the unpredictable swerve of atoms

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

Guillaume Apollinaire

The pursuit of happiness or being in the moment or achieving our bliss. These ideas are not new, but they are touted these days by gurus and self-help book authors and advertising strategists and t.shirt designers as though the concept of happiness was a discovery of the 21st century.

Clinamen. The Latin name Lucretius gave to the unpredictable swerve of atoms which occurs at no fixed place or time. Atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough so you could say that their motion has changed. But if they didn't swerve, they would just fall, like rain and there would be no collision. And nature would not have produced anything.

Lucretius would have this indeterminacy as providing the "free will which living things throughout the world have".

Sometimes, as we fall through life, we collide with a person who alters our motion. The collision may be only brief as you move together for a moment, sharing space and time and food and wine and ideas and hopes.

But better to have swerved and collided than to have never swerved at all.

Timing. It's everything.

Convergence. Divergence.

All.

Nothing.

Golden, soul-filling, splendour.

I could have missed it. But I didn't. And I'm glad.

and of apathy

Sometimes things appear that don't make any sense and are impressive all the same. I bought half a dozen farm fresh eggs. The guy behind the counter put my eggs in a container with a nest of shredded paper. When I opened the box, this one shred fell out on the bench. And I liked it. I liked the simplicity of those three words. I wondered what the first part of the quote was. I thought about the concept of apathy. Even just saying the word aloud has a sense of deflation about it. 

Looking at definitions of apathy, there seems to be a few ways of looking at it which range to fairly bland descriptions of a lack of emotion and passion through to apathy being up there with all that is evil, with one definition describing apathy and evil as two sides to the one coin. Evil wills it. Apathy allows it. Evil hates the innocent and the defenseless most of all. Apathy doesn't care as long as it is not personally inconvenienced. Seen in this light, apathy takes on a rather dark cloak. Other views have apathy as a consequence of helplessness at the hands of a greater power or in the face of a course of events over which we have no control. I leave the last word to American novelist, John Dos Passos, one of the Lost generation writers who came of age during World War I: 

Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.

mothershucker's oyster hour

Strange Sunday evening. Dark clouds gathering. Big fat spots of rain on the windscreen. The perfect evening to be sitting on the third floor of a grand old building on Smith Street in Collingwood looking out through the large arched windows eating fresh Pacific oysters from the shell and drinking beautiful chablis. Fancy. $1 oysters...who can go wrong. Well, actually a lot could go wrong with $1 oysters but nothing did because this is The Panama Dining Room and they were perfect. 

10 people, 64 oysters, a few drinks, nice.

Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds

Tulpenmanie is how the Dutch refer to the period in the Dutch Golden Age just after the tulip was introduced to Holland. The tulip was different to any other flower known in Europe at the time with its saturated intense petal colour and everyone wanted in on it. At the height of tulip mania, some single bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.

This communal frenzy for a flower resulted in what has come to be considered the first recorded speculative, or economic bubble. Prices reached extraordinary heights and then collapsed. This rapid rise and fall is difficult for economists to explain and assessment of this period continues with controversial theories being put forward and arguments hotly debated.

* The title of this post refers to the 1841book by Scottish journalist Charles Mckay in which he outlines the folly that takes hold of the collective consciousness of a people in the face of economic, philosophical and social trends.

crystalised

what does their name mean? chromosomes? kisses? legend has it the members of the band just liked the way the double x looked on the screen.

seeing the xx live, i was nervous. i love their music. how would they be live?  

festival hall in west melbourne. a 'concert and sporting venue'. it was known as the original house of rock and roll and has apparently hosted some pretty rocked out nights. how would the xx fill this big, dirty space?

enigmatic, ghostly music. thoughtful reflections on love mostly.and heartbreak. that's what most musicians sing about, i guess, but somehow the xx make it different.

they did fill the space, and mesmerize the people and their voices were even better live than on cd.

as I gazed around the warehouse space, there were a lot of people nodding, like a collective agreement, yes, this is good.

some like it hot

The Elwood balcony harvest was not abundant. Rosemary and basil flourished in the hot weather and assiduous watering and are still hanging in there as the weather cools, although basil is looking slightly peaky. Thyme is on our side, and has made some kind of amazing rallying from death move and is looking good. Alas, life was not kind to the lettuce and the aubergine. The aubergine was afflicted with two kinds of fly: green and white and pyrethrum came too late. The flowers which held so much promise are no more. And as for the lettuce ... a couple of good salads and then something ate the rest of my crop. And by something, I don't mean an insect. I mean something with teeth. Decimated overnight. I'm thinking possum. 

But the chilli plant. That tenacious star of a chilli plant has borne many fruit and spiced up many dish with its fresh kick of heat, better than any store-bought version. At the risk of sounding like a proud parent or one of those people who refer to their pets as fur children, I am very impressed with my little chilli plant. And, alarming as it may well be to take portrait shots of a fruit, well, it really does glow with a light all its own. 

It's not only me who gives perhaps just a bit too much power to this tiny seeded claw.

“Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

Just saying.