Life Is Magnificent

*

Feverish and indistinct, yes, but there had been gaps, whole days even, when life had been magnificent. He stood on one of the balconies of the great house, listening to the street life outside the walls, the music pounding while he padded the empty corridors. He could see the golden stream, the golden way, the road not just less traveled but so much grander, beckoning from an adjacent path. The boy is mopping the many marbled floors. Long ago, in a distant disconnect, he had dreamed and written of hallucinatory marble floors high above the sky, and in these strange realms he had sought to make his own there were few personalities, much broken glass, much that was ethereal. Back in the real world bodies snored in his lounge room. There was only one way to protect.

He had been around there, in those last weeks before leaving Sydney, searching, paying homage to the house where John Bygate had lived, where his life had changed, possibilities had opened up. They remembered only the good times. Perhaps it was only euphoric recall. Again. Imprinting the city landscapes on a deeper retina. But that was the way of it. He thought there was no way back, that time, unfortunately, was a linear construct, but as they moved and ducked and shadowed through those ordinary streets, overridden now by decades of a property boom, with millionaires ensconced in the homes where ordinary people had once lived, there they were, the ghosts of those he had loved so much.

There was Lynne pushing her pram, every witticism that came out of her mouth a W.C. Fields style wisecrack, there was John Bygate vibrating on the stairs, the lines of the universe crossing his handsome face, there were others as they came and went. It was all too true, and it was as nothing. So few had survived. The passing of Colin Griffith and of Ian Farr in recent years had put a final full stop on that ancient gang. Oh how much those streets had seemed their own. The rooster crowing in the morning. The cats sneaking along rooftops. Now he stood looking out across another city, its strange rhythms a throwback in time to his happiest days. Mine were the 90s, David declared. Perhaps the eighties. As you get older responsibilities accrue.

Everything changes. Children come along. James, he said, I read you, I see you, I see deep into you. And then another moment was passed. He had traveled along the great divide, from the seediness at the heart of the Cross, where he had thrived and been and haunted, and it too rotated every few years through the bottom of his heart, as if any of this made sense, as if any of these people were still alive. He had become the final sentinel, harbouring things he could only poorly describe. If they had meant so much, why not conjure them up? Living, breathing? Charismatic, doomed.

Because shadows are shadows and the past is the past, and every little thing is as nothing when compared with the bigger, grander world that the sun now swept across every day. When communications had opened up everything and there was no excuse for ignorance. When rich men lived in Dubai and the world was their glistening oyster. When private planes roamed the planet at will. When the shadows of grand houses swept down across manicured lawns, and the camera eye was everywhere. It wasn't fair to be haunted. It wasn't fair to be changed. It wasn't fair to have outlived everybody in his youth. But in this strange city, in a place he had never even contemplated being, just as he had looked out across Marrakesh from that dusty rooftop more than 40 years ago, just as he had gazed out the second floor window of that room in the community centre all that time later, and seen the same dreaming spires, the same set apart rooms, the same web of streets, the heart of the matter. A landscape undone, overprinted, reread.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8544608.stm

Thousands of Chilean troops are heading to the country's devastated earthquake zone as reports emerge of desperate survivors turning to looting and arson.

President Michelle Bachelet said a total of 7,000 troops would soon be in place in areas around Concepcion.

The city, Chile's second-largest, was the closest to the epicentre of the 8.8-magnitude earthquake.

At least 723 people have been confirmed dead, with 19 more missing, officials say, with the toll expected to rise.

Ms Bachelet said reinforcements would join the troops already in the provinces of Bio Bio and Maule, bringing the total to some 7,000.

Concepcion will see another night under a dusk-to-dawn curfew, with reports emerging from the city of residents clashing with police as they lay siege to shops and supermarkets in the search for food.

The army was called in to help the police force deal with looters, some of whom filled shopping trolleys with groceries while others made off with plasma TVs and other electrical appliances.

Some 160 people were arrested for looting and breaking the curfew, police said on Monday.

Clashes with looters saw one 22-year-old man shot and killed.

And by Monday evening tensions had flared once more, with troops deployed to the streets after a blaze began in a looted supermarket.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/article/the-abbott-poll-jump-is-deceiving-pd20100302-35qqw?opendocument&src=blb&

Mark Westfield

The plunge in Kevin Rudd and Labor's opinion poll figures, and the corresponding recovery of the Tony Abbott-led coalition has caught most pundits (including this writer) by surprise.

It has been the speed of the Labor fall from grace that has been most surprising – triggered by the insulation batts fiasco, but due also to a number of slow-burn policy failures – rather than a closing of the poll gap itself, which was widely expected on both sides of politics as we move towards an election.

Tony Abbott finds himself in a fortunate position, courtesy of Rudd’s many failings. But then the opposition knew it was only a matter of time before voters wised up to Rudd, though the wait has been frustratingly long.

Malcolm Turnbull fought so hard for his leadership because he also knew that this swing away from the government would happen. Rudd suddenly looks like a rabbit caught in the spotlight, though he is transforming himself from being a leader overconfident to the point of hubris, to the more palatable position of underdog.

However, the reality is more complex than this. What appears to be a potentially election-losing shift in the polls for Labor could easily be mishandled by Abbott and his colleagues. They will need to continue fighting hard to keep Labor on the back foot and any complacency or premature arrogance, will be punished heavily come election time.

I still believe Labor can and will win the next election, but the remarkable string of policy failures and blunders and unmet promises by Rudd Labor are taking their toll, and the contest is shaping to be far closer than I – or most observers – would have believed at the turn of the new year.

From consultation with former colleagues, I get the sense that Labor will still increase its majority, but not by the 10 seats I believed at the end of last year – more like a net two or three.

If Labor’s margin increases only narrowly, the coalition numbers men (they are overwhelmingly men, and to the right in the coalition’s spectrum) will see this as a moral victory justifying their decision to risk all by dumping Turnbull in favour of Abbott, and a victory of sorts for the opposition given the dire predictions of only a month or two ago.

The recent boundary redistribution has rendered five coalition seats notionally Labor, so a net loss of anything less than this number will be regarded as a net gain and a reasonable outcome.