Midweek recharge

Leunig (& RS Thomas) on ANZUS

… or we might also recall those insightful words of RS Thomas‘: ‘We talked peace, and brought our arms up to date’.

‘Carnival of the Animals’, by Michael Leunig

1. PROLOGUE.
When human beings began to walk
Upon hind legs and learned to talk
And say, “We are no longer creatures …”
They covered up their natural features
And set about becoming clever –
Enough to ruin the earth forever.
And as sophistication grew
The world became a human zoo.
Where human types in many cages,
Sang their songs on little stages
Staring sadly through the bars
Towards the distant moon and stars.
So lend your ears and come with me
Into this weird menagerie.

2. PRESIDENTS AND PRIME MINISTERS. (LION)
Presidents and Prime Ministers are magnificent creatures;
They’re magnificent at making speeches.
Which tell us of our national glory
The stirring and redeeming story
That we are good and the others bad
That we are happy – the others sad
Then having said these wondrous things
Our leaders stand like queens and kings
So noble, truthful, just and wise.
That tears of gladness fill our eyes.
Until, upon election day
We vote and have them flushed away.

3. THE COMMON PERSON. (ROOSTER)
Now let’s imagine if we can
A fanfare for the common man:
Bright and bold and lyrical –
Perhaps that’s too satirical –
If we pause to contemplate
The common person’s current state
Considering the simple facts
Of how the modern person acts:
Running here, running there,
Agitation and despair,
Incurably Titanic –
The common man is manic.
The modern world in disarray.
It might be time to sit and pray
And let Camille Sain-Saens express
An anthem for this crazy mess:
For nothing could be truer.
Than this fanfare for the insecure.

4. THE TOURIST. (JACKASS)
The tourist runs away from home
And all the roads that lead to Rome
Are packed with speeding human ants
Wearing lightweight tourist pants
Catching buses, catching trains
Catching colds in aeroplanes
Hurtling to everywhere;
Through the streets and through the air
Faster faster, more and more.
Through another hotel door
Photograph it, see it all
See another Chinese wall
One more continental shelf.
Tourist you should see yourself.

5. THE OLD, OLD MAN. (TURTLE)
The old, old man is a weary beast;
He pulled the plough, he pulled the cart
Through the famine and the feast;
It broke his back, it broke his heart
But it did not break the magic spell
That gave him wings to drift and fly
With music that he loved so well
To sweethearts floating in the sky.

6. ME
The me slowly emerges
And when it does it’s splendid;
Delightful inner urges
All beautifully extended.
The me just simply must
Unto itself be true
And absolutely thrust
Its life into the blue.
The me is full and rounded
And ripe and sweet and free.
It’s great to be surrounded
By a lovely peaceful me.

7. STRANGERS (KANGAROO)
Unfinished.

8. THE DEPARTED. (FISH)
Don’t fret too much for the Departed.
Even though they leave you broken hearted.
Have no fear
They WILL reappear
When you’re alone and unprepared
They will just turn up. Do not be scared.
Be still. Do not turn away;
There is something wise they have come to say
To you and to you alone;
Some plain and simple thing already known
They will touch you and say,
“It’s alright, everything will be OK”
Or something just like that, short and clear.
Then casually they will turn and softly disappear
Leaving you elated and in perfect peace
The meaning of life and death will then increase
And your love for the departed one will grow.
There is so much more you will get to know
About love that is unassailable.
So long as you make yourself available.

9. JERKS (MULES)
Jerks know all the lurks
Jerks get all the perks.
Nothing really irks
Like the murkiness of jerks.
Jerks know all your quirks
Jerks do all the smirks
Nothing really works
Like the murkiness of jerks.

10. ECCENTRICS (COOKOO)
The eccentric is a mysterious creature
Peculiar behaviour is its notable feature
Lost and alone in a world of conformity
Where oddness is seen as a dreadful deformity.
Yet, of all the creatures, the true non-conformist
Is often the brightest, the boldest and warmest.

11. THE BELOVED. (BIRDS)
The beloved brings intoxication – for a while.
Then some time later the beloved brings – a smile.
And later on the beloved brings a few concerns.
And later on the beloved brings a rash that burns.
And later on the beloved brings a sleepless night.
And then the beloved brings a dreadful fright.
And so the beloved brings us to our senses.
And that is where the greatest love commences.

12. MEGALOMANIACS (PIANISTS)
Megalomaniacs want control
Because they do not trust the soul.
In every living situation
A megalomaniac seeks domination.
Megalomaniacs want their way
To make a better world they say;
To fix the breakages and cracks
Of other megalomaniacs.

13. THE CHILD (FOSSILS)
The human child at a tender age
Is often placed into a cage
Where it is trained to join the cult
Of acting like a nice adult.
The nice adult then goes all sad
And starts to act a little mad
Until it turns completely wild
And liberates its inner child.
Childhood must be had when young
Something like when spring has sprung
Let the birds and angels sing
Childhood is the time of spring.

14. THE NAKED LADY. (SWAN)
The strange naked lady is wonderfully plump–
So soft, so large and complete.
Magnificent bosom and fabulous rump
Just gliding along through the street.
Slowly and gracefully – light as a cloud
A faraway look in her eye
Humming a sweet little song to the crowd
And holding a rose to the sky
But why is she naked and where are her clothes
And what is her medical history?
She’s simply the lady that nobody knows:
A divine and miraculous mystery.

15. THE GRAND PARADE.
And so we come to the grand parade
Where all the sounds of joy are made
As we finally open every cage
And let the humans out to rage
And dance along with hands on hips;
To roll their heads and pout their lips;
Characters bright and characters shady;
The prime Minister shall dance with the Naked Lady,
The sad old man will be reconciled
With the beautiful truth of his inner child,
And sweet Palestinians with sweet Israelis
Will blow fanfares of peace on their ukuleles.
Then the humans creatures shall finally see.
That where there is love – THEY ARE FREE.

– Michael Leunig, Carnival of the Animals (Sydney: Macmillan, 2000), np.

The effect of the carbon tax on your sausage

While Aussies discuss the new carbon tax, Michael Leunig provides his own take:

On blood and guts, violence and death

I’ve been enjoying this delightful collection of short essays by the Melbourne-born poet, artist and cultural commentator Michael Leunig. Here’s a snippet from his essay ‘Blood and Guts, Violence and Death’:

“No nation can go to war without a sufficient reserve of hatred, cruelty and bloodlust politely concealed in its general population, and if our so-called Western democracies wanted their ‘war against terror’, then let them now at least see the graphic details of war’s sickening and hideous consequences.

The curse is, however, that it’s the children who are most defiled and blighted by such frightening imagery – and they had no part in it.

My years in the abattoir taught me that society denies its bloodlust and cruelty and imagines that such impulses appropriately belong to prehistoric barbarians, or ‘rough and uncouth men’. But I believe we now have the unique modern cruelty of the refined and educated Western man, the respected gentleman in the fine suit who has never much dirtied his hands or killed a living creature, never meditated upon a rotting corpse and never had his consciousness infected with the messy organic substances of violent death – yet who can sign with an elegant golden pen the document that unleashes the cowardly invasion and who can then go out to dine on claret and lamb cutlets.

The likes of these men abound in the halls of academia, the boardrooms and corridors of power, and the chicken-coop workstations of the media, where they have clamoured for war, for all sorts of ungodly and unfathomable reasons, without really knowing in their bones how it works – the business of violence and blood and guts.

They are primally inexperienced, unconnected and unwise. Their flesh has not been seared. Their  repressed death fascination and sly cruelty has not yet been transformed into reverence and understanding by initiation into things carnal and spiritual, by the actual sights and sounds of splattering blood and crunching bone, and the pitiful flailing and wailing of violent death – the very thing they would unleash upon others. Just one sordid street-fight or one helpless minute of aerial bombardment might redeem them. They lack the humbling erudition of the slaughterman, the paramedic and, no doubt, the soldier who has really been a soldier.

I dare say there’s something foul, creepy and disgraceful emerging in the character of corporate and political leadership in ‘Western civilisation’, and I sense it’s substantially the result of an insipid masculinity problem.

The insatiable need for heartless power and ruthless control is the telltale sign of an uninitiated man – the most irresponsible, incompetent and destructive force on earth.”

– Michael Leunig, The Lot: In Words (Camberwell: Penguin, 2008), 50–2.

Leunig: Good Friday

We celebrate Spring’s returning …

Dear God,

We celebrate spring’s returning and the rejuvenation of the natural world. Let us be moved by this vast and gentle insistence that goodness shall return, that warmth and life shall succeed. Help us to understand our place in this miracle. Let us see that as a bird now builds its nest, bravely, with bits and piece, so we must build human faith. It is our simple duty; it is the highest art; it is our natural and vital role within the miracle of spring; the creation of faith.

Amen

– Michael Leunig, When I Talk to You: A Cartoonist Talks to God (Riverside: Andrews McMeel, 2006), np.

… and a little Leunig for Lent

Leunig on a great lie

‘I suppose it dates back to an early childhood feeling that people weren’t really saying what they were thinking. I think a lot of children grow up thinking, “Hang on, more is going on here, but people aren’t saying it.” I wanted to know what they really thought, what they were saying to themselves that they couldn’t say out loud. People lie constantly, we all do. I think we suffer from the absence of the personal. When society lapses into the personal it gets all maudlin and inept and clumsy. Because we are not used to incorporating spontaneous, natural, truthful response’. – Michael Leunig

Leunig on Over Stimulation

‘The individual is overwhelmed by the magnitude. We have embraced technology and economic systems that are just unfathomable and massive and all-powerful. I think television is a totally destructive and corrosive medium. People are living lives though television and films and the media rather than through their own lives. They are not living creatively. They are living reactively and passively all the time. We feel we need all this stimulation, but in fact we need very little’. – Michael Leunig

Leunig on Television

‘You see a society that’s provided for by television is a society that says it doesn’t need too many parks or natural situations for children to play in because television will look after them. So I think we, we start to construct the shape of our cities and our suburbs is built around this fact that people can be taken care of, they can be plonked in a room and absorbed in this virtual reality and reality itself becomes kind of a little bit degraded. I have a sense that it is mad making somewhere. That the quality of attention we give to each other as humans is degraded and diminished eventually with the sustained cultural usage’. – Michael Leunig

A commentary on contemporary scholarship