Period

Between the pertinent facts, to paraphrase Martin Heidegger, there can only be music.

He is perhaps the only other philosopher beside Wittgenstein to truly revel in the linguistic thorns of the German language since the trenches, but unlike his shell-shocked counterpart, he only really stumbled on and over a concept of silence. The Period, as it has to exist in both cognitive and dialectic theory. That instant between two changes. What poetry thrives on. What Wittgenstein must have glimpsed manning the spotlight on the frozen river, what in Beethovian scoring would look something like.@?@?//what the?...

Well, I can envisage it because I have seen some of the scratchy pages, and we all know what Beethoven looked like tearing his lead-based hair out. The lack written all over a child's face when they're left to guess the word. Pertinence of so much happening there can only be a single measured beat to account for it. That the only depth and calibration of the great eternal OTHER, of SILENCE, is in music.

Silence is not something bloggers are good at, but then ours is a different universe, blogosphere, floating around like Icarus with aluminium wings.

There is a journalist on this scorched island writing for one of its major dailies whose father taught her everything she knows. She best float up to the blogosphere, because she has inherited her father's eye for the pertinent and all his impatience for detail.

There is a federation on this island, one of the oldest surviving, which isn't saying much perhaps, because they are tenuous things. But there has been a concerted attack on this adolescent bonding, as on many of the other tried and trusted institutions of this oh so young oh so ancient place, snatching at the hook of all our daily troubles like one of those dark eels you hook off a pier that turns your hand black and crowds your faith in doctors.

James Joyce, I apologise for all that maybe.

Her name is not important. Those who have lived in Sydney or Melbourne for any length of time will (eventually) know who I am talking about. She does not brave photos that aren't a dozen years old. She talks of mothers like some talk of diggers, as though they were all blameless and not sometimes answerable for the wrong turnings of the world. She does a hatchet job of almost every subject she preys on, but she is impetuous and almost indelible now on my fair, forever spruiking harbour city's crystalline chatter. No-one trusts her but everyone likes her in that trussed up way of port cities. Fortunately we are not the capital of this country, only its first port of call for most new constituents and its administrative centre for its most teeming most consistently bankrupt state.

She has now settled into her role as some sort of gadfly for the new "socialist" Australia. She is kidding herself. She is nothing but a whiner and an apologist depending on the day and the turn of phrase that enters her diesel-powered head. She is, in other words, a blogger, not a journalist, at least none worthy of the name even on this truth-scorched island.

I will blog now, but hopefully you will get my point and search elsewhere for something to fill the THE PERIOD, that great Beethovian scratch.

She, like those shady and not-so-shady figures in the Sydney Institute (I will parcel up all "think-tanks" with short-selling as a doomed phenomenon - call me sunny) have taken to filling up valuable real estate in Sydney's only broadsheet with half-baked commentary for the triumphal post-1998 Howard decade. Bill Clinton still had two years to run then, don't forget, albeit against Gingrich and a hostile Senate. Australia had diggers storming beaches that weren't theirs, even in 1915, usurping questions of who stormed this island's beaches when and why and for what and for how long - all old barbecue questions with suddenly two sharp ends and no prong.

It was all finger-licking fun when my nephew was a boy, except for all those usurped by the mindless chatter post- Mabo, post-Wik, about what should and could be done about the cultural, spiritual and material health of all occupants of this island.

Now she of the Calender quote is trying to teach teachers how to teach. She is spirited in her defence of nothing, just a white room with a rat lurking somewhere inside. She quotes Orwell without blinking, she one of the proudest lieutenants of one of the greatest periods of obfuscation this Federation has ever seen. Something about the erosion of a language if it is not handed down properly...

Fittingly, I suppose she means.

And she will always have a point as long as there is an alternative point of view. Which, the last time I checked, was the birth of civilisation, not its end, Socrates.