Ce qui est simple est toujour faux,
ce qui est compliqué est inutile.
What is simple is always false,
what is complicated is useless. (Paul Valéry) (I've also seen this quoted so:)
Tout ce qui est simple est faux,
mais tout ce qui ne l'est pas est inutilisable.
Everything simple is false,
but everything that isn't is unusable.

Valentine's Day today, and we went to a concert of the Australian Chamber Orchestra led by the brilliant and beautiful Richard Tognetti (pic.). They played Haydn's Symphony no. 49 in F minor 'La passione', Tchaikowsky's Variations on a Rocco Theme, Symphony in F (W.183/3) by CPE Bach, and Schubert's Symphony no. 5 in B flat - great music, played superbly.Life has become so crammed, that I'd forgotten the joys and solaces of fine music. This concert reminded me to take more time out for music this year and to get some really good CDs.A small aside in the concert's progam caught my eye. Speaking of Joseph Haydn's creative freedom, Alexandra Cameron commented that, "a fundamental element of creativity is novelty but with value in a given context." That is what I pray for in my own researches.

Last night James and I gathered with friends for a 'reunion' of our local church's Alpha team. We were so encouraged as we chatted about the course we ran last year.The Alpha course has become a way for people in all kinds of situations to think about Jesus and Christianity in a friendly, non-confronting way. All Saints' Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills CA have enjoyed Alpha for the gay community. They have written about it in the The Witness.

... in the words of Judith Wright, whom I believe to be Australia's greatest poet.

Request to a year

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great-great-grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,

who, having had eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland,

and from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice-floe,
drift down the current towards a waterfall
that struck rock-bottom eighty feet below,

while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
and with the artist's isolating eye
my great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.

Year, if you have no Mother's Day present planned,
reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.

Another poem by Judith Wright, that is real in my own experience.

Reason and unreason

When I began to test my heart,
its laws and fantasies, against the world,
the pain of impact made me sad.
Where heart was curved the world ran straight,
where it lay warm the world came cold.
It seemed my heart, or else the world, was mad.

Could I reject arithmetics,
their plain unanswerable arguings,
or find a cranny outside categories,
where two and two made soldiers, love or six?
My heart observed the silence round its songs,
the indifference that met its stories;

believed itself a changeling crazed,
and bowed its head to every claim of reason;
but then stood up and realized
when work is over love begins its season;
each day is contraried by night
and Caesar's coin is paid for Venus' rite;

and knew its fantasies, since time began,
outdone by earth's wild dreams, Plant, Beast and Man.

Judith Wright, 1962