Night in the Library

So engrossed was I in my search for the perfect combination of books to borrow that I didn't notice the overhead lights being switched off one by one. I didn't hear the jangle of the librarian's keys as they were slid into the lock and turned with a click of finality, I didn't hear the fading footsteps, the car start and drive away, and I didn't notice the dimming daylight.

Still I pored over the shelves, crouching in the Politics and Philosophy corner where the librarian had failed to notice me reading jacket blurbs and admiring cover artworks. It wasn't until I heard that voice that I suddenly stood and looked around and noticed it was night time.

The voice came from over in the Fiction section. It spoke with stately authority and had a distinct Russian accent. I'll never forget what it said, for the words seemed somehow familiar as they echoed around the darkened library. It said "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Quite a statement, I thought. Intrigued, I stalked over towards the voice and sure enough, there on the shelf, with TOLS on it's spine, was a Tolstoy making all this racket.

Before I had a chance to do anything further, the book's neighbour responded.  This time the voice clearly sang, ringing with a shimmer of delight. I thought I heard the sound of pan-pipes in the background as the singing went...
"Hey dol! merry dol! Ring a dong dillo!
Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!"

This jumble of nonsense, sung with the joy of all life, was also familiar to me but I couldn't place it until the next lines made it clear.

"Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water:
Old Tom Bombadil and the River-daughter!"

Of course, it was Tolkein! The singing was old Tom Bombabil, that zealous master of the woodland. He and his wonderful wife Goldberry, whose merry dinner table was laden with yellow cream and honeycomb, white bread and butter; milk, cheese and green herbs and ripe berries gathered, where singing came more naturally than speaking, were a happy family quite unlike any I knew of. Tolkein certainly had a point there. 

I was curious to know how Tolstoy would respond, but just then over towards the Ms, I heard the sound of a ghostly wind echoing across the Texan plains and the tormented voice of one who had wrestled demons in the dark slowly drawled “It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.” 

I didn't need to see the MCCAR on the spine to know they were Cormac McCarthy's clipped sentences, sharing his thoughts in his characteristic poetry of the damned. A mood of melancholy and the terrible beauty of darkness fell over the library, but then I heard the tinkle of tea cups and the satisfying slurp of steaming tea being poured. An irreverant Scottish voice announced  “It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.”

I had an inkling, but it wasn't until I saw the MCCAL on the spine that I knew it was Alexander McCall Smith, using his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency to give quite a different view of things. 

The tumbleweed blew again, and McCarthy retorted "People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there," as though to prove that darkness also has a sense of humour, albeit laced with arsenic. 

I didn't stay around to hear the debate develop because from the next aisle I heard the unmistakable din of working class nineteenth century Britain, and a confident voice proclaim a favourite line: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was..." I raced over to see Dickens orating, but as I got there he was interrupted by science fiction master Philip K. Dick  with “A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.”
"-It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness-"
“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
"-it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity-"
"If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.” 
"-it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness-"
“Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.” 
"-it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,-"
“No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.” 
"-we had everything before us, we had nothing before us-"
“Everything in life is just for a while.”
"-we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way-"
“I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. "You have to let me in," he says. "I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?" And they answer, "Well, we read it and it makes no sense." SLAM.”

Things were getting louder. Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac were trying to out-hip one another, but it was made difficult by the absurd interruptions of Kafka, who thought he was a beetle, a few books down. 

Tom Wolfe was trying to joke with Virginia Woolf but she kept disappearing into her interior monologue, and Coelho was dispensing quaint wisdom to Coetze. 

"Call me Ishmael" Melville proclaimed, and Conrad screamed "The horror! The horror!" while from the Ss came the sound of  “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” 

Joyce chimed in with “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” 

Ideas were ripe and flowing, the words were crisp and vibrant, life and love were lived and lost; it was a most beautiful night in the library.   

In praise of libraries

With a feeling equal but opposite to the caustic loathing I have for shopping centres, I truly love libraries.

I love the dignified buzz of a building devoted to the attaining of wisdom. I love the sight of row upon row of books, each one a work of countless hours of dedicated research, of late coffee-fuelled nights, of long back-aching days of compiling and composing, cutting out and adding in, editing and redrafting, so that finally this precious volume can be printed and published and delivered to sit here neatly in its allotted place on the shelf. It  pains me to pass any of them by. All they want is a good home to be taken into and a comfortable lap on which to spread themselves; to be admired and understood. I wish I could read you all!

I love the librarians, so peaceful, helpful and quietly delighted to find themselves in this sanctuary every day like happy monks sitting in their shrine of words.

There's excitement in my belly on the day I wake up knowing I'm due to visit the library. I've already checked the catalogue online and have a good idea what is available and what I'd like to borrow. But I've always got one eye open for a surprise. There's a  lesser known Tolkein book I haven't yet read, there's the Booker Prize winner from 2002, and I can't but grasp greedily at that new tome on the philosophy of happiness. When I'm loaded up with more books than I can possibly read by the due date (but boy, I'll give it a red hot go) I approach the counter for the final and most satisfying of all surprises. I take out my wallet, but instead of paying for the privilege of reading these, the thoughts and work of the giants of literature from across the globe and across the centuries, I simply hand over my library card for a quick scan and away I walk. For this, the most frugal of sojourners, this is the ultimate buzz.

In times when everything is becoming commercialised and co-opted, (even SBS has ads!) libraries are a bastion of society's goodwill towards itself, like a healthy tonic to neutralise the runaway diet of crass junk.

I love the different flavours of libraries in the places I've lived. There was Hobart's imposing and efficient modern library with compulsory lockers to store your bag, where I first encountered the machine to auto-check your own books. Compare this with Fremantle's ramshackle atmosphere, where hobos read newspapers in sunny corners and the wide open doorway lacks even a beeper to check for smuggled volumes in whatever suitcase you care to drag in.

My current local is small but packed wall to wall with wonders. It will take time, but I'm getting through them.

 

They say mine

They say "mine"

Gina Rinehart. Net worth approx $29 billion

First half-year profit in 2011/12, approx $9.2 billion

Annual revenue approx $4.3 billion. Pushing to construct world's largest gas plant at James Price Point in the Kimberley region of Western Australia

Clive Palmer. Net worth approx $975 million

Market value approx $8.7 billion. Aggressive proponent of controversial coal seam gas mining throughout Australia.

We say "ours"

The Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven wonders of the natural world, under threat from development of several new ports for exporting coal and coal seam gas. Courtesy of mining giants such as Rinehart and Palmer.

James Price Point, proposed site for Woodside's industrial gas development 

visit here:
 http://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/coal-seam-gas/save-the-great-barrier-reef/save-the-reef

http://www.wilderness.org.au/campaigns/kimberley

TV is the devil

TV is the devil o yea

It leads us into temptation.

That devious device we invite into our homes to

sit in the corner and batter us with

crass comments and insidious urgings.

It says the kingdoms of sports, movies and crime drama

will be ours if only we fall down and worship it.

Its forked tongue turns us from participants to observers

in the dance of life.

Every night it comes bearing news,

but even this serves only to depress and fill us with fear

and a sense of hopelessness in a world out of control.

TV is the devil o yea.

The microwave is Lazarus o yea

It brings food which is stiff and cold

back to life, to be enjoyed once more.

The dishwasher is John The Baptist o yea

It cleanses our plates and glasses

And washes their unholiness away.

The refrigerator is Noah’s Ark o yea

Into this vessel go the chickens and the fishes

and the lambs and the bacons and the beefs and the turkeys

that would otherwise surely perish.

The sink is Pontious Pilate o yea

Where we wash our hands of all that ails us.

The radio is Jesus o yea

So let’s gather round and listen.   

A debate

Adjudicator: Welcome ladies and gentleman to this week’s debate. Last week we had a cracker, those of you who were here will remember the battle regarding Arnie’s greatest movie – Kindergarten Cop vs Twins. And tonight promises to be a beauty.

For many of us, life just seems to happen without our having much say in it. We have jobs, we have family, we have social obligations. Our days are full and we don’t seem to have the time to stop and think whether or not things are really taking the direction we want. Could I be doing things differently? Am I happy with my life? These questions may arise sometimes, but do we really address them with the attention they deserve? We feel constrained by external factors and internal fears so that we can’t face up to any major changes that may be needed. And then there’s all that tv to watch.

Well ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have two speakers who have thought about these questions and they will each propound their chosen philosophy for living. A debate entitled: How are we to live? Without further babble from me, I pass you to speaker number one.

Speaker One: Thank you ladies and gentlemen. I am here to speak to you tonight for some few minutes, and I hope to convince you through my humble words that we should live each day as if it were our last. 

We know that life is precious. I’m sure each of you understands that life goes by fleetingly; the days, weeks and years seem to go by faster and faster all the time with irresistible momentum. Our children are one day babies, going to school the next , and getting married the very next. And though we may feel as if we were young people only yesterday, we look in the mirror and find a grey haired, wrinkle-faced person staring in amazement back at us.  Life is short, ladies and gents. And it is for this very reason that we must seize every opportunity that comes our way. We can’t afford to put off doing those important things with the people we love, we must live as though it were our last day on earth.

Picture yourself, ladies and gentlemen, on your death bed. You are in your final moments, looking back on your life. Your one life. Would you like to be feeling as though you gave it a good tally ho, you lived each day with zest, with gusto, with the thought that you might not have another day? Or would you prefer to be thinking of how you were cautious and put things off until another day and you let fear dictate what you would or would not do with your time?

Live each day as if it were your last. If we truly grasped this concept surely we would be calling our mother to tell her we love her, we would watch the sun go down with the people we care most about. We would make a special dinner and invite all our friends to sit, drink some wine and enjoy healthy food and colourful conversation.  

Not only would our individual lives be more vibrant, but the world would be more harmonious, more joyous and less rapacious than the world we currently find ourselves in. Carpe diem, my friends. Seize the day. We must live each day as if it were our last, because you never know, perhaps it is.

Speaker Two: Thank you to the first speaker for a top speech. You gave it a good shot mate. However, my friends, I am here to tell you tonight that we should definitely not live each day as if it were our last. I’ll show you how stupid that is, and I have a much better plan for you. 

Firstly let’s look closely at the phrase ‘live each day as if it were your last’. Just imagine, my friends, that it was our last day on earth. Let’s say there was a meteor coming to hit the earth tomorrow and kill us all. It’s unavoidable. Even Bruce Willis can’t stop this one.  Ok, are you imagining? Do you think many people would be going to work on this, their last day on earth? I wouldn’t be there. It’s the last day for crying out loud! There’s no tomorrow, so there are no ramifications for our actions. It’s all about instant gratification. There’s no future to plan for. No point in beginning long term projects, no reason to invest energy in helping somebody unless you expect instant results and thanks. Just have fun, get high, get happy right now. Take all your money out of the bank and throw it off a bridge, just to see it fall.

Imagine a world full of people all wildly trying to spend their last twenty four hours going down in a blaze of glory. There’d be looting of liquor stores, shooting, brawling, biting, rooting, nudity in the streets, madness on the roads and fires burning through the night. Sure, there may be a few lovely sunset dinners, but they’d probably be run through by a band of drunken hoodlums who’d steal the chicken drumsticks and stomp on the pavlova.

And imagine planning the perfect evening with your most precious loved one only to find that, seeing as it’s the last day and all, she’s decided she’d rather have a quick fling with your best mate. And your brother.

Then we’d all wake up in the morning. We’d realise the previous day hadn’t in fact been our last, and we’ve now got a choice to make. We could either go about making some apologies, fix the hole in the wall and go back to work. Or we could think, well it wasn’t true for yesterday, but maybe I should live today as if it were my last.

No, I think if we lived each day as if it were our last we’d make such a mess of things that we’d pretty soon be wishing it was.

I propose we should instead live each day as if it were our first. I don’t mean lying around naked, screaming and kicking my legs around like I did as a baby on my first day on earth. I mean that we could stop acting so damn clever like we know it all, like we've seen it all before. Instead we could take a leaf out of the kids' book and keep on looking at the world with wide-eyed innocence, with wonder and excitement. Glowing as the sun warms my face as if I’ve never felt such a thing before. Fully appreciating that first bite of a crunchy apple, smiling at a stranger on the street, feeling the wind in my hair at a cliff-top lookout, listening to smooth chords strummed as though for the first time. Live like it's your very first day. 

There are plenty of things in this old world of ours that can really blow your mind, if you just stop and think. You know there are. You can look at nature. Listen to the stories of people around you. There’s art, there’s literature, there’s music. There’s a world of amazement, we just need to open our eyes to it. And if I’m in that kind of head space, then I’m going to be more able to help other people which I reckon is what it’s all about really.

Speaker One: Thank you to Speaker Two for your, ahem, original insights. Let me ask you though, seeing as you have attacked my theory for the fact that people wouldn’t be going to work. Let me ask you compadre, if it were your first day on earth, would you indeed be going to work? Or would you be walking round all goggle-eyed staring at apples, waving your hair in the breeze like a demented Pantene girl, gawking at strangers, and gazing in wonderment at the stripes on a zebra crossing until you get run down by a truck?

Your theory would lead to a world full of drooling weirdos, I’m sorry to say it.

Speaker Two: Better drooling weirdos than rampant rapists.

Speaker One: What about Robin Williams eh? Captain My Captain!

Speaker Two: Oh right, let’s all stand on our desks, like that makes for a good life...it’s written somewhere that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Speaker One: What by golly do you even mean by that? Keep up this nonsense and I’ll see to it that  this is your last day mister!

Speaker Two: With that attitude you won't last mate!

Adjudicator: errrm haha, thank you indeed to our two speakers. Yes, a fierce competition tonight. How are we to live? And as I look at the tallied scores, I have found in fact it was a tie! A dead heat. My oh my. So how do we resolve this? Well, I’ve listened closely to both your arguments, and humble adjudicator though I may be, I have come up with my own theory which I believe takes the good points from both your proposals, and here it is...

We should live each day.

       

Places I Been

 

Once upon a time I was at Large.

Didn’t stay long -

them police boys they caught up with me,

took me into Custody,

said they’d bring me to Justice.

First they introduced me to my smart-man friend with the suit and tie.

Said he was a loyer

Though I didn’t see nothing much loyal about him.

He said let him do the talking, because my future was in Jeopardy.

I told him I didn’t want to live there, it’s too far from me kids.

He said to be serious because my kids life was at Stake.

Buggered if I know why he kept wanting to split me family up.

 

They put me in a cell with a few other blokes -

Criminal types.

Then we all went to court

The other loyer was pointing his finger

saying how me and those blokes were in Cahoots.

Not only that, but I was in Charge

And I was in Telligent.

How could I have been in all those places, when really I was in Nocent?

Never even been to Telligent.

 

The judge fell for it though.

He took me to Task,

said I should be in Carcerated

so he sent me to prison at Once.

That’s maximum security.

 

 

Now I dream of the blue sky and the green grass and me two kids.

I’m in Despair. 

And now for something completely different

The Brainwave


Last night I was waylaid by a brainwave.

A brand new idea, a bolt from the blue, a turning on its head.

I turned and paddled and I caught that wave

taking the steep drop and feeling it surge beneath me.

I rode its neural pathways,

the thrill of a new plan like a slap of wind in my face.



Before I'd finished riding I had another wave and then another.

The brainwaves came on, growing larger and frothier

until I was engulfed in a wild brainstorm.

Thunder announced a thought from the east,

lightning illuminated my mind from the west,

and gusts of wind swept new possibilities around me.



Then I remembered I'd left the washing on the line.

So I put on my braincoat and ran out

to save my clean clothes from being saturated with revolutionary plans.

Those things never come out.

That done, I stood in the storm

listening to the wind and feeling its freshness, its new perspective,

all those ideas filling the gutters, soaking the soil.

Soccer will be off tomorrow, but it's good for the garden -

imagine what will be sprouting from there in the coming weeks.



I lay awake all night

unable to sleep for the stars and the universe and this warmth inside me,

my tanks filled and sloshing with lovely fresh breathing new thoughts.