How many know that this is the International Year of Astronomy? To me, it's among the most fascinating of the sciences. NASA reports that on 23 April 09 NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old—less than five percent of its present age. The event, named GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen. The satellite information allowed telescopes on Earth to target the burst before its afterglow faded. Astronomers in Chile and the Canary Islands independently measured the explosion's redshift of 8.2, corresponding to a distance of 13.035 billion light years. That's roughly 123,320,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1.2332*10^23) km, a distance beyond imagining.

Prayer flags

I left the store with a Kleenex and Snickers bar.
The girl behind the counter said,
"Enjoy your afternoon"; I said, "you too"
and walking home I asked myself
what I could do, if anything,
too reel that pleasure in.
Perhaps in stores across the city
people were telling one another
as we had done just now
to fill the afternoons with happiness
and as those wishes caught the wind
like prayer-flags in the Himalayas
were there enough of them
to change the days for some of us? Who knows?

—David Chandler, Quadrant, March 2008, p. 107.

Maurice Jarre, composer for film, died on 28 March 09, aged 84. I take note of this because of Jarre's astonishing list of film credits, with some of my all time favourites including The Longest Day, Lawrence of Arabia and A Passage to India.

The Economist's obituary (16 Apr 09) says this of Jarre's part in Lawrence:

The cinema, as he remembered it, was off Trafalgar Square. It was small, stuffy and dark. And there, over 40 hours in early 1962, Maurice Jarre watched the first rough cut of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. The showings started at 9am on a Monday and did not finish till the Friday. And he was mesmerised. Peter O'Toole, the blue-eyed, white-robed Lawrence, rode his camel along a beach at dawn. He crested the dunes and gazed out over a landscape of shimmering oranges and greys. Cavalcades of Arabs, keffiyehs flying, raced across the sand. It was astoundingly beautiful. And it was completely silent.

Mr Jarre's commission was to write the music for it. It was extraordinary that he had been asked. Sam Spiegel, the producer, had heard only his ten-minute score for a French film called Sundays and Cybele, written for bass, counter-bass, flute and table-harp. Now he was supposed to produce, in six weeks, two hours of music for a 100-piece orchestra. Back in his room in Half Moon Street he tried to read all he could about T.E. Lawrence, including the huge Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as well as searching for that little swatch of notes that might turn into a theme. Search, search, search, search, as Stravinsky said. "Sam Spiegel told me, you have the job of Superman!" Mr Jarre joyously recalled.

New York Times also has a fine obituary.

I greatly enjoy Donna Leon's Inspector Brunetti series of crime novels, set in contemporary Venice—and not just for the detection. Leon's Brunetti has life, family, and love. This from Doctored evidence. London: Heinemann, 2005, ch. 9.

Paola had been as good as her word, for the aromas that met him as he entered the apartment were a rich blend of seafood, garlic, and something he wasn't sure about, perhaps spinach. . . She was already seated at the table, a glass of white wine in front of her, reading.

'All right,' he said, 'I'll ask you what you're reading.'

She glanced at him over her reading glasses and said, 'A book that should be of great interest to us both, Guido: Chiara's [their daughter's] textbook on religious doctrine.' Little good could come of this, Brunetti realized instantly, but still he asked, 'Why to us?'

'Because of what it tells us about the world we live in,' she said, setting the book down and taking a sip of wine.

'For example? 'he asked, going to the refrigerator and taking out the open bottle. It was the good Ribolla Gialla they'd bought from a friend in Corno di Rosazzo.

'There's a chapter here,' she said, pointing at the page she had been reading, 'on the Seven Deadly Sins.'

Brunetti had often thought that it was convenient that there should be one for each day of the week, but he kept this thought to himself for the moment. 'And?' he asked.

'And I started thinking about the way our society has ceased to think of them as sins or, if not all of them, has managed at least to remove most of the scent of sin that was once attached to them.'

He pulled out a chair and sat opposite her, not really interested in this latest observation but willing to listen. He raised his glass in her direction and took a sip. It was as good as he remembered its being. Thank God, then, for good wine and good friends, and thank God even for a wife who could find reason for polemic in a middle school textbook of religious doctrine.

'Think of lust,' she continued.

'I often do,' he said and leered.

Ignoring him, she went on. 'When we grew up, it was, if not a sin, at least a semi-sin, or at least something that one did not discuss or present in public. Now you can't look at a film or television or a magazine without seeing it.'

'Do you think that's bad?' he asked.

'Not necessarily. Just different. Maybe a better case is gluttony.'

Ah, that was to strike a blow close to home, Brunetti thought, and pulled in his stomach a little.

'We're encouraged to it all the time. Every time we open a magazine or a newspaper.'

'Gluttony?' he asked, puzzled.

'Not gluttony for food, necessarily,' she said, 'but the taking in or consumption of more than we need. After all, what is owning more than one television or one car or one house but a form of gluttony?'

'I'd never thought of it that way,' he temporized and went back to the refrigerator for more wine.

'No, neither did I, not until I started to read this book. They define gluttony as eating too much and leave it at that, but I started thinking about what it would or could mean in larger terms.'

That, it seemed to Brunetti, was the essence of Paola, this woman he still loved to the point of distraction, that she was always thinking about things--everything, it sometimes seemed to him--in larger terms.

'Do you think you could start thinking about dinner in larger terms?' he asked.

[later]

. . . 'I'd probably starve to death without you to protect me.' Brunetti said.

[still later]

He thought of the kids, how tired they had been at dinner, while his eyes travelled down her body. He set his glass down on the table and leaned towards her. 'Could we return to our examination of the seven deadly sins?' he asked.

Big John: the extraordinary adventures of John McKinlay 1819-1872, by Kim Lockwood. (Melbourne: State Library of Victoria, 1995)

Burke and Wills, with King and Gray, were the first whites to cross the Australian continent from the southern coast to the northern coast. They didn't make it back. Who was second? Most people will say John McDougall Stuart, on the third of his epic journeys in 1862. They are wrong. A 6ft 4in Scot named John McKinlay beat him by two months. McKinlay led the South Australian Burke Relief Expedition, one of four sent out from the south, east and north to look for the missing explorers. In doing so he crossed the continent, got back safely, did not lose a man, was reduced to camel's feet soup to stay alive, and had a row with his second-in-command, who resigned in disgust, but was forced to stay with the 10-man party to the end. McKinlay also managed the first—possibly the last—transcontinental droving feat, taking with him 100 sheep as 'stores on the hoof'. Four years later he had a much closer escape. Sent to the Northern Territory to seek a better site for settlement than the existing Escape Cliffs, he set out into Arnhem Land at a disastrous time of year--the middle of the wet season. With 14 others he was marooned on a hillock for six weeks by impenetrable sheets of water, finally made it to the East Alligator River and, under attack from Aborigines built a remarkable punt from saplings and horsehide. With only a small amount of dried meat and with their fresh water turning putrid from its rubber containers, they rowed downriver to the sea. Tides and currents took them as far as eight miles out from the coast, but by non-stop rowing they made it back. After six days and nights of this hell they landed, starved and exhausted, on the beach at Escape Cliffs--six months after they had left. Big John tells McKinlay's story. It is told without frills, but with plenty of action. Apart from being a ripping yarn, it is a genuine and important contribution to the body of Australian historical literature.

INTJ - The "Strategist"

INTJs are introspective, analytical, determined persons with natural leadership ability. Being reserved, they prefer to stay in the background while leading. Strategic, knowledgable and adaptable, INTJs are talented in bringing ideas from conception to reality. They expect perfection from themselves as well as others and are comfortable with the leadership of another so long as they are competent. INTJs can also be described as decisive, open-minded, self-confident, attentive, theoretical and pragmatic.

INTJs are often happy with the following jobs which tend to match well with the Strategist/Intellectual personality: Business Administrator, Computer Programmer, Computer Specialist, Corporate Strategist, Dentist, Engineer, Judge, Lawyer/Attorney, Manager, Medical Doctor, Military Officer, Organization Founder, Photographer, Psychologist, Researcher, Scientist, Systems Analyst, Teacher/Professor

Many words flow past in the three-hour Good Friday observance, in scripture, prayer, preaching and song. Three things lodged to stay forever.

The choir of just five women (Pat, Denise, Leila, Anastasia and Gemma, accompanied by Colin) gave the very finest singing. The Reproaches by Thomás Luis de Victoria were especially beautiful.

Rev Dr Erica Mathieson's sermon spoke of the love of God evident to us in the cross. She explained that God does not will us to suffer, but rather God wills us to love, which may mean that we suffer—part of what God is doing with the world, making it new, through love. Simple, yet profound and helpful. I recalled Joan Chittister's book Welcome to the wisdom of the world, in which she draws on 'Hindu wisdom, ' Buddhist enlightenment', Jewish community' and 'Muslim submission', but 'Christian love'. How often we, his followers, fall short, yet it was love that held Christ to the cross.

Shocking and more gut-wrenching to hear than simply to read was Bruce Dawe's, "And a Good Friday Was Had by All" read for us by Dr Ian Barnes

You men there, keep those women back
and God Almighty he laid down
on the crossed timber and old Silenus
my offsider looked at me as if to say
nice work for soldiers, your mind's not your own
once you sign that dotted line Ave Caesar
and all that malarkey Imperator Rex

well this Nazarene
didn't make it any easier
really—not like the ones who kick up a fuss so you can
do your block and take it out on them
                            Silenus
held the spikes steady and I let fly
with the sledge-hammer, not looking on the downswing trying hard not to hear
over the women's wailing the bones give way
the iron shocking the dumb wood.

Orders is orders, I said after it was over
nothing personal you understand—we had a
drill-sergeant once thought he was God but he wasn't a patch on you

then we hauled on the ropes
and he rose in the hot air
like a diver just leaving the springboard, arms spread
so it seemed
over the whole damned creation
over the big men who must have had it in for him
and the curious ones who'll anything if it's free
with only the usual women caring anywhere
and a blind man in tears.

—Bruce Dawe. Sometimes gladness: collected poems, 1954-1982. Rev. edn. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1983, p.38.

A benefit to me of rehearsing and performing in the choir for Bach's St. John Passion recently was that it focussed my attention on the detail of the Passion narratives. Who, for instance, was the young man, mentioned in Mark, who fled naked from the garden at Gethsemane? There are many and various explanations, but no firm answer. I thought I might try to find an art work about him, of whatever style or period, but I can find nothing.

While searching, my attention was grabbed by this picture, "Judas's Kiss", by contemporary artist Paul Silak.



I wanted to say that I find the picture "arresting", but perhaps I shouldn't.

James and I were blessed by a service of Tenebrae at All Saints Ainslie last night, sung excellently by members of Igitur Nos. I learned that a hearse is one of these (picture). It features prominently in the service as the candles are gradually extinguished until just one remains. It's explained here and here.