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[misswanderings]

here were plenty of reasons why he should not go - public reasons why he should not quit his post at this crisis, leaving Mr. Brooke in the lurch when he needed "coaching" for the election, and when there was so much canvassing, direct and indirect, to be carried on. Will could not like to leave his own chessmen in the heat of a game; and any candidate on the right side, even if his brain and marrow had been as soft as was consistent with a gentlemanly bearing, might help to turn a majority. To coach Mr. Brooke and keep him steadily to the idea that he must pledge himself to vote for the actual Reform Bill, instead of insisting on his independence and power of pulling up in time, was not an easy task. Mr. Farebrother's prophecy of a fourth candidate "in the bag" had not yet been fulfilled, neither the Parliamentary Candidate Society nor any other power on the watch to secure a reforming majority seeing a worthy nodus for interference while there was a second reforming candidate like Mr. Brooke, who might be returned at his own expense; and the fight lay entirely between Pinkerton the old Tory member, Bagster the new Whig member returned at the last election, and Brooke the future independent member, who was to fetter himself for this occasion only. Mr. Hawley and his party would bend all their forces to the return of Pinkerton, and Mr. Brooke's success must depend either on plumpers which would leave Bagster in the rear, or on the new minting of Tory votes into reforming votes. The latter means, of course, would be preferable.

“Mr Brooke, necessarily, had his agents, who understood the nature of the Middlemarch voter and the means of enlisting his ignorance on the side of the bill  - which were remarkably similar as the means of enlisting it on the side against the bill. ...There were plenty of dirty handed men in the world to do dirty business.”

Chpt 51, Middlemarch

On a day that was all about the number 43, it was hard to think about 51. Malcolm Turnbull, after one unsuccessful spill attempt by Peter Dutton, declared that until he had the names and signatures of the 43 betrayers, he would not call a party meeting. He wasn’t going to allow a second swoop at him without those who were his Brutus’ being publicly outed. So, in a dramatic

[misswanderings]

50

“When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheeks sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better - her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties. She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates....that her daughters - Prue, Nancy, Rose - could sport with infidel ideas  which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps a wilder life; not always taking care of one man or another......”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

[misswanderings]

49

After a powwow, the forty nine started. A time of dancing, music and drinking. There are various stories as to the origin of why it is called a 49. According to an Elder of the Commanche tribe it was a war journey ceremony, they would sing these songs before and after war.  The war leader would hold a hide and start to beat the hide and sing standing up and also they would dance around in circles as they sang through the village.  These were almost memorial songs as it might be the last time you would hear that person sing.

[misswanderings]

48 Cadmium is a chemical element with symbol Cd and atomic number 48. This soft, bluish-white metal is chemically similar to the two other stable metals, zinc and mercury. 

[misswanderings]

47

The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn are 47 degrees apart. I can’t help but think of Henry Miller when I read these lines of latitude, and his books that I read in my early twenties, hungry for anything to do with sex, Paris and the literary life. I jumped from him to Anais Nin ( a much better writer) and then the film Henry and June, and the whole love affair and dream of a life in Paris started. I love this line by Miller before he undertook writing The Tropic of Cancer – “I start tomorrow on the Paris book. First person, uncensored, formless – fuck everything!”

That has to be my motto for life. The book was apparently originally titled Crazy Cock, and, from memory is a tale of one man’s sexual and drug exploits, a genre that has generally bored me. It inspired memoirs such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, On the Road and many other indulgent boring crazy cock tales. I was reminded of the night I met Michael Hutchence in Spago’s, a Sydney nightclub off Oxford Street in the late eighties. My friend and I had dressed up and shown our fake ID and made up some story to our parents and there he was dressed in a priest’s outfit, off his head on drugs and surrounded by a group of young soapie starlets and he sidles up to me and gives me my first acid trip.

I was 17, still in school and couldn’t reconcile a little piece of cardboard doing anything to me, I took the acid and spent the most bizarre twenty four hours of my life to date having a series of adventures that were a little like reading Tropic of Cancer – plotless wandering, dangerous and erotic. I ended up the next day at the State Library of NSW, without having slept, not able to stop a strange tourrette style laugh, with my Blake poems to study for the HSC exams in a few weeks. My friend and I seemed to go through Year 11 and 12 sneaking out to clubs, studying in bars, drinking cheap champagne and flirting with boys. This is when you had to go into the world to flirt, not do it via a screen. I remember feeling a sense of great anticipation for the rock star’s first words as he approached me, at 17 I was pretty arrogant no doubt, armed with ambition and studying acting at night at the Ensemble Theatre. Alive on poetry thanks to a brilliant English teacher at my wonderful Santa Sabina College. I waited for his opening line and was totally let down, this was it –

“Hi, I’m Michael, I’m so out of it man”.

Words from a rock god.

[misswanderings]

46

I was torn, my mind was full of frantumaglia, between the 46 peaks of the Adirondack and the number of Valentino Rossi’s motorcycle. The mountains won, as Georgia O’Keeffe spent time there at Lake George,as there is a club called the 46ers that you can join once you hike all the peaks. The choice is tinged with Rossi though, with Italy, with the searing prose of Elena Ferrante that I am reading, by her concept of frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments inside her that were tearing her apart, a term her mother had used to describe a state that made her dizzy.

[misswanderings]

45 years. 2 kids. 12 men. 3 marriage proposals. 14 career paths. 21 homes. 2 lost babies. I breakdown. 4 broken bones. 12 stitches. 1 sister. I sister I never met. 2 broken hearts. 2 brothers. 1 niece. 2 nephews. 1 regret. 5 cars. 800,000 km 14 countries. 3 best friends. Countless: kisses, novels, cigarettes, dreams, films and crushes.

[misswanderings]

44

Dziady, loosely translated as ‘Forefathers’, is a Polish poem written by Adam Mickiewicz, considered one of the great works of Romantacism.

The title is an ancient Slavic feast commemorating the dead, the drama consists of four parts, and the poet was influenced by Gothic literature. The play was banned as part of the 1968 political crisis in Poland. The work itself was dedicated to the people fighting for freedom in the 1830s against the Russian emperor. The poem is full of ghosts, angels and devils and the narrator is a poet called Konrad, and alll the forces are competing for Konrad’s soul,

A crucial character is a Priest called Piotr who has a vision for the future of Poland, that it will be liberated by -

“The Son of a foreign mother, in his blood old heroes. And his name will be forty and four.”

Mickiewicz claimed the number came to him as a vision, the vision was to be one that plagued him.

[misswanderings]

43

In 43 AD the Trung Sisters were defeated in battle, though there are different stories on how they died, the year is not debated. The sisters, along with other women, were fighting against Chinese Han occupation, and maybe against a lot more as women had a lot to lose under the patriarchal teachings of Confucius. Before sinicization, Vietnam seemed to be in many ways a matriarchal culture. Indeed one legend of the battle of 43 AD has a story of a pregnant captain giving birth on the front line and then killing the baby and killing herself, rather than surrendering to the Chinese. A far cry this is from the current cult of the mother, the idea that woman should surrender everything for their babies – career, independence, sanity and life.

The Trung sisters were rebels, who briefly established independence against Chinese domination. Trung Trac, the eldest sister was a widower, her husband had been assassinated by a Chinese general, so along with her sister Trung Nhi she marched against the Chinese commander, forcing them to flee.  In AD 39 they became joint queens of the independent states of Vietnam, liberating a group of  sixty-five strongholds that stretched from Hue in the South to Southern China . According to legend they committed suicide by drowning themselves at the junction of the Day and Red rivers after the Chinese Emperor had sent his best army to reconquer Vietnam and holding them off for two years. There are other stories that they were executed or that they floated up to the clouds, whatever way they were fierce revolutionaries who are celebrated still as symbols of the spirit of independence of the Vietnamese.

I decided to book a trip to Vietnam over Christmas after reading about these two warrior women. I have always longed to see the colours and beauty of the country, but this gave me an added pilgrimage reason. I am fascinated with the way so many of our female warriors have been forgotten, or their paths at the very least made difficult. I am steeped in Homer at the moment, and the concept of agenor, or extreme masculinity, and how this abundant manhood can drive them to reckless and passionate extremes. The women lack all agency in the early Greek mythology, they are all longing for marriage or fought over as war booty. How wonderful to come across a society that has women as warriors and refusing to be quietly sitting at home.

[misswanderings]

42

I wake to rain. Blink once.

A drip in the parched tank.

Ah, ahhh, aghhhhh…. a magpie trails off.

Another echoes it’s forlorn song.

It’s been so long, since I wake in a bed.

Even longer since I woke, not hung

over. I hate how my body loves wine.

My eyes lidded and heavy like a lizard

A giant goanna, stirring after Winter.

They blink again. I hear a kettle boiling.

Sweeter, less dramatic birds chirp and tweet.

(such naff words)

It is the period of metamorphosis.

From woman wanting a man,

to woman not wanting a man.

I’m aware of every drop of it.

Every drought ridden Sydney longing for rain

drop of it.

And always the decision -

Do I hold off till the rains

promised or buy water now?

Crickets.

The earth’s creatures love rain.

They sing, we write songs about it.

My eyes are closed again.

My breasts will no longer be full and sore.

I dreamt I was the publicist for Kylie,

on the eve of her Australian tour.

It wasn’t selling.

I sat with her trying to find a new angle..

Prying into her love life. She tweets,

“I shot a scene in an art house film”

Wanting to be sold for her art.

not he looks or love life.

The metamorphosis of the ageing pop star.

Worse for her I suppose,

though she looks way younger.

Skin not doused by the Australian sun.

Botox money to burn.

Photoshopped illusions.

Rain and light, there is no thing now.

Just the optical illusion.of water droplets

viewed from 42 degrees,

the angle that creates rainbows.

 You see a different rainbow to me,

my female role model poets,

didn’t live to see out their longings for men.

Plath and Sexton killed themselves.

I’m not that interested in writing about

dogs.

I am not one to form attachments to cats.

I liked men. Always men.

Their smell, their chest, their arms,

their ability to build and be harsh.

Their harsh working hands,

their problem solving minds.

And now I don’t need them.

Now the under the rainbow,

end of the rainbow, the one,

the finding of him, the fairy tale

is shown to be an illusion.

Science has killed it,

like it killed the dream of cloud hopping.

You don’t see the same rainbow as me.

I can’t physically approach you.

You don’t exist except in my illusions.

So I stand here at 45, 42 degrees

from you and watch your beauty,

your colours fade and flair,

in the rain, with sleepy eyes.

And I think, yes, but

Science overreaches itself,

like it did when it killed my sister.

My hormones are not just me,

science can’t hold all of me or explain,

this rain, this moment,

this spit of human time.

[misswanderings]

41

41 shots, and we'll take that ride

Across this bloody river to the other side

41 shots, they cut through the night

You're kneeling over his body in the vestibule

Praying for his life

Is it a gun?

Is it a knife?

Is it a wallet?

This is your life

It ain't no secret (it ain't no secret)

It ain't no secret (it ain't no secret)

Ain't no secret my friend

You can get killed just for living

in your american skin

41 shots

41 shots

41 shots

41 shots

41 shots,

lena gets her son ready for school

She says now on these streets charles

You got to understand the rules

Promise me if an officer stops you'll always be polite

Never ever run away and promise mama you'll keep your hands in sight

Cause is it a gun? Is it… 

                                           Bruce Springsteen

Give me the lyrics and heart and sweat and soul of Bruce Sprigsteen any day than the wank of modern art. I tried again this last week at the Melbourne Festival, I drag my children to galleries in the hope of transformation and feeling. They call it what it is each time. Boring and stupid and bullshit. Once the intellectual gets in the way of the heart and emotion you are doomed to being nothing but marketing fluff. I saw Kader Attia ‘explore ideas of injury, repair and cultural exchange” - “mum what is that tin foil on the floor, and broken doors” How much did that cost us Australia? I saw the most dead group of artworks. I had higher hopes for Experimenta Arts as there was a group of artists in an exhibition that ‘asks us to contemplate just what it is to be human in the technological acceleration of our information society.’ I saw them cough up the most nonsensical, intellectual dribble to such a powerful question. I wanted to see what Bruce would do. I wanted to hear his poetry and see his human sweat and love and sharing of politics and the personal. I wanted to be moved. It doesn’t come with this intellectual disconnection.

Springsteen’s lyrics of course recreate the story of Amadou Diallo a 22 year old street peddler who immigrated from Guinea in West Africa to America and who was mistakenly shot at by 4 police officers who had mistaken him for a rape suspect reaching for his gun. The fired at him 41 times and when they turned over his bullet-riddled body crumpled faceup they saw he had been reaching for his wallet and was not at all like the suspect, he just had black skin, or as Sprngsteen makes clear - american skin.

[misswanderings]

40

“You can spend your days baking cookies for your offspring, or — as ever through the ages — you can become a madwoman, a nomad, a warrior, a saint. But if you do decide to follow the way of the few, you must remember this: Whenever you come to a fork in the road, always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you.”

“Forty Rooms” Olga Grushin

Grushin’s 2016 novel title symbolises the average number of rooms in a middle class woman’s life where she has grand realisations. As she writes it’s always 40: men’s pilgrimages or periods of penance seem to take 40 days. Apparently from what i have read it just was shorthand, at the time, for a really long time.  A baby is made in 40 weeks. A moment of passion and then this tiny perfect little babe is in your arms. After 40 days we are meant to have learnt something new— Noah’s 40 days and nights of rain, Moses’ 40 days in the desert, Jesus’ 40 days of fasting and temptation. 40 years was a generation in biblical time. Just like 40 rooms represents a life of more internal discovery in the interiors of Gushkins novels. I am again reminded of the interiors of Elisabeth Cummings work, while so many men paint the exteriors.

40 also means symbolically a period of rebirth. 40 is a product of a period of  grace (signified by 5) and a new beginning (8), the factors of 40, or if using the factors of 4 and 10, with 4 representing the creation of something and 10 representing perfection and completeness. I couldn’t get close to 40 days for this sort of self-discovery, as a single mother, or maybe a woman, or maybe any single parent, or anyone without the ability to demand time to be alone I had to be content with 3 days trecking in Wilson’s Promontory. So three days was all I had as a period of deprivation from social media, alcohol, toilets, coffee and screens. Three days to put one foot in front of the other and be silent in nature is the only way I can stop the ego narrative in my head. The narrative that, ever since I can remember has been, Bridget Jones style, obsessing over decisions about love and career. Relating, always, to the melancholy lyrics of The National, one of my favourite bands

I've been talking about you to myself Cause there's nobody else And I want what I want And I want everything

I want everything

Three days to not have to make any decision apart from to put one foot in front of the other and avoid the brown snake on the side of the path. Three days to trek to the southern most point under the full moon, the track alive with owls and wallabies.  I came close to a period of grace for a few moments, as I plunged into the freezing ocean naked or watched the moon rise whilst camping on the brilliant white beach, and the stars appear whilst curled around the fire nestled into the seal smoothed granite rocks of Little Warterloo Bay. I came close the morning I woke, my mind and body finally aligned from strenuous exercise and no alcohol, and ran again naked into the cold blue water. This wasn’t endurance, this was a total gift, the human spirit is tested every day in the real world, not on these pilgramages into nature. How sad that women have had to have their discoveries in the interiors, whllst men could go bush.

What did I learn on my own quest, apart from the fact that leaving my self behind is the most important goal? I realised that I have never been a successful writer, actor, director or film-maker and that nothing I have ever created has any mark of permanence about it. The art companies I founded or saved or worked my ass off for don’t exist anymore. All the relationships I have had have ended in tears. I realised I am ephemeral, a rambler, a runner, a taste tester, a pilgrim. I asked myself as I looked out from the Southern tip of Australia if maybe that is ok? It stared back at me, uncaring, bored, beautiful and brilliant. The many shipwrecks at the bottom of the Bass Strait are testament to the human dreams that this coastline is oblivious to. You are nothing, that is the message it gave me, and it is best to learn that lesson early, you are a blink in time in this design.

I found letters to my younger self a few weeks ago, addressed to me in Bayswater London where I lived in the nineties. Friends from Australia were telling me to calm down and enjoy life, reassuring this ambitious but broke and lost young woman that I was still young and I was destined for greatness as a performer and writer. Clearly I was obsessing over this question of what was my purpose in life and lack of self belief from the beginning of this decision to work in the world of stories. Me and just about every other person I suppose.

Just 3 days on a 40 day pilgrim quest and I learned that I am not special, I just am, and if I shut up I can just appreciate the beauty of what I have and the peace when it is there. I should be grateful that I do not have to die for my beliefs or choice of life, like Joan of Arc. I don’t have to marry to be accepted as normal, to have children out of wedlock is fine and I’ve managed that alone, and I also don’t have to commit myself to one person although the couple is the currency society likes and gives tax breaks and respect to. I can have my own economic independence and choose to live a life of ephemeral wandering.I can learn to stop longing for 40 days and realise that 3 is a gift, and then the children that run (slower now) back into my arms after their stay with their dad, are a gift that I should not wish away into the world too soon.

[misswanderings]

39

It beats Tinder as a way to meet. In this scene a beautiful spy named Anabella Smith pleads with Richard Hanney, a Canadian who has found himself in a musical hall in London, to take her home with him. This is 1935 and doesn’t happen everyday, Smith also is pretty good with the pick up lines, as she brushes herself close to him asking, “Have you ever heard of the 39 steps?” They head back to his short term apartment, Hanney who thinks he has just hit gold by finding a vulnerable woman with persecution mania, rather than believing her to be a real spy seems to have forgotten he is in a Hitchcock film, so Smith is that night murdered and Harney has to go on the run to Scotland prove his innocence.

I’ve paused the film there, just as he is immersed in the mountains. I’m savouring it. I’m thinking about mountains because I just saw “Mountains’ directed by Jennifer Peedom and written by Robert MacFarlane and was unmoved. I also just wondered through alleyways and down steps in Melbourne. I wanted to be in a black and white noir film, I wanted to have mysteries to solve and be chased or chasing a handsome stranger with secrets. I’m not, I’m not getting that “I’m in a movie feeling” I used to all the time, that hyperreal sensory overload of possibilities that a strange city can give you.” So often a trip to Nova cinema Carlton and a few hours spent in Readings bookshop would make me soar far away into worlds of possibility and romance. How can a movie about the power of mountains not inspire awe in me? The orchestral score by Richard Togentti is certainly beautiful, and it works off the narration by Willem Dafoe perfectly, and Dafoe is just the right choice, but the narration feels flat and the visuals bored me mostly. I loved Peedom’s ‘Sherpa’, this was a very poor alternative exploration of the way humans need to conquer mountains, or to quote the best line from the film, summittng Everest ‘is not climbing, but queuing’. Sherpa showed this through the drama of the interaction between a group of tourists and sherpas, both in need of each other. The sherpas for money and the tourists to help them climb to the top of the box they need to tick, often at the cost of around $75,000 American dollars. The horrible exploitation of the sherpas and the history of this exploitation was explored brilliantly. The rather dull images of men on top of mountains or falling or riding bikes or skiing down that was half of Mountain, just left me cold. In trying to reach for a universal and poetic exploration of what Sherpa had done  with a specific moment in time, I was left feeling underwhelmed. I actually dicn’t want to see any people in this piece, I wanted it to just be about the music and the mountains without us on them. We polluted too many of the shots, we stopped the film from becoming anything but yet another glossy ad for Gortex. I’m bored by the humans we have become.

When Richard Hanney arrives in the Scottish Highlands, following the map that he had found in the dead hand of his unfortunate choice for a one night stand, he requests a night’s board from a crofter. Hanney then manages to get up close and personal with the criofter’s wife and later is handcuffed to a beautiful blonde for most of the second half of the film. You get the feeling Richard Hanney’s life always exists as one romantic adventure after another and will continue to be so. The dramatic moodiness of the Scottish mountains are captured in just three or four shots by Hitchcock, in what is largely a studio film, and I was immediately taken back to my own trip to Scotland a few years ago

[misswanderings]

38

The 38th parallel north is a circle of latitude that is 38 degrees north of the Earth’s equatorial plane.

I miss you.

The circle crosses Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, Asia, the Pacific Ocean, North America and the Atlantic Ocean.

You circle me, you draw me, photograph me and take me out of this little Italian café in Coburg and throw me roughly on your bed.

The 38th parallel north formed the border between North and South Korea prior to the Korean War, forming roughly equal portions.

I rip of my shirt so I can feel your hands on my breasts. I surrender my North.

You strip me of my jeans. They are stuck around my shoes.  You don’t care.

You stare at the South. It shudders under your ruthless gaze.

At this latitude the sun is visible for 14 hours and 48 minutes during the summer solstice.

You leave me waiting till the winter solstice ,to expose me to the sun for 9 hours and 32 minutes.

I can feel the wool blanket scratching my sweating back.. You won’t let me up.

You start at my Prime Meridian, you head Eastwards with your eyes and hands, sculpting my body to surrender it’s territory. 

You ignore the history of Soviet and American occupation.

You create your own borders and ignore the lines of latitude and the older rules.

I don’t want any borders from you. Your hands refuse to go South. I’m begging you for the Korean War.

It begins. It rages from 1950-1953

The Armistice Agreement signed on July 27 1953 created a new military demarcation line but there is no peace, no surrender.

There is still war.

Don’t give me fucking dates or facts.

Today I send missiles to the world. I don’t want to be diplomatic.

You have claimed one part of me after another, cut me up, sized me up, starved me and sanctioned me, now you threaten to annihilate part of me. Now you call me unstable!

I’m already annihilated, I’m already fucked up, I’m already thirsting and wanting and wanting.

Just take me, just use your bigger hands and bigger ego and bigger weapons and show me your strength. I’m not playing north or south. I’m not able to stop the scars and wounds of my past occupants. I’m just wanting decreation.

So you can keep your expensive toys and play goodies and baddies while I’m stretched out here on your bed. I’ll watch, with my silence and femaleness.

You can tie up my arms and legs and let Russia, China and America make me what they need me to be.

I want this.

I push it this way and you pull it the other way.

If it was easy you wouldn’t want it. I am not an easy trophy wife, I disturb you. I don’t wear designer clothes.

So you have cut me off and left me hanging here, twisting and turning and begging for the drug that is power.

You have banned me from food and energy, you are making me wait it out, daring me to back down, to stop flexing my own power.

Only you can have power, only you can use your hands.

I’m wet. I’m crying. I’m missing you and starving. I’m blank.

I am so used to being in the hands of my dictator.

The truth is kept from me. You make your own truth. The nations unite to talk about me, about my reclusive regime.

But maybe I like being repressed? Maybe I don’t seek liberation?

I’m so used to this life of torture, of rape and starvation.

I miss you when you are not here, changing my borders, protecting my flesh from others.

I don’t want to eat unless you feed me, I don’t want to cover myself from your eyes and your grasp. I want you to draw me and colonise me.

I want the sea that threatens to pour out of my borders to be stopped by your mouth.

Liberation doesn’t interest me. Clothe me how you like and take what I have. Give me nothing but you and you and you.

What’s feminism ever done for me anyway? Or capitalism? Or freedom of speech?

Take my north and south and unify me. Turn me over and brutalise me.

I didn’t ever believe in borders or countries or private property anyway. I just believed in you. You in me. I love you in me.

It’s a Korean situation we’ve got going on here.

[misswanderings]

37

A fever can be defined as a state of heightened activity and excitement. The body is said to be in fever if it gets hotter than thirty-seven degrees Celsius. The body overheats and the heart beats faster. The anthropologist Victor Turner could easily be describing fever when he defines the liminal state as a process of becoming: as a state of deep emotional intensity, like water reaching its boiling point. In fever nothing is linear, nothing is sure and no fever is the same. Fever is fluid, dangerous, fervent and borderless; it can incite rebellion and change. In extreme cases people come out of fever forever changed; body and mind are depleted of all energy, form reformed, consciousness withdrawn from the circumference, from the external world of multiple desires, towards the centre of the fever. The fever is a place where the ambiguous is graspable, the body is fragmenting and yet also in a state of extreme unification.

[misswanderings]

36

See my book, or better still buy it.

[misswanderings]

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35

I love old photos and their ghostlike capturing of moments and memories. This one of a man standing on the head of a Sphinx in Egypt with two pyramids behind him instantly takes you away from the modern package deals and politically correct holidays the bourgeoisie have today and then discuss over their dinner parties. Clearly if everyone climbed on the Sphinx’s head there would be no Egyptian pyramids to visit, and their beauty could not be marvelled at, Yet I am aware of how so many breathtaking natural and man made sites have been destroyed by tourism. The way hoards of buses and people cram in to see them, with the earnest narratives on their head-sets giving the history and the carefully constructed fences and wheelchair access lanes ushering them in single file down the paths you can take. You name the landmark, I’ve been there and observed it with bus loads of tourists with their selfie sticks and had it destroyed. I suppose though this image shows just why we do need to put up rails, it is the modern instagram photo shot – go to the spot, take photo of me there, claiming it. This is why the lonely austere beauty of Wedding Cake rock in the national park, or the figure eight pools I have visited since I was a child have had to be fenced off, as social media has made these landmarks to claim and project yourself within, on or close to.

  The Egyptian pyramids, build around 2500 BC, were remarkable in their construction and beauty, yet they were not nearly as elaborately designed to mathematical proportions as the Ancient Greek and Roman buildings that were designed with Pythagorean geometry. There is no written evidence of the mathematics used in the construction of the pyramids, yet it does seem they follow very similar designs to the foundations of geometry later employed and notated by the Greeks, particularly with the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Egyptian pyramids were made out of square blocks, which meant that they ended up as square pyramids, rather than the mathematically simpler and geometrically regular tetrahedrons. The Greeks were of course obsessed with symmetry and their architecture and worship of numbers and precise geometrical forms is reflected in their architecture. Indeed beauty to the Greeks needed to have a triad of symmetry, proportion and harmony, and their need to reflect these values in their lives, led to the creation of many important mathematical concepts that have been attributed traditionally to Pythagoras (570-495 BC), though in reality the precursors of these ideas were no doubt based on earlier ideas of the Egyptians and Babylonians. Some of the most important ideas of the Greeks when it comes to harmony, beauty and proportion are the concepts of The Golden Rule, The Pythagorean Theorem and the mathematical study of figural numbers.

  A figural number is one that can be expressed or represented by a geometrical arrangement of equally spaced points (pebbles or spheres). Pythagoras and his followers have usually been attributed with the creation of generating figurate numbers using gnomons, though the evidence that survives is rather scant on this. The gnomon is the piece that needs to be added to a figurate number to transform it to the next bigger one. For example, the gnomon of the square number is the odd number of the general form 2n + 1, n = 1, 2, 3, ... These formulas allows explicit formulas for all triangular numbers that are also perfect squares.

  35 is a figural number and it is a tetrahedral number, or triangular pyramidal number.). So 35, if represented by 35 equally spaced points, will form a pyramid with a triangular base and three sides, this is called a tetrahedron. A triangular pyramid with a side length of 5 contains 35 spheres, each one represents one of the first 5 triangular numbers. The tetrahedron is the simplest polyhedron with four our faces and six edges. All the faces are triangles. If they are all equilateral, such a tetrahedron is called regular. Accordingly, the tetrahedron is both a right triangular pyramid, the base of which can be any of the faces. You can build a tetrahedron with layers of spheres. The number of the spheres in one layer is 1,3,6,10..., generally n(n+1)/2.  If you add the spheres layer by layer, you get the tetrahedral numbers 1,4,10,20,..., generally 1+3+6+10+...+n(n+1)/2=n(n+1)(n+2)/6. The tetrahedron is widely used in the art and prevalent in the wild: fruits of some plants in racemes with the exact shape. A tetrahedron is one of the five Platonic solids that are sees as ideal primal modes of crystal patterns that occur throughout the world of minerals. The Greeks believed this solid represented fire.

  The Greeks believed that harmony passed from an arithmetical concept of number to a spatio-geometrical concept of ratio. In some languages tetragonal became a figurative term for someone of steadfast character.The tetraktys, or the figural decad was the most important figural number, it was a symbolic figure to which the Pythagoreans swore oaths; it represented a perfect reduction of the numerical to the spatial, strength, justice and perfect equality. A tetraktys was a perfect triangle made of ten points, and the Pythagorean oath was sworn on it:

          By that pure, holy, four lettered name on high,

          nature's eternal fountain and supply,

          the parent of all souls that living be,

          by him, with faith find oath, I swear to thee."

The Pythagoren religion of worship around the ten object triangular number, the tetractys. Full members of the society were called the mathematikoi (which is the origin of our word “mathematics”); those outside the inner circle of full members were the akousmatikoi (the origin of our word for acoustics). These could listen in on the discussions of the mathematikoi, but could not themselves take part. It is also often asserted that many of the discoveries made by the society were in fact joint efforts, but were all respectfully attributed to Pythagoras himself. One of the most central mathematical concepts and the foundation of aesthetics is sometimes attributed to Pythagoras’ wife Theano. Theano who was born in Crotona c. 546 BCE, wrote a treatise describing the 'Golden Mean" that is the first clear reference to what has become known as the ‘golden ratio’ or the ‘golden section’.

  According to legend Pythagoras discovered the concept the golden mean when he began his studies of proportion while listening to the different sounds given off when the blacksmith’s hammers hit their anvils. In further studies of nature, he observed certain patterns and numbers reoccurring. Pythagoras believed that beauty was associated with the ratio of small integers. Theano was very interested in these ideas and when Pythagoras came to Samos, she went to hear him speak. She and Pythagoras married although she was 36 years his junior. They had 5 children and she also wrote a number of his ideas into books, the most central one was the golden mean which he saw as the ratio that exists within flower petals, trees, seeds, natural foods, shells, the galaxies in the universe; a mathematical language of the universe.The Pythagoreans endeavoured to keep this language a secret; declaring that anybody that broached the secret would get the death penalty. With this discovery, the Pythagoreans saw the essence of the cosmos as numbers and numbers took on special meaning and significance.  The symbol of the Pythagorean brotherhood was the pentagram, in itself embodying several Golden Means.

    The Golden Ratio exists when a line is divided into two parts and the longer part (a) divided by the smaller part (b) is equal to the sum of (a) + (b) divided by (a), which both equal 1.618033988749894848204586834365638117720309180, now known as Φ. However it wasn’t until the 1900’s that American mathematician Mark Barr used the Greek letter phi (Φ) to designate this proportion. The golden ratio is a unique ratio such that the ratio of the whole to the larger portion is the same as the ratio of the larger portion to the smaller portion. As such, it symbolically links each new generation to its ancestors, preserving the continuity of relationship as the means for retracing its lineage. In nature, we find patterns, designs and structures that follow geometrical archetypes. These relationships were studied famously by Leonardo Da Vinci and become fundamental to renaissance thinking. The Golden Ratio reveals the underlying metaphysical principle of interconnection between all things, the inseparable relationship of the part to the whole; that ‘everything impinges upon everything else’. These ideas were expanded fully In Luca Paciolo’s book whose title references the golden ration, De divina proportione (On the Divine Proportion). The book is illustrated by Da Vinci and composed around 1498. Its subject was mathematical proportions and their applications to geometry, visual art, and architecture. The clarity of the written material and beauty of the diagrams helped the book to achieve an impact beyond mathematical circles and bring Pythagorean geometry into the wider discourse. By this time this ubiquitous proportion was known as the golden mean, golden section and golden ratio as well as the Divine proportion.

  If it wasn’t for Theano the golden mean which permeates the architecture of all forms may not have been attributed to Pythagoras. After his death Theano became the head of Pythagoras' school and, with the help of her daughters,(Damo, Myria and Arignote) all of whom were philosophers and one of her sons, she continued the Pythagorean school of wisdom. She and her children not only kept the school and its doctrines alive they were central to the spread of Pythagorean thought. Without Pythagorean thought some of the most central elements of Western philosophy based on the Golden Mean would not exist. As Aristotle later put it, the Golden Mean is the Greek ideal of the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency.