On Gates: Locked Out

What do you do when your computer suddenly locks you out, and offers an arcane message with no way in again? The 'new' computerised world isn't all that new; it's been in place for at least 30 years.  That's the world where everything from blogging to banking is done online, and I remember the night the state government sent someone to our town demonstrating the wonders of the internet to us locals: I felt like an ancient alien in the presence of my first camera.
     Technology moves quick, superseding itself continually, and somehow, engaging with real life had a grip on priorities while IT went through several permutations  How did we become at once so ignorant and so dependent?
      When you get a computer, you don't have an object.  You've purchased a key, manipulated from elsewhere, and they can suddenly change the locks.  This has its benefits: when you don't have the key you must turn to your fellow human beings for help and support.  While you wait for repairs.
This prompts reflection.
     I got locked out of my computer. Who else gets locked out, of where? Clearly asylum seekers (refugees) often lack many keys to safe spaces.  Physical lockouts operate on disabilities: the world is full of spinning lights, steep stairs, narrow gates, and fine print.  There are social lockouts over superstitiously seen 'contagious sorrows' such as addictions, mental conditions and the victimhood following violent crimes (especially murder), since the idea that anything can happen to anyone affects our beliefs in the safety and sanctity of our own lives.  Shunning is lockout.
     So if you have a key, it would be kind and thoughtful to share it. I'm writing this blog at the library, while I await the new key, the restoration, the repairs.

On Fragmentation: Piecemeal Days

Buddhism tells us that all worldly enterprises end in sorrow, and Christianity notes the affinity of the world for the flesh (our mortality) and the devil (the prospect that things can go Very Badly Wrong, often without warning, at any given moment in time). What happens to the time in the meantime?

            What happened, for example, to a certain journal subscription that hummed along nicely for the Carmelite Library in 2006 and then suddenly disappeared — not in evidence for years (despite correspondence) — only to reappear outside our expectations (and without staff participation) in 2013? What happened to the intervening seven years? Did they fall through a hole in space?

            Indeed this question may apply to time in general. Overheard from the middle-aged daughter of a grandma wistfully fingering a baby’s cap — “for Nathan” — that lay in the basket on the footpath: “Mum, my Nathan is a grown man now. He doesn’t need a hat.” He takes up more space now, it seems. What has been displaced by the new shift in spaces?

            Laments from vestries, vicars and voters that churches no longer fill automatically on Sundays with persons regularly in attendance at their devotions seem to proceed from a view of time that dates to the era of the 9-5 job, the guaranteed pension, and the unbroken year. Fragmentation is about the two-or-three job individual posted any time 24/7 on an irregularly changing pattern. Time isn’t the only thing that shifts, either. The days when my mother-in-law, affectionately known as Old Grandma (though called Bess in her times) could be born near Ballarat and travel no farther than Mitcham in her lifetime, have been so fragmented that many persons spend almost more time overseas than at home, and this, again, on an irregularly changing pattern.

            The shape-shifter was a feared entity as early as Roman times. Something that appears to be something actually turns out to be something else. The shape of time is shifting. Perhaps this is why so many people say they want ‘spirituality’ instead of ‘religion’. Maybe there’s a need for something we can take with us, through an irregularly changing pattern of time and place: and space — where were those seven years — the magical duration of elf kidnappings? Maybe there needs to be something that fits into the disintegrating jigsaw puzzle the world is becoming: something to place in the spaces, something you can rely on in the fragmented moments of your life.

On Archives: A Box from the Past

They are covered in mould and some of them have been eaten by mice. They’ve been damp, and in some cases most of the words have been washed away. My brother has decided to clean out his basement which was filled to the roof with family items, the detrius of compounding deaths, estates, and house moves over many decades, never dealt with until now. He sent me a box filled with my past.

            Coughing from the dust that rises from some of the items. What shall be kept, what thrown away, what is too damaged to restore, what can be filed and who will ever read any of it? Is there anything left of me that survives from this time? Another time, another land, another communion of saints — and sinners. A letter from the ex, respectfully pointing out the path not taken. One of those weird letters from Angel, the primary school friend who would afterwards be not sane, slowly retreating into her other world. An invitation from a painter to a Truffaut screening. All the badges from the scouting movement. A couple of turquoise crosses set in silver from my mother’s Navajo jewellery collection. And the prize exhibit of all, my baby shoes which had become bookends according to some fashion current at the time my parents had to decide what to do with them.

            Some of the letters have value as literary history, and I send them to the archives at the National Library, where a curator will become involved with them and they may rest in peace. Some are so wrecked they go straight to the bin, and others, such as Angel’s ramblings, too painful for me to revisit: time to let them go. There are cards which are still pretty and can be used as Christmas decorations, and a set of Russian costume cards from the Russian bookshop in San Francisco: I have learned a lot more about asylum seekers since then, but it’s good to be reminded of the waves of refugees who pass through the lands in geological layers, becoming assimilated in their times, making room for new people from new places, or rather new displacements.

            What shall I do with these baby shoes? They’re rather quaint and lovely in their way, like the little baby shoe discovered at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall. Parents do like to cover their children’s feet. Since I’ve had quite a lot to do with children’s books in my time, I decided to let them fulfil their destiny as bookends, keeping the children’s books in my house company.

            So it all rests in the archives, of one kind or another, for awhile, until the changes of this mortal world call for new decisions, new fates, or new moves.

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On Repetition: Einstein on the Beach

As a piano student, I play lots of Hanon. Hanon’s exercises develop strength and speed, and the essence of this is repetition. I couldn’t help thinking of Hanon when I went to see a substantial (4 hours long) work, Einstein on the Beach, with music by Philip Glass, who is a master of repetition.

            The demands of repetition are first of all on training: everyone is a virtuoso performer. One dancer was striding diagonally forward and back for 30 minutes, longer than any ballet soloist would be called upon to dance, and must have the fitness of a middle-distance runner. The solo violinist performed continuous repeating patterns evoking Bach: the more I listened, the more I was aware of the warmth of the living instrument, in contrast to electronic sounds. You become involved: will this violinist ever be let out of purgatory, repeating the same movements seemingly endlessly? To the ear, it isn’t troubling, but to the eye, you have to ask what the repetitions are doing to his arm, his shoulder? And the mental demands of counting so much the same, but sometimes different.

            It isn’t quite meditative, because the repetitions contain small variations. And not quite random; it would take a lot of rehearsal. The repetition is constantly broken and interrupted, only to return to the pattern. Where words are involved, in choral passages for example, repetition makes the listener sort out voices: upper, lower, heavier, lighter. The words become objects, released from context, part of a pattern: indeed, the words are often numbers.

            Counting the repetitions is a musical project. Counting of chords, intervals, bars, beats. Scales, solfeggios, vocalises set one against another: the conductor beating time is repetition. You begin to be aware that underlying the world there is repetition. Repetition is practice; practice is living. Life is practice. It’s not about what it says; it’s about what it does.

            The tick of the clock or the metronome is repetition. The lapping of the sea against the sand: repetition. The saxophone may appear to improvise in jazz against the repetition; the singer may delicately soar above a bell-like repetition. It underlies; it surrounds; it supports; it abides.

            Repetition is also seen in the returns of the liturgical year. Cells renew themselves, breaths rise and fall, God and man are killed and rise together as the events of our salvation recur and remain the same.

            Repetition avails.

            And when you go outside, and the performance is finished, everything sounds different.