Welcome to Eureka Street
Looking for thought provoking articles?Subscribe to Eureka Street and join the conversation.
Passwords must be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, and a numeric value.
Eureka Street uses the Stripe payment gateway to process payments. The terms and conditions upon which Stripe processes payments and their privacy policy are available here.
Please note: The 40-day free-trial subscription is a limited time offer and expires 31/3/24. Subscribers will have 40 days of free access to Eureka Street content from the date they subscribe. You can cancel your subscription within that 40-day period without charge. After the 40-day free trial subscription period is over, you will be debited the $90 annual subscription amount. Our terms and conditions of membership still apply.
Love is a much-used word, and, like domestic cutlery, it tends to lose its shine. Its boundaries then shrink to the average rather than to the inspiring. For that reason we need stories that stretch the ceiling of love beyond anything we could imagine. Not because we think that we could reach such far places, but because it enlarges the horizon of our lives.
In an era where physical gatherings are replaced by virtual meetings and religious processions by online sermons, the Feast of Corpus Christi raises poignant questions. Once a grand demonstration of faith, it has subtly withdrawn from the public eye, leaving us to grapple with the nature of Christ's presence and, more broadly, the concept of human presence.
I circle the huge granite standing stone sunwise three times, as my ancestors did long before the designs of cranes and coins, of theory. ‘Tell me how and what they thought.’ No answer but the wheeling murmuration of a thousand starlings. A stubble field.
A Bone of Fact is one part love letter and two parts plea bargain. That’s how Walsh can take a stab at Catholicism one minute and the next admit that in the 'thrall' of Michelangelo’s Pieta he loses all faculties. And for someone who’s gleamed much from betting, gambling gets short shrift.
The Garden is populated by the larger-than-strife figures who follow their lust of life and self. Kaos the crocodile, who becomes the first man, and Hades the platypus, the first thief. Orpheus the lyrebird, the first actor, and the first healer, possum Prometheus. The giant red kangaroo, Knuckles, the first ruler. This is storytelling that exults in pain and primordial uncertainty, passion and purpose.
He carried no phone and sent no text. He had no email address, deleted no spam, recharged no devices, never backed up.
All is not quite lost. There's still Michelangelo's David in the Academia — that's 'famous' and always makes for a good Facebook album cover. But after queuing for two hours, you feel rather underwhelmed — David isn't the 20m high statue of a ripped male you had been expecting, and there isn't a secret passageway leading from his gluteus maximus to a torture chamber beneath the Vatican.
A hollow booming is the only result of the sickly goatherd's urgent knocking on the church door on the night before his death. The image makes a sad irony of the man's simple faith in the healing power of the ash he earlier swept off the church floor.
If Caravaggio hadn't been such a drunken, violent, criminal, he may never have been human enough, disturbed enough or repentant of enough sin to produce the most arresting, influential and remarkable sacred art in the history of the Christian West.
As Copenhagen looms on the horizon like a giant apocalyptic festival, I can’t get Michelangelo and my kids out of my mind. The image of the Pietá, the mother holding her dead son, keeps appearing.
What Mozart and Michelangelo did with music and art, Maxwell and Euler did with numbers. But students would be better off learning a compulsory second language, rather than maths with little real-world application.
Michael Magnusson and Caravaggio.