Bull Market

“Life cannot be assigned a cash value because, simply, it is beyond value.

Yet the Golden Calf syndrome – assigning great value to metal and no value to life – persists in risk management, infecting not just theory but also practice. The record is incontestable. Again and again, market values, rather than human values, have dictated policy decisions.”

Jacques Cousteau. The Human, The Orchid and The Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World.

More News From Nowhere

Q: You believe that there are areas where epic and tragic forms intersect?

Robert Fagles: Yes. I and others like to read the Iliad as the first tragedy we have.

Q: And the Odyssey as its comedic counterpart?

RF: Comedic, but not necessarily in the funny sense, though the poem has its sneezes, puns, and fools. Rather in Dante’s sense of a commedia, a struggle against adversity to reach a state of equilibrium and harmony.

Robert Fagles. Translator of Homer and Virgil.

Today I’m going to the Kings Cross library to borrow the Robert Fagles translation of Homer’s Odyssey.  He died in March of this year and the New York Times obituary attributed the success of his translations to the vividness of his writing. “While faithful to the spirit and intent of the original, his translations were remarkable for their narrative energy and verve. His “Iliad” and “Odyssey” had a Homeric swagger, said the poet Paul Muldoon, a colleague at Princeton, who also compared Mr. Fagles’s epic vision to that of film directors like Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.”

There are references to the Odyssey running all the way through the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds single, “More News From Nowhere”, and I don’t know what to make of this. I’ve picked up enough of the highlights enough to recognise them in the song: The “friends in high places” might be the Gods who intervened to allow Odysseus to escape from the clutches of the “nubian princess” Calypso, who imprisoned Odysseus. Nick is tempted by sirens. There’s a detour into Hades. And Nick has already visited the Land of the Lotus Eaters in an earlier song on DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! He battles the Cyclops, blinds him, and escapes disguised in a sheepskin, telling the Cyclops that “nobody” has wounded him.

Timeless stories maintain their power by being retold in the language of each new generation. Nick’s Odyssey comes twelve years after the publication of the Robert Fagles translation. Fagles  “…was not an exactingly literal translator but rather one who sought to reinterpret the classics in a contemporary idiom,” said the New York Times. “He once compared his job to writing Braille for the blind, and said that he imagined in a generation or two that someone would have to come along and re-Braille it.” The Odyssey is being used today by an American psychologist to help soldiers readjust to civilian life after the psychological traumas they suffered in Iraq, but I wonder if Nick might be alluding to another aspect of the Odyssey. As a musician he spends much of his life on journeys away from his wife and sons and the refrain of “More News From Nowhere” is “don’t it make you want to get right on home.” Maybe it feels, sometimes, that Nick has been away so long that everyone gives him up for dead, but Nick’s wife and sons never give up on him and know he’ll always return. Robert Fagles described the Odyssey as  “… a poem about family values, and where families are of value, and the families don’t always get along so well. There’s a lot of irritation and abrasion, as well as deep affiliation and affection that finally wins out.” 

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Please read something for us.

ROBERT FAGLES: I’d love to. This is the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope after 20 years of warfaring and wayfaring. “He wept as he held the wife he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last. Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel when they catch sight of land. Poseidon has struck their well rigged ship on the open sea, with gale winds and crushing walls of waves, and only a few escape, swimming, struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the shores; their bodies crusted with salt, but buoyed up with joy as they planted their feet on solid ground again, spared a deadly fate. So joyous now to her, the sight of her husband vivid in her gaze, that her white arms embracing his neck would never for a moment let him go.”

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It’s beautiful. What kind of problems did you face in translating this passage? And how were you different from other translators?

ROBERT FAGLES: I can’t quote the other translators, but I’ll tell you one problem that came to mind immediately. The line “would never for a moment let him go”–in Greek that’s opo pompon–which is an awkward kind of phrase. It means “not yet completely would she let him go.” And I wanted a phrase that could remind us that it took 20 years of longing for each other, and finally in one embrace, that one moment of embrace, their remarriage is sealed, and from it comes a kind of long life and, indeed, the longest kind of life because we’re still reading about these people. The sight of her husband vivid in her gaze, that her arms embracing his neck would never for a moment let him go. That’s just one of many.

There’s a book by William Morris called News From Nowhere. I know that the cover for the More News From Nowhere single is a schematic for an electronic sign by Sue Webster and Tim Noble, but the drawing looks a little like a map of a park to me, a natural domain, the territory of Morris’s book, rather than something electronic.

News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. In the book, the narrator, WIlliam Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.

From Wikipedia

In his personal history of the communications revolution, Arthur C. Clarke noted that William Morris, who he described as “the leader of the romantic back-to-the-Middle-Ages revival” lived in a house that was once occupied by Sir Francis Ronald, the creator of a telegraphy system that pre-dated Samuel Morse’s. Morris “could hardly have felt a great deal of sympathy for an invention which was to do so much to sweep mankind into a strange and tumultuous future,” wrote Clarke.  

Love of the Common People.

All of us are born explorers. From the very beginning, as infants and young children, we are a curious species of animal. We observe, reach for, and question everything around us. Many of us carry throughout our lives a series of fundamental questions we seek to answer. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? When we consider the intricate patterns of life on earth – how everything connects with everything else – our questioning becomes all inclusive. Where did the earth, and the life forms on it come from? Where are we going? 

Dr. Robert Ballard

Thirteen years ago I mailed Nick a letter that described how I’d begun to recognise symbols from ancient Greek and Roman myths in his songs. I gave it a heading: The Love Songs of Nick Cave. The mythological symbols identified even his darkest, bloodiest songs as love songs for all of humanity, grappling with love as agape, a selfless love of others. It wasn’t yet fashionable to call them love songs. At that time The Murder Ballads album was newly released and Nick was recording the spare, crystalline outlines of the songs for The Boatman’s Call album (which he sent me on cassette).

            I was beginning to delve deeply into Buddhism at the time, and the songs on the cassette – those that appeared on The Boatman’s Call and those that emerged later, on the B-Sides and Rarities set – made reference to The Gospel of Thomas, a Christian scripture discovered in 1945 that has parallels with the Buddha’s teachings of inner divinity and a sense of personal responsibility. Elaine Pagels opens her study of The Gospel of Thomas with a quote from the video artist, Bill Viola: ‘It’s an invisible world out there, and we’re living in it.’

            I carried around Nick’s songs on my Walkman and they operated as a field guide to this invisible world, through them I could recognise the spirit alive (or not) in the people of the city. When I reached for the words to describe something inexpressible, frequently those words were from Nick’s songs. For instance, young, affluent men in trendy business suits holding fistfuls of hip techno-devices who were sitting on Melbourne’s free City Circle tram, looked straight through a disabled man struggling and lurching as he tried to swing his crutches and himself onto the tram. ‘But watch the one falling in the street,’ Nick sang in ‘As I Sat Sadly By Her Side’. ‘See him gesture to his neighbours. See him trampled beneath their feet.’ 

            And I comprehended the title of the Let Love In album when I saw a blind man with his guide dog busking on Swanston Street in Melbourne. He played a voluptuous acoustic Spanish guitar and wore two hearing aids. His singing had a distant quality, as if he were remembering the music rather than hearing it as he played. His music was magnificently sad, reminiscent of Portuguese fado ballads. At the end of the Eagles song, ‘Desperado‘, after he’d sung the lines ‘you’d better let somebody love you, before it’s too late’ he reached around and stroked the muzzle of his guide dog.  It occurred to me that to ‘let love in’ is to be humble enough, to strip away one’s defences enough, to accept love.

            I gain insights from Nick’s songs in the same way that he gathers the insights to write them, by bringing them into the life of the city. He drives around, without destination, just listening, soaking in the world around him. I first heard the new Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! while Nick was in Sydney for the Grinderman tour in October of 2007, driving around Sydney’s inner city and North Shore with him, along the harbour, on a cool, clear Monday morning. The sounds of the city are in the dazzling beauty of the musical arrangements of the album: temple bells clanking like heavy machinery and a sensual groove, sunshine reflected from the surfaces of buildings and water turned into sound.

            Lazarus digs the dark, funky underworld of New York City in the 1970’s. Maybe he’s buying branded ‘blue magic’ heroin supplied by the drug lord from Ridley Scott’s new movie American Gangster, who has it shipped from Vietnam in military coffins with the bodies of soldiers returning home. Lazarus experiences the spiritual sugar-rush of San Francisco in the aftermath of the summer of love. Joan Didion chronicled this time but while readers saw the era’s treacly reaching for peace and love, baby, she was writing about the absence of a core myth to guide people. She saw the coming of an apocalypse that WB Yeats had alluded to in his poem ‘The Second Coming’ in 1919. ’Anarchy has been ‘loosed upon the world’ and ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Nick’s itinerary for Lazarus includes Los Angeles, probably at the time that Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys crossed paths with Charles Manson. Lazarus may have been in Los Angeles when a musician from a band making music that sounded like sunshine itself crossed paths with a murderous figure with a messiah complex. This allusion is mystifying: are you referring to the Bad Seeds? Please clarify! Lazarus may be brought back from the dead but he isn’t reborn. He falls on hard times, becomes homeless, goes mad and becomes violent.