Thirty Two Words for Field and Sand Talk – Irish and Indigenous wisdom
May 12, 2023 at 9:17 pm | Posted in arts and health, Australia behind, Blasket islands, Books, capitalism, Common Good, Democracy, Indigenous wisdom, Inequality - Australia, Living creatively, Manchan Magan, mental illness, Nature writing - Irish, rural Ireland, Sand Talk, sustainable living, value of the arts | 1 CommentTags: Indigenous wisdom, Irish wisdom, Julia Louis Dreyfus’ ‘Wiser than Me’, NeoLiberalism dogma versus Indigenous wisdom, our co-dependent relationship with nature, The Voice referendum, Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape by Manchán Magan, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk
Connecting with a better world
Apart from reading some fantastic books, I’ve been having fun with my new Kick-Start creative writing workshops. They’ve been zipping along with the poetic contributions of talented students, filling the BRAG room on Tuesday nights with laughter and creative verve. BRAG stands for Braidwood Regional Arts Group and you can find it here: https://www.bragart.com.au
I’ve also been filling in for someone on a local radio station plus submitting my novel MS, Off the Plan, and making collages out of my painted papers and photographs, even working towards an exhibition with some others. And still dancing the Argentine tango. Brilliant books like Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape by Manchán Magan (Gill Books, 2020) have taken up some time too.
Sounds resonate inside us. If ever you’ve heard a cow lowing after losing her calf, you’ll have felt with her the panicked despair floating out on the air. In Irish there’s a word for the sound: diadhárach – the particular loneliness of a cow bereft of her calf. Before the English suppressed the Irish language, words like this connected the speakers more deeply to the world around them. It’s great that Irelanders learn Irish in school now, reconnecting with their native tongue after centuries of English repression of it.
A deeper truth
Manchán Magan considers in his book ‘how words can be wedges that prise back the surface layer of thought and feeling, revealing a deeper truth.’ (p. 185) He observes in his intriguing book that old languages are rich in words that ‘emphasise our interrelatedness with all life and that reveal the empathy we have with each other and with our surroundings. They acknowledge our co-dependent relationship with nature, revealing almost as much about our inner processes and frailties as about the world around us.’ (p. 311)
You don’t have to know a word of Irish to be totally absorbed by this enchanting book. The author offers 45 words for stones and 4,300 words to describe character traits. He spent summers on the Blaskets with his grandmother where he learnt the many ways to express the changing qualities there of the light, winds and the sea. The language expressed a different way of being, of connecting with the landscape around them. Continue Reading Thirty Two Words for Field and Sand Talk – Irish and Indigenous wisdom…
Lost Focus – Johann Hari’s feasible solutions to our burning problems
April 13, 2022 at 4:08 am | Posted in capitalism, Democracy, depression, digital technology, dreams, Leisure, Living creatively, media negativity, mental illness, stress management, writers' health | Leave a commentTags: ADHD, Aza Raskin, extremism, Facebook, Google, Johann Hari, sleep, Stolen Focus, toxic culture
Tsunamis of information are drowning us
We’ve lost our ability to focus. Tsunamis of information are coming at us, drenching us every minute of every waking hour. We can’t keep up with it, mentally or emotionally. What we sacrifice when we try is depth. Not to mention sanity, peace of mind and our democracy.
In other words, the stakes could not be higher. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (Bloomsbury, 2021) is an important book, beautifully written, which outlines practical solutions for the problems that unregulated social media has unleashed.
While researching this book, Hari interviewed 250 relevant experts worldwide. One of them was Aza Raskin. You mightn’t have heard of him but chances are, he’s influencing your behaviour every day. His dad invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. The internet used to be divided into pages. When you got to the bottom of one, you had to decide to click a button to get to the next page – an active choice that gave you time to think: do I really want to continue reading this? Aza designed a code that took away that choice: infinite scrolling.
All social media now uses a version of this. It automatically loads more when it gets to the bottom. It will scroll infinitely.
Soon after his code took effect, Aza Raskin began noticing how his friends seemed unable to pull themselves away from their devices. He did some sums, and calculated that his invention was making people spend 50% more time than they otherwise would on sites like Twitter. For many it’s vastly more. He saw people becoming angry, hostile and lacking in empathy as their social media use rose. Had he invented something that not only drains away people’s time, but ‘that tears us, rips us, and breaks us’? (p. 116) Continue Reading Lost Focus – Johann Hari’s feasible solutions to our burning problems…
Drinking the days: biographies and oysters
January 28, 2020 at 10:36 am | Posted in Australian memoir, Christina Stead, Democracy, Dennis Glover, Kay Schubach, Living creatively, mental illness, optimism, value of the arts | Leave a commentTags: David Leser, Derry Girls, George Orwell, Greta Thunberg, Jonathan Self
‘Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.’ American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote that. I love it and would often think of it after opening the curtains first thing.
But her words took on a tragic tone in the mornings after the bushfires began. We could no longer open windows. Canberra’s air quality suddenly became literally the worst city in the world.
Actually it wasn’t as sudden as it seemed. Canberra’s air quality has been gradually worsening in the past few years, along with the rest of the country’s, thanks to our Government doing less than nothing about vehicle and other emissions responsible for raising CO2 levels.[1]
But I was aiming at an uplifting, positive post, damn it! I normally slant towards the upbeat, the whacky, the whimsical, but before veering in that direction, a serious point needs to be acknowledged. Continue Reading Drinking the days: biographies and oysters…
Thinking women, hope and regeneration
June 12, 2019 at 6:56 am | Posted in Andrea Goldsmith, Australia behind, Australian novels, Democracy, Living creatively, Movies, optimism, Toni Jordan | 2 CommentsTags: 2040: Regeneration, Damon Gameau, Invented Lives, Julienne van Loos, Kafka, optimism in depressing times, Rebecca Huntley, Sarah Macdonald al, The Fragments, The Full Catastrophe, the importance of play, The Thinking Woman, Toni Jordan
It’s been hard to find anything uplifting to say in the last few weeks. The last time I read John Milton (1608-1674) was in English (Hons) many years ago. But I just came across a quotation from Paradise Lost that seems like a sanity-saver in the world we’re enduring now.
‘The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’
I can imagine a certain homeless lad I see often, camping endlessly outside Dickson Woolworths, waiting for a Government flat to come up – or any of those poor, skinny, desperate blokes on Manus Island or Nauru who find themselves simultaneously in Hell and in Limbo – saying, ‘Yeah, that’s easy for him to say!’
And yes, Milton had his books and his house, music and writing, and his wife (a succession of three) and children.
But everyone has his own trials and Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, and of course when writing poignant poems like ‘When I consider how my light is spent’. His first two wives died, he also lost a son and a daughter, and he had a strained relationship with his remaining daughters.
Yellow horses: a story of thwarted ambitions and coming full circle
August 29, 2017 at 8:25 am | Posted in art, creativity, Franz Marc, Living creatively, Writing | 1 CommentTags: art teaching, creative setbacks
Silver needles in my knees
I’ve been working on a book about an abstract artist and having some minor setbacks. First, a previous writing job kept spilling over into the time I wanted to be researching the new, much bigger project. (And this keeps happening. They come back wanting more and I do more because they pay me.) Although shorter and simpler than a PhD, the new project is like a PhD in that if I take even one day off it, it takes about two days to get back down to the deep level of engagement with the subject again that makes the connections come easily and the writing go quickly.
Second set-back: I hurt my knee and spent many hours of many weeks doing physiotherapy Continue Reading Yellow horses: a story of thwarted ambitions and coming full circle…
Lamplight on the darkened path
May 7, 2017 at 4:04 am | Posted in capitalism, creativity, Democracy, Living creatively, media negativity, public squalour | Leave a commentTags: Elisabeth Wynhausen, Margaret Heffernan, Mel Jacobs, Rod Judkin, Sara Paretsky, Sarah Lewis
In Sickness, in Health and in Jail by Mel Jacobs
‘The world breaks everyone, and afterwards some are stronger in the broken places.’ Hemingway said that, and Mel Jacobs quotes him in the front of her poignant memoir, In Sickness, in Health and in Jail (Allen & Unwin, 2016). The author describes the shock, social stigma and logistical nightmares involved when her husband went to jail for two years after breaching the rules concerning his online hunting weapons business.
It was being uncharacteristically slack with a couple of technicalities (which were, granted, against the law, but seemed so minor in the scheme of things) that landed a decent, normally highly moral, small business guy in jail. A pity that the justice system doesn’t use such finely honed powers of legal scrutiny on anyone in finance or banking, I thought, since at the same time I was reading Elisabeth Wynhausen’s riveting The Short Goodbye (Melbourne University Press, 2011) about the global financial crisis.
Almost no one in finance or banking – no matter how illegal, unethical or immoral, no matter how many millions of lives they’ve ruined – will have to endure the appalling conditions of Australian prisons described in Jacobs’ book, and it’s exactly the same in the UK and Europe and the US. As Wynhausen states:
‘Even as unemployment around the globe soared, the financial institutions responsible sped from the wreckage they had left in their wake, to grab whatever they could get their hands on. After nine big Wall Street banks … were bailed out with US$175 billion from American taxpayers under the program President Bush signed into being, though President Obama would cop the flak for it, they handed out nearly US$33 billion in bonuses. (p. 189)
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