Let's imagine a school devoted exclusively to the exploration of textures. Tradition says that the school is in the foothills of the Himalayas. Students learn how to recognize specifc materials, how to tell fne sandpaper from rough sandpaper, how to gauge resistance in spring mechanisms, how to read Braille, and how to tell a 3B pencil from a 4B pencil simply by touching the pencil to paper. Over the years, students become alert and sensitive, and their textural skills end up infuencing their entire lives.

In truth, this is how every life unfolds: as an endless series of encounters with textures and gradations. Your kitchen is a textural school. Peeling a carrot is diferent from peeling a potato; their textures aren't exactly alike. Placing a knife against a tomato, you sense the tomato's texture and its degree of resistance, and you make quick psychomotor decisions as to the angle of the blade on the tomato and the force you’ll apply to slice it. Dinner is a series of textural assessments (Figure 8.1).

Walk barefoot through your house, and your feet will marvel at how many diferent textures the foors ofer you: rugs thick and thin, stones rough and smooth, planks and slats, tiles, each texture with its own personality and its own physicality. There's no confusing stone and rug; there's no confusing wool and wood. Your feet are lovers of texture, and so are your hands.

Our imaginary school of textures takes on students of all ages and all levels of talent and experience, ranging from a complete beginner to a complete master.

We are told that poetry makes nothing happen (Auden 1975, 142). We are told that ‘the approved practice of high culture is marginal to the serious of political concerns of society’ (Said 1984, 2). We are told that a university degree in literary studies has no value, that it amounts to pure indulgence, to be equated somehow with a hobby or leisure pursuit.

Following through on such talk, the Australian government has recently hiked the fees for humanities degrees: for such a decadent luxury with no tangible social utility, you now pay a hefty price, in contrast to core societal commodities such as a Bachelor in Nursing, which has now become eminently affordable. Paradoxically, it transpires that because a lunatic fringe of afficionados of the book will probably overcome any obstacle to get a literary education, universities may cash in quite nicely on boutique BAs in humanities (Eltham 2020; Karp 2020; Zhou 2021).

In all of this, we are being told that the power of the imagination has no purchase on the power of the buck. Symbolism is out, simony is in.

Yet there are modes of symbolism that, unlike poetry, do make things happen. Clicking on certain icons on the computer screen transfers money from my account to your account. In the meantime, the bank is doing some very real stuff with the figures on your balance – some of which you’d rather not know about, so real is its reality.

Methodology and Approach

As previously stated, and according to the LCN network website, around 2,000 churches were established by Liberty University graduates throughout the United States and approximately 4,800 churches. Falwell's vision/ estimate was planting 5,000 new churches. This original qualitative study is a mere example or model that does not presume to indicate the full extent of the phenomenon but shines a spotlight to illustrate Falwell's strategic action and ofers a case study to understand better the ripple efect and infuence caused by the conservative political force in particular and the American political system in general. The study only examined churches established by Liberty graduates throughout the United States. In cases where an alum planted more than one church, the sampled church was the frst one he planted during his studies or postgraduation.

Liberty University alumni were tracked via two primary sources: The frst was student newspapers, alum publications, and ofcial university publications found in the Falwell archive at Liberty University. These covered mainly graduates who completed their studies in the 1970s and 1980s. The second was a LinkedIn search, which is not limited by time, hence including even recent graduates. After identifying the graduate's name and the church they planted, additional background information was reviewed, like the exact church's address, city and state, year of establishment, the number of worshippers in the frst prayer service, and as many historical details as exist on the pastor who founded the church.

Were one to be invited to participate in the design of a twenty-frst-century version of ecolonial board games, tiles would be needed in order to capture new geopolitical confgurations and incorporate visual display techniques equipped to accurately personify and convey power dynamics and transactional asymmetries. These should not be understood as innocuous changes, but rather as signifcant modifcations with analogous adverse efects. Contemporary practices share with their historical predecessors a range of raptorial actions, profteering motives, and extortionist orchestrations, as well as reckless and transgressive behaviors. As Giuliano da Empoli has convincingly shown, the “tech conquistadors” have transported us into an “era of digital colonization” and “the age of predators.”

Arguably, no world leader has, at the time of writing, more than Donald Trump, exploited and instrumentalized the nefarious and algorithmic potential of new technologies, and “the new American president has led a motley procession of unashamed autocrats, tech conquistadors, reactionaries and conspiracy theorists eager to do battle.” There has been no hesitation in rewriting history and privileging alternative narratives. Furthermore, the question of narrative is especially relevant to the rhetoric of Donald Trump and other far-right, populist or extremist politicians and thinkers, since recourse to narrative authority inserts itself into governance strategy.

A strange coincidence: the very week I teach a poem by my Fijian colleague Sudesh Mishra, ‘A Rose is a Rose’ (Mishra 2016, 8), I also read an essay of his (Mishra 2024) that articulates, I realize abruptly, precisely those things that the poem does. I have had the poem in mind for a long time for a course on the sonnet, and had read it a couple of times. Now, however, it is the combination of different articulations of the same ideas that strikes me with sudden force. In itself, it is unsurprising that the poet says much the same as the academic: but it comes as a flash of recognition nonetheless. It is as if I have experienced a Benjaminian (1999, 254) dialectical ‘configuration pregnant with tensions’ where something ‘gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad’ – a moment in which ‘what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’ (Benjamin 2002, 463). But if there is a past meeting a present here in a flash of ignition, it is in ways that Benjamin may not quite have imagined.

Sudesh's ‘A Rose is a Rose’ contradicts Shakespeare head-on, suggesting that his famous conceit is fundamentally flawed:

In the simple poem composed simply The sun's never likened to a brass gong. Conceits fail to plunge from the sky. A song Is sung for the joy of singing freely. No noun strays into rouged alleys. A gun Kills, yes, but kills neither poorly nor well. The dead are not brought alive by a spell.

We take our own coordinates and variables to any reading of a text – be it a novel, a short story, an article in a newspaper, a film or a poem. The ‘meaning’ of a work is going to be more ‘intended’ and maybe more obvious in, say, a newspaper article than in a poem (though in this age of alternative-news truths, this is increasingly doubtful). Who we are and why we are as we are (life experience, if nothing else) necessarily makes readings of texts infinite and certainly unstable.

I am stating the obvious here, but I feel I have to, as when one takes a particularly overt prejudice or viewpoint to a reading, one can twist a text to mean what one wants it to without seeing the wood for the trees. We could, for example, make a pacifist reading of Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, but we would be working against the noblesse oblige of Tennyson’s imperialism, against his valorizing of the courageous futility, along the lines that ‘war produces annihilation, but it’s certainly noble to die in such a way’. Stupid but noble. As a pacifist, I can make an argument for a slanted reading, but I am pushing against the weight of many other readings.

As a vegan and animals rights person, I might be doing something of the same with Ali Alizadeh’s poem ‘Animals’. The poem is clearly dismantling the hollow fetishizations of the notion of animals – the separation of human relationships with animals through the commercial idea of animal – as well as the usage of animals as pets to meet the human need to substitute, even ‘lightning-rod’, their feelings through a creature that is given human attributes but is no human.

Recently I was up on the high tops following the track that gradually reveals a view onto the Alb as one emerges out of the forest on the incline to the crest. There, on the shoulder of the hill, there had always been a gnarled apple tree on the side of the track – as so often in these South German landscapes where lines of ancient fruit trees mark the perimeters of the fields or the route of a path or track. I was shocked to find it had been chopped down in what seems to be an orgy of tree-felling currently under way in our forest. The boll lay on the side of the track, the branches had already been neatly pared and were stacked up a little further on. I know that this is nothing compared to what Bolsonaro is currently planning in the Brazilian rainforests, nor even what the Poles are up to in the primeval forest of Białowieża, the oldest forest in Europe, but nonetheless it is distressing to see the amount of apparently unnecessary felling going on at the moment (Klamer 2024). This policy of forest maintenance by culling (Wohlleben 2015) is merely a symptom of the notion of quality via triage that pervades German society, structuring the entirety of the education system and producing the most blatant mediocrity where it is most aggressively pursued – our very own federal state of Baden-Württemberg – and recalling, in its logic at least if not in its substance, the algorithm of mass purification of the body politic that manifested in the Holocaust (Agamben 1998, 126–53).

Juggling Balls

Get two or more soft juggling balls. They’re easy to buy on the Internet and elsewhere. Juggling balls have so many useful qualities that every musician and every music teacher should stock up on them. We won't be learning how to juggle, even though juggling does ofer many learning opportunities. Instead, we’ll use them to explore texture, shape, size, form, function, intrinsic qualities, specifcs and universals.

• 1. Every game in Object Wisdom starts with no rules. You’re given a toy without the instruction manual. The frst learning experience isn't to learn something but to agree not to know what you’re supposed to be doing or how you should be doing it. Handle the object as if it's an incomprehensible artifact from a faraway culture.

• 2. To an adult, household objects are normal, logical, ordinary. They’ve always been there. But for a baby, every object is new and perhaps incomprehensible. Sooner or later, a strange object becomes a lamp, but to begin with, it's a thing or an entity or a source of miracles, light and heat, shadows, sounds, stories.

• 3. The problem with knowing too soon is that knowledge prevents or eliminates discovery. A banal object discovered for the frst time can be very exciting—because discovery is a sudden fow of energy, a sudden perception, a sudden realization.

In the days when my mother

saw the influence of the Evil One

everywhere there was an embargo

on witches. She took to

gluing the pages of our children’s story books

together whenever wizards or witches or sundry other magicians

made an appearance. Our children’s story books were purged

of satanic traces. Their plots were oddly lacunary

proceeding in fits and starts according to a

tattered causality a bizarre magical realism

—RWP

imm Niall Lucy, 2019

In all the discourse of river flow down to river reflection-grabbing city which is the place they rise out of in making comparisons,

they, the phenomenologists— perceivers of high ground wavering in and outside subject-object relations—make claim

for multi-phasing definitions to slip in like justice, and for quality augmented reality which is the ‘freedom’ of coal and uranium

and those precious metals found after the maps guide the hand over a sustainable separation from the glossy ibis I experienced

with all senses open though none as open as some might boast. It is unusual to detect a glossy ibis there and then, to detect across

the spectrum dividing you from neighbour after neighbour—there, amongst twenty-four straw-necks and a pair of sacreds which is

not to suggest a bonding ritual, not a leap of faith, or are you foretelling a being awestruck at a patent for light, for an infectious excitement over

the actuality of an egg in communication with its contents with its layer and/or protectors, when spending a life watching eggs guarded in nests outside the windows in wild limbs

cupped in small nest failures of bearing witness to their own delay their own rush of enthusiasm, their being picked off from inside chambers

by cuckoos worlding their own way to presence, is more than living, more than feeling things through skin? And yet, reading the phenomenologist's

wild wild wonderous world in which the virtual is vulnerable to all conditions of decay, a nest mistaken as a breakfast bowl

for an unfamiliar cereal…? disconnects to such an extent that actuality of glossy ibis and thin wetlands around Toodyay Brook, those final

Meet your inner animal.

The inner animal isn't the same thing as your body. It's a sensorial and psychic being with agency, but with the tendency to sense frst, think second; and, through sensation alone, arrive at a quick discernment: safe environment, I like it; unsafe environment, I’m outta here. Silk, linen, cotton, polyester: I don't know their names, but I can tell one from the other right away. And the thing called polyester, I don't like touching it, not with my fngers, not with my belly, not with my face.

The inner animal knows certain things before you know them yourself. And the inner animal knows certain types of things that you will never know; or, at least, not that part of you that thrives on analysis and understanding, that part of you that tends to issue a judgment before seeking an experience.

The inner animal breathes. While breathing, it senses the elastic movement of its breath, the elastic movement of its ribs and lungs, the elastic infation and defation occupying its trunk and afecting its whole being. There are plenty of human beings out there who are breathing normally, walking here and there, working, shopping, watching TV. And although they’re breathing normally, they don't feel their elastic breaths going in and out of their elastic beings, and they don't feel their elastic ribs, and they don't think that their ribs deserve their attention. The inner animal is attentive and appreciative.

The inner animal wants to live, and it wants to live to the fullest; this is its urgency and its pleasure (Figure 14.1).

Fire is personal and communal in extremis. The word ‘fire’, especially when spoken in the hot months, evokes caution, care and action. As we are often told, fire has always been part of the (‘Australian’) continent – a visceral reality and adaptive force, one that defines the germination of certain seeds, and part of a replenishing and renewal cycle. It doesn't need to be proved that Aboriginal peoples have long if not always used fire as a tool for farming and habitat planning, and that there is much for all of us to learn from Indigenous fire-usage, ‘cold burning’, and sustainable burning. And the but that follows isn't linked to this knowledge, for which we should all have the greatest respect, but to the dramatic shift in climate conditions that means fire is more overwhelming, more omnipresent than at any other time of human fire-usage. This is the ‘but’…

But things are becoming more and more different, because human industrial-consumer rapacity has pushed the biosphere beyond the manageable and sustainable. And again: But the ‘hot months’ make up so much of the year now. I have been recording weather observations since I was very young, and the diminishing of birds and animals that comes with clearing habitat has gone hand in hand with increased temperatures and less rainfall. For the first time in a decade, we’ve had to have showering and washing water carted to our home at Jam Tree Gully.

The Scarcity of Materials

Access to books and writing materials was a strong indicator of social and regional inequalities in colonial Australia. Those who lived in major cities, especially Sydney, Hobart and Melbourne, could benefit from an increasingly dense reading infrastructure, which expanded from very scanty book provision in the early decades of colonisation, to a variety of libraries, bookshops and literary societies later on. Meanwhile, in country areas and even more so in the outback, such opportunities were rare and the story is primarily one of scarcity and difficulty of access. Furthermore, there were significant social fissures in rural Australia itself which expressed themselves in terms of different literary cultures. A wide gap separated the literary culture of a wealthy pastoral elite from the spasmodic reading and writing, together with the ubiquitous illiteracy, of the workforce. This chapter investigates what the autobiographies tell us about these fault lines in colonial society. It will consider briefly the place of books in the early years of colonisation, before considering the availability of books and writing first in the cities and then in the country.

In 1820, 19-year-old George Allen also missed his books, when he wrote to his brother in England drawing a stark contrast between the shortage of libraries and other essential entertainments in Australia compared to England.

Every language contains a wealth of metaphorical expressions involving the hands—as well as the wrists, the fngers, and other body parts. Here's a short sample of expressions about the hands:

As these expressions attest, hands are deeply intertwined with the symbolic dimensions of existence, which are contained in the stories we tell ourselves. The idea of washing one's hands, for instance, is related to responsibility, guilt, remorse, and many other emotions. In some tellings of the biblical story (which may or may not be underpinned by historical events), Pontius Pilate washed his hands in front of the bloodthirsty crowd, indicating that he didn't consider himself responsible for the crucifxion of Christ: the matter now was in the hands of the crowd. Ever since, many millions of people have employed the expression many hundreds of millions of times. You don't need to know the original story or to believe in its historicity; the expression lives on, independently of Pontius Pilate, the crucifxion, and the Bible. Washing your hands is a banal act that isn't banal at all.