july in the year of the me(n)tal rabbit

Recipe for Irish Cream

i bottle of cheapest scotch

1 x 600 thickened cream

2 x 400g condensed mulk

i tablespoon of chocolate topping

i teaspoon of vanilla

4 eggs room temp

Whip eggs & vanilla, add cream & choc, cond. milk and scotch slowly =

2 litres

Glass bottles

23/7/11

I want to go where my heart is warm

but neither spaceship nor feet can take me,

not a fleet of sailing ships,

yet a glimpse of such might be enough

like picture of Keats;

for no apparent reason

it rises on a breeze

where no wind can blow

but tides of blood ebb and flow

beat a shore with waves of passion

on its circular passage in and out of the heart

within the climate within the veins and arteries

of living and giving it

a moment of attention.

How can I embark on this journey?

28/7/11

In this rocky desert I am surrounded by bums,

heads buried up to the shoulders in the sands of detail,

the shifting sands of daily life,

each grain examined for evidence of strife --

sometimes I stroll among them &

wonder if these boulders are human beings

or rocks in socks (frocks, jocks ...)

Myself I sit in a mess of things around me spreading a chaos of thinking outwards towards the lizards' nests and let the natural burroowers make holes in the ground and watch the Foxy bolt the foxes from their wicked privacy and perhaps chance a glance of pure passion in the pearl of a vixen's eye as she protects her pups from the predators in their hides

I dunno. I dinnae ken...

on the way somewhere, Oxley Highway

You must be, I will say to Sarah, or Carmel, or Sally, without ambition,

yet somehow completely sure of yourself, if you want happiness over success,

for the latter is never ever itself: it is in the eye of the beholder,

totally...

as if you were a dancer without the practice mirrors,

without the lovely barrs

of doubt & hunger, holding your spine straight

and your entire weight on one toe.

You give your guts but you cannot be certain

there will be claps, curtain calls or rousing applause,

success!

Make your cause a happiness you can give away

as you keep it like the fabled cake,

or magic pudding.

The trouble with "know-alls", I will say to Bec, Brooke or Billy,

[know-it-alls for my US readers]

is it is impossible,

unconscionable.

Best work out what you don't know

and keep doing that for the rest of your life,

Then choose either to inform yourself or not.

Some knowledge is opinion

some knowledge is faith

some knowledge is subjective

Thus you can choose to express it out loud or not.

Out there, somewhere, is the scientific method of reaching unassailable conclusions,

facts,

then they argue about them. Go figure.

Now tell me the difference between the god particle and god

for most people.

screens

I lived in the time of cinema, I will say.

Wordsworth didn't.

It changed our eyes:

how could i imagine the dawn view from Westminster Bridge

without having seen in a fair few movies

tall ships crowding the Thames, the atmospherics

of sails and slaves, trading beneath the mean light

of whale oil lanterns, pre-Pasteur dirt et cetera,

characters presented in large for us to care about,

actors reacting to the wrenching rigging?

How?

Consider the size of screens.

A little history knowledge has informed my view of movies:

St Paul's a mere hundred years old glistening

in young Wordsworth's dawn along with the other architecture 

of the reconstructed city following

The Great Fire of London.

A little history

has sharpened my critical enjoyment of film,

but what i'm trying to get at is

i really cannot see the non-present world without a 35mm camera frame.

The accident of birth in a certain age.

Gen X with the television eyes,

gen Y with their little screens

and buttons and interactive graphics:

what do I know about how they will see the world

in their imaginations.

Since we have had magic windows looking out on definite unreality,

how do we see looking in? How do you, my little Joey boy,

understand my childhood of the Saturday matinee,

the joy of Jaffas bouncing down the thin-rugged wooden stairs in the dark

of the old Matthew Flinders theatre in their clinking orange glory, the thrill of interval

coming between the cliff-hanging serial and the one movie of the week?

It is part of the DNA of my adulthood, the cinematic stories priming us for the brilliant burst of Moral, Philosophical dilemmas, amazing European, post-Nazi war and American guilt over its Vietnam engagement , which we, Generation Open Mouth, drew in like breaths of fine fresh air, the politics of discussion, fed by the visual appreciation of the world around us,

 which my mother didn't have as she roamed the hills reading the Romantic poets.

How do you see

the wind-dance of leaves in the breeze?

casual thoughts

now is the end of civilisation

or is it the end of its enemy, the earth/ or

have folks always though this way?

somehow it feels as if it's all falling apart

as if dread has entered like cracks in the glaciers

through cracks in complacency

shifting sands are revealing heads murky with the dirt of faiths,

ugly and angry with conservatism as against conservation;

faces askew with ignorance and defiance as the seas rise

and the dunes expand exposing rocks of dry ground

multiplying like skulls in the killing fields

please let me be beautiful,

they cry, as they buy and buy

and the rubbish of their purchasing creeps closer and closer &

floats on wider and wider portions of ocean

swamping their mean needs with the putrid reality of excrement

eat more, eat less:

only the rich can afford to eat less and burn off excess

on shiny machines with magnificent self-obsession

heads in the sand, you could say