The Bushfires and the Great Australian Spirit

Gerringong, NSW

Credit: Sam Markham took this photo approximately 20 minutes after a firestorm tore through his family's home. (Instagram / sam_markham_)

Bushfires in Australia when “tree stumps are kilns” and the land is covered with “red-black wounds” (Les Murray, Late Summer Fires) are certainly not new. They have been elemental to living in this land Down Under for timeless generations. They are an “ever-present part of life.”[1] We have almost become used to them, if that could ever be possible, and we might sometimes speak a little too casually of the ‘bushfire season’. Different parts of the continent given the vastness of our country experience this fiery season both in winter (dry) and in summer (hot) conditions. But it has become increasingly ferocious, where perhaps a more descriptive word for these huge fast-moving firestorms would be mega-blaze. We have had the real bad ones like the Tasmanian Black Tuesday Bushfires (1967), the South Australian and Victorian Ash Wednesday Bushfires (1983), and more recently one of our worst natural disasters the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday Bushfires. Not surprising then, that we have become more acutely sensitive to both the short- and long-term consequences of these “late summer fires”.[2] And yet, these ones we are currently living through, described by many in the middle of these infernos “as hell on earth”, are like no others we have seen.[3] Australian records for its highest-ever temperatures have been consistently topped together with a number of towns during these months identified as the hottest places on Earth. These fires have not surprisingly caught the attention of the world and it has rightly asked questions as to our preparedness. But how does one prepare for something as terrible as this, for the unprecedented. The inferno, this ‘mega-blaze’, we are living through, even as I write [from the South Coast itself], has even shocked hardened firefighter veterans with flames in some instances reaching heights of over 40 metres.[4] As a scholar of the Apocalypse of John, I can say, that the apocalyptic imagery that has been used by many of the first responders, and by those brave souls in the thick of the bushfires and the ‘devilishly twisted’ pyrocumulus clouds, is not an exaggeration. Where within minutes day turns to pitch black and the sun to blood red. Desolation, an awful word which denotes emptiness and destruction, utterly describes the blackened and ashen landscape. To date we have lost over 10 million hectares compared with the correspondingly calamitous Siberian fires of 2019 where 2.7 million hectares were lost. This gives some idea of the far-reaching catastrophe. As a dear friend from Europe also wrote to me only last night, these are indeed, "apocalyptic realities".

These few paragraphs, primarily written for my colleagues and friends overseas, are not a discussion on climate change.[5] This is not the time for such a discussion however urgent it surely is. This time will come over the next weeks and months when people are safely back into their homes, when the injured have been healed, and when our dead very sadly, have been laid to rest by their loved ones.[6] Rather, I wish to speak and share some thoughts on the ANZAC spirit of Australians (endurance, courage, initiative, discipline, mateship) born in the battlefields of Gallipoli, a legacy of one of the bloodiest World War One engagements.[7] This Aussie spirit, as “tough as goat’s knees” it is said, is also evidenced in peacetimes during periods of natural disasters of which our country is no stranger. Not only ravaging fires but also catastrophic cyclones. Older Australians would no doubt still remember the devastation of the tropical storm, Cyclone Tracy, which smashed into the city of Darwin in the Northern Territory on Christmas Eve of 1974. Australians all over the country responded with incredible speed.[8] Much of this benevolence quiet and anonymous. It is true we are not to be ultimately defined by what we possess, but by what we are able to give. Nothing is insignificant, all things touch upon the eternal.

This same spirit of ‘mateship’, the Anzac ‘attitude’ if I might call it, is being displayed in abundance during these terrifying hours. Volunteer firefighters [and certainly many other essential services volunteers] together with their professional workmates threw the timetable out the window and laboured through darkened days and spectral nights to not only save the lives of their neighbours but also their homes and properties.[9] A number of these firefighters having already suffered personal tragedy of their own. Our own Rural Fire Services (RFS) Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons who has been a bastion of support and of clear reason throughout these many days, had lost his own firefighting father in a hazard-reduction burn which turned wrong years earlier. Neighbours with no fire experience fighting spot fires on each other’s homes and properties, people opening up their homes to feed and to quench the homeless, truckies driving many, many hours to drop off food supplies and water to the little towns cut off from distribution routes, local communities and clubs opening their doors to those who were in need of shelter and comfort, people putting together essential survival parcels. Here too, I must mention the many reporters who risked their own lives to update us from the front line. These are all people from different walks of life testifying to good deeds of bravery, courage, and compassion.[10] Faith-communities as well have engaged in special prayer services and supported those in need of spiritual succour. Many gifts, too, have come from overseas and for these gifts we thank you. They are very important. Typical of this generosity is Pink’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar donation which made headlines here in Oz and inspired many others from both the entertainment and sports communities to get on board.

Credit: Jimboomba Police

Of course, we cannot forget the dreadful plight of our animals. A large group of this wildlife unique to this continent. A video of troops of kangaroos escaping the fires says much more than I could justly describe.[11] A rough estimate is around 480 million animal life lost. [12] Including large populations of our beloved kangaroos and koalas. Who can forget those extraordinary images of distressed koalas in dire need of water approaching people.[13] This great number of animal loss does not include “insects, bats or frogs.” It is estimated that in all likelihood even this huge total is an underestimation. The implications of all this to ecosystems, our biological community, is another subject altogether.

These marvellous acts of humanity, sweet-scented as they are, with such heroic mettle and backbone of steel, are of course not only common to my fellow Australians. Other countries face their own devastations and have suffered and conquered through similar tribulations. People are much nobler than what we might normally give them credit for. There are far more ‘angels’ in the world than the opposite which the popular media would normally lead us to believe. Good deeds which move the heart, even “that someone lay down his life for his friends” (Jn.15:13) or deep expressions of compassion [lit. ‘to suffer with’] from ordinary people doing extraordinary things, will rarely make the headlines. It takes such devastations for the greatness of the human spirit to warrant attention. Even now, acts of love and charity move and abound daily about us. Otherwise it would not take too long for our world to ground to a complete halt.

We will ‘regenerate’, it is what we do best. It is what this inimitable land, this “sunburnt country”, with all its natural beauty and untreated harshness, has taught us. To regenerate, is to restore. This enduring is also the ageless story of our indigenous Australians and we have much to learn from them when it comes to the wisdom of land management. That is, putting our ear to the ground and ‘deep listening to the earth’. New and vigorous life, like the uniquely Australian grass trees [the Xanthorrhoea], will return to our burnt places. Our spirits will revive and rekindle. And what is ashen now will once more turn to forest green.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2013/dec/01/history-bushfires-australia-interactive

[2] http://www.lesmurray.org/pm_lsf.htm

[3] https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/bushfire-refugees-and-injured-wildlife-escape-mallacoota-armageddon-20200103-p53ojo.html

[4] https://www.9news.com.au/national/nsw-bushfires-south-coast-man-forced-to-defend-family-home-from-inside-firestorm/16cdd92e-3508-4990-bf20-53170fec72a8

[5] https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

[6] https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/what-we-know-so-far-on-the-nsw-and-victorian-bushfires/news-story/9e0268f8b13102c57370df951a6d1483

[7] https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac-day/traditions

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Tracy

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uavHvY7KPXw

[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ST_n0_L7dc

[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUGvay_E4s

[12] https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/01/03/a-statement-about-the-480-million-animals-killed-in-nsw-bushfire.html

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwf9yQhYVrA

Eric Arthur Blair aka 'George Orwell'

26th May, 2011 [date of the original draft]

Sydney, Kingsgrove

I have just finished reading a selection of George Orwell’s letters and was deeply moved by his acute anxiety to protect his adopted young son, Richard, from any potential infection of the tuberculosis which was killing the famous author and essayist.[1] Orwell’s love and concern for the boy was particularly evident and tender-hearted when he was lying on his death bed at UCH in London (University College Hospital) and painfully desperate to embrace the little boy but having to push him away. He was “absolutely devoted” to his son.[2] Writers, too, like all other artists, are more than the iconic works with which they are normally identified.

For most people George Orwell will forever be connected to those classic socio-political critiques of the ‘engineered’ trajectory towards ideological monoliths and totalitarianism, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949).[3] This is unfortunate for a number of reasons. To begin with Orwell was a prolific writer and an amazingly generous correspondent, and this despite his persistent and ultimately fatal joust with TB at the age of forty-six (though given the viciousness of his disease he invariably appears much older in photographs). Towards the end of his life writing became an increasingly difficult task and the use of heavy and unreliable typewriters for a bed-ridden man made the task even more onerous. Both of the novels for which he is chiefly famous for were written towards the end of his life, 1984 was his last major literary undertaking.[4] There is then, and despite his early death, a voluminous amount of material which serves as a backdrop to these two books. To study these novels (given the special subject matter) outside Orwell’s political and social inheritance is to fall into the trap of caricaturing or misinterpreting his philosophical thought. This no less given the confusion of his position on socialism and communism and the evident distinctions he wants to make between the two, but then also with his interpretation of the unique brand of British socialism itself.[5] In the excellent introduction to his correspondence, Peter Davison pinpoints the reason why we find a none too small collection of inconsistencies to do with Orwell. Notwithstanding his own political ambivalences there are those who without reasonable knowledge of his life quote him in catchphrases which only adds to these ‘misinterpretations’:

“…many of those who refer to Orwell seem not to have read much more than Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four, if those. The millions who have heard of Big Brother and Room 101 know nothing of their progenitor. Ignorance of Orwell is also to be found in academic circles…”[6]

This would account for some of the political contradictions and his ‘contrariness’ which Orwellian students will invariably point to.[7] It does play an important part of how we are to receive and understand these books together with the socio-political conditions, ideologies, laws and practises he wants to anatomize and to critique. It is tempting for some to put aside the actual life of the author, particularly given the cinematic translation of the works, and to miss the message altogether: that George Orwell’s stories have more to do with the ‘human condition’ as a universal experience over any political or geographical borders. And so, we can with confidence in our own times, consider how he would have ‘reviewed’ liberal democracies bent on panoptic surveillance and the resultant erosion of our private space. This is a vital point which also permits for the broader context of his work to remain both inventive and relevant as a diachronic critique as to how civil societies “form” and “change”. Particularly in the sphere of social theory, and especially with readings connected to conflict perspective. The same we could write for example of Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and Margaret Atwood. Even the same let’s say for the religious ‘eschatologist’ Seraphim Rose. The famous story which underpins 1984 itself, is only ever incidental to the greater truths of what man [ideally] is rather than what man can [potentially] become, which Orwell subtly yet effectively communicates:

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” (1984)

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.” (1984)

There is also the graphic and unforgettable warning of what we are ‘politically’ capable of [in Aristotelian terms of “zoon politikon”] rather than a pure and simple critique of a prevailing ideology or the sinister shadow of the “political Leviathan” Big Brother.[8] There is a great deal of political philosophy to be found in these dystopian stories of a dis-functioning hierarchical social system primarily brought about not by ‘authority’, but ultimately by the consent of a vulnerable and crushed human spirit. Almost everywhere, Orwell is saying, it is unacceptable for the power elite, whatever name or label they might go under, to rule over and to tyrannize the vulnerable. ‘Hell’ begins at the point when we are no longer free and able to act as we would wish. Here is the fundamental place from where both “Big Brother” and “Uberveillance” emerge, to depth-charge into the other places of our social activity and everyday being. The irony is that nowadays we are becoming much more than just willing participants in this mushrooming surveillance ecosystem, but are in fact inviting “Room 101” and our very jailers, not only into our homes, BUT into our blood streams.[9]

[1] Orwell, A Life in Letters, Peter Davison, (Harvill, Secker: London, 1998).

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jdftY4j-Nc

[3] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/biography/

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell

[5] https://www.biographyonline.net/socialism-george-orwell/

[6] Orwell, op. cit., p. ix

[7] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/27/honest-decent-wrong

[8] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780203941638/chapters/10.4324/9780203941638-7

[9] Uberveillance and the Social Implications of Microchip Implants, M. G. Michael and Katina Michael (eds), (IGI Global: PA, 2014).

Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, 1987

September 25th 2010

Gerringong, NSW

Caption: The con-celebration in Rome was preceded with a meeting in 1979 between the two Primates held in the Fener.

There are moments in our lives which leave us with such a strong impression that the picture will fade little with the passing of time. One of these instances I experienced in Rome, in December of 1987. I was twenty-seven years old, recently ordained into the holy diaconate of the Eastern Orthodox Church, yet here I was about to witness one of the most significant events in the relations between the two great churches since the “official” schism of 1054.[1] I had been travelling through Switzerland and was in Zermatt where I had decided to stop for a few days, but was able to make some fast changes to my travel itinerary hop on an express train and make it to the Eternal City. It would be just in time for the highly controversial con-celebration in Saint Peter’s Basilica between Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Demetrios I of Constantinople. Some days earlier the two religious leaders issued a joint-declaration from the Vatican stressing “the fraternal spirit between the churches.”[2] This meeting would also coincide with the anniversary of 1200 years from the convening of the 7th Ecumenical Council in Nicaea in 787.[3] In a solemn ceremony, in a place of worship where soaring architecture and astonishing art alone could strike you speechless, the Primates of West and East together recited in Greek the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as originally put down in 381 AD:[4] without the filioque [“and from the Son”].[5] From that hour ecumenism careered into a new dimension and we would in the following decades become witness to the extreme articulations of both ‘liberals’ and ‘die-hard’ fundamentalists.[6] I believe, the implications of that great moment were not fully seized or realized. Even so, the foundation stone, directly implied in Ephesians 4:1-16 [‘the unity of the church’], has been forever put in place. 

Outside in Saint Peter’s Square among the throng of thousands happy enough to witness the momentous event on the giant monitors, another much smaller act was about to unfold. Entry into the Basilica on that day was by a special ticket, though it was plain enough to see that it was still hugely overcrowded. I was thinking how memorable it would be to witness it all from the inside. To be part of this historic occasion as it actually happened. It was then that I was approached by a nun who appeared to have been the superior of a small group of religious in her company. I could not rightly guess her age on account of her veil, but her face though visibly pale, was strikingly handsome. She smiled with the expected reserve of an experienced religious and promptly introduced herself, “Good morning Father, I am Sister Benedicta.” All the while during this short exchange Sister ‘Benedicta’ kept her hands clasped in front of her blue habit. A rosary with a pearl crucifix was intertwined between her fingers. She asked whether I would accept the biglietto of one of her group who at the last minute could not be there. It would still prove a challenge to make my way to the entrance, let alone get in. I thanked her and took the ticket.

I would have liked to talk to this softly-spoken woman, whose accent betrayed a French background, to have asked something of her life, but before I could rightly thank her, she and her little troop disappeared into the growing mass of people. Many years later in Bucharest when I had similarly lost the “old man” in the maddening rush of afternoon traffic, I would once more remember losing her, too, in the crowd. I reflect as I write this entry many years later, if I really did ‘lose’ them or if [for some reason] it was an unconscious act which I willed to happen: “[a]nd this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.” These disarming words from the Serbian poet Dejan Stojanovic challenge me more regularly as time flashes past and I do further battle with the twin concepts of ‘community’ and ‘solitude’.

I pushed and shoved through this great sea of animated bodies to get to my destination. At last after showing my ticket to the officials I was treated with new found respect and escorted to the front of Saint Peter’s Basilica. My seat was only a few rows behind the impressive congregation of VIPs. The sister’s friend must have been somebody quite important to have been allotted a seat this close to the historic proceedings. Whose place did I take? And why in that mass of people did she choose me? There in the company of cardinals and bishops, and of politicians and celebrities, I became increasingly agitated. At the end of these solemn proceedings together with the other clergy in those front rows, this little boy with the peculiar name from Newtown would meet the Pope. As for the genial Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox [“the first amongst equals”] I would meet again in the Fener during a Christmas liturgy at the Church of Saint George in Istanbul. I felt my chest puff up and my head begin to spin. Clichés are not altogether redundant. One moment I wanted it all and knew that I could make it happen. For such are the deadly games which the ego, or better still ‘the id’ can play on us, to fuel us with a heightened sense of self-importance. Much of the ‘hard work’ I had reasoned was already done. All the big boxes [education and network] were ticked. A few minutes later I was deeply sickened by what I was feeling and realized that such high-places were not meant for me. I was possessed with too much ‘bad’ pride which I could feel running through me like the foreboding sense of mortality, and I would need to fight against it for the remainder of my life. From that time onwards whenever such opportunities might again present themselves to me, I would have to make sure to ‘uproot’ myself. And flee into the darkness in search of the ‘compensation’. This I would do more than once. I do not wish to pretend it was easy.

It never was. This need to recognize my voice.

[1] https://www.patriarchate.org/meetings-between-ecumenical-patriarchs-and-popes-of-rome-through-history

[2] https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/joint-declaration-8155

[3] https://www.apostolicpilgrimage.org/meetings-of-popes-patriarchs

[4] https://orthodoxwiki.org/Nicene-Constantinopolitan_Creed

[5] http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/ecumenical-and-interreligious/ecumenical/orthodox/filioque-church-dividing-issue-english.cfm 

[6] http://www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org/articles/ecumenical/hallam_orthodoxy_ecumenism.html

The Little Boy and the Huge Dragon: The Truth Behind Uberveillance

Mollymook, NSW

NB Introductory pages from “The Little Boy and the Huge Dragon: The Truth Behind Uberveillance”, (September 21st 2010, Gerringong, NSW).

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26)

“The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.” Nikos Kazantzakis

“The day when God is absent, when he is silent – that is the beginning of prayer.” Anthony Bloom

“Sometimes a man can become possessed by a vision. Perhaps it makes no sense to anyone else; perhaps it is a revelation to everyone. Yes, this man will say to himself, this is the way the world is supposed to be. This is how I am supposed to fit into it. He will know, like a man trying on shoes, that he has finally found a pair that will serve him for a very long walk indeed. So he begins, one step at a time.” Joshua Cooper Ramo 

September 21st 2010

Gerringong, NSW

I have been here before, this much I do know, ever since the dream.

But how and why have I arrived into this fearful place and will it ever be possible to escape its dark and terrifying rooms? “Tell me little boy, tell me that together we might deal the huge dragon a mortal blow.”

MG circa 1966. Credit: Michael Family Archives

Outside the early sunlight is bending through the cactuses. One can learn a lot from the improvisation of a cactus, but when pressing our flesh against its secret we must not be afraid of the stabs. Redemption is not a bloodless exercise. For those stubborn enough to hold out through to the end they would hope the price of admission into this world was worth the cost. And that the need to understand was greater than the darkness. “I dive down into the depth of the ocean of forms…” (Rabindranath Tagore).[1] These are the deep mysteries which beckon us to search for the soul and which like the private imaginations of a good monk, they will both fascinate and repel.

The one thing I must now do is to write. Write, Michael, it is your only way out of the abyss.

To keep on writing until the larger pieces to this puzzle begin to fall into some recognizable pattern or shape. How many times have I made this promise to myself? Only to see it broken when the story became too hard or when gripped by the dread it would sound too improbable, if not unbelievable, to most. Maybe, too, it is the fear of writing itself, vox audita perit, literra scripta manet: the heard word is lost, the written letter abides. Then again, this ancient maxim takes on new connotations in the world of Uberveillance.[2] The delete option will increasingly become one of those fantastic recollections of the past and the “heard word” too, it would not be lost. All will become video and uploaded to be re-run by the collectors, the controllers, and the hunters.

It has now been almost twenty years since my exile. An exile both forced and self-imposed for the crime of refusing to accept privileges and honour but also for daring to suggest that the “sheep” are not dumb. I cannot but recall those telling and now most ironic and coincidental lines from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, “I have been living like this for a long time now – about twenty years. I am forty… [a]fter all, I didn’t take bribes, so I had to have some compensation.”[3] Unlike Fyodor Mikhailovich’s “bad civil servant”, however, I am now approaching my fiftieth year and was once a young and highly idealistic clergyman.[4]

As for my own compensation? Hope. And only heaven and hell would ever know how much of it I would truly need. For certainly, I too, am not entirely blameless. Yet even our ruins carry our legacy from which we pick up the pieces to rebuild. Nothing should be wasted. “There is always another story” writes W. H. Auden, “[t]here is more than meets the eye.” We are all looking to be saved by somebody or from something and so every last piece of this big heap of fabulous rubble will find its rightful place. Like great cathedrals and national monuments rebuilt after the bombings of war.

[1] Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, (Macmillan & Co.,: London, 1938), 91.

[2] M.G. Michael and Katina Michael, Uberveillance: Microchipping People and the Assault on Privacy, Quadrant, LIII (3), 2009, 85-89.

[3] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground/ The Double (trans.) J. Coulson, (Penguin Books: London, 1972), 15.

[4] At the time of upload [December, 2019] “I am now approaching my sixtieth year”.

Debating topics like a pair of unresolved owls

Newtown, Sydney

To the right two old men debating topics like a pair of unresolved owls; to the left a woman breastfeeding providence into her newborn; a younger man with fingers on his chin spotting the menu; outside an Ivorian rapper with long braided hair improvising; pockets of young students heading off to school; a lone crested pigeon swooping across the road; a group of elderly Greeks dressed in black heading back from church; Odysseus lived in Ithaka; gods and demigods; ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’; functionalist; structuralist; formalist; tears; water; and rips; the metaphor is everywhere; fall; ball; where are you Paul; I could not sleep last night the black dog has been back; “The different faces of depression” (Psychology Today); Erik Erikson (1902-1994); Leon Festinger (1919-1989); Albert Bandura (1925); there was hurting in places I must not yet discover; this was the year of my preparation; the gall bladder gone; “lucky to be alive”, he said; “luck’s got nothing to do with it”, I tell him; surgery kheirourgia; from Ancient Greek; “hand and work”; we mourn, yet we mourn not without hope; “Tomorrow will be beautiful, For tomorrow comes out of the lake” (Emanuel Carnevali); deep gorges and waterfalls; Weeping Wall, Hawaii; Ulysses butterfly;  electric blue hue; tropical rainforest; Father Nektarios is an angelic being; celebrating the great day of the Archangels; “O ArchangeI Michael whose countenance is like lightning”; I lit candles with the secret prayer that I not yet be consumed; the light which sifts the wheat from the chaff finds a way to pass through the impenetrable night; “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn. 1:5); illumination; luminescence; set alight; I am opposite the Reno Café; yet again reincarnated from its old bones; this time to a tidy Vietnamese vegan; where are you Father; behind me, my old school on King Street, it was only yesterday; Chronos; Aion; Harvesting Scythe; “If I could save time in a bottle” (Jim Croce); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO1rMeYnOmM; I am enjoying my house muesli with roasted plums and coconut yogurt; George is happy at his new school; he has given up football; okay, it remains to be seen; general election on the horizon in the United Kingdom; protests continuing in Iraq demanding an end to government corruption; the department of homeland security plans to have biometric data on hundreds of millions of people by 2022; the two old men next to me reminiscing on the celebrations of their 21st birthdays; the one closest to me was with his bride to be, so he says; the other was with work mates and the stolen bottles of champagne; Dom Perignon 1996; Rose Gold; Methuselah; my 21st was down at the Rocks; our lives have changed; we have changed; Oh Lord! If only You gave us a second chance at this; where has the time gone; I remember Tony S. telling me to “hurry it up”; I remember him saying I looked like chiselled marble; if only he knew the prophecy he was pronouncing; “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” (Eccles. 3:1); the Wright brothers; Yuri Gagarin; Neil Armstrong; I want to go home to sleep; I didn’t take my tablets; anyhow, they get lost upstream; why does this make me think on AI and such; you get the picture now; don’t you?; “By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it” (Eliezer Yudkowsky); how many friends do you have; do they read your poetry; do they dare penetrate into the spaces behind your eyes; I remember the blind man with a cane outside Newtown railway station; my own eyes flood with tears; he is wearing a pair of mismatched socks; oculus; lumen; who loves you, brother; Fred Hollows (1929-1993); Pavlos  Sidiropoulos (1948-1990); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUFfsRe8myA; another gem from the two old friends; “imagine just looking at the world and refusing to categorize it”; “yeah, from the point of view of being up in aeroplane”; Plato (b. 429 BC); Immanuel Kant (1724-1804); Karl Marx (1818-1883); I see colours when I close my eyes; long rivers of colours; blue-violet, yellow-orange, blue-green; Chris Rea; rock and blues; The Blue Cafe; Pies; Breakfast; Lunch; Refill not Landfill; Served with Bourke Street Bakery Sourdough; time to go to my other place for a cup of green tea; Rui’s café bar on Station Street; the man with the neat white ponytail introduced me to Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935); the young boy offering his Mother bread with spittle; a woman in a black and white print asking for her espresso;  a group of four friends huddled next to the door like a scrum; Myra Hess; Martha Argerich; Joanna MacGregor; Hortus deliciarum; Herrad of Landsberg (1130-1195); “music from the garden”; I discovered things I had buried away too deeply; how much I love my wife; that my children are my witness to the mystery of creation; carbon-based structures;  life-bearing molecules; pyrene; major breakthrough in the deadly vaping epidemic; Anonymous Trump Insider’s ‘Warning’; Flood, fire and plague: Climate change blamed for disasters; the SS Ourang Medan; shipwrecks and ghost ships; dots and dashes; today I left the liturgy not long after I said my prayers; I was terrified at what He has called me to become; I never wanted it; and even now my struggle against this little apocalypse is not rescinding; then the beast [the beast which you too carry but refuse to see] came hard at me; Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936); the Generation of ’27; “As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die”; honey bee; bumblebee; carpenter bee; Katina is in her element at ASU; Eleni wants to dance, she says; Jeremy is surprising us all with his skills in mathematics; they will be here in four weeks and four days; Deo volente; Dei gratia rex; Dominus illuminatio mea; distance can have unexpected results on perspective; from medieval Latin science of optics; diffraction grating; focal length; gamma ray; “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work” (2 Thess. 2:7); Antichrist, Robert Bellarmine; The Deeds of Antichrist, Orvieto Cathedral, Italy, 1517; end on a more positive note, dear Michael; all will be well; day by day; thank you Mr Brahms; “agreement or concord of sound”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGRqIGOAPcE