Baby

A baby is nestled from the opinion of the world. Sleeping on their mother’s breast, the world is movements of sound. Perhaps that’s where symphonies begin. Laughter awakes the baby from undisturbed bliss. Merriment perchance. Louder laughter at a voice with an upturn, a timing of lines. Yet louder then the turn up to full pitch of baby’s wail, filling the theatre to the ceiling with meaning, a voice demanding attention, a mouth with something to say. Arj Barker is distracted. He knows that voice, he’s heard it before, a straight line wanting air, or milk, or a face, all three. He delivered lines like that himself early in his career, spontaneous and attention-grabbing, on his mother’s breast. It’s the unmistakable voice of need. A need different from his, which is keeping to the script. Argy Bargy could lose the thread. He welcomes hecklers, the thrill of audience interaction, while the audience responds to his well-tended comic material. But this interjector doesn’t use words. Their unpremeditated expression is superior to the sound system, gets in under audience attention, and his intentions. Large Marker is the one with the one-liners, the stand-up tweets they repeat as they walk down the street, undelete, all in the name of the Large ego. This baby’s intrusion is a confusion, a wordless whine lacking comic timing, tingling the chandeliers with primal diffusion, a non-grammatical non sequitur of healthy lungs leaving Large tongue-tied, ego upstaged. Taj Mahaler’s reduced to Garage Parker, his lofty visions at the grandiose Athenaeum an anticlimactic search for a corner to reverse into without crashing the show. Baby babbles at the pretty lights as Taj in his mind fears the worst, a reviewer expert in one-line demolitions of his craft, out of the mouths of babes, and all that. Baby threatens to have the final word, an indignant protest only to be silenced by a nipple. Sarge Starkers is used to crowd control, his delivery keeps everyone in order, feeding from the hand that commands. He stands at ease while they stand to attention. But Sarge is cooling to baby’s heckle, frighting on stage in the emperor’s new clothes. His attention turns to the mother, cuddling her child in the old-fashioned manner, waiting for his next well-timed wit skit. Starkers bawls out the order, take her baby from the theatre, no maybes, or words to that effect, allowing for the shades of English typical of comedy festivals. Barge Harker wants all the attention, that’s show business, his name in lights, viral online. Contrary to baby, who remains nameless, a special command performance repeated every minute of the day the world over, saying It’s Me Time! Mother ups and departs, now the audience has lost the thread, her baby resting into new symphonies. Merriment perchance. While Harker has a farking feeling he won’t be hearing the end of this, on stage in the Athenaeum, up the proverbial creek with a barge pole. 

 

 

 

Image: Detail from the Yoko Ono exhibition ‘My Mommy is Beautiful’ at the NGV Triennial, 2024.

  

Idea

 

‘Listen! I have an idea’ is the subject of this year’s poetry prize. How do I teach this to sixty primary school students? By reading poems aloud, but first what is an idea? And do children have ideas? I raise these questions at a dinner party on the weekend. Friends at dinner agree, it’s a great subject, but even though we all have ideas, we don’t think of them in the abstract. I said I was helped by William Carlos Williams’ saying in his poetry “No ideas but in things.” In other words, things prompt words that reveal ideas. Young poets find poetry by using images in their own language. Our host wrestled with how thoughts expressed well are kind of the start of ideas. I introduced the oft-said concern that children simply parrot the ideas of adults, in particular their parents. Wine and conviviality got us no closer to a theory about how we write poetry about ideas. Or may did, but the wine was taking effect. Next day I asked my daughter on the phone, what is an idea? She said, after some thought, walking along the street, that an idea is when two thoughts meet, at any age. Trick being, how to present this definition of Idea to a group of under-12s? I cannot, of course, because it’s too cerebral, like thoughts and ideas in general. Some older students may respond with a poem like a philosophical argument, but most wish to say something, or else even write a poem called ‘I Have No Ideas Today’. But admittedly, thoughts meeting is often the genesis of poems, so how to make that happen. By chance, whatever chance is, over the weekend a relative gave me a spare copy of Saul Bellow’s essays. I discovered that Bellow is an intellectual who hates the word intellectual. His biographical interview ‘A Half Life’ (1990) opens “I certainly wasn’t conscious of ideas as such before I was ten. I did have ideas of some sort earlier, but they were the sort of primitive metaphysical ideas a small child has.” Asked for examples, he replies: “Sitting on a curbstone, looking at the sky, thinking: Where did it all come from? Why was I here?” I started to think that the first word in the theme was as important as the last. Listening was as much the theme as ideas. I needed to find poems for reading that showed things and that drew in the listener, whether child or adult. The theme equated poetry with the need to say something to others. If children already have ideas, whether as defined by my host on Saturday night, my daughter on her phone, or the American Nobel laureate in his interview, then those ideas will form by hearing poetry and imitating its sounds, feel, word games, subjects and so forth from their own experience. My job became one of finding poems that assisted that process, reading them out carefully, and seeing what happened next. Poems would follow, and ideas, even poems about what is an idea.

Finland

 

Standing at Westgarth Station the anonymous author considers how clouds superimpose themselves on other clouds, cold as snow. The clouds are images in his mind, slowly ending up upon alpine plains. A high bridge arches across the sky in his mind. The anonymous writer wonders why Gerald Murnane never uses the name Gerald for the first-person narrators of his incremental fictions. But not for long, as he finds images in his mind are of white expanses of Finland. Snow footpaths and snow windows show at some unearthly hour and briefly the moon the same. There are ice rivers and ice rinks all day in daylight then candles in the windows when an unearthly sunset makes everywhere black and the winter sea. Westgarth platform is an arc. Large mirrors on sturdy stilts help the train driver see the back carriage exits and entrances. The anonymous author notices how superimposed clouds and a bridge in the sky are reflections in a large mirror on Platform 2. Surface glaze and white sprays of graffiti improve the superimpositions in his mind. He thinks it must be exciting for humans and wolves when the darkness breaks open with a red line that widens into pink and yellow, in Finland, in winter. Windows and exterior landscapes turn white, making space for memory. When a Hurstbridge express train hurtles through the arc of Westgarth, disappearing around the bend, the station is left feeling redundant. The anonymous author senses the loneliness experienced sometimes by characters in stories by Tove Jansson. A mirror on stilts temporarily reflects woodlands and cold lakes and pale blue skies. He sees the music of Jean Sibelius, chilly and austere sonatinas, proof, if only in his writing, that music is visible. The unnamed writer wonders why Tove rarely used the name Tove, though all the characters in her fictions were people in her life. Tove gave them special names, some of them look like clouds and the main ways to reach islands in Finland are by boat or bridge. The nameless composer in words considers it a great relief to know wolves were never introduced into Australia. He wonders if an academic living in Westgarth with nothing better to do will one day collate a who’s who key to all the people in the novels of Gerald Murnane, formerly of Macleod. He recollects images in his mind in a glass whitely on stilts of the frozen north, or is that the melting north, or the misty north, the slushy north, the pale blue north? A stopping-all-stations to Macleod rounds the bend, slows and halts along the arc, beneath the bridge in the sky. Five people get off and two people get onto the train, also the unidentified author into the second front carriage. The driver waits till all is clear then closes the long line of carriage doors.