Tracing the evolution of our wildly woke species

Coincidentally, a poetry group with which I am affiliated has just had an appreciative reading of some of the poetry of Nobel Laureate Wislawa Symborska, including her witty poem Consolation.

In Consolation she notes Darwin was a famous reader of novels. She speculates that given that his scientific work on evolution was harrowing stuff to do with "dying species, the triumphs of the strong over the weak, the endless struggles to survive ... he'd earned the right to happy endings, at least in fiction".

And so Symborska's poem has the great man reading heart-warmingly escapist fiction.

In these stories rich with silver linings, he's able to escape into delightful tales of "the lovers reunited, the families reconciled ... good names restored, old maids married off to worthy parsons, troublemakers banished to other hemispheres ... orphans sheltered, widows comforted, pride humbled, wounds healed over, prodigal sons summoned home ... and the dog Fido, gone astray in the first chapter, turning up barking gladly in the last".

Symborska's beautiful idea about Darwin's light-reading needs is a reminder of how we all need more poetry in our lives.

Alas, though, this column's calls for Canberra to have a City Poet (every self-respecting city in Britain and in the United States has one) continue to fall on deaf, philistinic, under-evolved ears.

And now this very week there is news illustrative of the philistinism that prevails in the federal capital city's high places. Last Sunday's Canberra Times reported the woebegone artistic director of Canberra's National Opera marvelling, ruefully, that the ACT government has chosen to give National Opera not a cent, not a brass razoo, of funding.

One imagines that the ACT government, as well as being philistinically opera-deaf, is afraid that to give money for opera (which only has appeal for a few elderly aesthetes) will knot the knickers and alienate the votes of the Letters-to-the-Editor miserabilists.

Those miserabilists would seethe that the money should be spent not on the useless beauty of the arts (of which I agree opera is the most uselessly beautiful of all) but on the useful utility of filling in potholes and of mowing unsightly long grass.

As it happens, this columnist, an elderly aesthete, loves opera and thinks it a wondrous achievement of our species.

I believe that for a city of Canberra's character and national heft not to have a top-class opera company is (like not having a City Poet) unbecoming and uncitylike.

But I know that to try to talk of these soul-nurturing kinds of things to a city's philistines is as much a waste of time as asking Fido (the gladsomely returned dog of Wislawa Symborska's poem) to give a detailed account of where he has been all this time.

I see my inner-curmudgeon (a brute normally safely locked away) at large in some of what I am writing here. And I know it is because I have just been to see the Sydney Theatre Company's far-too-woke-for-my-tastes production of Shakespeare's play The Tempest.

In this tampered-with Tempest, Caliban - created by Shakespeare as a kind of semi-human monster with loathsome designs on the pubescent teenage maiden Miranda (he has tried to rape her) - is instead a noble, chaste, and polemically eloquent Australian First Nations man.

This production's Caliban is too decent a chap to have ever even leered at Miranda (Shakespeare's mentions of Caliban's brute lust for her have been deleted) and has been given (not by Shakespeare but by the production's wide awoke producers) deeply meaningful things to say about his wrongful dispossession by the island's white coloniser, the magician Prospero.

Oh dear.

One tries not to be a curmudgeon but when modern mediocrities seek to "improve" Shakespeare for their own woke ends, the cage of one's inner curmudgeon is given a seismic rattling that wakes that monster up.

Any day now I go back to glittering Sydney for Handel's Messiah in the Opera House and with wokeness everywhere now, I suppose one must brace oneself for a woke Messiah.

Perhaps it will be a woke, agnostic, SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious) Messiah from which, so as to be inclusive and so as not to give offence to sensitive, snowflake non-Christians, all unnecessarily provocative and Christian-elitist notions and words (words like "Christ" and "God") have been cancelled.

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