I don’t like to use the word ‘journey’ as a metaphor for life. It smacks of a certain inevitability and predestination that is the opposite of the engine of evolution that has driven all life on this planet for thousands and thousands of years and studiously ignores the unique in human life. In the poems Brunswick Station, and Flinders Street Station an external viewer, that is someone watching from outside the carriage, would assume that the train is simply going from one geographical point to another but that is not what is happening on the train itself.

When I am on a train I look at the other passengers and wonder about the scores that are playing out in their heads and if you look closely at their faces you can perceive the subtle tics of quavers and crotchets that tell of the internal dialogue or dialogues as they relive or anticipate a scene from their lives. These scenes are not journeys but a developing musical score. Think of it like this; would anyone describe Mozart’s score for Don Giovanni as a journey? When you listen to it you can hear and feel that something incredible is evolving. Compare a rose with the Don Giovanni overture. It begins as a flower bud and then starts to unfold and reveal itself as the score develops new ideas, and as the bud yawns opens, we start to catch a glimpse of the perfection, the beauty and the  complexity of the work.

In Brunswick Station the diva referred to was actually  a real person that got on a train at, you guessed it, Brunswick Station and I watched her as she scrambled from the entrance of the train station, carrying too many things and just making it through the closing carriage door before she fell into a seat. I could see the perspiration on her forehead from her exertion. She was already a dramatic event before she pulled out her phone and looked at the screen and then moved to shock, then disbelief and finally overwhelming grief. No one noticed her until she started sobbing. Her lips were moving but looked like she was repeating one word over and over, now I’m not much of a lip reader but it looked like… why? And in this moment, when she was being buffeted around by powerful emotions it was clear she did not have the deep well of vocabulary that was capable of describing what was happening to her. To an external viewer she like the other passengers, she was going from one geographical point to another, a journey, but the metaphor could not come even close to describing her current experience.

Likewise in Flinders Street Station.  Here we see the many who do live lives of low expectation, the many of us that have one song stuck in our head for days on end until it is replaced by another.  Here the term journey is more applicable as people trace on their scores, with a tedious plastique of thought and movement, endless semibreves of soul destroying habit. People whose one driving ambition is to be told what to do by a Pirandello, the Italian playwright and fascist, whose play Six Characters in Search of an Author underlines themes of appearance and reality. Pirandello also influenced existentialism and the search for meaning in our lives.

It could be argued that the overthinkers of this world are particularly susceptible to the bug of existentialism and miss the sensibility of the vibrant who:

create an emotional and savage counterpoint

to the sense of purpose and the dreary safety

of the collective