http://www.themonthly.com.au/anthropology-and-passion-political-ghassan-hage-2230

I love suburbia and suburbia loves me...

Nomadic or territorial? The millenium-old debate between these two ways of inhabiting the world happens internally also. The debate in my life seems to've been settled on the sedentary, at least for now.

And here's a phew photos of my new house to prove it!

Nice original wall paper:

Thanks for the Versailles Hall of Mirrors suggestion, Kirsten, it's a winner - just you wait and see!!

The renos are underway:

Nice original lino:

And nice original light fittings! Thanks, Vera, whoever you were, you rocked!

Doo doo doo, looking out my front door:

The labyrinth is a “place with more dead ends, more flaws and fault-lines than the human heart”.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/sandh/2008/jan-jun08/minotaur1504.htm

The Poison Tree

by William Blake

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree

Only one person dies...

"... the Mishnah declares that, for the Justice of God, he who kills a single man destroys the world; if there is no plurality, he who annihilated all men would be no more guilty than the primitive and solitary Cain, which is orthodox, no more universal in his destruction, which can be magic. The tumultuous general catastrophes – fires, wars, epidemics – are but a single sorrow, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors. That is Bernard Shaw’s judgment when he states (Guide to Socialism, 86) that what one person can suffer is the maximum that can be suffered on earth. If one person dies of inanition, he has suffered all the inanition that has been or will be. If ten thousand persons die with him, he will not be ten thousand times hungrier nor will he suffer ten thousand times longer. There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human suffering; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions. 1937-1952. p178, “the Modesty of History.”

the full text

What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men...

Summer Swallows

It's been a long day, a busy day, moving sheep and checking troughs, inspecting fences. We drenched two mobs of big, headstrong wethers. Hard work on a hot day. At the end the dusk comes very slowly, the heat sitting in the hollow, the sky turning orange like the underbelly of the swallows.
Swallows nest on the metal girders of the machinery shed. Swarms of them swoop in and out through the open front side of the shed catching insects abundent in the gloaming; their darts are a pure, sharply precise cutting of the air. My brother winds down after the long day shooting them with the air rifle. He is quite an accurate shot. The roof and tops of the walls of the shed are speckled with dozens of feathery, bloody slpodges. He knocks down their nests, too, until dad gets annoyed with the mess of the nests falling on the vehicles parked underneath.