here he was nearly 60 years later on an autumn day in Perth talking about it to me. 

“War is a terrible business” he told me again. “ I saw that myself”

When he came back from the war and had children of his own Joe told me that he said to his wife that he would never let his children go to war to fight. If war came again he was going to take his family inland, out to the remote WA bush country where he was born and that knew well. He would hide his children away from any war.

My mother’s brother- my uncle- fought in the Western Desert and in New Guinea during WW2. His life was thereafter affected by that experience, not just because of the health effects of malaria. 

After his return from war he wanted nothing to do with all the celebratory war talk. He had no time for groups like the RSL. He used to say that those who talked the loudest about war were usually the ones who had never seen the real action close up. I am reminded of Albert’s words and of Joe's words and of the truths they knew.

Monty Python: The 4 Yorkshiremen sketch

Last night my brother and I described this sketch to his children and their partners. 

It is a wonderful parody of the tendency of the rich and the powerful to wallow in nostalgia about the circumstances of their upbringing.

Monty Python Four Yorkshire Men Sketch

Four well-dressed men sitting together at a vacation resort.

Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.

Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?

Terry Gilliam: You're right there Obediah.

Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?

MP: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

GC: A cup ' COLD tea.

EI: Without milk or sugar.

TG: OR tea!

MP: In a filthy, cracked cup.

EI: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

GC: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

TG: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

MP: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."

EI: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.

GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!

MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

EI: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.

GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

MP: Cardboard box?

TG: Aye.

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

ALL: Nope, nope..

Western Australian poets: Amanda Joy

Walking Dialogue

by Amanda Joy

Today, I didn’t think,
I didn’t speak,
I walked.

I walked in atonement,
I walked with limbs seeking clemency,
I walked with the eloquence of feet on dry leaves.

I let my eye become an opening
Today;
I allowed a penetration,
like music into my body,
I walked to clear choking definitions
I walked to erase a separation

I walked to fabricate another distance,
I walked to secure my own form.

I walked to divine my losses,
I walked to shake a shadow
settling on my light-heartedness.

As I walked my compass
was drawing circles
around a small stone
you’ve been keeping
which belongs to me. 

Amanda Joy is a West Australian poet, sculptor, installation artist and songwriter. Born in Broome in the Kimberley region she lives in Fremantle and publishes her poetry online and in various journals and  books. 

One of her poems- Almost Pause/Pareidolia- was recently shortlisted for the 2013 Blake Poetry Prize.

Some of her poetry can be found on her website Little Glass Pen.

Her book of poems Orchid Poems was published in 2001 by Mulla Mulla Press in Perth, Western Australia (a review of the book is here) and another small book of poems Not Enough to Fold was published in 2008. Some poetry and artwork from that book can be viewed here. 

In 2010 she published another collection of poems titled In Hand.

Not Enough to Fold
by Amanda Joy 

Forgotten like air
without movement

The simple dream
of people talking

Animate with hunger
for the unexpected

While the woman
I used to be
sleeps

Friday's poem: For Precision by Judith Wright

As always, when in doubt, weariness, and anxiety there is the poetry of Judith Wright. 

The poem For Precision was written in 1955, the year of my birth.

For Precision
Judith Wright

Yet I go on from day to day, betraying
the core of light, the depth of darkness-
my speech inexact, the note not right, 
never quite sure what  I am saying-

on the periphery of truth. Uphold me now,
pure colours, blacks and whites, bells on the central tone,
middays, midnights. I wander among cross-lights.
Let me be sure and economical as the rayed
suns, stars, flowers: wheels let me fall as a gull, a hawk,

through the confusions of foggy talk,
and pin with one irremediable stroke-
what?- the escaping wavering wandering light,
the blur, the brilliance; forming into one chord

what's separate and distracted; making the vague hard-
catching the wraith-speaking with a pure voice,
and that the gull's sole note like a steel nail
that driven through cloud, sky and irrelevant seas,
joins all, gives all a meaning, makes all whole.

Wislawa Syzmborska: The Astonishment of Daily Life

May delivery be easy,
may our child grow and be well.
Let him be happy from time to time
and leap over abysses.

Let his heart have strength to endure
and his mind be awake and reach far.
But not so far
that it sees into the future.

Spare him
that one gift,
O heavenly powers
 Wislawa Syzmborska

I have had enough of elections. Today is for reading Syzmborska and appreciating what she calls the "astonishment of everyday life".

Some People
by Wislawa Syzmborska

Some people flee some other people.
In some country under a sun
and some clouds.

They abandon something like all they’ve got,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now preens.

Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles.
The emptier they get, the heavier they grow.

What happens quietly: someone’s dropping from exhaustion.
What happens loudly: someone’s bread is ripped away,
someone tries to shake a limp child back to life.

Always another wrong road ahead of them,
always another wrong bridge
across another oddly reddish river.
Around them, some gunshots, now nearer, now farther away,
above them a plane sort of circles.

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or, better yet, some nonexistence
for a shorter or a longer while.

Something else will happen, only where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
maybe he won’t be the enemy
and will let them live some sort of life.

(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanag)

Some people fleeing some other people. In some country under the sun and some clouds. They leave behind some of their everything, sown fields, some chickens, dogs, mirrors in which fire now sees itself reflected. On their backs are pitchers and bundles, the emptier, the heavier from one day to the next. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20449?utm_source=Anything+Can+Happen+by+Seamus+Heaney&utm_campaign=poemaday_090513&utm_medium=email#sthash.xugsvU29.dpuf

Some people fleeing some other people. In some country under the sun and some clouds. They leave behind some of their everything, sown fields, some chickens, dogs, mirrors in which fire now sees itself reflected. On their backs are pitchers and bundles, the emptier, the heavier from one day to the next. Taking place stealthily is somebody's stopping, and in the commotion, somebody's bread somebody's snatching and a dead child somebody's shaking. In front of them some still not the right way, nor the bridge that should be over a river strangely rosy. Around them, some gunfire, at times closer, at times farther off, and, above, a plane circling somewhat. Some invisibility would come in handy, some grayish stoniness, or even better, non-being for a little or a long while. Something else is yet to happen, only where and what? Someone will head toward them, only when and who, in how many shapes and with what intentions? Given a choice, maybe he will choose not to be the enemy and leave them with some kind of life. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20449?utm_source=Anything+Can+Happen+by+Seamus+Heaney&utm_campaign=poemaday_090513&utm_medium=email#sthash.xugsvU29.dpuf

For my sister on turning 50

For my sister on her 50th birthday.

Turning Fifty
Judith Wright

"Having known war and peace
and loss and finding
I drink my coffee and wait
for the sun to rise.

With kitchen swept, cat fed,
the day still quiet,
I taste my fifty years
here in the cup.

Outside the green birds come
for bread and water.
Their wings wait for the sun
to show their colours.

I'll show my colours too.
Though we've polluted
even this air I breathe
and spoiled green earth;

though, granted life or death,
death's what we're choosing
and though these years we live
scar flesh and mind,

still as the sun comes up
bearing my birthday,
having met time and love
I raise my cup-

dark, bitter, neutral,clean,
sober as morning-
to all I have seen and know-
to this new sun"

Sunday poem- Wendell Berry: Lives and deaths that have belonged to us

Wendell Berry

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.

More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.

You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.

And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.

Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.

Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

Naomi Shihab Nye: At First Light

  "This morning the newspaper
was too terrible to deliver
so the newsboy just pitched
a little sheaf
of Kleenex"
Consolation
Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye's evocative poems below capture exactly what it is like when I get up in darkness each day.

In all her poetry and prose Naomi Shihab Nye writes clearly and beautifully of the daily realities of life and the sad state of the world in which we live. Her work has featured on the blog before.

Words When We Need Them
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Before this early moment,
another, ripe with rain,
the scent of its own full shape.

Each day the rooster
we have never seen
raises the first greeting
and darkness which holds us
in its loose pocket all night
sets us down.

Now we walk,
waking up rooms,
switching on lights.

Into the breath,
wordless but ripe
with all possible words,
messages not yet gathered
or sent.

Morning looms,
more friend than
the best friend.
We could still say.

Breaking the Fast
By Naomi Shihab Nye
1.
Japanese teacher says:
At first light, rise.
Don’t hover between
sleep and waking,
this makes you heavy,
puts a stone inside your heart.

The minute you drift back to shore,
anchor. Breathe.
Remember your deepest name.

2.
Sometimes objects stun me,
bamboo strainer, gray mug,
sitting exactly where
they were left.

They have not slept
or dreamt of lost faces.

I touch them carefully,
saying, tell me what you know.

3.
Cup of waves,
strawberry balanced
in a seashell.

In morning the water seems
clear to the bottom.

No fish blocks my view.

Sunday morning Reflections

photo courtesy of The Boston Globe

The Guest House
Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Nikos Kazantzakis and the Politics of the Spirit

 "Gradually I began to understand that it does not matter very much what problem, whether big or small, is tormenting us; the only thing that matters is that we be tormented, that we find a ground for being tormented. In other words that we exercise our minds in order to keep certainty from turning us into idiots, that we fight to open every closed door we find in front of us".
Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco 

 On my fortnightly pilgrimage to scour the shelves of the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia I found the second volume of the biography of the Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis by Peter Bien ( Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, 2007). 

Kazantzakis is best known for his 1946 book Zorba The Greek (made into a famous film starring Anthony Quinn) and the Last Temptation of Christ, published in 1960 (which was made into a controversial film by Martin Scorsese)

In my 30's I read everything that Kazantzakis wrote and was deeply affected by his work. Bien's mammoth work, which totals over 600 pages, is the second volume of his biography of Kazantzakis's (the first volume  was published in 1989).

I look forward to re-engaging with the remarkable life and work of Nikos Kazantzakis.

"The endless scream in the breaking news"

Just heard that my step daughter's best mate in Sendai is alive. Nothing had been heard from him since Friday when the earthquake and tsunami destroyed much of the city. But he has just been sighted in a shelter in Sendai. 

Through the power of email and Facebook my step daughter, who is on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean, found about his sighting from friends in Japan and then she alerted me.

I pray for my step daughter's mate and all the people who have suffered so much in Japan at such terrible times. 

Like people the world over I have been overwhelmed by the terrible tragedy in Japan and the destructive power of the forces of nature and the earth on which we live.

So many terrible stories and images are emerging from the multiple catastrophes in Japan, and now, a few days later,  the full extent of the unfolding crises in the nuclear reactors and the realization of the scale of the devastation are becoming obvious.

Yet also emerging are stories of human endurance and survival, human compassion and solidarity, and ultimately the power of the human spirit. 

But it is hard to do anything but feel complete and utter despair at the horror of it all. And the terrible realization and question that has dogged me since Friday- is this an apocalyptic vision of how the world will end?- humankind and human civilization overwhelmed by the forces of nature and the earth, and our own hubris, in the form of forces we have unleashed- climate change and nuclear power.

This poem by Mahmoud Darwish, perhaps my favourite poet, was bought to my attention by Charandev Singh.

"Her voice carries her higher and further than
the seashore. She screams at night over the land
The echo has no echo
...so she becomes the endless scream in the breaking news
which was no longer breaking news"
...- Mahmoud Darwish

Music over Xmas

Xmas Reading

Currently listening to: June Tabor

Currently listening to English folk singer June Tabor's 4 CD career compilation Always.  

The CD is a reminder that June Tabor has a voice like no other singer and is undoubtedly the finest female interpreter of traditional and contemporary folk music.

Here she is accompanied by one of my favourite musicians Martin Simpson.

Who will form Australia's next 'minority' government?

image courtesy ABC

The mainstream media suggests that all signs point to the three country Independents supporting the incumbent Gillard government, thereby allowing Labor to form a minority government. With lower house Independents Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie already supporting Labor and  the formation of a Greens-Labor alliance in the Senate enabling Labor to govern with Senate support, the view being expressed by the mainstream media is understandable.

But I am not so sure. My view has always been that the three Independents will support a Coalition government (see here) and I still hold that view. But, by the end of this week we will know one way or the other.

Like many of Australians I am hopeful that the cracks that have appeared in in the hegemony of the two party system will continue to widen and that the Independents and Greens will exercise their power for serious reform.

The scare mongering and fear about the shift to the left is palpable. The Murdoch rags are railing against the Greens' ascension to power and are making all sorts of predictions about this leftist takeover of the reigns of governments. How we wish!!

August 12 2010: In memory of Kit Penter (1928-2008)

Today is my mother's birthday. She would have been 82 today. There is not a day goes by that I don't think I think of her and my father (who died in 1994).

Pablo Neruda says it best:

"They told me
many things, everything.
Not only did they touch me
and take the hand I gave them
but they were bound to my life
in such a way
that they lived in me
and were such a living part of me
that they shared half of my life
and will die half my death"

Tony Judt and the fragility of language

At election time we are reminded of the ways that the powerful, including politicians, political parties and corporations use language and words to mystify rather than inform.

So in the middle of a deeply depressing Federal election campaign, it was a pleasure to read Tony Judt's* profound and moving meditation on language and words, and their capacity to communicate ideas and meaning. Judt's piece titled Words appears in the New York Review of Books.

Judt. who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) a terrible disease that has left him a quadriplegic, writes that his own loss of capacity for speech reminds him of the power of language in creating and holding together public space and communicating public ideas.

"I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

For Judt words lose their integrity when they privilege personal expression and rely on rhetorical flourishes. When this happens, Judt believes the public ideas that can be expressed and discussed through language fall into disrepair and eventually are lost.

Judt makes the point that the professionalization of writing, be it by academics, journalist, writers or politicians, favors obscurantism and has:

" encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib popular articulacy.. It is the performer rather than the subject, to whom the audience's attention is drawn".

His conclusion is a timely warning to us all:

"If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have".

* An earlier blog piece on Tony Judt is here

"Duende" and the music of Townes Van Zandt

Since writing the previous blog piece on the music of Townes Van Zandt a couple of additional things have turned up.

I came across this piece on Townes Van Zandt on the excellent Just a Song blog site. Writing about Townes's song The Rake the author writes this:

"The lyrics are spiked throughout with Townes' trademark melancholia. A melancholia that emanated from Van Zandt's pained troubled soul. An essential and undeniable part of his essence, of his songwriting. Never maudlin though. Never false. On the contrary, immensely powerful, impactful, unforgettable."

Very well put. The writer goes on to use the concept of "Duende", coined by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, to understand Townes's work. As defined by Lorca "Duende" refers to a raw inherent sadness and a heightened awareness of death, that is the defining quality of great musical art.

As the blog writer points out:

"The music of Townes has duende in spades. It climbs up from deep inside him, from the soles of his feet to the tip of his skull."

This week ABC Radio National's Daily Planet program features a new album of Townes Van Zandt songs recorded by unknown artists titled Introducing Townes Van Zandt via the Great Unknown. Here is a link to the Project and the CD. The Daily Planet also features songs from Steve Earle's latest CD Townes, in which he interprets some of his favourite Townes Van Zandt songs.

At family gatherings

Tonight a gathering of three generations of my family from Perth and Albany - my brother and sister and their partners, my son and his 7 nephews and partners, and the baby daughter of one of my nephews. Seventeen in total.

At such events I am always reminded of a Wendell Berry poem from his book Leavings

VIII.

I tremble with gratitude
for my children and their children
who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinners together, the dead
enter and pass among us
in loving love and in memory

And so the young are taught

Wendell Berry