Cri de Coeur

Reflections on Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia'

2012-01-03T23:31:00.000+11:00

Spoiler alert: There's almost no suspense in the film Melancholia, but any tiny bit it might have will be ruined by the following review.

Ironically, the last time I found a film as uncomfortable to watch as 'Melancholia', Lars Von Trier's latest piece of cinematic iconoclasm, was when I suffered through Todd Solondz's 'Happiness', almost fourteen years ago. The titles might be diametrically opposed, but the films share a determination to go straight for the viewer's psychological jugular. In Happiness, the subject was paedophilia, in Melancholia, it is depression and death. And Von Trier is not pulling his punches. However artful the cinematography and art direction, Von Trier's message about mortality is brutally blunt. We all die, the film reminds us, and only the melancholic, Von Trier seems to be saying, is capable of facing the true facts of existence unflinchingly.

For those who know nothing about the film, it depicts the end of the world as the earth collides with Melancholia, a planet which has been 'hiding behind the sun'. Simultaneously it tells the story of a clinically depressed young bride, Justine (Kirstin Dunst), an advertising copywriter whose marriage disintegrates before the wedding party is over. Reviewers who have decried the film's scientific implausibility miss the point entirely. Despite the premise, this is no sci fi flick. Those who have described it as a film about mental illness are of course much closer to the mark, for it is indeed a study of depression, and the whole film can be read as a metaphor for the implosion of the depressive's psyche. The world may be larger than any single mind it contains, yet it is never experienced on any grander scale than the mind of the individual, and so the obliteration of one mind is no less a cataclysm, in that subjective frame, than the annihilation of the whole planet. But ultimately, to describe it as a portrait of depression is to miss the ultimate message about mortality. Von Trier hasn't just made a film about depression, he's made a film that argues depression.

In a sense, Melancholia is not so much cinema as anti-cinema. For where the usual function of cinema is anodyne, pandering to soothing fantasies of perfect romance, invincible power, unlimited wealth and so on, Von Trier's aim is the absolute opposite. This is a film driven by the same iconoclastic impulse that drove the director to declare at Cannes that he "understood Hitler," sparking widespread condemnation. He wishes to tear away everything phony, every saccharine fantasy, every pitiful self-deception, and expose the ugliest truth. That was the ethic at the heart of 'dogma': don't soothe the viewer with the trappings of slick production values, stirring soundtracks, and technical whizz-bangery. The cinematic illusion is harnessed to a contradictory project: the destruction of the viewer's illusions. In that sense, Von Trier has something in common with Brecht, though Brecht exposed the illusions of theatre for political purposes, whereas Von Trier's ultimate motivations seem darker and more emotionally driven. Iconoclasm does not need a constructive agenda.

The deep discomfort that this film engenders stems from the way the film targets the viewer for attack. At the end of the film, Dunst's character Justine comforts her nephew, a boy of seven or eight, by helping him to build a 'magic cave' where he will be safe against the coming catastrophe. The magic cave turns out to be a rough tipi of sharpened sticks under which Justine, her sister Claire, and the boy all sit to await the end of the world. So much for your childish illusions of safety, Von Trier seems to be saying. See how pitiful are your attempts to keep out the reality of death? And I couldn't help feeling there was another layer to this 'magic cave' image: couldn't it be that cinema itself is this magic cave, a place we go to deny death and close our eyes to horrible reality? Von Trier ends the film by hurling Melancholia directly into the audience's face in a climax that is at once haunting, terrifying and strangely empty - there is no 'resolution' here, only annihilation.

Violence is also done to the other possible remedies for death anxiety: love, solidarity, togetherness. Justine's sister Claire shakily and unconvincingly tries to persuade Justine that they should perhaps sit on the porch and drink wine together for the coming of the end. Justine is scathing. More than scathing. "I think your idea is a piece of shit," she spits. At the end, in the magic cave, they do hold hands, and I was reminded for just a moment of that lovely scene in Toy Story 3, where the toys hold hands as they slide down towards the furnace that also clearly stands for death. But in Melancholia, we aren't offered the release of that emotion. The hand holding feels futile and desperate, another form of the magic cave.

No wonder that the first thing that could be heard as the credits rolled was the querulous voice of a movie-goer complaining that her time had been wasted. If you go the cinema for the pleasures of fantasy and self-deception, you just stepped into the wrong theatre. As my friend put it, pity the poor sod who saw a poster with Kirstin Dunst in a wedding dress and expected Toby MacGuire might make a showing too.

Despite this, Melancholia is a beautiful film - the opening sequence contains some of the most extraordinary and surreal images I have seen on the silver screen. The soundtrack is pure melodrama, gothically overblown, but the effect is perfect: it creates a mood of claustrophobia and barely repressed hysteria. I kept thinking of the German word Beklemmung, an emotion also captured in the work of another famous depressive, Franz Kafka.

There's a moment in the film in which Claire discovers Justine lying naked on the bank of a river staring up at Melancholia looming in the night sky. Having rejected human love, turned away from the world altogether, she basks in the blue light of death, in a voluptuous misery. It is moments of imagistic poetry like this that lend the film a kind of greatness. It is a perfect image of the depressive dynamic. All around her, the people who love Justine have been shut out. Her husband cannot reach her sexually, her sister can barely feed her. Yet inwardly she gives herself completely to Melancholia, the deadly pull of pure negativity. It is a haunting image that will stay with me a long time.

I said that the film argues depression. By that I mean it tries to convince us that depression is rational, the only sane response to our meaningless existential condition - at least that is how I read Von Trier's intent. There is a competition at Justine's wedding to try to guess the number of beans in a jar. None guess correctly, but Justine does. Perhaps Lars has read the psychological studies that show that people with depression have more accurate reality checking than non depressed people. Having used the bean guess to prove she 'knows things', Justine then tells us that there is no life anywhere else in the universe, that we are alone, that life is evil anyway, and deserves the annihilation soon coming to it. One has the feeling Von Trier is presenting this as a sort of argument, even though, as a piece of logic, it's as flimsy as Justine's 'magic cave'.

The depressive may have superior reality checking, but this does not mean the depressive is a good philosopher, even less a wise man. To seek truth means facing the reality of death and having the courage to face one's illusions. But depression is not the final waystop on that journey. Many artists pass this way and many have fallen into their own private doomsday, flying too close to the planet Melancholia. Yet those who do not suicide find something on the other side of this crisis - compare the Leonard Cohen of today, a man exuding wisdom and gentleness, with the near-deranged singer you can sometimes see in old films. Peace and acceptance are possible and sane responses to the reality of mortality, even for those who have rejected the comforts of religion.

Nihilism is bad philosophy, and Melancholia is deeply nihilistic. Nevertheless, it's one hell of a piece of filmmaking.

Mixing Politics and Fiction

2011-11-13T11:13:00.001+11:00

Last year there was a series of blogosphere broadsides exchanged between Emmett Stinson (author, editor, academic) and Overland magazine on the subject of 'political' fiction. In the one corner, Overland fiction editors past and present argued for the 'moral and aesthetic imperative' of political engagement (Jacinda Woodhead originating the controversial phrase), while in the other Stinson stood up for authorial freedom. What exactly an imperative is, whether absolute or conditional, is a moot point in the debate. Stinson argues that any imperative is proscriptive (it implicitly forbids non-political fiction) and absolute (all fiction must be political), whereas Jane Gleeson-White, Overland's current fiction editor, considers the word to imply a somewhat weaker injunction. The key exchanges can be read on Emmett's blog and on the Overland blog here and here.

The insistence on the political in fiction is something of a personal bête noire, so I am weighing into the debate, albeit a year too late. Let's not forget we read fiction for enjoyment, and that, as literary writers at least, we write from the passionate centre of our creativity, wherever that is found. To me, an 'aesthetic imperative' is an oxymoron, at least in so far as it refers to something imposed externally (such as a political ideology). The only aesthetic imperatives I know of are those that emerge from within the creative process itself - the inner imperative that tells me, for instance, that a certain metaphor must go, or that a particular sentence should be arranged in this particular manner. An aesthetic imperative imposed as a result of politics sounds like the death of art, like 'art' sponsored by the Soviet state. (I suspect, however, that the phrase 'aesthetic and moral imperative' was one that rolled nicely off the keyboard, and I am sure Woodhead was not advocating anything so totalitarian.) The point remains, nonetheless, that writers write from an inner imperative that may or may not be overtly political, and will always do so, regardless of what obligations certain literary editors feel them to be under.

As for the moral imperative, I do believe that we writers have responsibilities. Stinson rhetorically asks if shoemakers should also make political shoes. One need only look at Nike's well-known practices to answer that question in the affirmative. Indeed, if Nike is the example, the politics of shoemaking in the developing world is probably of much greater significance than the politics of fiction among certain well educated types here in Australia. After all, Stinson's point is well made that the equation: politically engaged fiction = social change has yet to be established. That said, if moral imperatives exist at all (and they do), they bind all of us, writer, tailor, candlestick maker. Just as there is moral weight to my purchasing decisions, there is political and moral significance to my choices as a writer. What do I put out into the world when I write? Even as apolitical a text as Harry Potter has its 'karma', its downstream effects on a generation of young readers, good or ill.

But does this mean all writers must be like mini-activists, agitating from their offices? I don't think so, and indeed what does "must" mean when it so patently will never occur? That we must frown upon or perhaps not publish the work of writers whose primary preoccupations are interpersonal or intrapersonal? I certainly hope not. We need literature to engage the whole spectrum of human experience, to enrich our vision of the world and make life more tolerable through the quality of its illumination, whether its subject is the plight of indigenous peoples, the complexities of marriage, or the private struggle for identity. After all, however politically aware and active we may be, we still spend much of our time preoccupied with the dramas of the private domain.

Stinson's argument against the politicization of fiction relies on a more academic point however. He questions whether fiction can be 'about' anything at all. Fiction is, for him, so complex that it is naive, indeed anti-intellectual, to see any connection between words and their referents (that would be realism, the mimetic theory of art). While I agree that any mimetic theory of representation in art is unsustainable, I am sympathetic to the Overland editors' impatience with this line of reasoning. It is not anti-intellectual to disagree with a philosophy of literary criticism, even if it is the academic fashion of the day. Stinson would transfer the entire weight of meaning over to the 'reading' side of the ledger, voiding the text of any capacity to hold significance in its own right. This is taking it too far. Ulysses may not be 'about' a man wondering around Dublin one day (Stinson's example, a straw man if ever there was one), but it's probably fair to say it's more 'about' that than it is 'about' cheese manufacture in the Baltic states. I think it is disingenuous of Stinson to claim that he doesn't know that 'politically engaged' fiction is or could be. Yeah, it exists, and yeah, Emmett knows it when he sees it, even if its boundaries are unclear, even if it needs a reader and a reading to re-hydrate it into meaningfulness.

Now that I've managed to disagree with everybody, let me say how I also actually agree with everybody (and it is heart-warming to see Gleeson-White and Stinson did eventually bury their hatchets - somewhere other than in each others' faces). The arguments put by the Overland editors are nuanced, and it is easy to poke holes in a caricature of their position, less so once their position is understood properly. Overland, of course, has a right to whatever editorial policy it chooses. To say 'we prefer politically engaged fiction' (however philosophically problematic to a post-structuralist) is a reasonable enough statement of editorial intent, and hardly surprising coming from Overland. Let's hope though that above and beyond their worthy desire for fiction that tackles the issues of our times, they still have time for a plain old good story.

Excerpt: Croc

2011-10-21T13:27:00.001+11:00

The following excerpt is from a new story 'Croc', currently unpublished.

She remembered the night she ran away, the moment it became clear that she could do this, that she was serious, and they couldn’t stop her. Nobody could stop her. It was as if a sort of film broke and all of a sudden she could see the world clearly. Running her hand along a wet metal rail, sweeping the water under her palm, she felt naked to the touch of things, like she could really feel for the first time. It was cold, she walked along the Nepean Highway and the lights of the cars shone off the wet, the tyres hissed and made tracks through the neon and she walked and walked, and slept under a bridge, woke up to her beating heart and stared up at the dull stars and thought, Who am I? She felt swollen with her lostness and her anger and her bravery. She would survive — like this, like a wild animal if she had to.

But now here she was, on her knees in the bathtub, scrubbing Ajax into the gleaming enamel for the fourth time today because she had to do something with the restlessness. The house stank of bleach and everything was scoured back and spotless and she was so lonely she almost wished Croc would come home just for someone to talk to. He’d said to her, no TV. How would he know if she did watch, but she was scared he had some way, a hidden camera somewhere or something. She’d found cameras before. Scrub, scrub. Or he’d come home and catch her before she had a chance to flick the remote.

Her hands were a mess. She bit a loose point of skin beside her nail, stripped it back with her teeth and winced at the pain. A bobby-pin of blood welled. She’d have liked to sit on the couch again and watch Home and Away with her sister and argue about who was hotter, Aden or Ric. Christ, she’d even have liked to see her Mum and Dad right now. She tore another corner of skin down, nibbled at the root. Fuck it, don’t cry. Don’t fucking cry. Scrub, scrub. But it came, she couldn’t stop it. Shoulders shaking in the bathtub, she watched her tears run down the sparkling enamel.

She stood in the living room, no energy now, just a shell. Gazing at the street through the cheap lacy curtains which let her look out, but hid her from view. Number fifteen across the way: What goes on in there? she wondered. What secrets does it hide? Do you see me, number fifteen? Do you see that shadow through the curtains?

If only she could sleep. Day, night meant nothing. She’d lost the sense of them, slept sometimes randomly during the day, spent the night wide awake. A permanent jet lag when she wasn’t speeding. Outside it was windy, the prunus trees on the nature strip agitated. The whole world was scoured down, abraded back to its bones. And her mind was the same, empty like that street, but endlessly moved by a wind that tossed and spun and blew nowhere.

...

She mustn’t lose her mind. She went to visit Ange the other day to get her meth, and wondered if Ange was losing it. She looked bad, with nasty sores on her face and hands, white and skinny as hell. Sorry love, she said, her hand hovering near the bloody crater on her cheek, I been pickin’ again. Ange had an ex who used to hit her, did stuff to her much worse than Croc had ever done to Kelly. Croc had bruised her forehead pretty badly one day when he threw an ashtray at her, he’d burnt and hit her, but he never broke a bone or put her in the hospital or anything like what Brian had done to Ange. She got away from him, but she reckoned he’d found her again, that he was hiding around the house at night. The worst thing was he’d gotten into the roof. She’d heard him up there moving around at night. So Ange had gone up herself and scattered broken glass everywhere. She’d got the bastard, too. See? she said, holding up a sliver of glass stained rusty with blood. Her mouth twitched into a smile, fell back to a quivering line.

Fucker. We might not be able to get away from ’em, but we can mess with them too, right?

Rhona, Kelly’s youth worker, once said you got like that on meth: hearing things in the walls, worms under your skin, shit like that, but then Rhona hadn’t seen the blood on the glass.

They did some ice and then went outside into the sunny front garden. On the nature strip next door there was a whole lot of junk waiting for the hard garbage, including an old photocopier, and suddenly they both had the idea they’d like to take it apart and see how it worked, so that’s what they did for the next hour or so, pulling apart that photocopier and every little bit inside it until they’d reduced it to a pile of scrap. And still they had that meth-driven urge to do, so they pulled apart a TV and a computer as well. It was funny. They had a good time, sitting on the nature strip in the sun and laughing as they picked metal and plastic apart with their fingers.

Disappear?

2011-09-24T19:38:00.000+10:00

Do you remember your first musical love? The other day I had my iPhone plugged into the stereo, set to play random songs out of my collection (always an interesting exercise - I honestly have no idea where half this stuff comes from), and the first warmly melancholic bars of The Church's "Disappear?" rang out, sending me back twenty-odd years to the confused, unhappy, intensely lived summers of my youth. Steve Kilbey's lyrics seemed to summon up the exact mood:

Like a womb the night was all around
Someone somewhere must have talked some sense
I could feel it moving underground
So many things I still don't understand...

There are a few albums that epitomize those days: Suzanne Vega's first album; the last, self-destructing works of the Roger Waters-driven Pink Floyd; and The Church - anything and everything by The Church. Those were records I must have spun literally thousands of times (my parents were remarkably stoic - I remember my father working at the dining table in industrial ear muffs, but he never said a word). I'd sit in the living room absorbed in every note, studying the lyrics like some sacred Vedic mantra.

"Disappear?" is from the The Church's strange failure of an album, Seance, which came out in 1983. The album cover shows an androgynous figure in lipstick and a white hood, holding some kind of metal flower. It's an image both stark and surreal, a perfect fit for the mood of the album. "Dark and cryptic" is the way Wikipedia describes the consensus opinion of the record. And yet if I was only allowed to hang onto ten albums to listen to for the rest of my life, I'd have to give serious consideration to including Seance among them.

Of course it's hard to separate the nostalgia of association from the merits of the music itself. The second track 'One Day', an anthem of hope clothed in a heavy downbeat, always makes me want to sing along at the top of my voice, and yet when I do, I realise that it has almost no melody - most of the song is sung on a single note. And yet it aches. Could it just be the memory of my own ache, that bittersweet experience of being young and not knowing who you are yet, full of confusion and longing and the mystery of your future? Somehow I think not entirely, for most of the other music from that time has become unlistenable to me. Another record I thrashed to death - Pink Floyd's The Final Cut - now seems so full of anguish and self-pity that listening to it is like having my teeth drilled.

Sadly, Steve Kilbey himself came to disavow Seance as a flop. A friend of mine drunkenly questioned him about that one day after a gig, and Kilbey cut him dead with the arrogance he's well known for. You're a fan, you don't question Steve Kilbey. For all Kilbey's gifts, he's always given the impression of being one of those troubled people who is unable to escape the involuted torments of narcissism. The Church were often accused of pretentiousness, and there was always an edge of affectation that threatened to creep into their songs. To my mind the worst offender was guitarist Marty Wilson-Piper, who always seemed compelled to sing with an annoying Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Alice-Cooper accent. David Bowie did something similar and pulled it off as an act of theatre, but Wilson-Piper is no Bowie.

Affectation is of course the refuge of insecure creatives who seek to cover over their lack of real inspiration with a stylistic gimmick that is always guaranteed to fool a certain number of punters. It can also be an unfortunate habit of gifted artists like Kilbey who seek to compensate for a fundamental self-rejection by constructing for themselves a narcissistic image of their own genius. Affectation is an expression of the way they stand apart from themselves, fascinated by a performance in which they desperately hope to glimpse the image of someone other than themselves. Think Michael Jackson's creepy voice and reconstructed face, affectation as psychopathology.

There was nevertheless always a seed of real creativity underlying The Church's pretentions. Listen to the early single "Too Fast for You". It's a strange, psychedelic song with a truly different edge, even while one can discern distinct echoes of bands like The Cure. You can hear in it the original, exciting voice that would give birth to amazing songs like "Almost With You" - and that would sometimes devolve into a sort of tic, a style expressed in foppish mannerisms, lyrical obscurity and a precious and superior attitude.

It's when Kilbey drops the put-on self and just sings from an honest place that he shines, like in the lovely "Into My Hands" from the Remote Luxury EP, in which he sings joyfully, sadly and without artifice about love: "Some seek sleek and slithering charms/ Out of reach their grasping arms/ Our skin like milk, our breath of words/ Like happy, awful and absurd." And the last verse: "You know it's always out here in my head/ And stupid bloody things get said/ Then drifting on a summer pond/ I notice that my love has gone."

In my story 'Suburban Mystery' published in Meanjin a couple of years ago, I have the main character discovering The Church the way I did:

That summer Ibought my first record, The BlurredCrusade by The Church. As I slipped it out of its sleeve onto the turntable for the firsttime, the light caught a line of handwriting—some impenetrable in-joke—inscribedin the smooth black vinyl inside the last song. That opaque, mystic scribblefascinated me: Steve Kilbey’s last elliptical utterance before the stylusspiralled into the black hole at the centre of the record. ‘Almost with You’was my anthem. Its lush, anguished paisley-poetry made my soul bleed. WhenSteve Kilbey asked Can you taste theirlonely arrogance? I wanted to shout: ‘Yes! Yes! I can!’ I understoodnothing he said, but I could almost not bear the sorrow and longing when he sang,I’m almost with you, I can sense it waitfor me. I’m almost with you. Is this the taste of victory?

I know I'll never experience that kind of enchantment by a record again, however much I may fall in love with a new artist I've discovered. Like first love, it's an experience that can't be repeated. For all his flaws, his "lonely arrogance", I owe Kilbey a huge debt of gratitude for that gift.

The future of the book, and all that

2011-09-24T13:47:00.000+10:00

This is an edited cross-posting of my response to a forum question posed on the literary website Verity La. Alec Patric asks:

A New Archaeology?

When the novel first emerged it was considered trivial entertainment. The literary productions most honoured were to be found in verses and sometimes on stages. As those mediums waned in their traditional states, the art of song writing matured and attracted many of the talents driven by poetry. Cinema rose into a global phenomenon—becoming the major cultural agent for all Western cultures.
We are presently watching the book dwindle into the doddering ineffectuality of old age as print media prepares for retirement. A new medium is already emerging. It is often considered trivial entertainment, just as the novel was in its youth. Will an e-form emerge in the coming generation as the new literary standard? Is the blog already the key artefact for a new archaeology?

There is one really fundamental difference between writing on the net and writing for the pages of a book which relates to the relationship between reader and text. In a sense internet writing always exists as part of a much larger text with which it is constantly forced to compete. This turns readers into skimmers and writers into copywriters. Writing on the net is a constant exercise in attention-seeking, with the text forces to double as its own advertisement.

The novel, on the other hand, is a world-to-itself. It guarantees the author not only the reader’s undivided attention, but a particular kind of rapt attention (or at least guarantees the preparedness to commit such attention). The type of novel – ‘high’ or ‘low’, Ulysses or The Twilight Saga – is irrelevant. Once the reader settles down and opens that first page, making him or herself available to the narrative, a certain intimacy and suspension is established that is simply not present online.The novel reader is implicitly committed, whereas the online reader is implicitly inattentive, restive, a single dull sentence or too-long paragraph away from disappearing altogether. If a novel is a marriage, a blog is a date with a 20-year-old with ADHD who doesn’t like the word ‘boyfriend’.

We tend to impute to literature an intrinsic value, forgetting that it is a kind of conversation between writer and reader. It depends on the quality of the attention that the reader brings to bear on the work. A great novel in a world where people are no longer capable of committing their attention is like the proverbial tree that falls unseen in the forest. Does it make a sound? Where does the artistic value reside? If the novel does truly fade into quaint obsolescence, if all our reading becomes ‘browsing’, I fear we will lose even the capacity to read the hundred-thousand-odd words in a row that a novel requires. And the imaginative, aesthetic and intellectual capacities that the novel exercises in us may atrophy too.

I don’t decry the blog and its value (obviously). But if the blog is ‘the key artefact of a new archaeology’, I pity the archaeologists who will be tasked with its excavation. It will be a job of monumental breadth and infinite shallowness, sifting an endless expanse of digital topsoil to reconstruct a picture of our society mind-numbing in both its detail and its inconsequentiality. The artist’s job has always been to dig deeper, revealing something true and important about being human in a certain time and place. The blog, for all its wonderful attributes, is not a capable instrument for such a task.

Having said that I remain personally optimistic that the paper book and the novel both will continue to have an (admittedly reduced) place in our culture, and I don’t believe that the intimate relation between reader and (paper) book is quite as easy to virtualize as the e-pundits imagine.I do think we are becoming an attention-deficit society, and this spells bad news for literary writers (who, let’s face it, weren’t exactly swimming in milk and honey as it was). But there will always be those determined to put into words important and hard-to-say truths, and others ready and indeed hungry to read those words. If the printed book does die, I don’t doubt human creativity will find ways to bend the available media to its own ends.

The Doomsday Argument - and why climate change will probably kill us

2011-09-02T00:43:00.000+10:00

More philosophy today! Though this time something a little less out there than the Cryogenic Paradox. I discovered this idea in the intellectual meanderings that have followed my Paradox post. It's one of the marvels of the Internet age that one can find hidden corners of the universe where the most strange and exotic flowers of thought blossom and thrive. Today, however, I wanted to talk about an idea that is deceptively simple. Simple, but with conclusions that are quite profound and, to me at least, somehow spine-chilling, awesome and sad.

First let me ask you the question: how long do you think the human race will last? With nuclear weapons, climate change, environmental degradation and our various other self-made threats, there is reason enough for pessimism. On the other hand, it seems with our resourcefulness that we could survive, if not forever, then millions of years. We might populate the stars and all that. It seems odd that simple probabilistic induction could shed light on what seems a complex matter involving innumerable incalculable factors, but it seems that it can. And the answer is not good. In fact the odds are fifty-fifty that half of all the people who will ever be born (the final sum of the human race) have already been born. It's as likely as not that the human race is already half run. Let me explain why.

Imagine that you are walking in a foreign country where you are completely unfamiliar with the animal life, and out of a bush comes a small furry critter the likes of which you've never seen before. Now you have to guess whether or not the creature you are seeing is a rare or a common sight in this country. Logic dictates that your best guess is that it is a common animal, for the simple reason that common events occur more often than rare ones, by definition. In the same way, in the absence of better information, we should always assume that any given phenomenon we observe is more likely to be unexceptional than exceptional. If, for example, we had no information about where our solar system is in the Milky Way, our best guess would be that it lies in the region where the most stars are. If evidence appeared to suggest that it lay somewhere unusual, like right on the very edge or right in the very centre, that would even be reason for us to doubt that evidence or look for reasons why our position might be other than random - because otherwise our placement would simply be an unbelievable fluke.

This is known as the Principle of Indifference - the selection of phenomena we observe is "indifferent", i.e., random. Now let us consider that the human race almost certainly cannot last forever. In that case there is a certain number of people N that represents the total number of humans who will ever exist. This number N does not have to be determined yet. All we need to assume is that the number one day will be determined. Now let us number each human according to his or her birth position from 1 to N. Let's call this "serial number" s. If we select from that list some random person we can calculate quite simply the odds of this number s being in a certain position, and it obvious enough that the person is equally likely to be in the first half as in the second.

You see where this is going? You are that random person - because your birth order in the human chain follows the Indifference Principle. Therefore it is as likely as not that the human race is already half done! And by the same simple logic, it is 90% likely that we are more than 10% of the way through the total number of humans who will ever be.

One objection that at first glance might appears to contradict the Doomsday Argument is that cavemen could have made the same argument as us today, and of course they would have been completely wrong. Of course it is possible to be wrong, because the argument is probabilistic. But on average, if every person who lives makes the Doomsday Argument based on his or her own birth position, they will tend to be right exactly as often as the argument predicts. By selecting a caveman, we are no longer choosing a random person, and thus violating the Indifference Principle.

Some further, very rough calculations sketch out what this suggests. According to the Population Reference Bureau, the total number of people who have ever lived can be guesstimated at around 106 billion. So (assuming this figure) we can be 90% sure that the number of people remaining to be born is less than around a trillion. The maths does start get to get complicated because of birth rates relative to population size, so I'm going to stick with the simplest, ugliest calculation. If the current worldwide birthrate of 163,000,000 a year remained stable (certainly a false assumption), we could be 90% sure of the human race ending in less than about 6000 years. If we went with the 'best guess' (in which we could admittedly have only a very low level of confidence) and assumed that the human race is half finished already, then that would be cut to about 600 years.

But of course, the population and birth rate will not remain steady. The US census projects world population growing to around nine billion by 2050. Most likely it will continue to grow in this exponential fashion until the earth's capacity constraints cause it to plateau and/or collapse. This large and ever increasing population brings our projected doomsday a lot closer. Even if 90% of humans remain to be born, we can't expect to last anywhere near another 500,000 years - the length of time we could expect if history continued for ten times as long as it has so far. Only if we manage to achieve a far smaller overall population and maintain that level (or if some small tribe of survivors continues after the apocalypse, but fails to repopulate the globe) can we expect a future longer than, say, 100,000 years.

One perhaps startling result is if we look at the other possibility - that we are right at the end of the line. Given the large living population - about 6% of the total of all humans - there would seem to be a roughly 6% chance that doomsday could occur within our lifetimes! However, we should recall that this argument is based on a situation where we lack any better information. Such a catastrophically sudden end seems a lot less likely than 6% (around 1 in 18) given what we see of the world.

Indeed what is hard to see is how our complete extinction comes about. Given our resourcefulness, it would appear likely that we would be able to recover from most catastrophes. A collapse in human population would create the possibility of environmental recovery, which in turn would support the regeneration of the human race. A drastic scenario such as an asteroid collision might explain extinction. However an asteroid collision would be an exceptional event, and our argument is founded on the idea that such exceptions shouldn't be expected.

There is however one scenario that could lead to extinction, and that is climate change. If scientific projections are correct, and any of the worse scenarios eventuate, environmental damage may be so severe that the survival of any stragglers left after the great collapse might be living in an environment so hostile that recovery is impossible. And these effects are projected to occur and worsen over the next several centuries - right in the timeframe that would place me and you at a plausibly 'average' point in the human trajectory.

And people are worrying about their electricity bills going up under a carbon tax!

Whatever occurs, one thing is for sure, and that is that we - not only as individuals but as a race - are mortal. We must pass from this earth, and sooner than we have dreamed. There is something about seeing this inevitability that for me inspires a strange chill - of sadness but of beauty too. I think of our great story as a passing moment, and I think of the silence, the wind, the trees that come after, and I feel a kind of peace.

Perhaps there is a chance for us however. That chance is transformation. Humans may well be halfway to over, but by this same logic animals probably still have a long and rosy future. If we can change, evolve by selection or engineering into some new kind of beast or animal angel, perhaps we can yet find a way to escape the cruel logic of the Doomsday Argument.

2011-08-25T12:20:00.000+10:00

Dream strangely of Beatles songs, as I sometimes do. John Lennon, "In My Life":

There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

And this is just achingly beautiful and sad, the very essence of that lovely melody, those words, seeming to break open inside me. It can sometimes be that way with music in dreams, some divine sweetness revealing itself in the heart of a well-known tune, a song worn out with use or that you never really listened to properly before. I've had it once with Brian Wilson's "God Only Knows", interestingly the song that Paul McCartney once called the greatest song ever written. And with "Eleanor Rigby" (Can you not imagine how this song came to be: Paul McCartney reading the name on a dilapidated tombstone: Eleanor Rigby, 1810-1864. Ah, look at all the lonely people. Do we not all know this precise feeling?). Perhaps in the dream some deep obscure emotion rises to the surface and, seeking perfect expression, finds the song that gives voice to it. And you sing it, and the song is your soul...

The bus (I'm on a bus, some strange landscape) drives along a shore where the waves rise to form standing hills of water that do not break. I'm singing - In my life I love you more - and thinking that time buries our hearts - in disappointment, in bitter experience, in the dullness of familiarity - and that only innocence makes it possible to sing with a certain freedom, the freedom of heart that is youth, the clarity and the foolishness we can't wish back. But still I can sing: In my life I love you more.

Then I'm a navy seal, sneaking aboard a ship to silently kill its sleeping occupants. And there are children sleeping - should they die too, in case they wake and cry? And a dog, guard dog I suppose. It is warm and I hold it in my lap and it waits to see what is coming and I push the knife in, feeling the way down the bone. Somehow the sadness is only apparent after I wake.

Shock

2011-07-29T11:07:00.004+10:00

This story was published in Kill Your Darlings Issue Two

Smithy meets the girl at the pub one Friday night, when his workmates have all gone home, and he’s the only one left at the bar, watching the foam slide down the inside of his glass. She comes to stand beside him and he feels her eyes on him. Her blackness is shocking and out of place in this white man’s pub; a different kind of blackness from that of the aborigines who occasionally slouch along the bar. Skin like polished night, against which the hot pink of her top looks bright as candy, her breasts provocatively emphasised. When he makes eye contact, she offers him a hesitant but warm smile.

‘Danny?’ She gives the name an American twang.

Wow, he thinks, a real – what do they call themselves now? – African-American, just like on TV. And so beautiful, so young. But who the hell is Danny? One thing is for sure, it’s not him. When was the last time anybody smiled at him like that, so hopefully and openly, as if he contained so many possibilities? He thinks he’d give just about anything to be this Danny character, the one that smile is meant for. Then, almost as soon as that thought occurs to him, it is chased by another, darker idea, and before he has time to think twice, before the faltering smile has a chance to leave her face completely, he turns on his own most charming smile, full of all the sincerity he can muster.

‘Hi. Yeah, that’s me. How are you?’

The doubt evaporates from her face and the wavering smile returns to take full possession of her features. She reveals brilliant white teeth, and inside her cushiony lips, a line of pink like the inside of a conch.

‘Hi! I’m Carla.’ She reaches out her hand with a charming awkwardness. Her palm is smooth and dry to the touch, pale as if it had been sanded back.

‘Of course,’ he says.

‘It’s so great to meet you!’ She settles on the stool beside him and plonks her handbag on the bar. ‘I wasn’t sure if it was you for a moment—that was such a bad photo you sent.’

‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ Smithy smiles, and signals at the barman. ‘Can I get you something?’

‘Sure. A G&T?’

The barman mixes the drink, and Smithy pushes a tenner over the counter.

‘So. How’ve you been?’

‘OK – oh you know, bored as ever! You were right — I should never have taken that house so far away from the city. It’s such a hole!’ she laughs. Despite her friendliness, he detects an edge of nerves in the way she latches onto her drink, her slightly gabbling speech.

She launches into a diatribe against the suburb, the house she lives in, the stares she endures buying groceries at the local supermarket—‘like they never saw a black person before! It’s so rude!’—and he thanks his lucky stars she gets talkative when anxious rather than clamming up. He’s quickly able to fill in that she’s a student, studying microbiology or something, here only until the end of the year before she has to go back to the States. She only flew in a month ago. She’s staying in a student flop way out in the northern suburbs with a couple of other international students. They live on a main road near an intersection, and each night she hears the diesel trucks lurch away from the lights, shift gears like they’re gulping for air, and roar past her window. It took a week before she could get any sleep. Every time she started to drift off, she’d be jolted awake by the vivid hallucination that they were headed right at her, that her bed had somehow been displaced into the middle of the road.

‘And you?’ she asks him. ‘How are you? How are the kids treating you?’

Kids? For a moment his mind spins in neutral as he tries to compose a response sufficiently vague to cover all possibilities.

‘Oh, the same, you know,’ he says, smiling indulgently as if to say kids will be kids!

‘I don’t know how you put up with them. I could never be a teacher.’

He shrugs philosophically. ‘Oh well, it’s a job.’

‘Come on, you love it!’

‘I guess... yeah, you’re right. I do. ’ He forces a smile that he hopes looks suitably modest.

A little while later she goes to the toilet and leaves her handbag on the bar. As soon as she’s out of sight he opens it and fishes around amongst her belongings until he finds her mobile. He quickly flicks through her most recent texts until he finds one with the name ‘Danny’.

Hey Carla. Looking 4wd 2 it. Will b gr8 2 meet u at last.

He thumbs ‘reply’ and taps in a short message, his heart pounding:

Sorry, not coming 2nite. Really sorry, i met someone. Pls dont contact me again. C.

He hits ‘send’, then goes to her sent items and deletes the record of the message. It all takes less than a minute, and he’s sipping his beer casually when she returns, the phone safely tucked away again. Now he just has to hope this Danny character is man enough to take it and not send some abusive or pleading reply.

‘Well?’ she says when she gets back. ‘Shall we get some dinner then?’

Smithy’s grin broadens. ‘I thought you’d never ask. I’m hungry as a wolf.’

And Smithy is hungry. Smithy is ravenous. Because two years ago—can it really be two years?—his wife left him, and he hasn’t had a woman since. Not a kiss even, barely a glance, when once they couldn’t get enough of him. What? Does his loneliness stink? He gave Melissa ten years, the better part of his youth, and then she left him while he was away on a day-trip to the Gold Coast for business. He came back and the house was a shell, doors banging open, that was how fast she’d run, and even the furniture gone. Nothing, just his clothes on the rack, the CDs of his she’d hated. Kids’ rooms empty. In the kitchen on the floor he found a butter knife with a bent-tipped blade that she must have dropped when she was packing, in the bedroom a bra, and in one room the wooden bee on a string that his boy used to drag about when he was two. With the wings that spun and went clacketty clack.

Those three things she left by mistake haunted him. In the end he was convinced there was no mistake after all. He was sure she planned each one as carefully as the escape itself. Either she plotted it or God did, not that he believed in God. The bee, that was for the kids of course. The cruellest sting. And what could you do about it? Throw it out? How could you? Smash it? No, you sat on the floor and you drank and you pulled the string, over and over, and the wings turned and went clacketty clack. Then the bra. Well figure that one out, Einstein. No prizes. It smelled clean, like a bed freshly made before you roll in it. No trace of her scent on it, just the empty cups, the what-do-you-call, negative space.

And then the knife. That was a good one. That was the punch line. Stick it in and twist. He’d hold it in the venetian striped streetlight shine in the long pissed hours, turning the blade to catch the flash of neon strip and laugh. Thumb the blunt serration where the tip bent from someone’s long-ago effort to prise open a jar of pickles and think, I gotta hand it to you. God damn butter knife. She might have left something sharper.

Two years later he was working again, back in a retail salesroom selling cameras. He’d moved out of the old house into a one bedroom shoebox, gone back to the gym, even signed up on an internet dating site. But the only women who showed any interest in him were old and used up, and had their own stink of desperation. The worst time was three a.m. That was when he’d have the dream, of rooms beyond rooms beyond rooms, and every one of them empty. He’d wake and in that low-tide of the soul the reefs of his pain — rage and hunger and despair — would stand out bare and jagged and completely unchanged from the last time. The immutable bedrock of his life.

Now they’re sitting on cushions in the plush warmth of a Thai restaurant and Carla has ordered herself Pad Phuk or something, and when he’s talking about how much he loves helping the kids at school, helping them get a better start in life, she reaches out and touches his hand. It looks so white next to hers, garish and old, the hand of a corpse, and he wonders she can bear to touch it.

‘You’re a good man, Danny,’ she says. ‘That is a rare thing.’

‘No I’m not,’ he says, but she shakes her head.

‘No you are,’ she insists. ‘I could tell that from your emails, the kindness in them. You’re gentle and you’re wise. You’re different.’

And what can Smithy say to that?

He finds himself putting up his hand to order a bottle of wine, against his better judgment, which tells him he’ll need his wits about him if he’s going to pull off this delicate deception. He thinks maybe he catches a surprised look from Carla, though she doesn’t say anything. Who know, maybe in his emails he said he was a teetotaller. He notices a dangerous stab of recklessness, an urge to shock her with some outrageously cynical remark. That acid tongue, that edge of danger was always part of his attractiveness to women when he was younger. Danny — this cheesy-postcard, kiddie-loving SNAG who probably believes in yoga and fairies and the manifesting power of crystals — is such a badly fitting garb. The sudden image of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood makes him grin. What big teeth you have Danny. He can feel his old savage loquacity gurgling in the rusted pipe of his throat, and all he’d need to do is turn the tap. Then he looks at the smooth dark swell of Carla’s cleavage. Easy does it, big guy. He fills her wine glass close to the brim and smiles.

She lifts the glass, holds it out in the air in front of her and he brings his own to meet it, a slightly too solid clink that threatens to upset the finely balanced liquid.

‘To... what?’ he says, allowing just a hint of suggestiveness to slide into the gaze which meets hers.

‘To new friends?’

The word ‘friends’ doesn’t please him, but he nods and takes a gulp. ‘Sure. To new friends.’

Carla sips, regarding him over the edge of her glass.

‘You’re different to how I thought.’

Smithy keeps his voice light. ‘How so?’

‘Just different. Older for starters. How old are you?’

He spontaneously rounds down by a few years. ‘Thirty-five. Does it bother you?’

‘No. I don’t believe in age. Everything you said in your emails I could so totally relate to, you know? I made a decision before I even met you that you were...’ she stops, embarrassed.

‘What?’

Her eyes drop bashfully. ‘I don’t know. Right. For me.’

Smithy fancies he can see the blush, even through her black skin. He leans forward over his hardening cock. ‘That’s so weird!’ he says. ‘So did I!’

‘Really?’ She looks up, her eyes shining, her wine-wet lips stretching away from the neat, pretty rows of her teeth.

‘Absolutely. I knew you were it.’

He watches her struggle to moderate her smile, to reshape its childish excitement into something composed and womanly. How old is she anyway? Surely no older than twenty-two, twenty-three. Yet there is an even younger quality about her, something unformed and naive, and Smithy feels an unwelcome flicker of letdown, as if maybe this is all too easy.

Later he is driving her along the freeway, out into unfamiliar suburbs, the pedestrian bridges above the road adorned with advertisements for airlines and credit cards. It’s late and the suburbs look abandoned apart from the trucks, the all night servos, a MacDonald’s, empty too but illuminated like a surreal doll’s house in a parody of the welcome of home. A cloned piece of America planted out here next to the highway.

There’s somewhere she wants to show him, she says. To his annoyance, she won’t tell him what it is — a surprise, she reckons. They drive further, into the ugly desolation beyond the suburbs.

‘Here — see that little turn-off just ahead?’

It’s just a break in the fence that borders the road, only some muddy tyre tracks spreading onto the tarmac indicating there is a turn-off there at all. The headlights spill onto gravel, mud, tufts of stubble. He pulls up, and the lights beam sightlessly into nothingness: a chain-link fence then an abyss of darkness.

‘What’s this about?’

‘You’ll see. Come on.’ She gets out of the car.

Smithy cuts the engine and gets out after her. It’s cold enough he can see his breath. Stars too, despite the dirty smear of light from the city, the rim of flickering suburbs. Surely she didn’t bring him here for this pitiful handful of stars?

‘Carla. What are we doing?’

‘Just be patient.’

‘It’s cold. There’s nothing here.’

‘Just wait, Danny.’

He stifles a pulse of impatience that surges suddenly through his limbs, keeps the smile edgily on his face.

‘OK. You’re the boss.’

He moves towards her darkened silhouette, wraps his arms around her from behind. Her frizzy curls prickle against his chin like steel wool.

Ahead in the sky, a point of light low on the horizon that he’d taken for Venus is brightening, growing. It’s an aeroplane — he can now see the lights flashing along its wings. At first he watches it idly, then it dawns on him that it’s headed right at them, moving neither up nor down in his field of vision, but growing larger and brighter by the second. It looms exponentially, becomes a jumbo jet, coming in so close and low that for an irrational moment he thinks it’s going to crash right into them. He yelps and lets go of Carla, putting up his hands in a helpless gesture of self-protection as it bears down like a gigantic bird of prey, wheels extending like claws ready to catch him... Then it’s thundering overhead, so close he can see the rivets in its belly, smell the kerosene. The engine roar shakes his teeth. And a moment later it’s gone over the chain-link fence, bouncing onto the runway a half kilometre downwind.

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘See?’ says Carla, excited as a five year old. ‘Isn’t that amazing? Wasn’t that worth it?’

She insists they wait for another one. They sit in the car and Smithy, still worked up, grabs a small bottle of spirits he keeps in the glove compartment. Carla’s profile is outlined faintly by the city lights. Her skin swallows the light, only her eyes shining pale.

Smithy swigs, welcoming the fortifying trickle of fire into his belly.

‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ she says quietly.

‘What?’

‘Drink like that.’

Smithy keeps that smile pinned tightly to his face. ‘Why? I’m not drunk.’

‘I know, Danny. It’s probably just me. I didn’t tell you about my Dad did I?’

Smithy shakes his head, casually screwing the lid back on the bottle, even though he’d dearly like another swig.

‘He’s an alcoholic, a gambling addict. He was violent towards my mom, but when I was young he didn’t use to touch me. Then after Mom died I guess I was next in line. That was the main reason I worked so hard to get into college — just to get away from him.’

She starts to say something else, but just then another plane comes down over the car, obliterating her words. It slides down the windshield and he thinks of 9-11, the knife in America’s fat white belly.

‘How did your mother die?’ he asks, to change the subject. The question seemed safe enough, but she jerks like he’s prodded her with a brand.

‘What?’

‘Sorry, I...’

‘I told you, Danny! Breast cancer. Don’t you remember? How the priest at my church tried to heal her? I told you all about it! That was why I lost my faith in God. I can’t believe you don’t remember that! And what you said made so much sense!’

To Smithy’s horror she starts to cry, and Smithy tries not to panic. He was doing so well, and now two fuck-ups in quick succession are threatening to shatter the whole crystal palace of her illusions. He puts his hand soothingly on her thigh.

‘Of course I remember. And I meant what I said, OK? Do you remember what I said?’

She nods, choking on her sobs. ‘About how our beliefs are like skins that we shed when we’re ready...’

‘Yes...’

She twines her fingers so tightly with his that it hurts. ‘And even if we feel naked, that’s just because we’re not used to the new skin.’

‘Uh huh, that’s right. You see? I remember.’

It’s too dark to read her expression, but her eyes are wide and intense, searchlights scouring the darkness of his face for the gentle man she hopes he is.

‘It’s getting late, I’m tired. I wasn’t thinking,’ he soothes. ‘Come on. Let me take you home.’

At her place he pulls up into a steep, cracked concrete driveway, jerking up the handbrake to hold the car on the incline. They sit awkwardly in silence, bathed in the cold light of the streetlights while the traffic swishes past on the road behind them. Smithy leans across the seat to kiss her, and the feel of her heavy lips is unfamiliar and somehow disturbing, the taste of her mouth different too. He puts his hands under her top. Her skin is oily and young and springy like rubber. He feels like he is bouncing off her, like there is another layer of clothing on her he can’t get under. He presses a hand into the crotch of her jeans, trying to feel her flesh through the hard material, and they writhe together, colliding and refracting and shocked by the contact of their skins and the confrontation of such intimacy between strangers. Smithy fumbles with her bra strap, tries to reach her nipples.

She breaks away. ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘Wait. Can we go inside?’

He follows her up the steps to the house. She switches on the light in the living room, the jaundiced illumination of a low-watt bulb revealing a boxy old Sanyo TV in the corner, a dilapidated couch across which someone has cast a cheap imitation-batik print. Someone’s takeaway containers on the floor. She takes his hand and leads him to her bedroom. It is small and airless. In the corner her bed: a thin single mattress on the floor, the bedclothes still tangled. Against the wall there’s a small vanity on which she has arranged her beauty things: hairbrush, cosmetics, a few bits of jewellery. She hastily snatches up a tampon wrapper from the floor, a bus ticket, an empty chewing gum packet. She sits nervously on the mattress and Smithy sits next to her.

‘There’s something you should know. I told you I wasn’t very experienced, right?’

‘That’s OK.’

‘No, but I mean, I’m... I haven’t...’

Smithy stares at her.

‘This is the first time, Danny.’ The words come in a rush. ‘I should have told you, I’m sorry, I know. But I want to. At least I think I do. It’s just... I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. Or do...’

Smithy and his mates used to boast about laying virgins. The sly smirk: Raised the Japanese flag on the weekend, mate. No bullshit. It was bullshit though. Of course it was. Now it’s happening for real, but he doesn’t feel like he thought he would. Still, she said she wants to.

He puts his hand on her leg and tries to slide it between her thighs like a letter-opener. ‘It’s easy,’ he says. ‘Just relax and I’ll show you what to do.’ But she keeps her legs scissored together.

‘The church I used to be in was very strict about sex, very big on hell and sin and all that. And even though I don’t believe it any more, I still get their voices in my head, you know?’

‘You hear voices?’

‘No, no, nothing crazy or anything. Just the voices of the preacher or my mom or whoever. Voices of the church.’

‘Saying what?’

She looks down, embarrassed.

‘Saying what?’

‘“The fornicators will burn in hell.” That type of thing. I know, it sounds mediaeval doesn’t it? But I can’t help it. I’m brainwashed.’

‘Relax Carla. You’ll be fine.’ He caresses her cheek. ‘You trust me don’t you?’

She looks at him, and Smithy sees that close up she’s not as pretty as he thought. Her skin is coarse with the pores of a recent adolescence, her cheeks a little puffy. ‘I think so,’ she says.

‘You think so?’

She’s about to answer when there’s a buzzing in her handbag. She reaches for it.

‘Don’t!’ Smithy yelps. It comes out loud, much too harsh.

She stops, looking at him quizzically.

‘Just don’t. Not now.’

‘OK...’ She puts the bag back down again carefully, looks at him. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Just lie down,’ he says.

She does, stiffly, on her back like a toy soldier someone knocked over. Smithy gets up and goes back to switch off the light. Now it’s pitch black except for a faint glow through the gauzy curtains that illuminates nothing. The girl breathes in the dark, and Smithy goes to her, lays down beside her. He can smell her sweat. There’s not enough room, and he’s half on the carpet. He puts out his hand and feels her there, the tight rise and fall of her belly.

‘Danny?’ Her voice is little and frightened, and he knows he should stop, but as his hand moves over her warm, yielding skin, he finds he can’t any more. He has her now, under his fingers: her breasts, her thighs, her neck beneath his fervid lips, her blackness in the blackness like a double negation, like an absence made flesh, and he’s full of a great, morbid longing. He’s swollen, aching, bursting with it. He finds the edge of her jeans, pops the button. The zip parts like a ripping fruit, and he slides his hand in deep, all the way to the pulp. He’s devouring that incarnate darkness like a fire, and words — dirty, reckless words — are coming up that rusty pipe now whether he likes it or not, but he doesn’t care. He’s going to gush it all into her. At last, at last.

Then she seizes his wrist. ‘Stop! Stop! Wait.’

‘What? What is it?’

Smithy’s heart pounds in the silence like a bass amp below the threshold of hearing. And then she says: ‘I want to pick up that message.’

A cold rush of fear: she suspects. Both their bodies are frozen in position, poised in an electric stillness like two wild animals that have stumbled upon one another, in the moment before predator or prey explodes into action.

He tries to pull himself back to a place of control, to make his voice nice. ‘Come on Carla. Not now. I want to be with you.’ He fumbles again between her legs, trying to arouse her.

‘No! I want to see who it’s from.’ She wrenches his hand from her pants, twists her body away.

‘No Carla!’ He tries to grab hold of her in the dark, manages to get his arms around her legs as she hauls herself to her feet.

‘Let go of me!’ she pushes him and he stumbles, disoriented in the alcoholic dark, falling forward and cracking his face hard against the edge of her dressing table. A stunned numbness and pain and a gush of warmth down his lip. The slick, rusty tang of blood. He clutches his face. ‘Oh fuck! Oh Jesus! I think I’ve broken my nose!’

Carla’s already across the room. She hits the light. Smithy is crouched on the floor holding his face, the blood running between the webs of his fingers. But she doesn’t care. She has her phone out, she’s looking at the screen. When she looks up again, her eyes are wide.

‘Who... who...’ she stammers, ‘Who are you?’

Smithy stumbles to his feet. He comes towards her and she shrinks from him. In her eyes naked fear. And disgust, horror, revulsion. Her face is curdled and twisted with it.

‘Greg,’ he says flatly, through the bloody mess of his nose. ‘Greg Smith.’

Her eyes are wild with incomprehension. ‘But, but ... who’s that?’

He gives a mirthless snort. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nobody. Don’t worry about it.’

The front door is open, and the sound of the trucks comes through clear with the chilling air, and for just a moment Smithy is sure it’s a dream: the staring girl and the taste of shock and the great whispering indifference of the city. He’s standing in the same desolate dream that he’s lived again and again, and he has the strangest sensation that something important comes next, that everything is stacked to collapse in some portentous way. The girl’s lips are moving and starting to form words, and Smithy thinks maybe this is it — maybe she’s going to tell me. Then he blinks and it’s gone, and the girl is screaming and shrieking, like a wild thing, a crazy person, and nothing she’s saying makes any sense at all.

The Cryogenic Paradox

2011-06-20T16:17:00.010+10:00

The paradox I’m about to explain is one that has been literally keeping me awake at night of late. This was never intended to be a philosophy blog, but then it was never intended to be a travel blog originally either, so I’m giving up on defining what the hell my blog is about and just going with it. If difficult philosophical problems aren’t your thing, you are hereby excused. If , on the other hand, you’re game for a genuine mind-bender, read on. A warning in advance though. The stuff I’m dealing with here lies in that tricky territory of the extremely-difficult-to-talk-about-in-ordinary-language, and I’ve discovered through trying to talk friends through the problem, that the whole paradox just eludes some people, like a sort of colour-blindness. I’m reminded of the Simpson’s episode where Lisa asks Bart whether a tree that falls in the forest when no-one is there to hear it makes a sound, and Bart replies in a snap: “That’s easy! Yes!” I insist that if this doesn’t bend your mind, if the answer seems “easy”, then you’re Bart. But we could argue that one forever... Anyway, to proceed...

The so-called ‘problem of consciousness’ is one that has fascinated and preoccupied me since I was young. As a child I always felt there was something deeply problematic about the division between sentient and insentient matter. How does a brain - an assemblage of mindless atoms - become, merely through the complexity of its assembly, aware? I felt there had to be a missing ingredient, and when I was about sixteen I decided that all matter had to have some form of rudimentary consciousness, which the brain merely marshalled into the patterns and arrangements we know as thought. Otherwise, how does the brain bridge this magic gap? I simply couldn’t accept the ‘epiphenomenon’ position - that consciousness is a secondary, irrelevant froth arising as a side-effect in the brain. Surely that position puts the cart before the horse in the most egregious fashion. Likewise the ‘emergent properties’ argument, which argues that in complex systems ‘higher order’ properties may arise that transcend the properties of the parts. I can accept that the whole may have different properties from the parts, for example a bunch of heart cells takes on the emergent property of being able to pump blood when organised as a whole organ. But this type of emergent property is of an entirely different order from consciousness, which seems to involve a leap into something that is not in any way implied in the properties of the parts. Pumping blood can be seen to be a natural outcome of the arrangement of physical components with normal physical properties, such as elasticity, shape and so on - the raw elements of ‘pumping’ can be seen to be there - but awareness does not seem to be implied in the properties of the parts at all.

The paradox I’m about to elaborate deals is related to this problem, and I think gets to the crux of the issue. Before I launch into the paradox itself, however, I need to make some preliminary remarks to head off a critical misunderstanding. When I studied philosophy 101 many years ago, we were presented with a so-called problem involving two ships - let’s call one the Pierz and the other the Pedro. Gradually, planks are removed from the hull of the Pierz and attached to the Pedro and vice versa. The question is, at what point does the Pierz turn into the Pedro and the other way round? The answer of course is who gives a damn? It’s all pure semantics, a matter of how you choose to define your terms. The Cryogenic Paradox, and the related thought experiments I’m about to explain, on the surface may seem to resemble a ‘dilemma’ of this sort. However, for reasons I hope to make clear, to reduce the problem to semantics is to miss the point entirely.

OK, so here’s the Cryogenic Paradox in a nutshell. You may be aware that there were once - perhaps there still are - companies that offered people a service whereby, for a handsome sum, their bodies after death would be preserved in perpetuity in liquid nitrogen in the hope that at one time in the future, science would be able to resurrect them. Disregarding scandals whereby paying customers were found to have been allowed to defrost rather disgustingly in their time capsules, let us imagine that one day, such a resurrection becomes possible, and these people are brought back. The question is: is the consciousness of the reawakened person the same consciousness as that of the person before they died? By the same consciousness, I mean are the new experiences happening to the same locus of awareness? The question seems almost banal at first glance. The frozen brain can be likened to a computer that has been powered down for a century and has now been rebooted. Of course it must be the same consciousness, right? Certainly if the resuscitation technology is good enough, and the person has all their former memories, they will believe themselves to be this person and will be delighted that their investment has paid off. I have to agree that it seems untenable to assert that this is a new person who merely has your old memories and personality wired in. What would such an assertion even mean?

To start to get at why there is a paradox here, consider four people (excuse my toilet door characters):

I can define a bunch of properties for these people. John is tall. Jenny is a social worker. Pierz likes to swing dance. Luke is a movie buff. Etcetera. These are objective properties. You could also define subjective properties relating to their identity - John considers himself a bit of a bad boy, Jenny remembers holidays at the beach, and so on. But Pierz, for me, has one special property. He is me. He has the unique (for me) property of being the locus of my subjective awareness. This does not make Pierz objectively unique, since everybody on the list is also me for somebody (themselves), but it does make Pierz unique for me, and in a most compelling way! All the others on the list are different and have the property of being ‘not me’.

Now to get at the significance of this me-ness and its difference from any question of identity, let us imagine that tomorrow I have a car accident and suffer a terrible brain injury that wipes out all my memories and causes a personality change for the desperately worse. I commit some horrible crimes and am sent to prison. Now the person who will commit these crimes is not really me, in an identity sense. They don’t have my personality, they don’t have my memories, they never recalling having been this Pierz character at all. It’s as if all the planks on the good ship Pierz had been removed and replaced with nasty Pedro planks. And yet if I’m told about this future, I will still be afraid of those prison experiences that lie in wait, because this new Pedro-Pierz will still have that mysterious property of somehow being me. Or at least we presume he will. We presume that, because the brain and body are continuous with the pre-damaged brain and body, the ‘being-me-ness’ is not going to change.

Now let’s return to the Cryogenic Paradox. Because the brain is the same brain, and the memories are preserved, the customer who buys his place in the cryogenic freezer assumes that the person who wakes up in a brave new world will also have this same quality of ‘being him’ and not ‘being somebody else’. But what if he’s wrong? Isn’t it possible to imagine all the aspects of your identity transplanted into some new body that is in all ways identical to you but that somehow is missing that crucial property of happening to ‘be me’. Mightn’t you, in spending a lot of money on your frozen future, be buying a life for someone who will have your memories, your identity, but sadly be lacking that final magic ingredient which is required to make this a bona fide resurrection - the property of happening to be the locus of your subjective awareness?

If you’re still stuck on the idea that the memories and so on of your former existence guarantee the same subjectivity, let’s vary the thought experiment and imagine that the procedure was imperfectly carried out and you lost your memories in the reanimation process (using ‘you’ as a pronoun of convenience here!). Your whole brain is wiped terrifyingly blank and you’re reduced to the tabula rasa of a newborn baby. If you knew before being frozen that this was going to happen to you, would you be afraid? Or would you dismiss it as easily as you might dismiss such a misfortune in a stranger - someone who happens not to possess that unique attribute of ‘being you’? I think you’d probably be scared at least of the possibility that you might have to be the one to go through this horrible erasure.

This is because of the brain, the physical organ, being the same. But is the brain the carrier of the connection between this body, this awareness, and the fact of it’s also being your awareness in particular? You’d think it has to. And yet how can the brain, as a frozen chunk of ice and protein with no activity, preserve the continuity of this ‘being-you-ness’ apart from via your memories? Where on earth does this fucking being-you-ness reside for chrissakes anyway? How does my I-ness continue to ‘stick’ to a dead brain? Surely it can’t.

A related paradox is what I’ll call the Duplication Paradox. In this, a complete map of your brain is copied into a computer and then all the neural networks are painstakingly reconstructed long after your death in a new human. Again, this person believes that they are you, because they remember your family holidays, remember your friends, your life, your decision to undergo the brain copying procedure. But does this duplicated person really have the quality of ‘being you’, or are they just some other person in the future with your memories? If you know some horrid fate is in store for them, will you be afraid?

It’s hard to see how you can say that this person isn’t you, from an identity sense, since identity is only information, and they have all the information that comprises your identity. But are they you in the vital other sense? Imagine the duplication occurs again, so there are now two yous. Surely both can’t simultaneously possess the quality of ‘being you’ can they?

Note that if we ignore the whole issue of ‘being you’, there is no paradox here above the jejune level of the ship dilemma. Without this mysterious property of you-ness, you can simply dismiss the problem as a question of semantics. Who cares whether it’s ‘really’ the same person? Like the two ships Pierz and Pedro, the question of whether the copied consciousness is ‘really’ the same person can be dismissed as a matter of mere definitions. But if it’s you being frozen or duplicated, then the question becomes vitally concerning: what am I going to experience in the future?

But let’s try and define what we really mean here by saying that this person (Pierz) has the property of being me and this person (John) doesn’t. Obviously, if I imagine myself into John’s consciousness, I will find that he has the property of ‘being me’ too, once ‘I’ am inside him, so to speak! So once I stop viewing people objectively, but start viewing them from inside, from their own viewpoints, then I discover that, lo and behold, all of them are ‘me’. I can’t, once I (some meta-I that is capable of flying between heads) experience their viewpoint, actually distinguish between their ‘being me-ness’ and my ‘being-me-ness’. To determine if the amnesic subject post cryogenic resuscitation is ‘really me’, I would need to identify some marker, some point of difference between various subjects’ experiences of being a subject. Not differences in identity or quality of consciousness - these are easy to find - but differences in the essential quality of being a me (language here is a completely inadequate tool). But there is no such marker and can be no such marker. Whatever differences exist between the experience of being Pierz and the experience of being John belong to the contents of consciousness, belong to the identity, and not to the attribute of ‘being me’, which has no other qualities than exactly that.

To illustrate further, let us return to the accident scenario, where I lose my memories and my personality changes radically. Now before this happens, as I sit and imagine this future person, much as I might sit and imagine the future duplicated self, or the unfrozen self, I am trying to determine if their me-ness is the same as my me-ness. Are ‘we’ a continuous self, or is this some other person, whose experiences I therefore won’t have to go through. But if I imagine myself into his ‘me’ (and I know he will have a ‘me’), although I can see that his identity, his thoughts and memories have little in common with mine, there is no way, even in principle, to determine if this me-ness is continuous with, or the same as, mine.

In fact, whatever head I imagine myself inside, I can never determine if it is the same or a different me, self or other, and so the question of who the defrosted person is, me or somebody else, appears absurd, unanswerable, meaningless or unknowable. What the above considerations amount to is a reductio ad absurdum of the whole notion of I-ness, or of individual ‘I’s. And at the same time, our very real fear of death, our very real awareness that we have a future self, different to other selves that aren’t us, tells us we can’t simply dismiss I-ness. Nothing is more palpably real - I think therefore I am. Indeed reality can’t be imagined without a subject, and quantum physics tells us that the universe can’t even decide its state without one, but remains suspended between all the possible states it might be in.

All this relates vitally to the whole notion of personal death - or rather, of annihilation. Death we can define as the body or the brain’s death. Annihilation is the death of the subject. Annihilation or becoming-nothing is what we really fear, much more than physical death or death of the identity. We could cope with losing our ‘selves’, our identities, if we knew our deeper ‘I’ would continue, as in, say, reincarnation. Annihilation is what we are generally promised by science and the physical model of consciousness. Brain death = subject death, end of story. But for the notion of annihilation to make any sense, there has to be a subject, over and above the identity. You clearly can’t annihilate something that does not exist. And yet the Cryogenic Paradox reveals how deeply problematic such a subject is.

So what’s the solution?

Obviously if I knew, and could prove it in some kind of undeniable formalism like a maths proof, I’d have solved what is probably the deepest philosophical conundrum there is. But I’m going to look at some possible approaches, and put forward a solution that I’ll admit is speculative, and sounds radical, but to me is the most elegant and appealing.

First of all, there’s a possible philosophical objection that needs to be addressed. When we make statements about the properties of things, including people, we are making assertions about so-called ‘objective facts’. Even if such facts are relative, such as an object’s colour (in what light? etc) or when an event occurs (it depends on the observer’s motion, as we know from relativity), we can still relate these facts back to a single universal framework. We can resolve the relativity, and in fact have to, if the statement is to be meaningful. The problem is that I-ness is not such a property. As we have noted, objectively, everyone has a sense of I-ness, everyone is both a me and a not-me. So when we try to establish whether this property of I-ness holds for some particular subject other than the person we know to be ourselves, we are trying to apply a subjective category in an objective way. Therefore, like asking what was going on one minute before the Big Bang, the question is unanswerable because its premises are false.

This is probably the ‘philosophically correct’ rebuttal of the paradox, allowing philosophers to sleep again at night, at least until they get to thinking about their own death. I accept that the Cryogenic Paradox is based on a confusion of subjective and objective statements. However, this does not neutralize the potency of the problem, because we are still frightened by death, we still believe in annihilation, and the objective meaningless of self does nothing to assuage this. We are still left with an unbridgeable gulf in our paradigm between subject and object. Indeed, this so-called resolution merely hides the problem inside the problematic assumptions of objective logic. Of course the problem makes no sense objectively, but precisely that is the problem itself. What this rebuttal effectively says is that there’s no way to resolve the problem of the subject, so stop worrying about it.

In fact, we know from science that objective logic is flawed. Physicists have had to formulate a new logic to take into account quantum physics, with its intimate implication of the observer, because it turns out that the paradoxes of quantum physics can’t be resolved by objective logic — rather it’s objective logic that has to give way to quantum physics.

The classic example is the paradox that Einstein choked on. This article is already way too long for a blog post, so I’m going to summarize this in the most brutal way, and leave you to wiki Bell’s Theorem if you’re interested. Basically, the problem occurs when two particles are synchronized so that they have opposed spins, then separated by a large distance. One of the particle’s spin is then measured. We then can deduce the other particle’s spin, because we know it to be the opposite. So what? you think. It’s like having a white and a black chess piece in two hands - once the colour of one is revealed, you know the colour of the other. But the problem is that quantum physics tells us that until the particle’s spin is measured, it exists in a state of both spins simultaneously, only resolving to one or the other state when actually observed. So how does the other particle ‘know’ which spin to assume when its brother is measured a thousand miles away? Einstein came up with the thought experiment to prove something had to be missing from quantum physics, but he was wrong. Something was missing from objective logic.

OK, so let’s take a look at our toilet door for polygender groups again.

Now, with the ‘me’ bubbles, we have a representation of what is essentially our conventional view, once we accept that me-ness is real. In fact to avoid the confusion between identity and subject, let’s remove the word ‘me’ and replace it with the word ‘observer’:

Everybody has their own observer which is different from everybody else’s observer in some indefinable way that is not merely a matter of semantics, but ‘just is’. The indefinable difference of ‘my’ observer is what distinguishes me from others and what creates the continuity between my future, present and past selves. We assume the me-ness is somehow held together by the physical brain, so when someone dies:

And then when Luke is cryogenically restored:

Are you seeing the issue here? The observer’s are identical but we’re still asking if the observer that returns is the same as the one that ‘popped’.

Or let’s swap Pierz and Luke’s observers without swapping their identities:

Notice the difference? Me neither.

There is a philosophical principle called the ‘Identity of Indiscernibles’, which applies particularly in the area of the Philosophy of Science (my major, many years ago). It states that two entities with identical properties must be the same entity. Whether the principle holds or not is still moot. There’s a thought experiment known as ‘Black’s balls’ (not chocolate or salty, pace South Park) which purports to show otherwise, though then there are counter arguments and in the end, the boxers are still in their corners, sweating at the futility of it all. You can read more about it at the above link, but I warn you, it’s for real philosophers, not exactly thrilling. In the end, one starts to suspect that the problem is, like the Pierz and the Pedro, a matter of how you define things.

But let’s run with it and see what we get. If all the observers are identical, then perhaps they are all one. Perhaps there is only one observer. Of course, the observers are different in what they observe, including the self or identity through which they make their observations. So if we’re to speak of a single observer, it’s a kind of super-observer that can’t itself be observed (of course not, for that would entail a different observer, and we know there is only one). It changes our toilet door to look like this:

The difference then between identities or subjects does not lie in there being a different observer, but one observer with different perspectives.

This observer is constant and never dies, can’t be annihilated. Doorways of observation, though, perspectives, may come and go.

This resolves the Cryogenic Paradox. Both the man in the bed with no memories, and all the computer duplicates, plus Pedro, Luke, John, Pierz and Aunt Nellie’s ugly cat with the bung eye are all you. But only if you let go of the notion of identity and self, only from this super-perspective, this view of the über-observer, the Ur-observer.

It also resolves the mystery of Bell’s Theorem. If there is only one observer, then it’s no mystery that an observation in one place can affect an observation in another. There is only one observer, one observation, the two are not separate. Only the illusion of separated observers creates the appearance of a paradox here.

Imagine a form of reincarnation where you can be reincarnated in parallel as well as in sequence, so your ‘next’ life might be as your own brother or best friend. Then what’s to stop you being reincarnated as everybody everywhere everywhen? Of course that is the wildest conjecture, but in a sense, something like that is implied. If all subjects deep down spring from the same observer, then, well fuck me, but that’s the best reason I ever heard to be nice to one another! You might have to be that person you’re doing over one day. You are that person. Right there is the ultimate wellspring of moral action. If we knew this, really knew it, wouldn’t we very quickly create the most optimised society we could, one that would also take care not only of all people equally but of all the voiceless subjects out there too, the animals and, who knows, the plants too?

As long as we think we’re in silos, and I don’t care, those silos include the soul too as far as I’m concerned, just another deeper way of separating ‘me’ from all those ‘others’, as long as we credit this insupportable separation, then we’re screwed by a fundamental error that makes us believe we can profit at another’s expense.

There is a mystery though here still (well, there are many mysteries, such as what the hell this observer is, and so on, though that’s outside the scope), which is a mystery similar to the problem of time, how there appears to be a current moment, though there is nothing in all the laws of physics that refers to such a moment or indeed to the apparent ‘arrow of time’ which gives time its direction. Why the illusion of separation? Why the division into so many points of observation, multiple keyholes? I suspect that the question 'why?' is not a good one once one gets to this kind of meta-perspective level. At bottom there is always a mystery.

The Unified Theory of Happiness - Part Four

2011-06-18T14:17:00.012+10:00

Several years ago I had a terrible flu, the sickest I remember being. Lying in bed, I was so drenched in sweat I'd have to change the sheets every few hours, a monumental task I'd accomplish in a reeling delirium before collapsing back into near-paralytic exhaustion. The room took on an evil, haunted atmosphere, the ticks of the walls, the dripping of rain on the sill echoing uncannily, as through some vampiric forest. On the third day I managed to bundle myself into my car and drive, chattering teeth, bones aching like an old man, to the doctor's surgery. Antibiotic prescription in hand, I then went to the pharmacy next door and sat on a chair under a searingly hot floodlight to wait for my pills. As I sat there, a terrible feeling began to grow inside me. I couldn't say what it was, just that something was awfully wrong, and something bad was about to happen. I suddenly desperately needed to remove the coat I was wearing, but as I sat forward to take it off, I heard a sound from behind me like an onrushing train, and then...

Darkness. But in the darkness, a light. I don't know what, where, who I am, but I can see that light, a perfect star of such purity, such utter bliss that words cannot describe it. And I realize: the light is me. I am that light. And that's all I am, pure and whole and free. I don't know how long this lasts. Seconds, an eternity.

Then something is changing, a tide is pulling me back into a murk of strange sensations that slowly resolve into me - the all-too physical me - lying face down on the pharmacy floor, a puddle of blood forming drip by drip from where my nose has hit the deck at full velocity. And some woman in a grey coat whom I will never forget looking down at me with a smirk on her face. I close my eyes again and wish myself back to that star, though of course it's gone for good.

Still, such an experience leaves an after-glow, a trace in the heart, and when the lovely nurse from the surgery next door came and picked me up and established my nose wasn't broken and looked after me until I was ready to face the freezing drizzle again to head back home to my cold, damp sick bed, I think she may have been slightly puzzled by my almost erotic radiance, a love and gratitude shining through the murk of my illness despite my attempts to simply be an obedient patient.

So far my Unified Theory of Happiness (I hope you've picked up the note of self-deprecating irony?), apart from spending most of its time straying egregiously from the topic at hand, has dealt with the notion of our 'set point', and how we simply normalize whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, thus giving the lie to the idea that more of what we want is the answer to satisfaction. The sublimely funny and insightful David Foster Wallace, writing about the failure of a luxury cruise to satisfy his wanting self, put it this way:

But the Infantile part of me is insatiable - in fact its whole essence or dasein or whatever lies in its a priori insatiability. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction. (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, 1998, Back Bay Books, p. 317, fuck the Chicago Manual of Style or whatever).

So happiness, I never said explicitly, must at least partly consist in adjusting the satisfaction one experiences at the set point of normality, rather than trying to spin the treadmill of desire ever faster, chasing the next gratification, stuff the insatiable hole. Put like that, it's sort of obvious.

But there's still a question of where this happiness is to come from, once one accepts that this is it, that there's no greener pasture, no magical Tattslotto moment around the corner when All Will Be Well (and here I can cite the research showing that a) lottery winners are as happy one year after winning the lottery as they were before they won, and that b) paraplegics are as happy one year after the accident as they were before it (incredible but true, at least if the ABC is to be believed, and this being a slack-arse blog, I'm too lazy to go chasing the actual research). So you might as well wish for paraplegia as for a Tatts win, if happiness is what you're after). The answer, I'm going to argue is: it's there, it's in you. It's the light inside you that it sometimes takes a fainting spell while overheating with the flu to reveal.

Be yourself, and the happiness follows. Though it takes courage to be that self against the social currents that tell you to be otherwise. Tiziano Terzani called it a 'life in which one can recognize oneself' (in The End is My Beginning), a phrase that had a powerful resonance for me when I read that book on various borrowed couches in frozen Berlin last year. Perhaps it struck a chord because of a developmental quandary that quite possibly strikes many forty-ish people: with age you let go of the fierce fight to assert your identity, but in the same moment as you breathe a sigh of relief at giving up this taxing effort, a vague, at first unnameable unease rises in your gut, to ambush you at three a.m. with feelings of pointlessness, as if something of great value that you nevertheless can't pinpoint had quietly evaporated on you, and along with it, the memory of what it was. It comes down to this: if the precious you that you fought so hard for requires no such effort and was in fact an illusion then... what's left but more of the same and more of the same and so on and so on until death? It's so easy, with the comfort in one's skin that is the supposed pay-off of maturity, to settle into mere placidity and consign the real aliveness, the vital, raw awareness of being, to a bygone youth. Being yourself, it turns out, is a much more active, seeking thing than mere self-acceptance, as important as that is.

'A life in which you recognize yourself'. Yes indeed. Perhaps it's not possible to recognize oneself in every moment, but the focus to find and express the nature of who and what you are in itself inevitably brings forth this self and makes failure impossible. Give up on the extrinsics and devote yourself to the intrinsically joyous. It turns out to be the same for us all, I think: the people we love and the activities that make us feel most truly ourselves. It's amazingly liberating when you realize that you don't have to worry about the things you never really wanted to worry about anyway: how many Facebook friends you have, whether you're getting ahead, whether you're Missing Out somewhere.

Really, it's not string theory is it? The Unified Theory of Happiness is, like, pretty much derr when it comes down to it.

So I'm moving on to something more radical. The Unified Theory of Self, Part One! And this really is a unified theory. It's come to me out of nights lying awake at five a.m. (I'm a shocking insomniac - perhaps this blog is revealing why!), puzzling over a paradox that just won't let me go. My Unified Theory is the only solution I can find that makes any sense, despite its radicality, and I've therefore decided to inflict it upon you even though several factors militate against its publication: namely that it is difficult to understand (not to me, but apparently to others), possibly boring to read, and preposterous to common sense. Anyway, it all begins with a thought experiment I'm calling the Cryogenic Paradox...

The Unified Theory of Happiness - Part Three

2011-06-01T23:04:00.003+10:00

There was a time when I was about nineteen or twenty when my older brother Jeremy and I became close again after years of semi-estrangement. During this period we became possessed by metaphysical speculations that bordered on the deranged. This was in the wilds of Lower Templestowe at a time when my family was falling apart after years of putting a face on it. The centre didn't hold any more and we were like electrons thrown out of orbit, little charged particles flying about looking for some new mental nucleus to bond to.

To understand our state at the time, you have to know a little bit about the Newton-John family culture. We are - were - a family with a healthy intellectual confidence, so healthy in fact that when my brothers and I were growing up, we received a tiny dose of Smug in our breakfast cereal every morning. We were special, and the proof was in the genes. Not only did we have our beloved 'Livvie', who would occasionally sweep in like visiting royalty, leaving trails of Chanel no. 5 and an after-glitter of fame, but on the bookshelf was our great-grandfather's book of correspondence with Einstein, discussing such weighty matters as whether God did, in fact, play with dice (Great Granddad got his Nobel for the affirmative, Einstein famously screwed up). And apparently we had Martin Luther somewhere up the tree to boot - a claim to fame rather diluted by the generations, and the fact that the man begat like a Catholic.

This was all on my father's side, who was not without his own brilliance, topping his year at Melbourne University Med School, and having the gift of being able to shine at whatever he turned his hand to - though not, alas, the intricacies of human relationships. My mother's side had its own minor luminaries too, including our grandfather Osmar White, who wrote the book considered the classic account of the war in New Guinea (Green Armour). He also brought some macho kudos to the genetic table, having, I don't know, wrestled anacondas while dodging Jap machine-gun fire and what-have-you.

I don't know whether the hypertrophied intellectualism of our family was a form of compensation for our social awkwardness, or whether the intellectual ego was the cause of the clunky social skills. Perhaps both. We tacitly believed our extended family home - an acre and a half of fruit trees and lawns in the middle of suburbia - to be a sanctuary of advanced intelligence in a world of benighted ignorance. Social graces in our position were as irrelevant to us as to alien greys silently orbiting the world with their giant foreheads and thin wrists. So long as we understood one another, what need to decipher the peculiar codes and signals of the natives?

And then came the bombshell that our parents were getting divorced. I was never exactly upset about it, but I did assume that they'd go about it in a rational and enlightened fashion, as behoved our advanced level of consciousness - and it's true there were no ugly scenes, no bloodshed, no spiteful court battles. But they never spoke to one another again. It was not 'amicable', it was clinically hostile. And the Newton-John paradigm, the great Myth of Enlightenment, was revealed for what it was, so much glossy lacquer over an all-too flawed human reality, a family with a fully stocked larder of fears, griefs and silently nursed wounds.

We knew, when the thing collapsed, that we'd been fed a crock, my brother and I. But we weren't quite ready yet to surrender our treasured specialness. That bruising correction would take years. So it makes sense, looking back, that when we went looking for a new paradigm, we dreamt big. We didn't allow anything as inconvenient as evidence or common sense to trammel our winged speculation. The zenith (or nadir) of this madness took place in India, in the piedmont village of Manali in Himachal Pradesh, spiritual home of the world's most mind-bending hashish. (According to the story we were told - in retrospect obviously bullshit - the year’s first harvest of hash is collected by rubbing it off the skin of a virgin who has run naked through the resinous fields.) There, Jeremy and I spent a week or so lost deep in a haze of cannabis and philosophical delusion. I saw the meaning of Schroedinger's wave equation (just don't ask me to explain), and Jeremy deduced that the popularity of the English language was based on the correspondence of the words 'I' and 'eye'. (I ridiculed him for this - one lunatic scoffing at the other’s madness).

All this is by way of background to a conversation which took place between us one summery night back in Lower Templestowe in the living room of the home that would be sold while we were away in India a year or so later. That living room, with its green sofa and cream shagpile, its quietly bubbling tropical fish-tank, was the picture of middle-class suburban life. As the room we’d eaten dinner in together our whole lives, watched the ABC News in every night, the room in which my parents had had weary, grown-up conversations over brandy-and-drys at six o'clock every weeknight, it should have felt like the family’s heart and hearth. But it didn’t. It felt peripheral, its feng-shui all up the spout. It felt lonely, like the smell of carpet shampoo in an empty house on a Monday morning. I remember lying on that carpet one night in my depressed late teens and staring into the glassed-in world of the aquarium, suddenly possessed by the knowledge of my own eventual death. The idea of Not-Being. Its reality shifted in and out like venetian blinds being opened and closed. In the moments I could grasp it, it was pure terror - while the guppies butted the glass, the neons shimmered in the flow of bubbles...

But that summer night Jeremy and I were talking not about death, but about duality. The way that everything is paid for by its negative image. For every particle of matter, an antimatter twin to cancel it out. For every action, an equal and opposite. For every joy attained, an equal grief suffered. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As we spoke, it was as if we could feel the whole universe around us turning in its great yin-yang machinations, a blind, oblivious machine composed of mutually annihilating blacks and whites, able to give nothing that it wouldn’t be forced to retract later, a gigantic zero-sum living on debt borrowed from itself, left hand robbing the right to pay for the illusion of Being.

The room seemed more lonely than it had ever been and despite the oppressive humidity of the late summer evening, we felt cold to the heart. And then Jeremy, suddenly overwhelmed by the horror of the vision we’d invoked, cried out, ‘It makes me want to kill myself!’ Typical of him, I thought, to get emotionally carried away. I came back with the technically impeccable proposition that in fact this zero-sum universe could not, purely logically, inspire the act of suicide. It lacked weight of any kind - to annihilate the self was as weightless an act as to go on living. I felt the hollowness of this even as I said it, the cold dread in my heart giving the lie to logic.

In my last post I paraphrased Safran-Foer: everyone loses everything. Ashes to ashes. Matter-antimatter. But here’s the thing Jeremy and I didn’t know. Scientists now believe that the matter and the anti-matter in the universe don’t cancel out at all. There is, they now say, a flaw in the laws of physics that results in very slight asymmetry, so that for every billion particles of antimatter in the universe, there’s a billion-and-one particles of matter. And that one extra particle in a billion results in the universe. A ‘flaw’ they call it. An accounting slip that means we actually do get something for nothing: the world and everything in it. Scientists may call that a flaw. I don’t know. it seems a peculiarly antiseptic mindset that would describe as a ‘flaw’ something without which only a perfect nothing would remain.

Would it be straining the metaphor to imagine that same ‘flaw’ exists everywhere, that whenever something joyous is lost, some billionth particle remains, a mote of light, undying and unkillable? Whenever ashes return to ashes, and our lives are weighed in the balance, some billionth particle of goodness tips the scales in our favour? I may be roaming back into Schroedinger’s Wave territory here, but I like to think that. I like to imagine that for us, as much as for the universe as a whole, something remains, stubbornly indestructible, when everything has returned its debt to the void.

And what of the Unified Theory of Happiness? The truth is, I’m less enamoured of unified theories than I once was. There’s always a tiny flaw in them too, a grating sand-grain of mystery that yields to no explanation. After writing the first two parts of my theory, I fell into a mood of pessimism that lasted a week. The God of Happiness, that shining child within, winked out, and my words rang back to me as hypocrisy. But then this morning I opened the blinds to let in the pale winter sun, and there it was again: the flaw, the chink, the tiny opening through which joy shines into a being stolen from nothingness.

The Unified Theory of Happiness - Part Two

2011-05-27T11:45:00.003+10:00

I would like to share a thought experiment of mine on the subject of happiness. It goes like this. Let's say we imagine you in a year's time. In fact, let us imagine tomorrow your life takes one of two possible paths, both of which end up with you in exactly the same situation a year down the track. In both these possible lives, you are a half million dollars richer in a year than you are today. But in one scenario, you are miserable; in the other, you are happy. In every external respect, your life is identical in these two variations, but emotionally the results are completely opposed. What explains the difference? Surely, if your life is the same, you should be equally happy. But consider: in one life version, you win $500K in a lottery. In the other, you win ten million dollars in the lottery, and, through a bad investment, lose all but the last half million of it. In the former situation, you're overjoyed because you perceive an expansion of your life's possibilities. In the latter, you're shattered by the contraction, even though your situation is significantly better than it was a year before.

It's not hard to imagine variations of this thought experiment. For example,you lose the use of your legs, but a miraculous new medical procedure restores your mobility. Now the mere fact of being able to walk brings you untold joy. It's all about the set point of 'normality' and the movement of our circumstances in relation to that point. It's about the story we tell ourselves about where we should be - the dynamic tension of having, desiring and losing - that determines our satisfaction, not the actuality of what we have. Consider the successful business men who commit suicide when their businesses collapse. They may still be far richer than you or I, but the massive readjustment of their set point and, more significantly, the attachment of their identity to this wealth, is more than they can take.

It seems to be the movements up and down the snakes and ladders of life that make us happy or miserable much of the time, not how far advanced we are on the board. Because wherever we are on the board we want to be further on, and fear falling back. For this reason, even though we kind of know that those with more than us aren't necessarily any happier, we still aspire to be in their shoes. We mistake the thrill of going up for the thrill of being high. And we always tend to focus on what we don't have than what we do. If you are the number two tennis player in the world, you don't lie awake at night thinking about the six and a half billion people you play tennis better than. No, you think about the one guy who still beats you.

I sometimes think about the wealth I possess today and take for granted as a person of average means in modern Australia: iPhone, flat screen TV, modern car. Any one of these items would be considered a miracle to a person of fifty years ago and would be beyond price, if somehow one could fall through a worm-hole to that earlier era. Yet it's precisely because these things are available to everybody that we take them for granted and don't recognise how truly extraordinary they are. What we consider wealth is a completely relative, social construct. It's all about the comparison with others, not the actual, intrinsic value of what we have. (For argument's sake, I'm deliberately overlooking the question of what constitutes poverty and lack - there is a real, absolute point of hardship).

Can we really talk about things having an 'intrinsic value'? I'd like to argue that we can. Otherwise we are forced to the conclusion that the value of a thing is merely the value we consciously place upon it, which runs counter to our frequent experience that 'you don't know what you have until you lose it.' It may be impossible to quantify, but I believe there is a value in everything we have, and this value is often best measured by what we experience when we lose it. Sometimes it turns out that a thing we valued highly leaves us merely relieved when it is taken away. Other times, something we didn't recognise as being of any value at all turns out to be of the deepest importance when we face the risk or the reality of its loss. Grief is the truest measure of value.

What I'm arguing is our moods and our feeling of satisfaction with our lot is generally tied to fluctuations around our 'set point', our 'normal', when we should be attuned to the real value of everything we have. An analogy that has occurred to me is ice in Antarctica. This ice seems cold to us, but in fact it contains a huge amount of heat energy. On average, this ice is -17 degrees Celsius, or approximately 260 degrees above absolute zero. Consider the difference between zero and 260 degrees Celsius - it's a lot of heat! Analogously, when we feel like we have lost everything, when we feel completely empty and like nothing we have is of any value, we still possess a huge amount. In fact, what we possess by merely being alive: our senses, our minds, our capacity for love and wonder - all these things carry a huge unseen value that dwarfs the difference between being rich and being poor.

This is the insight that many people have reported achieving in the act of unsuccessful suicide. People who have survived leaps from bridges invariably report that in the moment of certain death, the value of everything they have becomes clear to them, and they regret the jump. Almost as if the act of suicide reflects a kind of spiritual immaturity - a throwing away of what we have because of the hurt of losing something else. We all remember having done that, and how terrible it felt afterwards.

Here's the challenge then: to stay always mindful of the true depth of what we have rather than being hitched to the endless ups and downs of fortune. Not that it's easy. My initial thought experiment overlooks the significance of grief. To make it clear, imagine we hadn't won and lost the lottery, but found and lost a lover, or birthed a still-born child. Our different reaction to those scenarios reflects a recognition of the reality of loss, and our intrinsic awareness of what is of real value in life - not money or things but people, love. How do we becomes large enough in our hearts for the losses we will have to bear? Jonathon Safron-Foer's searingly memorable quote comes to mind: 'In the end, everyone loses everyone'. Everyone and everything, except perhaps our souls.

I'm going to come back to that in my next post - the remainder that is left when everything else is cancelled out - but for now let us acknowledge that life and everything in it is ephemeral. We can't, if we acknowledge the deep value of life in all its particularities, avoid the fact and necessity of grief. The project of happiness cannot deny sadness. But we can - and I know this because it is increasingly, if not always, in my grasp - live in gratitude for and awareness of the beauty of what is: this granted, extraordinary moment and all that it contains.

The Unified Theory of Happiness - Part One

2011-05-23T13:59:00.006+10:00

After several days of mild pre-winter funk, I dream I am holed up in some Antarctic bunker, prepared for six months of blizzard and darkness, when I open the ceiling and find a bright and beautiful, icy blue day. Happiness floods in with the light. Ah yes! I now remember how days in Antarctica can last for weeks, months - eternal sunshine in my spotless dreaming mind... I wake up knowing the meaning as clearly as if my unconscious had casually chatted to me in English: the funk is over, happiness is back. It's no longer the scarce resource it was in days of yore, when I squandered my youth gnawing the bones of melancholy and doubt, following the well-trod footsteps of the best Gen-X role models for the creative soul: suicidal and addicted rock musicians (Cobain, Waters, Kilbey, Morrissey, on they go). Today I'm sitting in a cafe eating pan-fried sardines and chat potatoes and reading, of all the soulless things, a Microsoft paper on updates to the .NET framework (never mind), and there it is again: a radiant gratitude for the preposterous fact of my existence and a cheerful knowledge of being a Fine Person Overall. No conceit. I just like me. I look out the window at the mild street, people about their business and I want to:

do a little Charleston (more on this later)

kiss the waitress (not for being sexy or anything, just nice, human)

write a blog entry about happiness (and voila!)

It's not a manic high, not like the two happy weeks I had once back in my twenties while living in St Kilda, unemployed and writing some crazy theory about the reality of qualities in the world, a fortnight of delirium somehow dislodged from my interior by an LSD trip that had me wandering out on the beach off Beaconsfield Parade, exclaiming to a passer-by, 'Isn't it a beautiful morning!' only for him to stop and, regarding me skeptically, reply, 'Well forgive me if I hadn't noticed.' Only then did I notice that it was, in fact, a pretty crap day - flat, grey and insipidly mild, perfect weather for the worms that shat up their little sand-turds all over the dun, wet expanse where the tide had shallowly retreated. The man kept standing there uncertainly as if the morning might be about to significantly improve, and I realised I'd just successfully, if inadvertently, picked up on St Kilda foreshore. Alas I had to throw the fish back however - not my kinda sardine. But I digress...

There's a story my mother likes to tell about my saying, as a very young child, that I was going to be a God of Happiness. Some boys aim to spend their adult years sliding down poles in fire-stations over and over, no doubt driving around in the big red truck a fair bit too. Others dream of being astronauts, policemen, 'engine drivers', pilots... Normal children. My aspiration, on the other hand, was to nothing less than apotheosis, it seems. Later I became a psychotherapist, evidently having traded down 'God of Happiness' for the more alliterative but less refulgent 'Mitigator of Misery'.

Psychotherapy is not the art of joy. And when I started studying it, back at age twenty-five or so, becoming a Supreme Being was honestly no longer part of my ten-year plan. I just wanted to work out why I was always so miserable. The only truly 'clinically significant' depression I ever suffered ended when I was twenty-one and threw in science-law to go roam the subcontinent for six months in search of God (of whom I found few unambiguous traces, though I had plenty of fun looking for Him inside various pipes) - but long after the depression ended I was still gripped by regular bouts of subclinical gloom. Now I realise I was unhappy because I was, in some ways, a bit of a jerk. Well, perhaps that's harsh. I couldn't help it. One's jerk-like aspects and one's unhappiness are really all part of the same dizzily whirling unmerry-go-round. The unhappiness makes you a jerk, and the more you jerk, the more miserable you make others, who in turn feed their misery back into the whole vicious cycle.

Perhaps it takes a new form of melancholy to stop being a jerk to yourself and the people around you. The kind of melancholy that comes when the egotistical illusions of youth begin to turn yellow and brittle and fall from the tree, and you're no longer full of angst and Weltschmerz and rage against the dying of the light, or against the machine, or whatever flavour of designer unhappiness you prefer to wear along with your torn jeans, and instead you're just plain sad, just plain lost, just plain you. Your misery don't make you special, sunshine. It's not an effective form of protest, not a form of creativity, not the secret brand of destiny.

Or maybe it is - the secret brand of destiny I mean. Maybe it's the calling of the Self, the keening of the lost You, the song that guides you Home. Because without the suffering, how would you know you weren't happy yet, how would you know to seek? Ah, paradox!

I have, I believe, a few things/people to thank for the unexpected blessing of being happy these days. Firstly, ironically, the women who've broken my heart - who, by tearing so many gaping holes in the fabric of my neuroses, actually left them in so many tatters it was impossible to keep holding them together any more. Unconventional therapy - and fucking painful I might add - but highly effective. Also I can thank the Bolivian Altiplano, for curing me of the fear of loneliness. That wild, transcendantly harsh and beautiful desert, that wind-scoured, planetary, salt-crusted, fuming flamingo-world leaves no place for the personal. You can slough it off into the rarefied wind, leave it behind like a rattlesnake skin, like you know life will leave you behind one day, your skin and bones the discarded husks of the vein of life that once animated you. There is nothing to fear in solitude - it inhabits you always anyway, like the starry sky obscured by the blue one.

I'm not going to try to trace all the tributaries of happiness back to their respective springs. But I will mention one other contributor: swing dancing, a pastime that occupies me increasingly these days, in spite of my lack of grace, aptitude, or co-ordination. I'm crap, but I freaking well love doing it anyway, and this love does somehow translate into something that could be described as a weird kind of ability. In spite of myself I think I may one day not only love it, but also be good at it. It's kind of daggy, not at all a Cobain or Kilbey thing, but it just makes you, well, happy, goddamn it.

Anyway, enough. I'm running out of steam. I have more to say on all this, but for now I'm done. Perhaps tomorrow I will return to write more about it. I have a theory, you see, which I'd like to share...

Crime and punishment

2011-05-03T21:45:00.006+10:00

Back in the mid 2000s I was working as a counsellor for an organisation that supported offenders and their families. I ran anger management programs for wife beaters and pub brawlers, tried to teach the inmates of a women's prison to understand their dreams, listened to the torturous denial of child rapists' wives. Looking back, what's surprising is not that I burnt out, but that I lasted as log as I did handling every day the currency of human misery. Recently, while trying to finish off my short story collection, I wrote a story based on one of my clients from those days, a young girl who'd fallen in unknowingly with a serial rapist. My editor rejected the story as just too preposterously horrific, too extreme, too unbelievable. Ironically it was the parts I'd added for fictional effect that she accepted without question. The truth is though that as a fiction editor she was right. Reality sometimes lacks plausibility - to make it digestible as fiction you have to dress it up in the trappings of the expected to get the reader to swallow it.

In the true story, the girl told her rapist partner/abuser about visiting a single mother friend of hers who lived alone in a nearby suburb and the partner, having noted the details, went around to her place, broke in and raped her. My client learned about the rape and was sure he was responsible (and therefore that she was responsible) but could never be sure. She was tormented by the guilt. She prayed to forget the trauma of her experiences, and managed to acquire a brain injury in a car accident that had the effect of destroying her memory - though not of the experiences she longed to obliterate.

We dealt with the walking wounded. Men and women so damaged by brutality it was scarcely comprehensible that they could have survived. Looking into their faces was a curious experience: something was profoundly wrong, like a terrible deformity, but it was not always easy to pin the sense of wrongness down to anything tangible - it was not just the missing teeth or the physical scars. It was as if they had been smashed into pieces and badly glued back together - everything in its right place but somehow fragmented, the unity lost.

Some of these people were deeply toxic and almost intolerable to be near. Once I picked up a call from Barwon Prison and the cold, arrogant voice of the man on the line sent instant shivers of revulsion down my spine. Sex offender, I thought. It turned out to be Robert Arthur Lowe, the man who raped and murdered Sheree Beazley and stuffed her body into a culvert under a bridge. Barely more tolerable to me was the woman who used to come in for travel assistance to visit the man she'd recently married in the same prison. He had raped and killed a sixteen year old girl and buried her in a shallow grave, but when we asked his new wife what she knew of his offences, she insisted that he was an armed robber - a respectable criminal in other words! Thinking that she had been misled, we confronted her with an entry in a book of notorious sex offenders that detailed his appalling crimes, she was horrified - not by the truth of what he'd done, but by the fact that the book was publicly available for anyone to read! For some reason, though I worked with murderers and criminals of all stripes every day, I could not suffer that woman's presence for more than a minute and always had to pass her on to a colleague when she came in. It wasn't evil in her case, but a sort claustrophobic atmosphere of pain, need, and oppression that clung to her, a horrible lack of any spiritual light in her being at all.

If you don't believe humans possess an aura, some sort of tangible psychic information field, that place would have to convince you of it. There was an old Italian guy who used to come in to talk to me while he was on bail awaiting trial for sex offences against a four-year-old boy who had lived next door. Not out of moral judgement of his crimes, appalling as they were, but out of a visceral repulsion at the man's physical presence, I used to dread the handshake with which he'd greet me when he stepped out of the lift. I'd want to wash my hand. Reviled by his community and his family, cast out on the street with nothing, he'd show up several times a week in his filthy, crumpled suit and his lank, matted hair and tell me the story of his life. As a child he'd been raped by his brother and his brother's friends on a regular basis back in his home village in rural Italy. He suffered a condition known as 'micropenis' ( yes, it's what you think) which he'd kept a shameful secret all his life. In Italy he'd been to visit a prostitute, who had laughed at him. In Australia he married a woman who was happy not to have sex, and to keep his secret for him. It doesn't take a psychologist to see how the story of his life led to the crime he eventually committed - indeed lent it a sort of awful inevitability.

My grandfather, who was a war correspondent on the Kokoda Track, once wrote about the nausea he felt upon seeing a man go to pieces with fear upon sighting an enemy plane for the first time in Port Moresby - he went to jelly as if literally spineless. I always found that a harsh reaction - until I thought of that old Italian paedophile. For as much as I could understand how he got to the point he did, I was still repelled by the cowardice of the man. 'Cowardice' may seem like an odd word, and yet it's the one that comes irresistibly to mind. He stank of the failure to shoulder the burdens of his life with courage. That was the aura of shame I wanted to wash from my hand whenever he shook it. Which isn't to say I didn't pity him. I pitied him greatly, but pity is not an emotion that the courageous inspire.

Mostly though, your average offender was a likeable fellow. I wouldn't want to encounter him strung out for heroin in my living room at two a.m., but my colleague's description of the average prisoner as a 'loveable rogue' always struck me as apt. These prisoners weren't the demons of tabloid imagination, but three-year-olds inflated into adult bodies. In them, the emotional self-regulation of toddlers was dangerously allied to the strength of full-grown men. Their psychological development stunted at a young age by trauma, they were disarmingly child-like in their responses, and often responded with great warmth and gratitude when offered the simple human gesture of respect. However much the outer vessel of their psyche had been warped, the light of a good heart still shone out of them, oftentimes with greater clarity for their emotional simplicity. It was this unaffected warmth that you lived for in that job - without it, the harshness of the environment would have been intolerable.

My blood still boils occasionally when the Herald-Sun recycles one of its lock-up-the-monsters, cheap outrage front-pagers that are always good to sell a few papers. The truth is so much more complex and morally ambiguous. So complex in fact that after five years in the system I left feeling far less certain of my notions of good, evil and justice than when I started. To know a man's crime is to know almost nothing of him, only a single act that, like an iceberg, projects above the surface but reveals nothing of the great mass of circumstances, choices and emotions that lies beneath, invisibly supporting it - and that, even when revealed, remains a mystery, impenetrable perhaps even to the person who experienced it.

Hometown blues

2011-01-13T11:10:00.003+11:00

Melbourne is rainy. We used to be famous for it, before the drought. Then we had ten years of sunny skies that gradually went from cheerful to relentless. Now it's rainy again. I sit at my computer at work and stare wistfully through the glass as it pelts down on the street outside, pedestrians with umbrellas scampering for doorways. The whole country is underwater, as if to match the mood of my homecoming - granted, a rather solipsistic take on the latest climate catastrophe.

Rewind five days: I'm sitting up at one in the morning downing bottles of German Pilsner with my couch-surfing host Tom (who I've incidentally trained to chill his beer to Australian subzero temperatures) and talking about conspiracy theories, the nature of truth and objectivity, the awkwardness of German's reliance on relative clauses - and getting steadily drunker, steadily less concerned with nailing the niceties of German grammar. As the alcohol prises me loose of the rocks of rationality to which I habitually cling, I find myself launching ever more boldly into the linguistic unknown, abandoning caution and just riffing away, surprised myself at how the sentences just form where I'm about to tread, the instant before I'm about to plummet into inarticulacy. Tom tells amusing stories about trucking in Germany in wall days, the futile bureaucratic attempts to stop him speeding, the secret routes he found to bypass border controls between east and west. Outside, another heavy snowfall outside is slowly, softly smothering the courtyard.

I love this immersion in my German alter-ego, but the truth is, there's not much more for me to do in Berlin. I've about exhausted the city's touristic value, the pleasures you can skim off a place without any effort other than that required to show up. If I wanted to get more from this place I'd have to give it more too. Work, involvement, commitment. Tom asks me if I've considered living here - the language wouldn't be an issue, I could do translation work... And of course I have. I'd love to spend a year or two here, enough time to close the gap between my current fluency and the thoughtless ease of a native speaker. Enough time to develop the internal riches of biculturalism. But there's the matter of that small, beautiful anchor by the name of Jude. In some ways being a separated dad gives you more freedom - like this trip for instance. In other ways it is more binding, since you can't make grand plans with the mother any more. When you're bound at the ankle you move and plan together, you go where you like, as one. Bound by a long chain, you run about freely without thinking, then you trip over the chain. Now I've reached the end of the chain, and it's time to come home.

Jude at the airport, his eyes red from crying because it's taken an hour and a half between my landing and getting through the arrival gates - my baggage has been left in Berlin or somewhere. Jude giving me raspberries, grapes and nectarines in the car because he knows how I'll have missed these beloved fruits in snowy Europe. Now I'm the one with red eyes. Jude romping in the pool in the preternaturally bright Australian sunlight, everything suffused with a quality of dreams from 48 hours with no sleep, from the shock of the unfamiliar familiar. I wake up in the middle of the night because Jude has turned on the light and is wandering about. Was machst du? I say, completely bewildered, drawing an equally bewildered response.

And then the work desk, the rain, the all-too-familiar trivial frustrations of trying to get computers to do what you want them to. Like dealing with a person with Asperger's, only worse: Why must you do what I say instead of what I mean?? My sails, recently so full of the winds of inspiration, are already hanging slack on their masts. The astonishing part is not so much how I forgot this life, what it feels like, as the fact that it feels like I never left it. It absorbs me back into it without a ripple. As if everything that still vividly fills me - the wild unbreathable winds of the altiplano, the sound of the organ in the Notre Dame, Kafka's marvellous German, the lustrous pebble of my own solitary soul - as if all these things aren't and never were.

In The End Is My Beginning, a record of journalist Tiziano Terzani's dying conversations with his son, Terzani spoke of work and the importance of a "life in which one can recognize oneself." This, he believed, was more important than happiness - whatever that is. Lying in bed in a state of hallucinatory jetlagged half-sleep, I saw a sort of groove stretching out in front of me. This groove was my character, the self that solitude and the world have revealed. It was as palpable, as certain as conscience. Stay within this groove, the vision seemed to say, and you cannot go wrong. For you will live a life in which you recognize yourself, and such a life cannot possibly be regretted. But it seems to me that loyalty to this truth is a form of great courage, a courage that cannot be taught - or perhaps only by the rarest of men, like Terzani. The functioning of the great machine that is this modern world demands inauthenticity on a vast scale, and offers many anodyne rewards for the conforming. The demands, and the costs, of being true to the groove of our inner nature may be higher than we dreamed. But the cost of the alternative? Thoreau's "quiet desperation."

The only question is: what now?

Picasso, Michelangelo, Kentridge

2010-12-28T07:14:00.006+11:00

Today, having visited Sigmund Freud's former house and office, I was blundering aimlessly about Vienna when I stumbled upon a gallery which was exhibiting both Picasso and Michelangelo. That's the kind of thing that happens in cultural capitals such as this. You walk around a corner and, hey, Picasso and Michelangelo! Well, why not pop in? Nothing better to do! Both exhibitions were excellent and extensive, but the real surprise, the show-stealer, was an exhibition of works by South African artist William Kentridge.

Kentridge is a combination of artist, filmmaker, animator and illusionist. On display were numerous of his stop-motion animated films, as well as traditional paintings, drawings and various 'multimedia' installations. I can only describe his work as brilliant.

It was interesting to compare Kentridge's political engagement - his works reflect on war, oppression and apartheid - with Picasso's. Picasso painted doves and bunches of flowers to express pacificist sentiment, or a lobster fighting a cat to allegorize the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which I applaud. There should be more feline-crustacean battles in our art. But whilst no-one can deny the power of 'Guernica', I can't help feeling that his later work slips into sentimentality. And allegory is not the most subtle way of interrogating political realities. Kentridge's work on the other hand, has all the power and mystery of dreaming about it. One of my favourite pieces was an animation projected from the ceiling onto a circular table in the middle of which was a steel cylinder. The projected image on the table was radically distorted, but the reflection in the cylinder reconstituted the image back into its correct proportions. The effect was stunning and mesmerising, as Kentridge's disturbing, surreal renderings of war seemed to glow from within the metal cylinder, like terrible dreams captured in a glass.

Viewing this art filled me with creative longing, and as I wandered through the seemingly endless exhibition space, new ideas for stories started popping in my head. I also saw in a flash how to fix my most recent story, which has caused me no end of pain. This in turn made me reflect on the importance of cultural 'food' for creative life. We have no shortage of cultural activity in Melbourne, but there is a qualitative difference to have these rich, deep wellsprings so close at hand, as one does in Europe. It helps. Connection to these traditions is immensely nourishing. Picasso 'fed' on other artists such as Velazquez and Manet, repainting and reimagining their works. But we don't need to be Picasso, or even European, to draw on the great inheritance that is the sum of human cultural endeavour. As artists we often, perhaps necessarily, believe ourselves alone, like Gods in miniature pressing out our own Adams from our own separate lumps of clay, but we never truly are. It is not only helpful and revitalising to draw sustenance from this great collective placenta of human culture, I think it is a flat out necessity if we're to avoid exhaustion, burn-out and the crippling effect of work in isolation.

Der rote Faden

2010-12-26T03:22:00.006+11:00

Whilst there have been times here in Europe when I have asked myself why I ever left South America, there have also been moments of sheer bliss. I was snowed in in Paris for three days, meaning that I ended up spending Christmas day there instead of in Vienna as I'd planned. But ironically, the bad weather turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because after days of bitter cold, I woke up on Christmas morning to a miraculously beautiful day. The air was crystal clear and the sky a perfect blue vault. There were bright patches of snow on the ground, the streets were glassy with ice, and everything shone in a pale topaz sunlight. The streets were nearly empty of traffic - it was almost like having Paris to myself, though there were a few other foreigners wandering about, everyone it seemed in the same quiet delirium of delight as me.

I wandered along the Seine, which ran high and swift, lapping over its banks. And then as I walked under the arches of one of the many picturesque bridges that cross the river, my breath was snatched by the sight of the two towers of what I assumed had to be the Notre Dame. Funny - a week later I saw the same scene, the same angle, in a Picasso painting. There's a little park at the back of the Notre Dame, and the rear view of the cathedral is just as beautiful in its own way as the spectacular front. The garden was covered in snow, and here for the first time I came across people in some numbers: wandering in the little fenced-in garden or drinking steaming cappuccinos in the crisp, bright air at a cafe on the corner.

I once wrote a line in a song about waking up to a cold, sunny morning in childhood: I dreamed then I awoke, with your name on my tongue/And the dew shone in the garden, a million tiny suns/Oh, it was so new... I remember that feeling so vividly, I suppose the same one Cat Stevens is talking about in 'Morning has Broken'. The feeling of absolute newness, as if the world had just been made. At 43, one doesn't have that feeling so often any more, sadly. There is always some burden, some distraction, some clouding of one's inner view. But on Christmas morning in Paris, I had that feeling again.

I went inside the Notre Dame and sat and listened to mass in French, and though I'm not religious in any conventional sense, though I couldn't understand a word, I also couldn't have felt more a part of that ritual. Unlike some of the gloriously flamboyant cathedrals I saw in South America and Germany, the Notre Dame inside is magnificent but subdued. Not melancholy - immensely dignified and joyous at the same time. It is just sublime. And I was happy to sit inside on that incomparable day for an hour or so just to be part of of that moment of thanksgiving. I couldn't get over the idea I was at the Notre Dame on Christmas Day! Just too wonderful...

And alone. I've spent more time alone during this journey than I really expected. The company I've had I've enjoyed and appreciated all the more for it. But there's been a lesson in this aloneness. There have been times when I've been on Facebook at every chance to check for messages, comments, even 'likes' - anything to remind me of my connections to people. But then slowly something else has happened, a feeling that I best expressed in that poem 'When there is no harbour' that I posted back in La Paz. 'This is being a man/Knowing you are alone/Not fearing it/Standing, not leaning.' Slowly I've found a centre that lets me do that, stand without leaning, unafraid and never more purely myself. I think it was that part of me that broke open on the altiplano, when I suddenly found myself in inexplicable tears, sad and joyous at the same time, as we crossed that beautiful, lonely desolation. 'I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got' playing in my ears.

Jon Bauer wrote in a comment to this blog that he thinks we travel because we can't change, but changing our context gives us a different experience of ourselves. On the other hand, Alain de Botton argues for travel as transformation, almost as therapy, arguing we travel in order to be changed, and we should choose our destinations accordingly. I think I'm with de Botton (sorry Jon!). I'm more sanguine about the possibility of change, otherwise I could never have been a psychotherapist. That despite the recognition that change is slow, hard, subtle. Drastic and rapid psychological or spiritual transformation is extremely rare. Some of us have might have one such change in us in our entire lifetime. Many of us none at all. On the other hand, slow change, far from being impossible, is inevitable. It's up to us what that change will amount to, growth or decline, opening or closing.

There's an expression in German - 'der rote Faden' or 'the red thread' - which is used to describe the subtle thread of connection or meaning that runs through something. Now that my travels are almost complete, I look back and see the red thread that runs through this journey. The red thread is solitude, solitude as ally and gift. I've always had a nature that drives me towards solitude, that seems to veer away from the collective. And fought against it, hated it, because I also need acceptance and belonging as much as the next person. But now I see the possibility of complete acceptance of my own solitary nature, not in order to turn away from others or be any less connected, but to be grounded in an unshakeable sense of my own solitary completeness. And I suspect that makes it all the more possible to connect wholly with others, because then there is no longer that edge of anxiety, that subtle but ever-present distortion of self for the sake of the other.

I'm in Prague now, another stunningly beautiful city, though the cold is harsh - it's -12 degrees outside, which is taxing the limits of my clothes. Same again tomorrow for New Year's Eve. Hard to imagine the forty degree heat in Melbourne. I'm not sure where I'd rather be...

Fleabitten in Paris

2010-12-22T06:44:00.008+11:00

My last day in Paris. I've fulfilled my obligations: been up the Eiffel Tower, visited the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay, consumed coffee and croissants in pretty little street-corner cafes, sampled expensive French cuisine, and bought two bottles of red wine to open among friends at home. It is an incredibly beautiful city, and yet - I can't decide if it's me or something I am picking up in the air - there's a bad mood about the place. Admittedly I'm uncomfortable, tired and ill-at-ease. I'm staying in an awful hostel for the absurd sum of 50 Euros a night. I can't help compare it to the gorgeous villa I stayed at in Sucre, Bolivia, where I paid half as much for a huge room with marble floors, a view over a picturesque terracotta-tiled courtyard, and wooden shutters on the windows so you could siesta on the huge bed in cool darkness. Lights twinkled in the open air restaurant, where you'd be hard pressed to rid yourself of ten dollars, and the staff were exquisitely polite and helpful. Here, the room is cramped and overheated, the toilet is outside, and filthy, and - wait for it - the bed is full of FLEAS. I have huge red welts all over my body, don't know whether to go outside into the bitter cold, where the itching stops, or sit inside in the stifling heat and try not to tear myself apart with my fingernails.

The Louvre? Death by old masters. Art just shouldn't be presented on such a vast and unmanageable scale. Again, I did my duty. I saw the Mona Lisa. More than anything else I was conscious of gazing at what must surely be the most gazed-at 0.3m2 in history. As I approached the hall where the masterpiece is housed, I heard an American father saying to his young adult son, "Hold on to your hat! Get ready!" Oh puh-lease! Then in the admiring crowd someone cried out "The eyes follow you around!" Yuh. Did you ever notice that every painting does that, if the subject is looking at the painter? And then so many crucified Jesuses with eyes turned heavenwards, so many static, artificial arrangements of figures, symbolically gesturing. So many imposing marble men with ten-year-old's penises... Is it the fleas that are making me like this? I'm a bad tempered philistine.

Or maybe not. At the Musee d'Orsay I was overwhelmed by the loveliness. I went round a corner and theVan Goghs made me gasp, their colours, their intensity leaping off the wall, less paintings than light-filled windows. Beauty raised to the nth power, to the edge of tolerance if you could allow yourself to be completely open to them. I'd have cried if that wouldn't have been embarrassing. Other paintings too moved me like this, not always the ones I expected. Some of Sicely's for instance, who I've never really paid much attention to before. It was a feast, sheer aesthetic gluttony, and I didn't leave until I had seen everything.

I've done a lot of walking, despite the cold. Two days ago it was a mild four or so degrees and after Berlin that seemed quite humane. I even left my thermals in the hostel. But yesterday I did the same thing, and froze. I have to say I was taken aback to have to queue for half an hour in the shivering wind to go up the Eiffel Tower, though I shouldn't have been. After all, it's probably the biggest tourist destination in the world. I wandered into a square in the city where there was a huge column with someone or other atop it looking triumphal and composed. The awnings of the shops around the square were all Chanel, Rolex, Dior etc. The place had a stink of unimaginable wealth. I then noticed it was the Ritz. The Euro cent dropped and I realised that this whole high-glam black-and-gold look that you see in Vogue advertisements, or the upmarket shops at Crown Casino, is a Paris creation. Well, duh! I suppose that should be obvious, but I had to visit Paris to realise it. It's not a look that I like - it's high artifice is oppressive to me - but here I can see its original context: these exquisite streets saturated with history, elegance, centuries of style and fashion.

Oh gay Paree! Truth is, I won't cry to leave you. I can only imagine how it must be to walk these streets on a fine spring day, in love, as one is supposed to be. But I'm not in love, and the snow is turning to slush, and my fleabites are tormenting me, and right now I'd give up Paris and everything in it to be playing cricket in the backyard with my son... Or even just wandering down to humble CERES, under its fine electric pylons, and eating their Indonesian eggs in the sun. Foie gras makes my gorge rise.

I've been reading a lovely book by Tiziano Terzani, "Das Ende ist mein Anfang" ("The End is My Beginning" - I suppose there is an English translation, since my book is itself a German translation from the Italian). I read this quote this morning and it spoke to me (my translation):

This world is a miracle! ... And if you manage to feel a part of this miracle - not the 'you' with two eyes and two feet, but the You, your innermost being - what more can you want? Hm? What more can you possibly want? A new car?

And I'd add, Paris? The Eiffel Tower? The Louvre? It is a great privilege to be able to see the world like this, to stand in these famous places, see these famous sights. But if you're alive to this miracle, you know it can't be captured anywhere, can't be crystallised in this monument or city or painting. A tired heart can be left indifferent by all the old masters in the world. And then the strangest, smallest thing can break you open, be more marvellous in that moment than all the masterpieces of the Louvre.

German history - that old chestnut!

2010-12-18T02:30:00.002+11:00

Berlin has always fascinated me for its history, its place at the fulcrum of the cold war.This is the city where the two superpowers of the twentieth century collided in the ruins of the world's most despicable dictatorship. It's a pity that almost all visible traces of that history have been eradicated in the haste to leave it behind. Today Berlin is a city of Neubauten - there are almost no old buildings left. Bombs cleansed it of its Nazi and pre-Nazi history, and the enthusiasm of reunification wiped away almost all traces of the Stasi era. Hitler's bunker is a carpark. Checkpoint Charlie is a tacky tourist attraction. The past is objectified and captured in numerous memorials and museums, all of which serve to delineate now from then, to sharpen the distinction between the enlightened Germany of today and the dark Germany of the past.

Yet among Germans there remains a deep-seated unease about the past. For years after the war, the past was buried because it was still too close. Then, as a new generation arose and demanded a reckoning, a period of Auseinandersetzung began. From denial, Germany moved to self-confrontation, sought to deal with the past by raking over the killing fields for every last bone, every rusty locket. And now the wheel has turned again. Now the past is too far away. With the 2006 World Cup came the feeling that Germans can be proud to be Germans again, the past be damned.

There is even, according to one of my hosts here, a concealed arrogance, the surreptitious return of that repressed thread of national superiority. She told me about getting into an argument with a businessman on the train one day. He accused her of being a 'radical' (she's anything but), and spoke of the German people as a 'huge social experiment', from the Nazis to the enlightened current day, as if it all formed a rational continuum, as if it were all part of a whole that made sense, even bestowed a certain special status. When in fact, if nothing else is clear, the dark period of Germany's history is a great, ghastly and senseless wound, which can never really heal, perhaps which never really should. According to more than one German I spoke to, many Berliners have a sense of pride in their huge holocaust memorial, claiming that it is the envy of other states. Wahnsinn! Of course Germany should have such a memorial, but pride is surely not the appropriate emotion.

But on the other hand, how does a people live with such a wound in its psyche? At least for the Jewish people the healing journey is somewhat signposted, has somewhat clear-cut parameters. Museums and memorials are symbolically and educationally important, but 'museumification' is hardly a sufficient response in itself. Yes, the past must be allowed to rest to some extent, and forcing younger generations of Germans to bear the cross of guilt for their great-grandfathers' sins is likely to backfire. And yet the desire of modern-day Germany to at last wash its hands of history is a disturbing trend. Not because of fears of a peculiarly German evil that only eternal vigilance can keep bound - in my opinion the next appalling regime is about as likely to come out of New Zealand as it is out of Germany. But because no people are better placed to build and maintain a lighthouse on these evil rocks than the Germans. A searching light must always be maintained here, and if there is to be any redemption of this history for Germany, it is Germany which must keep that light burning.

Short the real

2010-12-14T04:39:00.005+11:00

Why do we travel? My friend and fellow writer Ruby Murray told me she began a short story once with the question, 'Do we travel to lose ourselves or to find ourselves?' Good question. Or perhaps the two aren't mutually exclusive. Perhaps we try to lose familiar parts of ourselves in order to find unfamiliar parts. That which we call self can never be observed independent of environment, but we can perhaps infer it from that which remains constant when the environment is altered, like the centre of the kalleidoscope. Or, if you want to be looser, more inclusive about what constitutes self, you could call it the sum of everything revealed in the changing light of this kalleidoscope. Either way, travel reveals more of who you are.

It must be Germany doing this to me: turning me into an impenetrable philosopher. Verzeih! To backtrack: I had some hellish trouble leaving South America. I have the type of brain that is suited for looking down tele- or micro-scopes, not for managing anything as bewildering as everyday affairs. Travel just overtaxes my capacity for multitasking - I live in the continual anxiety that I've left some crucial bit of me - passport, money, iPhone - somewhere behind. I'm constantly frisking myself like a New York airport security guard. And then I'm amazed that somehow I've kept it all together despite my, er, limitations .

Until... I'm in Rio, ready to fly to Germany the next day, and look on my itinerary and notice I'm in fact supposed to fly from Sao Paulo. Now I definitely asked the travel agent to book me to fly from Rio, but I do have a faint hint of a memory that this might have been changed to Sao Paulo for logistical reasons. I have a brief moment of heart-lurching panic, before I realise that I can probably book a flight to Sao Paolo the next day at no great expense.

There's a sign at the hostel reception that says they can help with flight bookings, so I ask the receptionist, who is completely unsuited to the hospitality industry, if she'd kindly help me. She does that thing where she doesn't quite roll her eyes (though you can see the effort it costs her not to), then tells me to come back in fifteen minutes when she's had a chance to look on the website. I do this, and, upon my return she gives me that heavy-lidded lizard look and asks me what it is that I want now. Er... the flight? Oh, she says, why don't you do that yourself, and hands me the web address on a scrap of paper. And I'm paying European prices for this 'service', and a toilet where you still can't flush the toilet paper? If I was in arbitrage, I'd been calling someone and shouting 'Short the Brasilian real!' down my cellphone.

Instead I creep off to my overpriced quarters and try to book my own flight over the dialup-speed, constantly interrupted internet connection. Eventually I manage to find a flight that lands in Sao Paolo three and a half hours before my flight to Germany departs, which I figure should be plenty of time.

Curse the lizard-receptionist! There are two airports in Sao Paulo, and one isn't even strictly speaking in Sao Paulo at all. It's quite a bloody long way from Sao Paulo in fact. One does not necessarily realise this when one is browsing a Brazilian travel website with zero Portuguese at one's disposal. When I arrive in said airport, it is immediately clear something is wrong, because this sleepy, mouldering little place bears no resemblance to the mega-airport I remember passing through on my way to Rio. Still, I'm not panicking yet, because lots of cities have a couple of airports, and you can always drive from one to the other in fifteen minutes max. Right? Wrong. Once the person at information and I have established Spanish as our language of common incompetence, I learn that I can catch a bus, but it will take two hours and doesn't leave for another hour - way too late. Taxi then? Sure. She produces a card showing the price of a taxi to various destinations. Garulhos International: 330 Real. I do a double-take. Three hundred and thirty real? That's about $200, the same as my flight cost to this god-forsaken excuse for an airport. Short the real!

But I have no choice. My own stupidity has gotten me into this fix. I'm going to have to dig my way out with my own pockets. The taxi driver reckons he can get me to Garulhos in the hour I have before I'm supposed to check in, but the very lovely English-speaking lady who comes to my aid is less convinced. The traffic at this time is really bad in Sao Paulo, she says. Still, I can't miss that flight to Germany, so I have to give it my best shot.

Well the lady was wrong. The traffic is fine, just fine! We're making brilliant time. In the silence of our mutual linguistic incomprehension, my cares slowly lift from my shoulders. We have twenty minutes to travel fifteen kilometres. Easy! And then... the traffic. Absolute turn-off-the-engine-and-play-a-round-of-poker, Michael-Douglas-in-Falling-Down gridlock. It's a curious kind of tension that grows in a taxi in this sort of situation when neither of you can speak a word of the other's language. I'm sure the poor guy wanted to murder me for my tongue-clicking, seat-shuffling, fidgety behaviour. By the time we got to the airport I was so late I'd given up, but god bless South American inefficiency! Nobody even remarked on my lateness as I checked in, and then I found myself standing in the passport control queue for so long I could just about have walked from Rio. Two more disinterested, lackadaisical employees as these passport officers I haven't seen since... well, lizard-eyes the day before.

This being a Lufthansa flight, there are lots of Germans in the queue, who of course despise such inefficiency, and I hear one of them remarking, "This is supposed to be a developed country, but this is the worst I've seen!" But that's the thing. It may be trying very hard to look like one, but in no way is Brazil a developed country. You just pay developed-world prices. Like I said, short the real, because there's only one direction that currency can go.

Island of the Sun

2010-12-09T02:39:00.007+11:00

I’m walking the Island of the Sun on Lake Titicaca, where the Incan sun god was born. The air is so thin here at close to 4000 metres, it rasps in my lungs at every step, but looking out over the azure expanse to the horizon, I can’t believe I’m not at sea-level. It’s a long, arduous walk at this altitude over the island’s spine to make it to the boat pick-up point by the agreed rendezvous time. The sun is fierce, the island barren. Like the Greek Islands, only blasted bare. Incan memories in the stone. The last days of South America, so I’m feeling everything acutely.

On the boat, I have a puff of someone’s joint, close my eyes, and the sun god beams straight into me across Lake Titicaca, an x-ray of pleasure, lighting up forgotten centres.

And there are places here where you can see the Andes, snowy peaks standing unperturbed in the churn of cumulus clouds. You can watch the collision of these terrestrial and atmospheric mountains, the peaks that remain when the ephemeral ones evaporate.

I spent three days on the altiplano, a stark landscape separated from the Atacama desert, the world’s driest, by a narrow volcanic range. This side almost nothing grows either, and who knows what the vicuna browse on - a few sparse and hardy nubs that push up stubbornly through the stones. There are marbled and variegated volcanic lagoons, smelling of sulphur, in which flamingoes stand, root about in the salt and borax for whatever edible life thrives here. The laguna colorada is vivid in red, cobalt, lime green and I don't so much breathe the air as swallow wind by the gallon, though it’s thin on oxygen, barely feeds the blood. Walking against it, I feel my planetary contingency, my peripheral existence in the lonely cycles of nature. The sun burns, the wind lacerates my lips. We eat and play cards and drink beer in bare shelter against the elements, keeping close to the wood oven as the sky darkens, a vista of stars appears, serene above the battering wind. I leave the others to stand outside and gaze upwards, for as long as I can hold out against the cold. Feel my aloneness.

It interests me, the intersection between place and soul, between inner and outer landscapes. The chemistry between psyche and place. I cannot articulate the altiplano's effect on me. I’m rendered wordless, though I can feel it tear a hole in the thin fabric of my arbitrary cares, that scrap of knots and twists I call my 'self'. All those miles of salt. Twenty thousand square miles of blinding, snowy salt, sucking every drop of water from the air. There's a saline slush a few feet below the crust, which is tessellated with cracks like a leadlight window. In the sandy desert plains further on, strange twisted forms of rock stand out, like a sort of natural Stonehenge. They are erosion’s negative space, the refractory rock left after the scouring. Imagination naturally swirls and collects in the spaces in between these forms, is held and shaped here, as it was in childhood’s playspaces, as it is in Japanese gardens, in sculpture.

I am made silent by this place, blown through by it. But then, having left my travelling companions at the Chilean border, as we drive back through valleys where springs run down, where llama gather to drink the clear water and feed on the rich green algae that clings to and streams from the stone, I find something breaking open inside, something full of a hot, sweet sorrow. I couldn’t even say for what. Synchronicity: Sinead O’Connor comes on, singing: I am walking through the desert/ and I’m not frightened though it’s hot/ I have all that I requested/ and I do not want what I haven’t got. I lean back in my seat and watch the desert judder past and let that thing break, let the tears run onto my cheek and evaporate in the wind.

This is what we travel for, to be changed like this.

Wolf-whistles and dynamite in Ouyuni

2010-12-02T04:25:00.003+11:00

The town of Ouyuni lies at the edge of Bolivia’s great salar, 12,000 square kilometers of blinding white salt. Like the surrounding plains, it is a flat, beaten-down place, harsh, dusty, and windswept. Coming in on one of the daily bus services from Postosi, your first glimpse of the town is a field of rubbish, tattered plastic bags half sunk in the dust like some hardy desert shrub. Bolivia has yet to come to terms with the problems of sustainable waste disposal.

Tourism has breathed some life into what was once just a one-trick salt town, but the smattering of cheap hostels and eateries doesn't change its pioneer-town feeling. There's one automatic teller, a couple of internet cafes with agonizingly slow access, a military base, and the usual colourfully clad, bent old women selling miscellaneous wares from cramped stalls. A motley farrago of dogs stretched out asleep on the pavements or turning nipping circles with one another in the street.

I know I've reached the end of the world when a gaggle of Bolivian girls at the entrance to my hotel are sent into a state of tittering excitement by my arrival. I'm even wolf-whistled. After I leave the reception desk I hear a jabber of excited, hilarious Spanish break out, the only word of which I can pick up is 'atractivo'. Yep, it’s a desperate town.

I am woken in the early hours by a tremendous blast that shakes the windows of my grubby but functional room. I nearly die of fright. There's a moment's silence then a series of smaller explosions begin to crack and sputter. It sounds terribly close and my sleep-addled brain leaps to the direst explanations: outbreak of war, accident at the military base, terrorism. Then, rumpty-tump, a marching band strikes up. Bassoons and timpanies and inaptly-named euphoniums. I incredulously check my watch. Five a.m. I swear out loud at the bloody Bolivians and their explosion-crazy ways as another fearsome blast rocks the room. In the morning I ask the tittering girl on reception what the hell it was all in aid of. Anniversary of some victory or other, apparently. But at five a.m.? I protest. Es un poco loco, I say, twirling a forefinger at my temple. Such a nice phrase in Spanish.

There’s not much to keep me in Ouyuni, unless it’s the dubious novelty of being wolf-whistled by Bolivian peasant girls, so I sign up for a three-day tour of the salar and altiplano region the next day. I haven’t met many Australians so far, but my group consists of five Australians, myself included, and one unfortunate Hawaiian, who has a stomach bug and spends the tour either crashed out asleep, or shuffling about with exquisite caution as if his shoelaces were tied together.

Two of the Australians are gangling blonde girls taking a break after finishing medical school. Having doctors on board is handy – especially when they tell me that the ibuprofen tablets I’ve bought at the local pharmacy are four times the normal Australian dose, and taking two is likely to punch a jagged hole in my stomach lining. Thanks for pointing that out, Mr. Bolivian Pharmacy Guy. But didn’t I already…? I pull out the blister pack, and sure enough, two are missing from last night’s bus headache. Shit. Just don’t do it again, the girls tell me.

This was going to be my altiplano blog entry, but I’m telling peripheral tales instead. That’s because it’s a job for a Whitman or a Neruda. My courage is failing me. Mañana. I shall try to find a language for it mañana.

When there is no harbour

2010-12-01T14:22:00.004+11:00

This is being a man
Knowing you are alone
Not fearing it
Standing, not leaning.

Everything you love
Is sand, and blows away
Do not be afraid
The world has no end.

This is being a man
Losing your roots
Not fearing it
You are not your mother's son
You are not your brother's brother
You are not your lover's lover
You are the wind
And cannot be divided
Cannot be broken
Cannot be lost.

Fear no storm
You are the wind
And cannot die.

This is wisdom
For when there is no harbour:
You are the wind
And cannot die.

Potosí

2010-11-26T10:57:00.006+11:00

In Potosi, they're repaving a road near the central plaza, because earlier on today they had a street parade and, in Potosi, a street parade isn't a street parade without a few sticks of dynamite to blow the road to bits. Dynamite is popular here. You can walk into a shop and pick yourself up a stick of the stuff for a shade under three Australian dollars, plus a handful of detonators, and, for that extra bit of bang, a plastic bag full of what looks like calico pie, but is in fact ammonium nitrate. No permits or any of that silly stuff. And this is in fact what we do before our tour of Potosi's infamous mines. We buy three sticks of dynamite as presents for the miners, plus one which our guide promises to blow up for us in the mine just for fun. We'll also be taking in a few bottle of the miners' preferred beverage: 96% over-proof alcohol. And of course coca. Always coca. The miners need it because they don't eat lunch, so they chew coca leaves to ward of hunger and maintain their energy.

The guy in the explosives shop is a cowboy. He's already getting stuck into the rocket fuel. His teeth are black from coca, his eyes have a mischievous look. He demonstrates the non-flammability of dynamite by lighting a stick like a cuban cigar. Perhaps one made for Fidel by the CIA. You know it's OK, but still you shuffle on the spot a bit as the wrapper goes up in flames and the green plasticine underneath blackens. Now these, on the other hand, he tells us, picking up a harmless looking metal stick from a box of similar items. Throw this on the ground and you lose your legs and your penis. Suddenly that box is looking very close to the edge of the table. Nitroglycerine, you see. He grins, showing those blackened stumps. Now the tourist bit: getting your photograph taken with a bunch of dynamite sticks jammed in your mining belt. I refuse. Gauche.

Then it's off to the mines. The amazing thing is that the Cerro Rico still stays up. It's so riddled with holes by all rights it should collapse on itself like an amateur's souffle. But they're still burrowing, chipping, nibbling away inside it, extrapolating a crazy network of tunnels and shafts deeper and deeper into the mountain's bowels in search of that increasingly elusive vein of pure ore. The Spaniards managed to work to death somewhere in the vicinity of eight million indigenous slaves here. And the death toll continues, though today it's mainly the accumulated effects of toxic inhalations and accidents that acount for the deaths in the mining co-operatives that dig tin, silver, lead and zinc out of that perilous warren. Murder too, if the cowboy is to be believed. If you let on to the wrong person about a big find, you might just 'slip' down a hole one day.

At the entrance to the mine, bowed over to avoid the low beams and compressed air ducting, daylight shrinking behind me, I have just a moment of claustrophobia, a Gimli-enters-the-Paths-of-the-Dead moment in which I want to shout, stop! I can't do it. But it passes quickly and doesn't return. I ask the guide about the white and yellow mineral encrustations on the walls. Arsenic, he tells me. It's not this stuff that's a problem, he says, pointing to the crystalline formations, but this: he crumbles white arsenic dust from the wall with his fingers. It's breathing that stuff in every day that does for you in the end.

The first stop is the clay idol, or tio, to which the miners make offerings of alcohol, coca and llama's blood and pray for purer minerals, safety and fertility. To the indigenous miners of Spanish colonial times, the idol was the consort of Pachamama, Mother Earth. To Christian miners it was the devil - not that they didn't pray to it too. And it still combines these dual identities. The idol is bedecked with coca leaves, its crude clay phallus soggy and crumbling at the end from over-enthusiastic libations. The walls are black with llama blood. The devil in the mountain is hungry for blood - if it doesn't receive llama's, it will take men's.

We push on deeper into the winding, increasingly airless tunnels and come at last to a shaft. It's just a gaping dusty hole dropping an unknown distance into the dark. The tunnels are divided into levels separated by shafts like these. The miners work up to twelve levels down, but we are only going down two today. At first glance it looks unthinkably terrifying. There's a rope that leads over the brink and at first we think we're expected to abseil down without safety equipment. It's not quite that bad. Not far over the edge, a rickety wooden ladder begins. It's scary as hell, but you can hold onto the rope and, dangling over the void, find the top rung of the ladder with your feet. Grab the wrong place with your hand, and the earth crumbles and falls into the dark below. But once you're properly on the ladder, it's not so bad. It's too dark to see anything but the rung in front of you, so you go one step at a time and don't think about falling.

Some parts of the tunnels are so narrow we have to crawl through. I've lost my sense of direction entirely, I'm just plunging on following the light of the guide's helmet, panting and dizzy from the exertion and the altitude. We meet a miner, offer him gifts in exchange for a photo and a few minutes of his time. He cuts an archetypal figure somehow, standing there in that sweltering dead-end of rock, chiselling a vein of white tin. We find out he is forty-five, but he seems ageless, as if he were part of the mountain itself. All miners, every miner manifest in the one sweating, powerful figure. The bag of ore near his feet slowly grows heavier. He asks us for a 'hangover', so we offer him one of the bottles of alcohol we've brought. Long after we've left, I think of how he's still there, how he'll be there tomorrow, how he'll always be there, chipping out the metal that makes our machines, our tin cans, our playthings, one rock at a time.

Deep in the mine, as I'm panting at the bottom of another dodgy wooden ladder, another dangerous shaft close by my right hand side, waiting for one of my two companions to follow me down, I have a genuine sense of adventure and even some pride. I faced fears here. But when the guide lights the fuse on a half stick of dynamite and we stand in the complete darkness of a nearby cul-de-sac, waiting for the blast, I get that uncomfortable feeling that follows me throughout my travels: the awareness of the falsity of this, its built-for-tourists sensationalism. Even here, in the real mines of real Bolivia, in a (small) degree of real danger, I'm still inescapably a tourist, a gringo, a voyeur. It's an awareness that always leaves me slightly queasy and ill-at-ease. But don't talk about it to other tourists. Nobody wants the spell broken. Everybody wants to see the picture, not the carefully constructed frame.

After the blast, I'm clambering back up to the main tunnel when my light goes out. Unable to see, I can't climb any further. The last light from the others disappears around a corner and I'm alone in the dark. Wait guys, I call out, but nobody replies. There is not a photon of light, not a sound. Just for a moment the frame shatters and I really am lost and alone deep in the earth, buried alive. It is terrifying, but I realise later I'm grateful for this real moment. I was a tourist before, a tourist after - there is no escaping it - but I'm glad to have felt something down there that was not tainted by the suspicion of voyeurism and inauthenticity.

Cerro Rico

2010-11-25T09:39:00.006+11:00

There’s something not quite right with the taxi driver. We are on the road from Sucre to Potosi, the silver mining town that clings to the slopes of the Cerro Rico, the Rich Mountain. Thousands of Bolivians have died in its poisonous, treacherous tunnels digging out the precious white metal. Thousands still do. For their sacrifice, the mountain appears on the Bolivian coat of arms, a lonely Smaug’s mountain in the centre of the one boliviano coin. Life is cheap here, and it seems the taxi driver who is taking me and three Bolivians to Potosi treats it as such. He is driving erratically on the tortuous mountain road, as much on the wrong side of the road as the right, but the Bolivians are stolidly silent and so I sit tight in my belt-less seat and watch carefully.

He’s in the wrong lane and there’s a car coming right at us. He doesn’t seem to notice. We drift towards the car, which doesn’t slow down but holds a steady collision course. I want to yell out ‘car!’ but the paralysis of cultural uncertainty, the ridiculous desire to not make a fuss, paralyses me. Plus, the only word I can think of is German. Spanish has abandoned me. At the last moment, before the driver suddenly wakes up and swerves back to the other side, I’m giving myself about 25% odds of death. Not a head thing, but that’s the calculation my instinct is making, summing together everything I know and everything I don’t. Or am I crazy? No, something is definitely wrong. I look at the driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. They are red, slitted. He rubs them, yawns, waves his arm outside the car to wake himself up, changes the radio repeatedly, leans forward for a bit, leans back again. He’s a surly, unpleasant man, the eyes that catch mine in the mirror are cold and veiled. He has the broken-nosed profile of a boxer, of a man to whom bad things happen.

A car overtakes us. This is not good. The driver’s manhood is challenged. All of a sudden he is driving like a bat out of hell. If you want a picture of this road, think the Great Ocean Road, minus the ocean. Just barren badland mountains, starkly beautiful and utterly uncompromising. The landscape for a war, for oppression and suffering unremarked. No country for old men, you might say. And there are few old men. The mines kill them within ten years.

Back in Sucre I talked to a beggar who came from a village in these punishing hills. I told him Bolivia was beautiful. No creo, he said. I don’t think so. His father died in the mines, and he himself had an accident. He shows me his hands, the raw, infected stumps of fingers. There is no free hospital he tells me, or at least no free medication. He can have the operation he needs, but he has to pay for the anaesthetic and the antibiotics himself. Forty bolivianos that he doesn’t have. You can see where this is going. Others are watching the exchange and I know they are thinking: Don’t do it. Don’t fall for it.

Where are you staying? he asks me, and I make the mistake of telling him: La Posada. It’s my one splurge so far on the accommodation front, an elegant, classy place with soft sheets and terracotta tiled roofs, a beautiful hacienda-style courtyard. How much are you paying? Of course. The contrast, you see. And the truth is, it would pay for his medication five times over. The guilt trip. And yet, the reality. All those complicated, unresolved emotions associated with these situations. The guilt of privilege, the unsureness of oneself, of what is truth and what is spiel. But does it matter? The hands are no trick, the poverty is not feigned.

I watch the driver’s eyes, taking it on myself now to be the one to shake him awake if his lids lose their fight with sleep for that fatal moment. Right now, I hate this bastard. I have a son, you reckless prick, I think. Don’t make him wait for my call in vain. No, I’m being a chicken, a wimp, a soft westerner, right? This is normal. Has to be. He tears around the bends trying to catch the car that so rudely overtook him, but this is a deadbeat rust-bucket from circa 1985. Its guts don’t match his testosterone. Then I see he’s using the fucking handbrake to try to slow down. I hear its useless ratcheting as he wrenches it up.

I’ve had it now. Por favor, no tan rapido! I burst out. Please, not so fast. He nods curtly. Tiene sueno, es muy peligroso. You’re sleepy. It’s very dangerous. The taxi fills with tension, but I feel the gratitude of the others. Funny how you know just from the quality of the air.

We’re coming down a hill and there’s a truck in front of us. We are coming at it too fast, but he doesn’t change course, doesn’t slow. Suddenly it’s on us. The Bolivians’ stoicism cracks. Hands fly up, people cry out, and in the last possible moment, he swerves, the truck’s filthy tailgate slides past my door. I see his sly smirk in the mirror. A savage joke, punishment for my humiliating him. I look at the others beside me. The cultural differences are dissolved now. The driver is a lunatic. I am actually shaking with fear.

When we reach Potosi, his driving is no better, but I don’t care if we crash. At this speed I’ll be alright. And in fact we do. We actually do crash into the back of another car. No biggie. No-one even bothers to stop to inspect the damage.

It’s a strange town, bleak, bereft of green, and cold. Mountain winds flap the bright shawls of the old, bowed women by the roadsides. The air is thin, and the streets climb precipitously between close-flanked buildings which combine dilapidation and a certain beauty. There’s a deep resonance of time and suffering here, a grave dignity. I get out at the terminal, refuse to thank the driver, but bite my tongue on the words I want to say. I stand on the cold street beside one of my fellow passengers who smiles at me with real warmth.

That was crazy, right? I say to him in Spanish. That wasn’t normal.

No, he says, joy for his life in his eyes. I was praying to Saint Mary.

My next taxi driver, from the station to the hotel, laughs grimly at the story. Oh no, he says. Don’t take a taxi. Many accidents. Never take a taxi from Sucre.

The Cerro Rico, Smaug’s peak, scarred and shattered and eviscerated, looms in the light between the narrow lanes. The taxi driver holds up a coin to show me the mountain there too, imprinted in the silver. Lives minted in coin, in cheap Bolivianos. Forty of them, forty pieces of silver, to fix a man’s ruined hands.

El condor pasa

2010-11-21T11:14:00.004+11:00

In the courtyard of the hostel, an Italian is telling stories about his recent travels in Paraguay and Brazil. At the border of the two countries, he watched an unending stream of Brazilians pouring across into Paraguay. There was a border post there, but nobody seemed to be bothering to stop there. When he went to get his passport stamped, the officials were reading newspapers and seemed quite put out to have to actually lift their stamps. Outside, the Brazilian stampede continued. The basis of all this interest in Paraguay? It seems the Brazilians have just discovered credit cards. Their economy is booming, not just on the back of resources, but on a giant consumer credit binge. They are coming to Paraguay to buy cameras and laptops and mobile phones on the dirt cheap, uncontrolled Paraguayan market. The boom has driven local prices to crazy heights. Thirty real (fifteen euros) to catch a bus which in Argentina would cost a peso and a half. There's a madness about it. How can the poor, of which the country still possesses tens of millions, still afford to live there? And, as the Italian tells it, a certain easy-going joie de vivre has gone from the country. Now Rio and Sao Paulo resemble western cities, everyone working longer and longer hours to sustain their hunger for credit and the technological wonders it buys. Interestingly, when I took out cash in Paraguay, the ATM kept chanting phrases at me ending in 'en adelante': in advance. Seems the Paraguayans might be discovering credit cards too.

The Italian's English is excellent and he paints a vivid word picture of Paraguay that fits my own impressions. But whereas I found the place creepy, he was fascinated by it: its faded colonial buildings, its bizarre contradictions: a land-locked country with an (admittedly pitiful) navy, its homeless living under strips of plastic in the central plaza of Asuncion, with mobile phones hidden in their rags.

Also interesting is the story of the radiant beautiful American woman who works for a tiny tour agency near the hostel. She's a refugee from the madness of the American economy, which had seen her working as a paralegal for eight dollars an hour, with ten days leave a year. This is the norm now. Four weeks' leave is a 'perk' you can earn if you stay with a company long enough. Somehow she scraped together $3000 and now here she is. The Bolivian family she's staying with gives her board and food - admittedly it's bread for breakfast and dinner, only lunch is substantial - and she talks to the tourists in English. We go out for a beer and she's slightly embarrassed because her daily budget is one US dollar. Ice-cream and internet, she says. She has five hundred dollars left, and when it runs out, she has to leave. I shout her the beer, but she won't accept any food: she's adjusted to her Bolivian food schedule, doesn't get hungry any more. She tells me she tried chicken's feet, brains and eyes for the first time that day. The family just slaughtered a chicken and nothing goes to waste here. When in Bolivia, she says. But when I see her two days later she tells me she's been sick as a dog. She doesn't know what it was, but personally I think the eyes have it...

I link up with a German guy to do a two-day trek into Amboro National Park, to visit the 'cloud forest', with some of the world's oldest and largest ferns. It's a tough slog, up some Kokoda-like slopes at altitude, the guide hacking his way through places where the trail has grown over. The guide only speaks Spanish during the trek, so I'm at sea with his explanations a lot of the time, but fortunately my German companion understands a bit more, and can translate when my Spanish fails. At night we sit around the fire, and, since we're reduced to a primitive level of conversation, it turns into a naming game. I learn the Spanish for lots of basic things, like carrots, bears, shins and smoke. Funnily enough, the one language we can all speak at least a little bit of - English - is the one that hardly gets used.

In the night it pours. The tent is old and falling apart, and water seeps up into my sleeping bag. I stuff what clothes I can into my backpack to keep them dry, lie awake listening to the thunder and the rain thrumming on the fly. The next day we press on towards the summit of the mountain, in drizzle and fog, the ground now slipping and collapsing under our boots. I'm taught to chew coca leaves to ward off cold, hunger and fatigue. They are harmless and non-addictive, and don't give you a high, but I do notice the effect, a new lightness of step.

It's truly wild at the summit, no trees any more but a heath of lichens, algae, mosses and tiny wildflowers. We are standing in a sea of cloud that boils all around, blasts up the cliff face like ocean spray. The white abyss feels like the edge of the world. But then wind rends the cloud and another mountain looms in the tear, clambering jungle and rocky spurs and escarpments. Now I feel our vertiginous position. We watch the clouds broil and swirl and break, revealing and concealing the surrounding range, annihilating the forest then creating it again, a vast and fluid sleight of hand. Vultures and falcons reel about in the airy gulf.

Later in the day we stop for lunch at the edge of another cliff. The now intense sun has melted the clouds and the night's rain has rinsed the humidity from the air. We can see as far as the Andes. As we sit with our feet at the edge of the cliff, we receive our parting gift. From far left, a pair of silver wings rides the thermals that flow up the side of the mountain. Nearer and nearer it comes and then sweeps past: a rarely seen Amazonian condor, so close we can see its eyes, every feather in the black splay of its wingtips as it balances on the currents, lifting higher, higher, further away, at last cresting the ridge of the cordillera and plunging from view. It leaves a trace of chill beauty on the wind.

We sit a while eating in silence, watching the patchwork shadows move on the land. Then we heft our packs again. There's a lot of ground to cover to make Samaipata by evening.

Samaipata

2010-11-19T01:18:00.003+11:00

And then... paradise! There was a point there, squashed up in the back of a people-mover in sweltering heat, carsick and dehydrated, where I was starting to forget the point of all this discomfort I was subjecting myself to. But as soon as I arrived here in Samaipata, a village in southeast Bolivia in the foothills of the Cordillera Oriental, I forgave South America everything. Dusty tiled streets with lounging dogs, women selling chilis and beaded necklaces, picturesesque hills in the background, a shady square and peace. My room is tiny and simple and delightful, a view over the terracotta rooftops to the hills, a tiny wooden desk that begs to be written at. Down some wooden steps to a pretty, shaded courtyard where a hammock swings, windchimes tinkle, some Andean music plays softly. And all this costs the princely sum of ten bucks a night, breakfast included. Oh, if I had six months and no obligations! I´d set up here, write my novel, learn Spanish... I could weep at the thought.

I loved Buenos Aires, and Iguazu was unforgettable, but now I´m here I know this is the experience I came for. My body´s aches and pains are miraculously eased, my heart breathes, and all of a sudden I can really play the guitar again. I can sit up on the landing outside my little sanctuary and the notes just flow off my fingers like they were born to fly. The only blemish on this Shangri-La? The squadrons of mozzies that rise out of nowhere in singing, whining clouds at six each night to devour the juicy and unprotected.

But it´s sunny and fairly cool at this height, and there are treks to be done: three day wades into the trackless jungle with a machete-wielding guide, or the Che Guevara trail - the famous revolutionary was killed not far from here. There are also pre-Incan archeological sites to explore. But not yet. First I have some industrial-strength chilling out to do...

Saudade in Paraguay

2010-11-16T02:08:00.003+11:00

One of my dreams about coming to South America was that I would play some of the guitar pieces I've been playing for years in the places they were composed. Especially Paraguay, where Agustin Barrios, one of my favourite guitarist-composers was born. A romance built on nothing much but some fantasy of otherness, a dream of exotic lands conjured by Barrios' lyrical music. The Parana River runs between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, and just a few kilometres from where it plunges so spectacularly over the abysses of Iguazu, there is a place where the corners of the three countries meet. At night its peaceful and pretty, the river moving slowly down towards the falls, the lights of small towns on the Brazilian and Paraguayan sides playing on the water. It was here I chose to indulge my romantic folly, bringing my guitar and sitting on a step near where the bank sloped down to the river, and playing music from all three countries: a tango for Argentina, a samba for Brazil, and Barrios' Choro da Saudade (choro of longing) for Paraguay. The heavens didn't open, Barrios' ghost didn't appear to guide my fingers or to stand nodding in the shadows of the rainforest in the feathers and indigenous garb he favoured when performing. But couples who'd come to hold hands and take in the balmy night listened quietly, a man offered me a sandwich and a drink. I doubt anyone saw the musical synchronicity of the performance.

The choro da saudade. So beautiful, and I suspect it's the piece Barrios would play himself if he saw Paraguay today. There's not much left of the jungles he called home. Today it's a land known for three things: environmental vandalism, corruption, and cheap electronic goods. And the world's second largest dam, the grave of waterfalls said to have been more marvellous than Iguazu. No industry to speak of, its ecotourism potential squandered, you cross the border from Argentina and straight away you're in the real third world. I'd forgotten. The streets filthy, littered with trash, dog shit, rubble. Mangy one-eyed cats. Women with grubby infants on their hips, kids selling cheap bananas or apples or chewing gum at the intersections, or cleaning windscreens in falling apart sneakers and rags.

I have to cross Paraguay to get to the capital Asuncion so that I can fly to Santa Cruz in Bolivia. I wonder, as I sit in the dilapidated bus terminal, how many people would recognise Barrios if I played him there. None, I suspect. When I saw the road from the border of Argentina to Asuncion on the map, I'd pictured rainforest, but as I gaze out the window in my haze of traveller's fatigue, it's a singularly prosaic landscape that the streetlights illuminate. This was rainforest once, but no more. It's clear-felled, hastily, shittily developed. Barrios, your choro would do the crying for you.

I'm hungry, had no time for dinner, and when a woman gets on the bus carrying on her head a load of what look like bagels wrapped in a big sheet, I haven't a single guarani to buy one. The smell is a torment. The bus was supposed to arrive at midnight but it doesn't get there till after one. I leave the bus terminal and the city is a ghost town. This is no Buenos Aires, which would be waking up right about now. My eyes are gritty with sleep, my back hurts from slinging that massive backpack too carelessly onto my shoulders, my knee aches from some other unidentified insult. Thank you, trusty old body, for putting up with this. I look at the neon signs of grotty, unappetising hotels across from the station. No. I'm still too fastidious for that. A taxi appears on the empty and I get in, ask for the Plaza Hotel mentioned in my Lonely Planet guide.

Asuncion at night. Spookily quiet. Streetlights and dust and broken pavements and locked up stalls, Spanish signs at drunken angles. I watch the driver's head. Decide how to handle getting out in order to avoid the possibility of him driving off with my worldly belongings. That cultural vulnerability again. On one corner, "ladies of the night", or are they ladies at all? They look muscular, tough, like soldiers in fishnets and leather miniskirts. Utterly impenetrable, not that you would ever, ever want to try. Brutal, sad, grotesque sexual parodies, the antithesis of eroticism.

The hotel is empty, hospital corridors in bare neon light, grimy stairs. A kind of Graham Greene dissolution about the place. Am I dreaming? It has the feeling of dreams with nobody in them. The bed is all springs and bumps, the pillow dirty. Mosquitoes whine and feed, sleep recedes from my advance like fog. I've crossed into the dead zone, when sleep buses no longer come to pick you up. Though in the end oblivion comes. Oh Paraguay.

The secret of the secret garden

2010-11-15T08:29:00.003+11:00

Sketches, only sketches...

At the Argentinian-Brazilian border, an Australian woman is arguing with the bus driver. Apparently it's a matter of seven pesos for a ticket. The argument is heated enough that two khaki-clad border guards are getting on the bus. She thinks she's paid for the whole trip to Puerta Iguazu, and doesn't have to buy another ticket. The bus driver thinks otherwise. OK, fine, I'll pay, but I want your name, buddy. Where are your details? She snoops around looking for the non-existent name plate. He ignores her, takes my fare. I've been with this driver before, but suddenly the man is revealed beneath the uniform, the role. I like him; he has dignity and strength. The Aussie woman, having failed to establish the man's name, rank and serial number, goes for her backpack, says to her boyfriend, I'm taking his photo. He doesn't appear embarrassed by the hullaballoo, but stays uninvolved. The bus moves off and she sits down, red-faced, sweat running over her ample flesh. So. No photo after all? I watch her boyfriend lean back against the bus window, thumbs hooked in pants, sunnies and a three-day growth, chest pushed out, and two things are clear: what an absolutely first-rate dude he considers himself, and how deeply deluded he is in this conviction. As for me, I decide to be German.

According to the delightful John, who runs the Secret Garden B&B, a secret well and truly blown by an article in The Guardian, Umberto Eco said that Iguazu Falls was the one place in the world where he experienced a death wish. And this is funny - more funny for the rum cocktails we've all imbibed - because the English girl and I had been saying just the same thing: how we experienced an urge to jump. It might actually be worth it.

Awesome. How I hate that trampled and abused word. But here, it is justified. Picture a river twenty times larger than the Yarra plunging into an abyss. No, you can't. It's hopeless. The power of all that water lumbering over the lip of the chasm, the inestimable mass of it, passing with a deafening roar into a cloud of spume through which daring birds flick and and dart. It's not pretty like the photos. It's terrifying. But I experience no vertigo, even standing on the brink of the Devil's Throat. That's the strange part. It's not the perverted urge to jump of vertigo, which is nothing more than fear quantum-tunnelling to the Other Side. It's the Urge to Merge. It's holy terror, the longing for the divine, the desire for an end to separation from immensity. Umberto Eco's death wish.

John is serving the most sublime cocktails, and the German woman asks him, like she's asking the Great Guru, "So, vot is the secret of the Secret Garden? Vot makes it so special? Vy this vay, so different from every other vay?" She gestures to the tropical garden thriving in the darkness behind us, the flickering candles, the tables polished cross-sections of ancient trees. John is Indian, has that particular gentle charm unique to certain Indian men. He roomed at university with Sunil Gavaskar on whom he was supposed to be a sobering, academic influence, somehow ended up in a photographer in Buenos Aires and now, here he is, proprietor of the world's worst-kept travel secret. Now he gives a diffident smile and says that the answer is... rum. It so happens the the said beverage is doing its job. I turn laughing to the German woman and ask her what the German is for rum. "Well," she says in German, "I think it's Rum, but how can that be the secret??" I lean over and confide to her earnest Germanic face than this was, in fact, a joke. We're all a bit drunk, truth be told. Now John shows us that the candles are actually fakes. They're little flickering diodes in frosted glasses. "This is all a facade!" declares the American-Englishman. "It's fake candles and cheap rum!" God that seems funny at the time.

Almost with you, so far away

2010-11-13T02:00:00.003+11:00

I’m on the bus from Cordoba to Iguazu, reflecting on what it means to be a stranger in a strange land. Its linguistic and cultural insecurities, its disturbance of assumptions, its loneliness. One lacks assurance, sure-footedness, like someone walking on ground that might at any moment give way beneath his feet. But there are gifts in this alienation from ‘normality’ too, beyond an increased empathy for our immigrants. It’s a chance to stand outside of one’s world, to see its artificial boundaries, its totality, like astronauts seeing the world from a distance for the first time, its wholeness and its lack of borders.

Earlier I was bugged by the woman in the seat behind me listening to music on her headphones so loudly you could hear every distorted word throughout the whole bus. So I plugged in my own headphones and squeezed the switch for some music of my own. What came on was The Church, circa 1983, “I’m Almost With You”. Those famously “jangly” guitars (that was always the word used to describe it) and Steve Kilbey’s drawled Australian voice, a voice that out here, crossing the vast farmlands of northern Argentina, seemed steeped in its culture and its time, spoke of smoky pubs and nightclubs at 2am, of the time when guys wore paisley and eyeliner, a time in which a curiously affected effeminacy was the mode. You can hear it in Kilbey’s style: a lazy Aussie cowboy drawl mixed with a precious intellectual inflection. Sitting here it seems the affectation of a culture and time unsure of itself, straining for something, without knowing what it was. But the pretension of it doesn’t matter from this distance. It’s just the shape of the thing now, as beyond judgement as any expression of pattern in nature. And the song is still good. Goddamn, it’s a good song and it always will be. That’s another thing made clear by enough distance. Always is.

As the song goes on, I’m looking out the window over a stretch of river that is a mix of the picturesque and the ugly. Beside the river there are horses, and a man gallops bareback away from the water, graceful and thrilling. Another man holds a fishing line, bare to the waist in a wooden canoe. But the bank is littered with rubbish, power lines are draped over the river between pylons. As I look at this scene, The Church’s incongruous tones in my ears, I’m struck by two simultaneous feelings. The song is home. It’s those days back in the eighties when I was turning from boy to man. It’s the layers of a thousand memories that that song plays in. It’s assurance. It’s identity. And at the same time I feel I’m looking from a great distance of time and space into that strange place that was Australia, Melbourne, my homeland, back then when I was still forming. Heimat, the Germans call it. It’s in my heart and at the same time it’s distant from me, fading, already lost. I watch the cirrus clouds painted on a sky darkening from turquoise to lapis, and I feel a painful happiness. A sad joy.

Algedonic. I'm a one-man champion of this word. Look it up, or use your ancient Greek.

That’s what it is to be a stranger in a strange land. It’s the sharpening by relief, and the erosion of who you are. Or am I just saying I’m homesick right now? Not really, not exactly. My mouth waters when I think of some of the things I cook at home, and, sure, I miss the important people. But more than that I just feel the hugeness of the world, I’m aware that even at home, buffered by the familiar, we are spinning through this vastness and ephemeral.

Oh damn! I promised to spare you such melancholy bus-spawned philosophizings. Should I tell you that paragliding over the badlands near Cordoba was an absolute blast?

OK, I’ve arrived. What a night. I had just been patting myself on the back for my uncharacteristic foresight and organisation when it comes to travel decisions, and then… the fall that pride precedes. I failed to pack a jumper into my overnight bag, on the assumption that this bus line would provide a blanket like the other one I travelled with. First rule for the stranger-in-a-strange-land: make no assumptions. I could see the impending problem as the temperature dropped steadily with nightfall, so when we stopped for dinner (at half past midnight! What is it with Argentinian dinner times? Do they still eat at midnight after they have kids?) I spoke to the driver: esta bastante frio… It’s quite cold. I’d meant to go on with the rest of my prepared statement about please getting something from my baggage, but the driver came back at me with the yippity, from which I picked up the word calefaccione. Now isn’t it good that I bothered to learn so much obscure English vocab? I knew it’d come in handy one day. Calefacient means “heat producing” in English. Aha! So the heater’s coming on! No need for the struggle to extract understanding and my backpack then…

Well, yes, I was right. Some kind of tepid air did briefly raise the temperature above freezing, then seemed to lose interest in continuing its insipid efforts. So there’s me in my linen shirt with nothing under it, curled in as much of a foetal ball as a bus seat will allow (I have to admit, they were comfy seats, but still…), trying to collect as much warmth as possible in the spaces I manage to enclose between body and seat. There’s about a teacup of the delicious stuff. A leaky teacup. If I’m on right side, my left side is horribly envious. I flip over when I’ve had enough of its complaints (more like a hermit crab reorienting in its shell), and then my right side starts up its moaning. Tormenting image of someone who gives a damn throwing a blanket over me… I swallow three sleeping tablets. Take that, cold!

Oh I’m miserable.

Oh I’m miserable.

Oh I’m miser… what are those funny trees? And why can’t I quite fly over the top of them?

The Spanish verb and other hijos de putas

2010-11-10T12:36:00.004+11:00

A cat sounds like its dying outside my window. Several cats, in fact, are being murdered horribly. Dinner was a local specialty: beans, bones and bits of fat in a gelatinous stew. Yuuuum. Then humiliated myself by not having enough money to pay (!) and had to temporarily surrender my iPhone (quelle horreur!) while I went searching for a cajero automatico. But Cordoba itself is pleasant: a university city that unbelievably is as big as Melbourne, population-wise. Everyone you look at is under twenty-five. But that’s a noticeable feature of Argentina anyway: people are just younger than in Australia. No ageing population problem here. Like BA, it’s a hub of creativity and culture: the so-called ‘cultural mile’ in the city centre is a strip of one art gallery, theatre, museum after another – well, nearly. But to tell the truth it’s a little lost on me right now. For some reason all the hostels are close to empty – everyone is commenting on it – and I sorely miss some English-speaking company. I’m the ancient mariner in a sea of Latinos: people, people everywhere and not a one to talk to…

Though the Spanish bug is in my system now. Bug, I said, not fly! Such assistance would be entirely superfluous, trust me, in this the land of the fierce-eyed beauty – and I haven’t even seen Rio yet! I had a conversation in Spanish with the receptionist this morning – talking of the fierce-eyed beauty – and she couldn’t believe I only started learning a month ago and never took a class. Hehe. I do enjoy being a smart arse sometimes. I kind of hate it though that I have the bug. In fact it’s the reason I didn’t learn any Spanish earlier. I know what I’m like. Once it takes hold it won’t let go. I’m condemned to countless hours, days, months of work. I’ll be translating every thought in my head into Spanish in the shower. Goddammit. Just when I kind of finished with German.

May I also say: fuck the Spanish verb. The Spanish verb is a bastardo that should be run through pronto with a conquistador’s rapier. German grammar is a torturous turd of a thing too, until you get used to it – worse than Spanish on the whole – but the verbs have nothing on Spanish verbs. That’s because German is rather impoverished in its expression of tense. Whereas the Spanish managed to squeeze in a whole new tense between the present and the imperfect, probably just to torture victims of the inquisition:

“Conjugation or the Algerian hook?”

“Tough one, but … I’ll take the hook...”

Enough though on Spanish and languages. Tomorrow paragliding. The next day trekking. That should keep you all spared of any melancholy reflections about strangers on buses.

Oh and one more thing: the Argentinian beer of choice, Quilmes, is vile poison. They were probably extracting it with a catheter from those cats I heard before.

Sketches of the journey, and beginner's mind

2010-11-09T22:56:00.003+11:00

I'm hoping to capture something more on this trip than just some happy snaps and a few travelogue entries. That's by way of explanation for the rather drastically different tone of my last entry. Travel - especially travel alone - throws up so many unique moments where the strangeness of one's external circumstances intersects with a particular coloration of subjectivity, and I want to try to capture some of this, this inner journey. On my couch surfing profile (I'm couch surfing at least part of the time in Germany), I put down my 'mission' as 'chasing my tale'. I'm after stories to tell. Not traveller's war stories, though that's always nice, but stories that illuminate the inner world as much as the outer. Stories for the writer. In that sense I hope to make this blog a sort of sketch pad from which I can later work up more complete portraits. I'm not aiming for perfect, polished pieces. I could of course keep them to myself and work them up into something a little more professional and publish them properly. That would be less risky and less potentially exposing, but I rather like the idea of doing it this way, going out on a limb a bit. It's a fun creative challenge and part of the pleasure of blogging not to be too concerned with perfection.

I had a very enjoyable conversation in the main square of Cordoba with a guy from Peru who had come to study in Cordoba - a city with no less than seven universities. It turned out he spoke reasonably decent German as well as English and Spanish, and in the end we had a conversation that moved spontaneously between the three languages. My German is good enough that I can forget I'm speaking it, so half the time I was in a strangely pleasant meta-linguistic plane, the conversation bouncing like a skipping stone over the surface of language, in flight in those moments when the form was forgotten, touching down when we had to reflect on the underlying language. Of course I can't forget I'm speaking or listening to Spanish, but part of the enjoyment was our incompetencies and failures as much as our fluency, getting the stone skipping again with a bit of help when it splashed in the water, and learning something in the process.

At one point he clarified for me the correct form of 'to be' in the sentence 'I'm just a beginner'. Spanish has a verb for intrinsic being ('ser') and another for temporary or 'state' being ('estar'). I wasn't sure if my beginner status was intrinsic or temporary. It's intrinsic, at least in Spanish grammar: 'Solo soy (ser) un principiante'. It made me reflect on being a beginner, and on the value of it. As I've said before, I initially hated the feeling of incompetency which my rudimentary Spanish gave me in my first few days. I'd be in a shop trying to buy a SIM card - everything about the situation was familiar, in all visual respects almost identical to a situation I might encounter in Australia, but here I'm linguistically disabled, I'm reliant on the kindness and patience of multiple people to guide me here and there, to make gestures of explanation, to speak to me like I was a child or an idiot. I stumble about from one counter to another, making a fool of myself at every point of interaction.

Appalling. But appalling to whom? To the adult who is ensconced in his armour of competence and assurance and mastery, who wants to ride along safely inside the shell of his habits and perfected skills, like a man in a Mercedes on cruise control. But think of a child, whose life is learning, who is constantly confronted by a world which is beyond him or her. Children cannot afford to despise the experience of being a beginner, because it is their very intrinsic condition. Ser not estar.

Neither should we, as adults, because we too are intrinsic beginners. Will always be. It's just that we end up staying as much as possible within the sphere of our established competencies. We hate nothing more than looking a fool. But consider the gifts of embracing our beginner-ness, our beginning-ness. When we begin we are being born, and we all know what Bob Dylan said about those no longer busy being born. There's an immense liberation in being comfortable with being bad at stuff, with failing, falling on one's face, with screwing up, with being utterly crap. And yesterday's beginner is today's journeyman, tomorrow's master. The breadth of what we will be in the end all comes down to what we are prepared to be bad at today.

And finally, it's the precondition of creativity. Because as soon as you're a master of your art, as soon as you've 'got it down', you're finished. When nothing is being born any more, all that remains is the dying.

Stolen

2010-11-09T12:36:00.002+11:00

Somewhere between Buenos Aires and Cordoba I wake. Early morning fog hides the fields of Argentina. The girl next to me has turned to face me in her sleep and I hold my breath and watch her. The bones in her pale shoulder where the blanket has fallen from it.

I heard her earlier, half-whispering down her phone in Spanish with a smile in her voice. My foolish envy when I heard the deep voice speaking back. Her phone glowed in the dark of the bus. The phone her light to him, the light his voice. Happy, she folded it into her hand, shut the light with a click. She let her seat back. The bus rocked us in time.

And I thought:

Of the miles behind me
Of the child who misses me
Of the love you don’t get back
Of the greatness of the world,
Buenos Aires’ fourteen million lights
spread on the dark behind us
Of my childhood, deep and wide as a river, already half forgotten
Of her family, somewhere, waiting
Of our ignorance, the darkness so much vaster than the light of our intersection
Of us all
Of us all
Of us all.

I wake and her face is a foot from mine, young and beautiful, and I steal for just one moment into the room we call intimacy. I steal into the place of her quiet, sleeping breaths. A thief, tender and ashamed, lingering there in that carelessly open doorway. I stay just long enough to steal this from her, this beauty she will never know was taken. Then I quietly close her door. I roll over to the window and watch dawn fill the pane with light.

2010-11-08T03:20:00.004+11:00

The Russian is trying to keep his eyes open because he paid good money for the show but has been sampling the nightlife rather heavily. The Israeli is knocking back wine by the gallon and trying to pick up the Brasilian. The Englishman is complaining that he ordered his steak well done but it's just about mooing still. I haven't done this before - the full tourist deal: tango show with 'free' tango lesson included, dinner, the works. It's all ultra-slick, the busload of tourist cattle herded from point to point with efficiency and charm by young, handsome, smiling Buenos Aireans in black fedoras. The tango lesson is a mixed experience. Whether the move I can only term the 'legover' at the end of the twenty-second routine we get taught is hot or just plain wrong depends on whether your partner is a lithe, black-eyed Brasilian or a sixty-five-year-old housewife from Kansas City with arthritis. My conclusions from the lesson and the show? Firstly, that the learning of tango presents a major testicular hazard. Secondly, that tango is hotter than swing (the style of dance I've been learning in Oz). Yes, even hotter than belboa.

The dancers descend with intent into the aisles. Uh-oh. I am, however, comfortable in the knowledge that, despite my astonishing record for being singled out for public humiliation at every show I attend, the Russian is between me and danger. The Russian was between me and danger. The dancer is coming our way and I never saw a sleepy Russian move so fast. In a flash he's on the other side of the table and the dancer is raising her spangly finger... Nooooooo!! Yep, there's no escaping it. I join the damned in the aisle. I do my brave best to hold my own with the professional tango dancer. Then suddenly - baddaboom baddabang! - the other victims are returned to their seats while I'm abducted by three black-clad Argentinians, 'disappeared', then returned with fedora on head to be swept back down the aisle in the arms of the hottest of the tango dancers. Lights. Applause. Then the sweet anonymity of my seat. What was all that about? The biggest question though is: Why me? Why always me?

Ah well, that was my little touristy indulgence. Not exactly my thing, but kinda fun nevertheless, and the tango was spectacular. I think the Israeli got the girl too.

So I'm leaving Buenos Aires tonight for Cordoba, and I wish I could linger. My impressions of this city have changed a lot from my first post. Yes, it's dirty and grandiose and noisy. But it's not nearly as third world as I first thought. There are some very salubrious districts, you can get pretty much anything (except, it seems, a SIM card that works properly in my iPhone 4), and the lifestyle is modern and with-it. It's seductive and exciting and bursting with artists and musicians. I love this place, and I can fully understand the westerners I've met who've decided to live here, or 'commute' between their life in Australia or wherever and their life here. If only I had six months and I was twenty-five and fancy-free again. I'd hit the Spanish lessons hard and... (sigh).

I spent the day in the Recoleta district yesterday, wandering the famous cemetery where Eva Perron, among other Argentinian luminaries, is buried. It's spooky and atmospheric and a piece of walk-in art. Photos don't show it of course, but here's one anyway:

On the Spanish front, I'm improving. I woke up the other morning and stuff had sunk in somehow. I could say things. I can now read about 80% of what I see. Perhaps 'read' is the wrong word. 'Decipher' maybe. I can make sentences that amazingly have the desired effect upon their recipients. Ooh look! I say magic words, he does things! I just can't understand anyone. I swear these Argentinians can't speak proper Spanish! The consonants sometimes change for mysterious reasons, and my ability to interpret the word as I learned it is tenuous enough. It's hopeless...

OK, time to go find some lunch.

Day two

2010-11-05T14:19:00.005+11:00

I'm warming to this city. I sat today in the Plaza de Majo in the microcentro, the centre of town, and made a video postcard for my son Jude. There were marchers there - I was able to make out that they were protesting about and memorialising the killing of activist students by the previous government. I was shocked - and ashamed of my ignorance - that Argentina's history of repression was so recent. I could translate with a few guesses the headline of their leaflet: "When we asked for work they murdered us. When we demanded a life of dignity they imprisoned us."

The city looks much less third world here: impressive old European buildings, edifices on a grandiose scale, but decaying, graffiti-ridden, their pretensions to national slendour belied by the dirt and the squalor of the sprawling city all around. I wandered down the long avenue towards the city's famous obelisk, another vast monument to vaulting ambitions unrealised. Echoes of Albert Speer's Berlin, almost... Lots of shops for the wealthy here, ritzy opulence cheek-by-jowl with your typical third-world vendor: some guy in a three by three metre alcove flogging cheap soap, cigarettes, Pepsi.

I manage a conversation in part Spanish, part English with a hawker from Chile who is in Argetina studying architecture at university - so he tells me - but he looks like a near beggar. Education is free here, he explains. He's almost as new to Buenos Aires as me - it's his first week. He smiles wistfully about the differences between his little village and this mega-metropolis. The Spanish is different, he complains. Not "vos" for "you", but "tu". And the food. He looks sad. I take pity and buy one of his pendants, probably for way too much. I don't even haggle. That westerner-in-a-developing-country conflict:I'm a mug. No, it's the least I can do. I'm being generous. No, I'm a mug, but I don't care. Of course if any Argentinian heard me call it a developing country they'd probably flip. But this kid... it's India again. And the two beggars on the subway, a boy maybe ten chanting his cry for alms, a hoarse, cawing sound, and his sister or brother - hard to tell - probably three or four and filthy from head to foot. The boy holds her and talks to her because she's crying. I can make out the word word "baño". Bathroom. He's ten and he's the adult.

None of this is or should be shocking to me. But there's still the sadness. Maybe the difference from India is that I didn't have a child myself back then. It shocked me then because it was new and I was privileged and naive. It saddens me now because I look at that filthy, bare-footed kid and think, "that's Jude." Might as well be but for the accidents of fate.

May I say once again how it pains me to be so linguistically incompetent? I should perhaps add that I have some natural prowess with languages, and my Chilean friend was most impressed when I said I only started learning Spanish a month ago. (On the other hand, he asked me where I learned Spanish - "It's very funny". I laughed and said, "In Australia". I wasn't going into the iPhone thing again!) But quick learner or not, a month is a month. It's atrocious.

The daily minor humiliations kill me. Example:

Waiter comes to take my order. I want to say "I'm still deciding", but the grammatical complexities of that are beyond me in the moment. I can barely conjugate the two forms of "to be" on the spot. I come up with "I decide..." The waiter looks at me blankly, and finallyI get out the word "still". "Decido .... todavia." My expression (of pain? fear? insanity?) causes him to back away with raised palms as if I had produced a pistol instead of a dodgy Spanish utterance. "No problem, take your time," he says in perfect English. After he's gone I drag up some kind of grammatical insight. "Estoy decidiendo todavia". That would have worked quite well. The problem is when you put it all together properly, people talk actual Spanish to you, which is naturally hopeless.

Example two: I catch taxi, explain I want to go to "Estacion plaza Italia". He nods and off we go. Great. I relax. Then he starts up. Yippity blabbity blabbity blab. I trot out the usual line - my Spanish is very bad. I'm a beginner. He tries again. Yippity yoppity yappity yop. "Perdon, no entiendo". Sorry, I don't understand. No problemo: plaza Italia! Si, plaza Italia! (Phew). I get to said train station, hop out, run across to the subway entrance and ... it's locked up. Ah. So that's what yippity yappity blabbity blab means. Thank God he's left so I don't have to crawl back into the same taxi for the rest of the journey home. In the new taxi I make polite conversation about the size of Buenos Aires, the difficulties of learning Spanish etc. More yippity. Understand? he asks in English. "Si, entiendo" I say. I just can't bear to say no again, even though I in fact haven't a clue. I try to fool myself into believing I got away with it. I didn't.

The food tastes of Buenos Aires. I don't know how they do it. It looks just like an Australian vege lasagne, but it tastes like Buenos Aires. Not bad exactly. Just somehow Argentinian.

Slept like a flea-ridden dog last night. Body doesn't believe the relative position of earth and sun. Day of the zombie awaits...

Hola, Buenos Aires

2010-11-04T06:17:00.002+11:00

A city is like a lover - smell is everything. I remember on my first trip to India, when Mumbai was still Bombay, how I was struck by the city's pervasive perfume. A sweetish smell, like a spice, but freighted with complexity. A smell of rosewater and shit and betelnut and grimy human living. Even the fruit juice I drank tasted of it, as if it were some kind of obligatory local condiment. It scared me, as a twenty-one year old venturing for the first time into the third world, because of its complete alien-ness, its suggestion of layers upon layers of ingrained life. Coming from my sanitised Australian suburb, the floral-fecal smell of Bombay challenged my white, middle-class squeamishness, my unconscious rejection of the physicality of existence.

Buenos Aires has a particular smell too. A very different one from Bombay circa 1989, but a particular aroma that, once you register it consciously, makes you think, what is that? It also makes you wonder, as a lover's smell can, are you and I going to get along? Or are we too chemically different, will we react to one another like incompatible transplants? Because smell is a city's chemistry, and I'm convinced it works on and with our chemistry too, that there's a reaction. Perhaps that reaction somehow becomes the fate we experience in that city - whether it breaks or steals our heart, makes us king or robs us blind...

I am holed up now in a guest house somewhat further from the city centre than the internet ad promised, and I have actually lost track of how long I haven't slept for. I think it's about 28-odd hours now, so if my prose is lacking, I trust you'll cut me some slack. In fact, I'm just now starting to become delirious, and my eyelids keep spontaneously closing, so I'll keep it short. ish.

First impressions of BA: it looks like a third world city, it smells like a third world city, it functions like a third world city, but it costs like a first world city. Strange. What's more everyone speaks in Spanish all the time. Curiouser and curiouser. Now I never flattered myself that my Spanish was anything but dreadful, but, well it's even dreadfuller than that. I did have something resembling a Spanish conversation with the taxi driver who ripped me off from the airport. A conversation in which it took me about thirty seconds to remember the word for 'twelve'. Absurd. I had to actually count up to it in my head to get it. In fact -I'll admit it - I never did get it. I remembered the word for 'fourteen' and used that instead because it was close enough for the purpose (how many hours was the flight?). It was pure stage fright of course - my first actual conversation in actual Spanish in actual Argentina.

I was relieved that the receptionist at the guesthouse spoke English very well. He asked if I spoke any Spanish and I replied (in nice Espanol) that I was learning, but had only been doing so for a month. Any class in particular, he asked. I continued to explain in Spanish that I'd learnt it from an iPhone app. That seemed to amuse him for some reason. Later he wrote the word 'hoy' on a map and then, after explaining it meant 'today', said, with just a touch of irony, 'But you probably know that from your iPhone program.'

I said, 'It's a good program.'

And he said, 'Sure. You made a whole, properly formed Spanish sentence before and everything.'

Could it be there are limits to the iPhone's power?? My world, my world is crumbling!

Moving right along... I wandered down to San Telmo, the old, cobble-paved district where they sell lots of pricey antiques. After browsing for a while I thought I'd buy a certain young someone a present of a big old Argentinian coin, only it turned out to cost 750 pesos (divide by three-ish). But they do have the most fabulous old junk, including swords and daggers that were obviously real antique weapons, still sharp. Try buying one of those in the nanny state! (OK, I believe in our weapons laws, but still... there's something so charming and liberating about unregulated countries.)

Another thing I failed to fully appreciate about Buenos Aires ... it's eff'n big. Fourteen million people according to the taxi driver (unless my Spanish betrayed me again). It's eff'n big and it's eff'n noisy and Buenos Aires? Good airs? No. No, these are not good airs at all. Time to follow in Mumbai's footsteps and get a new name. Malos Olors, I suggest. Catchy.

2010-09-03T14:53:00.001+10:00

(The following is cross-posted from the Kill Your Darlings blog - KYD asked me to write a post which would speak to my story 'Shock' which appeared in KYD volume II.)

When I wrote the story ‘Shock’, what was foremost in my mind was the idea of vulnerability and exploitation. It’s a story about age exploiting youth, white exploiting black, male exploiting female. It’s a theme that’s been on my mind again recently because of two non-fiction books I’ve just finished reading: Jonathon Safran-Foer’s Eating Animals — an expose of factory farming and a plea for vegetarianism — and Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, an account of the extraordinary cupidity and stupidity which led to the Global Financial Crisis.

KFC and GFC. Although ostensibly about two quite different phenomena, I had the feeling I was reading about two ends of the same exploitative economic machine. On the one hand, the giant, toxic cesspits next to factory-style hog-farms in the US that poison rivers and cause health problems for miles around; on the other mortgage-backed bonds comprised of worthless, toxic loans built on the back of the American poor. The millions of dollars creamed off the top of the economy by bankers and traders on Wall Street are in a sense the final, abstracted product of the same exploitative system that, at its other end, produces cesspits so poisonous that to fall into one is to die.

Both books reminded me that we cannot really escape the systems we inhabit. The interchangeability of money means that, in a sense, exploitative economic practices such as factory farming, clear-felling and greed-driven money markets taint every dollar in the economy - we are always ‘buying in’ to the ethics of the system as a whole.

In ‘Shock’, Smithy - a white male approaching middle age - exploits and deceives a young African American girl who mistakes him for her internet date. It’s the type of interpersonal exploitation that occurs all the time, even if the premise of the story exaggerates the element of deception often involved in sexual seduction. There are internet sites that elaborate complex psychological strategies for the seduction of young women, and to engage in such behaviour (to be a ‘player’) seems to have at least as much dubious macho kudos about it as ethical stigma. And there can be no doubt that much of the widely viewed and circulated pornography on the internet is based on an exploitation that as viewers we can hardly be unaware of, yet choose to overlook.

It’s a scary thing, but the more I look for it, the more exploitation I find. It has become normalised in so many areas. But what drives it? In ‘Shock’, Smithy is driven by a ravenous emotional hunger that turns him into an opportunistic sexual predator. It’s no doubt a gross simplification, but I wonder if such hunger isn’t the driver behind most exploitation: this sense of lack and emptiness, a black hole of desire that both feeds and is fed by the messages we tell ourselves and are told by advertisers and the media.

About a quarter of the way through, I wanted to stop reading Eating Animals. Not because the descriptions of horrific animal suffering disturbed me (though they did), but because I recognised that the ethical argument against meat was irresistible, and it wasn’t a message I wanted to hear. It’s one thing to enjoy the pleasure of moral outrage, another to give up roast chicken forever!

And yet, as of two weeks ago, I’m a reluctant vegetarian. Thanks a lot Jonathon Safran-Foer!

On loving German... and two more translations

2010-08-21T15:33:00.004+10:00

There's a scene in '30 Rock' in which Liz is asked by Jack if she speaks German, and Liz replies in German, 'Yes, I think it's the most beautiful language in the world.' Then Jack asks her a question and she replies with a preposterously long outburst of German-sounding syllables, for which the subtitled translation is 'Yeah'. Uh huh: German is horribly ugly and has absurdly long words. That's the joke of course. Here's another: Italian is sung, French is spoken, English is spat, German is vomited. (I can't remember where I heard that one). It's a truism that German is ugly, guttural and harsh. And it can be. It's fortunate for film-makers that the Nazis were German and not, say, French, because those Nazi officers just wouldn't sound right barking out their orders in a romance language. But German's supposedly guttural sound is overstated. The most guttural sound in German is the ch in 'Acht', which is actually a much softer sound than the glottal consonants that one finds for instance in Arabic.

In fact I suspect German's reputation for ugliness is a hangover from World War II: Much of the world was exposed to the sound of German by the hate speeches of Hitler and Goebbels. The ugly, hateful sentiments of these tirades could have made any language sound hideous. Mussolini's speeches in Italian don't sound like a Rossini opera either: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr2swTOI49Q). But it can't be denied that German was a particularly well adapted linguistic vehicle for fascist ideology. There is a line in one of Goebbels' speeches that sticks in my mind particularly as an example of German at its ugliest, when uttered with Goebbel's shrill viciousness: "Wir sind nicht hier, um Kompromisse zu machen, sondern um zu zerstören und vernichten." We are not here to make compromises, but to destroy and annihilate.

And yet I love German and flinched a little at the 30 Rock gibe, because this preconception about German's ugliness actually closes people to the beauty in the language. Good example: the German poetry recited in the 2006 German film 'Das Leben der Anderen' (The Lives of Others). The film also includes a beautiful song version of the Borchert poem 'Versuch Es' ('Try It') which you can listen to here. I'm sure every language has its beauty and I dare say if I'd learned, say, Spanish at school instead of German, I'd probably love that language. But there's something about the rich complexity of German that I just find incredibly satisfying to speak. It's as if the rush of plosives and sibilants satisfies a sort of thirst in me. I am aware of the weirdness of how that probably sounds to someone who hasn't been possessed by a foreign language in that way. Perhaps the fact that German remains a second language - always that slight gap removed - allows me to hear it with a kind of detachment that my complete oneness with English does not permit for my native tongue. I can hear German both as pure 'speech-music', and understand its meaning.

This musical appreciation has its payoff in terms of my facility with the language. Germans often mistake me for a native speaker at first. That is purely to do with vocal mimicry (though my grammar is good) - if I talk for long enough the little idiomatic lapses and vocabulary stutters will eventually expose me. I've only spent six weeks in Germany and that was many years ago, so I haven't experienced the immersion required for complete mastery.

There seems to be a familial thing about this passion of mine: my grandfather Brinley Newton-John was a Welshman with an exceptional facility with German. He was Professor of German at Melbourne University and his German was so good he was used by British Intelligence to interrogate German officers during the war. His technique: to take them out to dinner and loosen their tongues with wine. They would mistake him for a German and soon enough spill the desired information.

Enough on me and my German. Here are two of my favourites from among the poems by Martin Auer I've recently translated. (Auer has translated these two poems into English himself, and you can find his (somewhat different) versions at martinauer.net.)

Tommy

I’m going to have a child, says Tommy
Boys don’t have children, says Annalise
Well I am!

Tommy’s belly gets bigger
What is your child doing? says Annalise
It is growing and getting bigger, says Tommy, I can already hear it talking
Children don’t talk in your tummy! says Annalise
Well mine does!

Why am I alone? says the child in Tommy’s belly
You’re with me, says Tommy

There are houses, says Tommy, and gardens and fences
and there’s the sky
I know, says the child

Do you want to be born? Tommy asks the child
What will happen then? says the child
Everything that is always happening, says Tommy
I want to try it!
But don’t get a fright! says Tommy

Where has your child gone? asks Annalise
It has run off into the world, says Tommy
Little children don’t run off into the world!
Well mine did!

Tommy dreams of a sea that is still dark in the morning
There is the wind, says Tommy, and long grey clouds that are fast
I know, says the child
The child runs to the sea
In the morning he plays alone in the sand
Play with me, says the child to the sea, and the sea plays with him

I died, says the child
I’ve come back into your belly
There are ships, says Tommy, and big machines
I know, says the child

Children don’t come back into your tummy! says Annalise
Well mine did!

I’m a mermaid, she says

I’m a mermaid, she says,
I come through the water mains.
My family lived in the south
before they moved to this town.
They live in a lift
over on second street
and when they eat breakfast
the dentist from the twelfth floor
always dips his coat in their coffee.

And she says: O man o man o man,
O man, how I love you!

And in the park it’s so bright today,
the air is like silver.
And baby gets an ice-cream
and has a choking fit.
And a little flying camera
takes photos of us with pink bows,
and the man selling pretzels
goes broke before our eyes.

And she says: O man o man o man,
O man, how I love you!

Well aren’t these glorious times, she says,
there are free vouchers for everything.
And yesterday I had myself insured
against melancholia and fear of death.
And now everyone has a phone in their car,
a credit card and an insurance number.
And even the police
wear valentines in their hair.

And she says: O man o man o man,
O man, how I love you!

I’m a mermaid, she says,
I can never drown.
But whenever I see goldfish
I feel terribly sick.
And maybe tomorrow peace will break out,
then we’ll go paint the town red.
And maybe there won’t be peace,
But we’ll soon see.

Another Martin Auer poem translated from the German

2010-08-20T15:40:00.002+10:00

On the day we go over the border

On the day we go over the border,
can you see the city already, over the river?
On the day we go over the border
can you see it?

We will find a boat
tied up, hidden in the bushes.
We will throw a rope with a hook on it.
We will crawl on our bellies in the mud,
dig a tunnel under the river,
and the river will rain down on us,
heavy drops from the dark stone.
We will go over the border.

On the day we go over the border,
can you see the fields already, over the river?
On the day we go over the border
can you see them?

We will hold on under a train,
balance on high voltage wires
at daybreak, high over the guards.
We will leap over the rapids
and if they shoot at us
we will turn into birds
and fly away, over the border
into the other country
into the other time
on the other side
over there
over the river.

Poetry translations

2010-08-12T14:39:00.002+10:00

Here are my first translations of some of Martin Auer's poems. More to follow soon. A couple of links for German speakers:

http://www.myspace.com/Martinauer

http://www.martinauer.net/

And completely without a word

And completely: without a word, you know?
As if you’d suddenly been blinded and just hadn’t noticed it
because you were still asleep.
Or drowned all of a sudden in your own dress
Yes: as if you had a dress made of water
and your head was stuck inside it, you know?
you couldn’t get your eyes over the collar.
Or as if — but that’s going too far, nobody would understand —
as if a rose made of air was growing on you
somewhere on your shoulder, but nobody knew,
only your jacket would never sit quite right
because of the rose.
Or as if — listen! — as if you’d already said every word
and there weren’t any more left, you know?
no more words you could say
and the whole dictionary
was empty.

Quiet waters sing

Quiet waters sing,
sing far away, behind the clatter,
behind the noise and the chatter,
quiet waters sing.

Quiet waters sing,
far away behind crying and moaning,
audible still through wailing and groaning,
quiet waters sing.

Quiet waters sing,
behind the laughter and the flurry,
far away, through cold, through death and hurry,
you hear quiet waters.

Get ready for some contemporary Austrian poetry

2010-07-30T12:16:00.003+10:00

For some time I've been listening to "Nachttaxi", the German-language podcast of Austrian author and poet Martin Auer. Sadly, the author has been experiencing some health problems which have resulted in the suspension of the podcast for some time. However, I've long been impressed with Auer's voice, with its combination of honesty, world-weariness, and compassion. Auer spent six months working as a driver for call girls in his home city of Vienna and wrote a book about it, "Hurentaxi: Aus dem Leben der Callgirls" that Auer serialised on his literary podcast.

The book offers a deeply moving glimpse into the lives of these disadvantaged young women, largely from Eastern Europe, who come to work as prostitutes in Austria, often for financial reasons - they can make ten times the money they'd earn as waitresses or nannies, and infinitely more than they could earn at home. Auer's reportage is unflinching and unsentimental, revealing the most confronting details without ever devolving into any kind of salaciousness. It documents without judging or theorising, allowing his depictions of these girls' circumstances - enlivened in the podcast by Auer's pitch-perfect impersonations - to speak for themselves. At the same time, the author doesn't try to paint himself out of the picture. He is not afraid to reveal himself and his own weaknesses and conflicts. Auer's compassion for his subjects is evident throughout, and the portrait of the man is as interesting in its way as the picture of Austrian prostitution.

Auer has also written some very fine poetry, which I've long wanted to have a stab at translating, so I could share it with others (alas, I have few German-speaking friends!). I wrote to Martin Auer and he has agreed to allow me to publish some of my translations of his poems on this blog, a prospect I'm quite excited about. I've finished the translations and sent them to the author, whose English is good, for approval before posting. So hopefully within the next few days I'll be able to share with you some of my favourite works of his: little gems that I think work very well in English, though they'll never be quite the same as they are when performed by Auer himself, in his gravelly, soulful German.

If you do happen to speak German, check out his website at www.martinauer.net.

More ideas about ideas...

2010-07-26T14:46:00.005+10:00

I was just interviewed by Alec Patric on Verity La on the subject of the ideas that fiction springs from. You can read the interview here. I've had a few follow-up thoughts to that discussion which I thought I'd record here. What sparked this was the experience I had this morning of successfully bringing a song back from inside a dream, something I've never achieved before. I've actually quite often had the experience of hearing music in a dream and desperately wanting to be able to record it - but of course it evaporates like so much mist as soon as I wake up. This time I was actually able to hold onto the tune and the words - even if the words were a little strange upon waking. It certainly aint 'Yesterday', which was also born in the dreamworld, but it still seemed pretty good when I was singing it in the shower... Unlike dream jokes which are always so 'hilarious' at the time... Well, it will be interesting to see what I can make of it with my guitar.

Anyway, the upshot of this was that it caused me to reflect upon the source of ideas again, and the mysterious way they seem to come from both within and beyond us. The power of this song, regardless of whether or not it turns out to be any 'good' in a musical or poetic sense, was that it came straight out of my innermost being in response to certain things in my life I've been grappling with. It was in fact the answer to these questions, a sort of spontaneous soul-song that expressed the powers I needed to call forth in myself in order to overcome those particular struggles. Not an intellectual insight such as we might get out of therapy, but a sort of home-brewed musical-rhythmic-poetic medicine.

When something like that song comes in a dream, the 'otherness' of the creative source is very apparent. I didn't sit down and try to write a song, I just found my dream-self singing it, with intense emotion. The surrounding dream was permeated with a sense of beauty and mystery - that strange aura that Jung called the 'numinous'. I remember seeing white birds flying at an immense altitude, so high I at first mistook them for satellites or shooting stars against the backdrop of the night sky. This sight filled me with awe and joy. It's the sort of compelling vision we try to capture in poetry or fiction, even though our words always fall short.

The vision seems to come from beyond us, and we have the same sense when we are writing with inspiration, "in the zone". Words that give you chills as they come off your hands. But is it really beyond us? Only if we think of ourselves as that part of us that is made of the prosaic stuff of everyday life: our tired old thoughts and motivations and habits, everything circumscribed by the known. But take a look at any child and it is apparent that in our essential being we are made of something far more illustrious than that. We do get so encrusted with the detritus of accumulated life that we lose touch with the living substance that we are really made of. I'm thinking of Joni Mitchell and Shakespeare: we are stardust, we are such stuff as dreams... etc. We lose touch with it, but it is there under the surface, like a subterranean river, like lava beneath the crust: the inner process of our life, always flowing forward.

That is my argument against the notion of the short story writer "living off his principal", this scarcity idea. The literary agent who put forward this theory may well have been a lover of literature, but he was not a writer, he was not a creator. Under the surface there is always the stream of Images. And nor is it hard to find, not really. It's there like a silver vein running through that story or poem or song you're working on, that little glint of the numinous woven into the weft of the thing. You can always tug that thread, follow that vein down.

The thing is it takes courage to go there, because this liquid stuff is also destabilising, transformative, demanding. It undermines our comfortable lives, asks for more, reflects truths we'd rather not see. This is where our wounds and secrets and fears lie. It has real significance and moral weight. That's why we fear it and suppress it even while we pretend to cultivate our creativity as if it were a tame thing. Beware: here be sea monsters! But our folk tales tell us that where the monster is, there also is the treasure.

2010-07-23T12:16:00.002+10:00

I recently finished Emmett Stinson's "Known Unknowns" - the latest in Affirm Press' Long Story Shorts series. I enjoyed the book greatly. Emmett writes like a writer, and that is no mere tautology. He's a writer who makes you trust him to the point that when he does indulge in some wild experimental excursion , you're willing to follow along, assured that he is still in control, even if on occasion you might feel a little lost! Emmett's a smart guy and his fiction reads that way: it's clever and challenging and absolutely contemporary in its sensibilities. For me the combination of street-wise edge (shades of Thomas Pynchon's 'V') with elegant, razor-sharp prose is very appealing. I think my favourite story was "The Sound of the Fury". It's worth the proverbial price of admission for the title (understood in context) and the last line alone.

My only gripe with the collection are the few moments when the heavy fingerprints of academia smudge the otherwise pristine prose. Academia is so often about proving you're clever enough to master the argot, and there were just a few moments in this collection where I felt the author was trying to impress me with his cleverness. In the Age Short Story Competition winning "All Fathers The Father", for example, we get a brief serve of Lacan's theory on the role of the father, followed up by the ironical observation that it's all "a load of horseshit". So why bring it up? To dazzle the reader with ideas that the author's dismissal seems to imply he is too clever for? Don't get me wrong, I loved this story in so many ways, but I remain unconvinced that the short story is the right forum for excursions into academic philosophy. By all means, provoke thought, but let's leave Lacan in the Baillieu, please.

Nevertheless, I strongly recommend you go buy the book. It's not always easy, but it is funny, it is surprising, it is intelligent and you'll definitely know you've just read the work of a real writer. Can't wait for Emmett's novel. I just hope he doesn't try too hard.

On my own writing front, jazz-focussed literary journal Extempore will be publishing my story 'The Thief', the tale of a jazz guitarist in the sixties running from commitment into a desolate future. The story was an example of how long it can take to shape a story. I actually submitted the story that 'The Thief' was based on to Extempore's short story competition in 2008, where it got precisely nowhere. I knew it wasn't right, and I think I must have written six different incarnations of the same story before finally nailing down this one. It was a case of fiction winning over over reality. The story started as a sort of melancholy ode to my old jazz guitar teacher Peter Roberts, who died of a stroke probably ten years ago. It ended up as a purely imaginative riff based on something he said to me once about hearing Procul Harem's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" for the first time. That happens to me increasingly these days: a root in the solid earth of autobiography puts forth an entirely fabulous tree.

South America here I come!

2010-06-07T17:35:00.003+10:00

So I am off to travel the world in a great story hunt! Some time possibly around September I'm heading off the South America and then maybe Germany to go chasing stories. I'll be armed with my camera and my laptop and I will blog my way through the experience so you'll be able to follow my progress right here. I've always said I'd go to South America and I figure now is as good a time as any. I've played the South American classical guitar for years and I'd love to put a landscape to some of those old favourite pieces - like Antonio Lauro's Venezuelan waltzes. I'm also a big fan of Marquez, Neruda and Louis de Bernieres' South American trilogy. Dare I say I'm partial to a little magical realism? So long as it's not reduced to the formulaic and trite.

Germany is more of a linguistic journey. I love the language. Those who think it an ugly language should listen to Rilke - or to some of the poetry you hear in "The Lives of Others". It can be spiky and harsh, but listen to a pretty German girl speaking it and I guarantee you'll get a different perspective on it! Or maybe that's just me... Anyway, I've spent so long reading German and listening to it (thank you, inventor of the podcast!) that I want to finally get the chance to immerse myself in it. I'll be story-chasing there too, maybe while I couch-surf around Berlin.

On another note, my friend Jon Bauer and I may have the opportunity to start a creative writing school next year. We're still in early negotiations stage, so I won't say too much more. But as a result I have been reading a lot of creative writing text books in order to understand how others teach it, to maybe pick out the ideas and approaches that suit my style an resonate with me. Has anyone read "Living the Writer's Life?" (Eric Maisel) Now there's a dose of gloom to counter any cheerful optimism which "The Artist's Way" may have left you with. Apparently writing is a thankless, penniless, excruciatingly difficult activity which only the insane and the daemon-possessed would consider dedicating themselves to seriously. The proof being that writers are in fact a bunch of manic depressives (or just plain depressives, without the upside) who commit suicide with disturbing frequency. Nah man, I'm going to be sticking with nice, comforting Julia Cameron with her artist's dates and her warming entreaties to leap into the void and fly, fly, fly!!!

My Collection

2010-04-07T08:36:00.003+10:00

Having all but abandoned my blog, I'm back again with all good intentions to treat it better in future. The good news is, there may be a possibility of my short stories getting published early next year as a collection. To reach the stipulated word count I had to produce two more stories, which has been an interesting exercise - I've never had to write to deadline before, and it has exposed some home truths: namely that what I've taken for lack of inspiration/writer's block/call-it-what-you-will is in fact more a lack of determination. I'd promised the publisher a story by the 26th of last month, and having got what felt like two thirds of the way through, I hit the famous block. I didn't know how to finish it! I tried this, I tried that. Nothing felt right. Three days I banged my head against the monitor, or cleaned the house within an inch of its life, or had a beer, deciding I'd done enough (read: nothing) for the day. That would normally be the point where I'd go: OK, that's enough, story hasn't worked. But I didn't have that luxury. I'd promised my publisher a story, and my book was depending on it. Nothing like panic as a motivator. So I pushed on through. Rewrote the ending several times. Rewrote again. Cut back from 5500 to about 4000 words. The result? A pretty tight, funny story. Certainly a worthy member of the collection, and a nice contrast stylistically with some of my more sombre and poetically inclined works. What do I learn from this? That "I can't" is just another excuse for avoiding the hard work that is making fiction. Forget inspiration: hack that story out of the recalcitrant rock! Yeah, I know I am totally contradicting my own remarks of a while back about "pushing the river". I'm allowed to change my mind, right?

In other news, my recent story "Shock" will appear in the next edition of "Kill Your Darlings". I posted a few paragraphs from an earlier draft of that story in my last post. That passage has been changed and improved since then.

My writing group (which I still think of as 'the Almaniacs' in my head, since it was originally formed of Sleepers Almanac contributors, though I don't think anyone else remembers the suggested moniker) is continuing to go great guns. We have two new members, having recently lost a couple of old stalwarts. Not sure if I mentioned that four of us are now in the fortunate position of having books coming out this year. Louise Swinn of Sleepers fame has suggested we be the subject of one of the Sleepers salons later this year, which would be great. I've written before about Jon Bauer's book "Rocks in the Belly". It's Scribe's lead title this year and I expect destined to make something of a splash. I hope so, since it really deserves it. Jessica Au's book "Cargo" (tentative title), her short, Wintonesque coming-of-age-in-a -seaside-town story doesn't have a strict publication date at this stage as far as I know, but will also be worth reading, if just for its lovely, graceful prose. Then there's Dan Ducrou's YA title "The Byron Journals", coming out through Text, which I've had less opportunity to sample, but which was short-listed for a Vic Premier's Award in 2008, I believe.

Not really a blogger

2009-12-05T15:28:00.003+11:00

So my last post turns out to have been three months ago. Not much of a blog is it? I'm not sure which is cause and which is effect: the pathetic lack of readership, or the pathetic lack of posts. Well, just to keep you all up-to-date, oh great and mighty readership of mine, I am aiming to write 6000 words by February in order to make a submission to publish a collection of my short stories next year. This post is my attempt to procrastinate on making a start...

I had the horrible experience of being forced to jerk an editor around last week. Island Magazine accepted my story "Different Kinds of Heaven" for publication literally the day I was composing a letter to them to withdraw it from consideration. Unfortunately, much as I would have loved to have a story with them, if I let them to publish it, my required word target would have gone from 6000 to 14000 by February, and I doubt I could manage that. Needless to say they weren't entirely thrilled with me, and I can't say I blame them. In this case, inconveniencing an editor was the lesser of two evils.

Just to prove I'm still writing, here's an excerpt from my latest story "Shock", which I'm including in the unpublished portion of my submission:

And Smithy is hungry. Smithy is ravenous. Because two years ago—can it really be two years?—his wife left him, and he hasn’t had a woman since. Not a kiss even, barely a glance, when once they couldn’t get enough of him. What? Does his loneliness stink? Melissa took his best years, sucked the juice, the marrow out of his life and then left him while he was away on a day-trip to the Gold Coast for business. He came back and the house was a shell, doors banging open, that was how fast she’d run, and even the furniture gone. Nothing, just his clothes on the rack, the CDs of his she’d hated. Kids’ rooms empty. In the kitchen on the floor he found a butter knife with a bent-tipped blade that she must have dropped when she was packing, in the bedroom a bra, and in one room the wooden bee on a string that Ryan used to drag about when he was two. With the wings that spun and went clacketty clack.

His brother sometimes visited, Jack the do-gooder psychologist who thought you could make everything better by talking about it. He bought Smithy some chairs, and cutlery, which he threw out, because what Jack didn’t understand was that he wanted it like this. To live in an empty shell was absolutely fucking apt and he didn’t want any stuff around to give the lie to his desolation. ‘It rhymes, geddit?’ he yelled drunkenly at Jack. ‘Inside and out!’ Was this a nervous breakdown? Jack said there was no such thing—a meaningless lay term he said—but he might meet the criteria for a major depressive episode. ‘Meet the criteria’: that was how he put it, like it was something he’d applied for at Centrelink.

Two years later he was working again, back in a retail salesroom selling cameras, and he’d allowed himself furniture again, moved out of the old house into a one bedroom shoebox. He’d gone back to the gym, even signed up on an internet dating site, but whatever it was he stank of, they seemed to smell it via email too. He couldn’t bear the way they all stopped replying to him. He tried a few times, but the only women who showed any interest in him were old and used up, and had their own stink of desperation. The worst time was three a.m., when the waters receded from the reefs of his pain—rage and despair and hunger standing out bare and jagged and completely unchanged from the last time. The immutable bedrock of his life.

Ok, back to work now. I'm hoping to knock over those 6000 words in the one story...

Comrade Vasilii Goes to War

2009-09-07T14:40:00.001+10:00

(This story was published in Wet Ink in 2008)

Strike a match out here at night and it’s the only light in a hundred miles at least. That’s if you don’t count the stars, which is a good idea, because if you did, your head would start to spin before you got to ten. You’d drown in stars out here if you were tall enough. Our generator died four months ago and we’ve been without lights or heating ever since. We thank God it’s summer and pray that Captain Sviatoslavich comes good on his promise to send out a repairman before the snow starts to fall. But frankly we don’t hold out much hope. We never believe a word he tells us.

There’s about fifty metres between our outpost and theirs, just a bare patch of dust. No barbed wire or boom gates mark the border. To tell the truth, we’ve no idea where it is. Sometimes, when we’re particularly bored, we play this stupid game, drawing a line through the dust with our rifle butts and taunting each other – step over that line, Comrade, and you’re a dead man! This here is Uzekhstan! And Vasilii – he’s the one that started this shit – he’ll step right over and draw another line ten metres further back and declare that that is the true border, and that we are in fact invaders on the sovereign territory of Ozakhstan! And so it goes, until we get bored with it all and decide to go inside and get pissed on Vasilii’s vodka.

To avoid confusion, I should point out that I, too, am Vasilii. Well, it’s a common name. Not that he is anything like me. He is intelligent, handsome and tall and reads Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He even reads some English writer called Shakespeare. When he’s drunk enough he stands in front of the window looking as tall and desperate as Rasputin and booms out sad English words that make all our hairs stand up, even though we don’t understand a bit of it. I, on the other hand, am stupid, ugly and short, and the only things I read are letters from Raisa, the girl who for reasons I cannot justify, loves me. I’ve been reading the same letters for months, because that’s how often the mail truck bothers to come by.

Vlad isn’t a much better specimen. He’s fat as a pig and has flat feet which stink, so I never let him take his boots off, even at night. Every now and then I tell him to wash them, and then I cross the border to play poker with Vasilii and Anton so I don’t have to be there when he does. Actually I shouldn’t order poor Vlad around like that. Technically he’s my superior officer, but even though I am stupid, he is really stupider. Vlad has no Raisa, or any other girl. He reads letters from his Mama and cries. He is such a baby.

We got sent out here to the border because we were the very worst soldiers in the academy. We weren’t cut out to be soldiers, but everyone has to be a soldier in Uzekhstan. Vlad should have been a pig farmer or a panel beater. As for me, I wouldn’t have minded working in a bar selling beer to western girls in tank tops and short denim skirts who want to ficky-fick with an Uzekhstani boy. Sorry Raisa! I am having dirty thoughts again. It’s this cold, lonely steppe. After a while it starts to turn a man into a wolf.

Captain Sviatoslavich told us the situation was this: we don’t want their bastards coming over here, and your job is to stop them if they try. This was stupid. Ozakhstan is exactly the same as Uzekhstan. Everybody knows this. Escaping from one to the other is like slapping your left cheek because you’re tired of slapping your right. But because we built a border post, they had to build one too. To stop our bastards going over there. Which is Vasilii and Anton’s job.

I don’t know about Anton, but I don’t think they sent Vasilii out here for being a bad soldier. It is obvious to everyone he should probably be a general and lead the whole Ozakhstan army. I think he was sent here for being overheard calling the Ozakhstan president a vodka-pickled, nepotistic, barnyard-animal-fucking, corrupt licker of fat western arses. When a nice secret policeman visited him to ask him about this indiscretion, Vasilii swore he was referring to the president of Uzekhstan (which is incidentally quite plausible) but a week later they sent him here anyway.

When they first arrived, we were such prigs. Refusing to say good morning when we happened to be out having a piss at the same time, spitting at the Ozakhstan flag and all that nonsense. But Vasilii wore us down with his charm and his stupid pranks. He was forever wandering around in the abandoned space between the outposts smoking a cigarette and gazing into the sky like he was working out some problem of astronomical measurement. It drove me crazy that he acted like there was no border there at all, so one day I went out and drew a line in the dirt and told him never to cross it. You can guess what he did. It made me laugh, but I was too angry to show it so I turned my back on him. And then I heard his voice purring right behind my shoulder. Are you laughing comrade? That was how he won.

Sometimes I think he only did it to supplement his miserable wages by luring us into those dreadful all-night poker games. I don’t know how he does it, but it always goes the same. Every time I pick up my cards and there’s a sweet row of queens or something, he folds. In the end you get so sick of it you bluff him, and he pushes you all the way over the edge and rakes in the pot with a pair of tens or something. Vlad gets so furious his face goes purple and he throws his cards and storms out. Then five minutes later, he’ll stick his big sheepish head back in and beg to be let into the game again. Vasilii is always willing to forgive him.

This morning our radio suddenly blared. It was Captain Sviatoslavich. The crisis has escalated! he shouted at us.

What crisis would that be, Captain Shitoslavich? I asked, winking at Vlad.

The political crisis, you idiot! screamed the captain. We are at war with Ozakhstan!

Vlad and I looked at one another, our mouths gaping dumbly. You must act swiftly to engage the enemy!

I breathed a sigh of relief. We were off the hook. I’d thought for a moment we were getting a recall. But for once Vlad was actually smarter than me. What do you mean by ‘engage the enemy’, sir? he asked.

What do you think I mean, you lard-arsed dolt? Shoot them! Now! Over and out.

Then I understood, and the dawning realisation of our situation hit me like a fist to the guts. I went to the window and looked out over the dusty no-man’s-land of the border. I could see Vasilii and Anton playing cards as usual. Obviously they didn’t know we were at war yet, but it would only be a matter of time. We had to act swiftly.

I threw Vlad his gun, which he held at arm’s length like it was a poisonous snake. I could see he was about to cry so I knew I had to take control. Why they promoted him above me I will never understand. We’re not going to shoot them alright? I said. We’re just going to take them prisoner. I looked him in the eye. Okay? He nodded, wide-eyed like a child.

It was only fifty metres from one door to the other, but that lugubrious march seemed longer than any of the exhausting forced marches from our academy days.

When we stepped into the room, Vasilii looked up from his card game and gave me his easy handsome grin. So Vasilii, have you come to shoot me now? he asked, raising an eyebrow.

In such stupid situations as this, it is impossible to be a real human being, so you read from a script, like a moron robot.

Comrade Vasilii, I am taking you prisoner of the state of Uzekhstan, I said, pointing the barrel at his chest. Vasilii’s smile stayed on his face, but I saw his eyes change as the reality of the situation dawned on him. He looked cool as my grandmother’s cucumbers but a drop of sweat ran down his brow and into one of his eyes.

He stood up slowly and as I stood there shaking, he unholstered his pistol and pointed it straight at my heart.

Comrade Vasilii, he said, I am taking you prisoner of the state of Ozakhstan. I don’t know if he thought this was funny. He might have been smiling about anything.

Anton was now pointing his gun at Vlad, and Vlad was pointing his gun at Anton.

Things were getting over my head, so I turned to my superior officer. What do we do now? I asked.

This Old Man

2009-08-16T12:55:00.002+10:00

(This story was my winning entry in the 2008 Alan Marshall Short Story Award, published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2008)

My son is singing in the back seat as the car winds along the road between Cairns and Port Douglas. Every turn along the crumpled boundary of sea and land reveals something I have not seen before, the blank map in my mind flooding with colour and detail. Ben’s happy, I know. I can hear it in his voice: adventure and safety together in the warm sea wind blowing in his face through the half open window.

This old man
He played ... zero!
He played knickknack on my ... hero!

Dad, he calls out.

Yes Ben.

He played knickknack on my hero!

Yes Ben.

Is that funny Dad?

Umm … not unless you’re six years old.

Why not?

Well, once you got to zero — I shrug — he was either going to be playing knickknack on your hero, or on Robert De Niro.

Blessed silence for a time. There are smudges of smoke from the cane fires, and coconut palms and macadamias, and waves nibbling the black rocky shore, and great fibrous fruit in the trees, but the sky is a featureless grey glare. Here and there a wan stain of blue. My eyes blur, my back aches. It’s been a long drive.

This old man
He played five...

Ben?

Yes Dad?

Can you stop singing that song for a bit please?

Okay Dad.

Then he sees something: Look!

He’s pointing in the direction of the sea, but I see nothing except the hard, flat light from the water.

What?

Look! Look!

He’s about jumping out of his seatbelt.

I can’t Ben, I’m driving!

Oh you missed it! He’s furious now, his seraphic face instantly souring to something far less pleasant.

I’m sorry Ben. I’m trying to drive. What was it?

A tree, Dad! It was an amazing tree. Can we go back?

I get cunning. I’ve learned to negotiate the shape of his mind, the catching points of his personality, as one steps around furniture at home in the dark.

Oh the tree! Yes I saw that! It was amazing, wasn’t it?

For a moment in the rear view mirror I see him struggle to change emotional direction. Then the shadow passes from his face. Happiness is restored now he’s shared his wonder. He leans into that slice of wind that’s coming in through the window, his blue eyes flickering in the gusts, and his hair dancing free. Rapturous and forgetful he starts to sing:

This old man...

***

The moment when I learned of Ben’s existence is preserved in my memory with the miraculous detail of a fossil in amber. Maddy had just stepped through the front door. She was wearing a white angora jumper, the summer light that spilled down the hall making a fine soft haze around the fertile swell of her breasts. The sweet smell of wattle pollen followed her, the hum of bees and lawnmowers. She brushed past me. I’m pregnant. Even though we’d only been together for six months, three living together, even though she would never have planned it, I could tell she was happy. She kept moving, her back to me so I wouldn’t see the excitement just beneath the adult grimness she was officially wearing for the occasion. I made an ineffectual gesture with my open palms. I’d been knocked out of gear and my thoughts and emotions spun without engaging. I was empty of anything real, anything remotely adequate. Out of this general vapidity, a smile arose to take possession of my features, the involuntary smile that the immature sometimes wear on hearing of a death.

It wasn’t real: the news, the smile, anything. I instinctively knew there had to be a way out. Other than the obvious. There seemed to be a certain obscenity lurking in the word abortion which the now preferred term termination only went part way towards eradicating. If abortion was awful, blood-stained by right-to-life images of foetuses dismembered with boning scissors, termination had a sinister, newspeak ring to it. Didn’t the mafia, the CIA terminate? There had to be some other way, some escape clause between the binary alternatives, between back and white, yes and no. There always had been before.

Some time in the coming days, as the uncompromising nature of the situation began to dawn on me, I arrived at a position. I gallantly declared: Whatever you decide, I’ll support you. A politician’s line, of course, fooling nobody. Whatever you decide. A masterstroke of abnegation. I hated this new found emptiness that seemed to speak for me, this puppetry of understanding: nods caresses murmurs. I searched for the man, the father, but finding him absent jerked and muttered and marionetted my way through visits to clinics and counsellors. We started taking phone calls in the other room. We closed the door.

***

I’m carrying heavy suitcases up the stairs to our room at the resort, while Ben lugs his own little bag. At the top of the first flight of concrete stairs I stop to rest a moment. Ben is thrilled to spot a translucent gecko inhabiting the concrete seam between the wall and the ceiling of the corridor, a ghostly comic creature. The stairwell is open to the air at the back, allowing a view of tropical foliage, tangled liana and fat heavy leaves trailing spider webs.

Look Dad, says Ben.

Yes, I say, once again uncertain what I should be seeing.

It looks exciting doesn’t it?

It sure does, I say, and pick up the suitcases again to tackle the second flight of steps.

When I paid for it in Melbourne, I had imagined luxury, but the room is disappointing: a functional, anonymous ‘unit’ with a sliding door onto a tiny balcony that overlooks the swimming pool. In the aggressive overcast glare of the afternoon, some kids are playing pool volleyball. I stand there a while watching them while Ben plays with the little packets of soap deposited on the ends of the beds. Pretty girls with small, new breasts, a fat pasty kid and a taller, good looking one whose every lunge for the ball is alpha-male choreography. The girls giggle and tease and retreat, reserving the right to exploit the ambiguity that suspends the game between child’s play and courtship ritual. Not far away the thirtysomethings are arranged like shish kebabs on the plastic deckchairs, creased brown flesh exposed for the benefit of whatever UV makes it through the cloud. A bull-shouldered man in tiny speedos drinks on an underwater stool beside the pool bar, his pale eyes sliding and swivelling over his gin as the women go by.

Later we go into town for the first time, looking for something to eat. I hold Ben’s hand to cross the sandy streets of the tourist precinct, restaurant touts hail me, and even though I am hungry, the shouting garish shops, the steel chairs of the restaurant forecourts repel me and soon we have reached the place where the street meets the beach, boats jostling in the marina and twilight falling over the palm trees, but nowhere to eat. We have to backtrack. Ben is hungry and getting difficult, dragging his feet, so it’s eenie-meenie-minie-mo and whatever restaurant; we order pizzas and Ben colours in a pirate picture with crayons that the harried waitress brings—they’re a family-friendly restaurant.

But we’re not a family, objects Ben, who has recently discovered the joys of pedantry.

Yes we are.

But Mum isn’t here.

Two people can be a family.

No they can’t.

Look here’s your pizza.

There’s a woman eating alone across the way, her table an island of concentration and composure amid the hubbub. Middle aged, I think. Then: no, my age. The candle in front of her flickers in a subdued way, shimmering through the chardonnay she sips between carefully excised nibbles. She is not a family; I’m prepared to concede that.

***

We’re going to have fun. I take Ben up to Kuranda on the cable car, wobbling high over the treetops. Ulysses butterflies floating like little shreds of sky or flying fish between the swells of rainforest. At Kuranda we eat Golden Gaytimes and hot dogs for lunch, what the hell we’re on holiday, and Ben’s face is a mess of melted chocolate bits and tomato sauce. The heat saps us. He needs to go the toilet. Now. We have to run in the end, and some leaks out, wetting his trousers. He’s ashamed and won’t leave the toilet block even though the train is coming in ten to take us back down the mountain. It wrenches to command him in his wretched condition, but what choice do I have?

He doesn’t know it, but I am six years old too, feeling every miserable half-choked sob as he goes through the crowd, head hung, not knowing nobody notices or cares about his little accident. On the train he presses his grubby, tear-streaked face to the window, so the rowdy boy next to him won’t see his eyes, and I know not to hug him. Some burdens I cannot share. Then he loses himself in the passing gorges and waterfalls and suddenly he’s pointing out a coloured bird to me, the smile on his face like sun breaking through a wet day.

***

When I was six my father and I turned over rocks in tidal pools near Anglesea, and discovered many miracles that seem to have disappeared over the years. Perhaps it was the effect of people like us, reckless wonderers, even though we always put the rocks back the way they were. I once found a mysterious crimson brain on the rocks, some protean creature like raspberry aeroplane jelly spilled from its mould before it was fully set. I took it home in a jar, and I guess it died, whatever it was. It stank in unexpected and incredible ways and completely liquefied; the atrocious slime I poured out into the sandy backyard of our holiday house had no relation to the extraordinary creature I had found on the beach. I felt bad but I never suspected that in killing one, I might have contributed to killing them all.

Five years after that, on the same beach, I stood at the top of a dune on an overcast day heavy with coming rain and watched my father running below, pursued by the dog. In his singlet and shorts he looked both skinny and paunchy— suddenly middle-aged — and he was wheezing and puffing even as he laughed like a child, the dog nipping at his heels. I was pierced by twin arrows of love and fear, afraid he might fall, that his heart might fail, afraid to see the old man in him, the first shadow of death. There is no one to save us, I saw. We are all children. And so I passed one of the unheralded markers on the road to adulthood.

***

Ben and I wander along a dun-coloured beach near Port Douglas. On the wide flat sand, the worms one never sees have left their little spiralled sand-turds by the million, evidence of the vast hidden industry of life. We walk into mangroves stinking and gnat-ridden, and find the remains of a bird: white knotted bones, ants in the sandy shrivel of flesh. Ben pauses to look, serious, his mind turning in some deep way, understanding something.

We push deeper into the smelly tidal swamp. I scare Ben just enough with crocodile stories to inject the right expeditionary frisson, and he digs joyfully with a stick among the jabbing mangrove roots. I sit higher up on the ground where some hardy beach succulent keeps my bum dry. My hand finds a rusty hook and a sinker, still tied to the sand by a line like a couch grass root, a thin unbreakable garrotte leading toward the sea.

***

At sixteen weeks the ultrasound — I guess I’d prevaricated long enough that the decision had made itself, or Maddy had made it without me. The doctor lifted Maddy’s shirt and smeared conductive gel over the tightening drum of her skin. On a screen, snow-storm static turned liquid and something began to take shape, some odd fish that rolled and transformed as the doctor slid her magic device around the shiny brown curves of Maddy’s belly. We heard an aquatic heart beat, a rapid pulsing boom like Morse from a far galaxy, life discovered in Andromeda. Then she found the right angle and the child appeared, sucking its minute thumb, its spine as fine and fragile as a sardine’s. For a span of unknown heartbeats my breath was stolen, ohmygodprotectit. How stupid had I been? Oh my god, protect it. And if god won’t, then let me try. Let me try.

***

I take Ben out to the reef. We are going to have fun. We go flying over the waves on a white ferry with engines strong as a jumbo jet’s, standing at the prow, drunk with wind and speed as the boat chops and sprays the sea. When we open our mouths to speak we swallow great gallons of air. The impatient ferry cleaves the horizon like an axe. I feel Ben tugging my sleeve. He points, and there below us are dolphins leaping alongside, improbably keeping pace, improbably joyous. In all wild nature they are our only friends, gregarious in spite of everything.

We reach the reef, and everyone begins the mad scramble for masks and snorkels. But even though he can swim and I promise to hold his hand, Ben is afraid. He says he doesn’t want to go in the water. But you wait, you wait, I tell him. You won’t believe what it’s like down there.

I don’t care, he says. I want to go back.

We can’t go back.

We can sit inside.

Then the phone in my pocket rings. It’s Maddy. I turn away from Ben, holding the phone in a little shelter made by my hand against the wind.

Hi, I say.

Hi.

What is it? Have you found a place yet?

Yes I have. It’s only ten minutes away from the house. I’m moving most of my stuff tomorrow. Where are you?

I’m on the Great Barrier Reef.

You having fun?

Come on Maddy.

Have you told him yet?

I can’t. I just ... can’t.

Greg, you have to tell him before you come home on Saturday.

I know. I’m going to, okay? Tonight. I just ... I just don’t know how to say it that’s all.

But we agreed on what you’d say.

We should have told him before, Maddy. We should have told him together.

Silence.

Maddy?

I know. We’ve fucked it up haven’t we?

For a while I’m standing there on the deck like a fool, knuckles gripping the silence. Then her voice again, broken: But it’s too late now. He has to know before he gets home.

Look I better go. We’re on the Barrier Reef, and I’m not leaving without seeing it.

Please tell him Greg.

I will, I promise. Bye Maddy.

I snap the phone shut.

Dad, says Ben.

Yes sweetie.

I think I want to go in now.

I crouch down in front of him.

Really?

Uh huh.

Good lad! Let’s go get some snorkels!

I fit the mask to his face, careful not to snag his hair, and arrange the snorkel, then we sit side by side on the platform, our legs dangling in the dark slapping water, in mystery. I hold his hand, small as a starfish.

You ready?

He nods.

And we slide down into the quiet blue.

2009-07-03T12:36:00.003+10:00

I was bemoaning the ravages of writer's block to a friend the other day at the Supper Club, and she made the wise observation that in the creative sphere, rest is not a luxury, it is an imperative. The fields must be allowed to lie fallow in their season, gather their resources. This agricultural metaphor got me thinking about the imaginative and emotional nutrients which infuse our writing. Visceral description, humour, clever observation, emotional truth, unsettling metaphor: these are some of the food groups of fiction. Whatever richness we bring to our writing comes out of us; how can we expect to nourish the reader if we're run down, burnt-out, used up? The fields need time to gather themselves, and there is a natural process to creativity that cannot be forced.

So instead of "pushing the river", I've been nourishing myself on others' work. In the past few weeks I've gobbled up Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (always read the Booker winner), Coetzee's Disgrace, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Wells Towers' short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Steven Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming and Jon Bauer's unpublished manuscript Rocks in the Belly. Jon is in my writing group, and I offered to critique the manuscript on the strength of the few chapters he'd read to us, which I'd found excellent. I understand that Rocks in the Belly is not necessarily the final title, but it works for me: this is a book that aims straight for the guts and pulls no punches. Despite the confronting, sometimes appalling behaviour of the protagonist, and the relentlessly downbeat emotional tone, this book truly gripped me. It covers some big, ambitious themes: the ineluctable grip of childhood, the fateful, unalterable moments that imprison us, and the physical frailty of identity - two of the three central characters have their selfhood disordered and eventually destroyed by insults to the brain. But perhaps its strongest theme is the intense relationship that can exist between mothers and sons, and the psychological scars that can be left when this relationship fails. Jon's protagonist is a man deeply damaged in his relationship both to himself and others by the perceived failings of his mother. As the reader, we are not quite so convinced that the responsibility for all of his pain really belongs at the mother's door; the chapters set in the character's boyhood show us a child whose profound psychological disturbance seems to have roots in nature as much as nurture. Yet the exploration of a boy's need for his mother's love and attention is very affecting, and the ways this "mother complex" plays out in his adult life through misogyny, seduction, the addictive need for sexual affirmation, are utterly believable. I haven't seen this theme explored in fiction before - perhaps there is even some taboo here.

I had my criticisms too, the most significant of which was the question of how many readers would have the stomach for the heavy rocks of truth Jon serves up. Or perhaps - probably a more serious criticism - whether the book doesn't at times slide from unflinching truthfulness into an indulgence in the awful that borders on the gothic. However, Jon is very much aware of these issues, and I must stress that the manuscript I read is still a work in progress. I sincerely hope he gets the balance right in the final work, because the core of this book is seriously good, and it deserves a wide audience. (I told Jon I would mention his book on my blog but I wouldn't review it, seeing as the version I read was not the final one. Sorry Jon, it just happened!)

The other book I wanted to talk about was Wells Towers' collection, recommended to me by Louise Swinn of Sleepers Publishing fame, and a great aficionado and patron of short stories. This is the kind of short story collection that makes you want to jump up and sharpen your pencil and write the best story you've ever written - if only it were that simple! They are relatively long stories by Australian standards - it's difficult to publish anything much over 3000 words here, whereas these must average at least twice that, though for US stories that is not unusual. They never ramble however - if more tangential detail goes into them than is customary for our pared-back stories none of it is dull or without impact. Tower just seems to have such a fullness of imagination that he can afford to pour all this extra material into the mix. Rather than feeling impatient with their length, I found myself flicking forward through the pages hoping there would be a whole lot more of them before the end. I can't wait to see what this guy does with a novel. Tower often begins his stories with events or details far removed from the crux of the narrative he will eventually unravel, then slowly narrows in on the quarry until the final line shows us what he's been chasing all along. In "On the Show", for example, the story starts with the literary equivalent of one of those "falling through the clouds" film openings: a wide angle view of a fairground, cast in disturbingly garish colours, rapidly closing in on a lizard on the side of a rusty gas canister. Before we know it, the lizard is trapped in a child's hand, and then, almost before our head has stopped spinning, the child is lured into a portable toilet by a paedophile. And yet even this is still not the real story, but just a thread in the tapestry Tower is weaving: a gripping portrait of the sordid, cruel world of life "on the show" and the characters whose stories converge in that surreal environment. It's not easy to write a short story without one central character narrative , yet Tower pulls it off masterfully, making it all appear effortless, almost throwaway. Yet once you start to take a closer look at the writing, the construction, you become aware that you are looking at a master's brushstrokes. As casual as it appears, everything is balanced, everything considered, and there's not a lazy metaphor or cliched treatment in sight. With the possible exception of Anne Enright's Taking Pictures, this is the finest short story collection I've read in a long time.

Letters

2009-03-17T23:07:00.002+11:00

I want to start a club of letter-writers! We will bring back the beautiful art of letter-writing in the age of the txt, when there's not even enough time for vowels, let alone poetical flourishes... We will sit at desks with red wine in front of us and write long, detailed, thoughtful letters to one another. These days the only exciting things that come by post are story acceptances. The rest is administrative drivel, never touched by human hand save in the very last moment when the postie lifts it from the bag and shoves it through the slot. Imagine receiving a letter from an old friend instead of an 'add' on Facebook. That little leap of the heart when you see your name in handwriting on the envelope, when you feel the thickness of the folded letter within.

It saddens me that most people can't write. They really, really can't. I mark psychology essays sometimes, and the standard is staggeringly abysmal. I read people's funding submissions, and they can't even say what they mean in simple clear sentences. It's turgid, ghastly, weasel-word-ridden drivel. I'd like us all to be poets, delighting one another with our wit and invention and sparking ever wilder, bolder leaps of fancy and whimsy and humour and insight. I guess there never was a time when we were all poets, but at least we could spell, and we had lovely handwriting, and we could recite a few lines of Blake or Wordsworth.

I have written one love letter in my life. Apart from the adolescent tragedies which, if they still exist, are sufficient reason for me never to stand for public office. Worse than Pauline Hanson. Far worse. I have written one real love letter in my life, and I did it in Microsoft Word. Printed it out, for Christ's sake, in Times New Roman or Garamond or something, and put it in her letterbox, along with the panties she'd inadvertently left in my bed. What was I thinking? I've lived forty years and in that time I've only really written one love letter and I fucking well did it on a word processor. Which meant of course that I got to keep a copy in My Documents, in the folder named 'love', I suppose. It would have been better to scribble it in shitty red biro on the back of a torn phone bill than do it in Word. A love letter is a physical object, like a feather, a pressed flower. It is not 'information'. You cannot 'keep a copy'. There is no 'copy'. There is the love letter and the love ketter is the love letter is the love letter. I kept a copy, because I thought it was a good love letter, but I missed the point that you have to give it away. Like love itself, you can't have your cake and eat it, give it and hold onto it at the same time. It destroys the very small, almost imperceptible magic that is in the letter.

One decent love letter in my whole life and I did it on the computer! I wonder if she kept it anyway.

Excerpt from 'Different Kinds of Heaven' (formerly 'Zoe and May')

2009-03-13T14:14:00.002+11:00

Mayflower, he called her, for the corolla of blonde hair that haloed her face. But this was not promising, since his pot plants never did well. He tried to guess if they wanted sun or water, and always seemed to jump the wrong way. As for May, he never knew what to cook for her. He found she’d eat bolognaise, so he made her that until one day she said, I don’t like bolognaise, and that was that. So he struck on the idea of fish-fingers—he felt absurdly pleased with the inspiration—and this kept him going for a while.

Entertainment was a bigger problem. He bought a huge box of Lego for her after the first disastrous weekend, but she was always demanding his participation. He could not understand why something as seemingly easy as playing with Lego people could be so exhausting. Fifteen minutes and he’d be unable to sit upright anymore; he’d slump to the floor beside her, utterly drained. He was in a Lego gulag. His suffering passed May by. Her Lego people cheerfully conquered the mountains of his chest, danced on the pinnacle of his nose. He let it wash over him. It was all okay so long as he didn’t have to raise a muscle. And all this killed half an hour, then she would ask him, what now Dad? and he really couldn’t think of a thing. How on earth did Cathy make the hours pass?

He took her to the Collingwood Children’s Farm, where for a time he thought he’d failed again, until he understood that this stillness, this sombre concentration, was her expression of rapture. She held the guinea pigs like a sacred responsibility. Then afterwards they walked along the Yarra in a fine wash of sunlight, past the serrated skyline of the old factories, the embankments of yellow sour subs. She picked the fattest ones and happily chomped their squeaky stems from the nub up, a childhood delicacy he remembered well, though the taste disgusted him when he had a nibble for old time’s sake.

Dad, how does the river know which way to go? she asked him.

It goes downhill.

It’s not going downhill. It’s going flat.

It’s very slightly downhill—this outrageous statement a cause for obvious consternation.

They walked a while longer in silence, and he could see her mind ticking over, puzzling something out. Then she said: What if I don’t like heaven Dad? I mean, when I die?

You will. Everyone likes heaven.

Are there different kinds of heaven for different people?

I don’t know sweetie. Maybe you get what you want. Maybe your heaven would be a garden with the hugest sour subs.

She walked silently for a while, studying the river, the people quietly whirring by on their bicycles. Then she said, cheerfully, definitively: My heaven would just be a normal life!

He knew what she meant: that this was enough, right here, right now, and she could foresee not a single shadow. Her innocence exposed the true love he had for her, a love that was almost an oppression. His own heart was armoured and weary, and protected because he considered himself disposable, not really so important. But loving her made a break in his defences through which pain could get in again, along with the light. Against this weakness there was no possible protection.

Excerpt from 'Zoe and May' - new and unpublished

2009-01-21T18:43:00.001+11:00

And then every Saturday, his ex brought around May, his five-year-old daughter. He was getting to know her still, after two years when he and Cathy hadn’t spoken, and the only times he’d seen May were through a parked car window, coming out of Cathy’s place on a blustery winter afternoon in a duffle-coat that made her look like Paddingon Bear, or going into the supermarket and emerging again half an hour later, skipping beside her plastic bag-laden mother. He’d watch the house for hours, nothing changing whatsoever except dark drawing in—this was so unhealthy—while inside, his daughter’s childhood was taking place.

Now at last he had her, and didn’t know what to do with her at all, he’d never felt such an oaf. The car door would slam in the street, and there she’d be at the end of the drive, with her overnight case in one hand and Puss-puss, her stuffed toy, dangling from the other. He’d open his arms, and while she ran to him, his eye would be drawn to the dark head in the car, turned his way. The long pause before she turned the ignition and the car slid off.

This mistrust made him defiant, but still he had no idea. When he lifted her up and spun her round he half expected his big dumb hands to be seared by contact with such loveliness. Mayflower, he said, kissing her cheeks. According to the scales she weighed fourteen kilograms, but he could not believe it. She felt light as a kite, only the pulsing imbalance of her kicking legs indicating she had any weight to her at all. What do you do when a butterfly lands on your shoulder? You hold your breath and wait and try not to move so you won’t damage it.

But holding still, he knew, would not save him from harming her, this serious child whose eyes took in everything, like she was swallowing the world whole. If he was not to damage her he would need to act, to decide, to care and nurture, he knew this, but—fathering? He simply didn’t have a clue. He remembered the first day she came, standing in his empty living room—he’d cleaned and vacuumed for the occasion, thinking he was preparing for her, making an effort, but now as she stood there on the bare carpet, like a sad but polite traveller, he understood he’d got it all wrong again.

2009-01-21T18:23:00.003+11:00

Furthering the theme of successive approximations from my last post, I heard someone on the Book Show today talking about the idea of working and working a poem until it stands up and says, "You have found me." The same idea, from a less mathematical perspective! I used to write poetry, was never all that good at it, but I think in my short stories I'm still driven by the poet's yearning for precision and highest refinement. Poetry is apprehended by all the senses: image and cadence of course, but to me the ultimate poetic sense is olfactory. You breathe in a poem, like the subtlest perfume, like a vapour arising between the lines. You could say that, literarily speaking, a novel offers meat: something to fill the belly, whereas a poem offers fragrance only, a very Buddhist sort of pleasure. I am not a poet because I am still too hungry, and then not quite a novelist, because I am too ascetic. So I keep on writing these damn short stories.

I have also reflected recently, like many writers before, on the failure of the realised to attain the perfection of the ideal. So those attracted to perfection, like myself, tend to cut back, to pare away the explicit in favour of the suggested. It truly is an ascetic's impusle, as if the cutting away, the negating of the material, somehow leaves a space in which the ideal can be reflected, can breathe. But the ultimate end of such an impulse, if left unchecked, is the negation of form entirely. It's J.D. Salinger's rumoured room full 0f stories too precious to ever be published, or John Cage's 4'33''. It's silence and anorexia. Poetic writing - by which I mean not just poetry, but all writing with a poetic sensibility, must play its music on a string drawn tight by the tension between the material and the formless, between sound and silence, being and emptiness.

And anyway - final thought - novels can have fragrance too. Some ideas, some images, some thoughts can only breathe in the space given by a whole novel. You have to build a cathedral if you want to make organ music. And yes, I'm mixing my sensory metaphors awfully, but you'll get the gist of the riff...

Eroticising the landscape, and the method of successive approximations

2009-01-13T09:27:00.003+11:00

The method of successive approximations is the way to go, I decided last night, as I tried to beat my latest story into shape. Sometimes I think I'm just too much of a scientist to be a writer - always looking for some theory or clever trick to capture or explain the creative process. Well anyway, it's my latest way of thinking about writing. Start with a broad idea, write it out, however it comes out, and then gradually shape it closer and closer to the 'ideal' in one's mind. It's kind of obvious in a way, but I find it a more helpful way of thinking about writing than a linear write-it-from-beginning-to-end type of model, which tends to lead to me obsessively reworking paragraph one to the brink of perfection or extinction.

The other day, I came up with this:

In the clog of the river, the slow sick froth and stagnation she’s lain for three days, face down and slowly swelling with the stench of the crime. Gone the girl, the beautiful girl, she’s long fled among the reeds, the cicada song, the thrips and the swooping kingfishers, she’s rushed out like a gasp into the starry chill. That is her in the long, elegant step of the heron, her in the silky fall of dusk, her in the crushed breath of eucalypt, the sigh of night breeze.

The thing down there in the river bend is not her, is nothing, only the carcass, the bag: a corrupted sac of virescent meat. The river stings and itches with flies, and plops with gases, and gathers the scum of decay in its teeth of rotted trunks and boughs. The thing-that-was-once-a-girl goes to collect there too, to slowly bloat and stink and simulate life with its sighing and popping and subsiding, as if restless with sad thoughts. It forgets itself and farts and belches and lets itself go completely, gets fat with death, does not even care that the rats tear flakes from its soft, white edges, that the maggots swarm on the water line and fill its skin like a piñata. It embraces decay unreservedly, loses unity and becomes a multitude, a human-shaped colony of crawling and microscopic things, her once fine, splendid flesh softening, loosening, dissolving away, so that soon all that once clothed her in loveliness will break up like suds and the bones will rise out, a reminder that a life cannot so easily be unmade. The bones will rise out, white as stones, severe and fragile, to sing in the twilight of lost and forgotten things, of love unmade and deeds undone.

Somehow it seems unlikely to become a short story, more likely the novel I write while I'm not writing the novel I'm supposed to be writing. Am I really considering some Wolf-Creek-Ivan-Milat-Joanne-Lees suspense thriller here? Hmm, we shall see...

I think I mentioned that I convened a writers' group last year, beginning with writers who have all been published in the Sleepers Almanac, but now expanded beyond that somewhat. I call us the Almaniacs in my mind, but I'm not sure anybody else knows that. Anyway, we are privileged to have some fine writers in our small tribe, and none finer than Jessica Au, whose story 'Leopards' is probably my favourite from last year's Almanac and who, at the age of twenty-very-little, writes absolutely Winton-esque prose. She's been presenting chapters from her novel in development for our delectation in recent meetings. I wish I could post some of the lines here, but that would be presumptuous. I can't however resist the one quote, something about "girls with salt in their hair and bodies struck with sunlight". "Bodies struck with sunlight" - how simple and gorgeous. I read this chapter with a feeling of sick excitement and jealousy. Trust me, you read it here first: this book will win prizes, and if it doesn't sell as well, then you're all crazy you hear me?

I heard David Malouf on the Book Show on Radio National talking about "eroticising the landscape" when he writes, and that is exactly what Jess does so beautifully: she manages to scoop some of the essential and the sensual out of whatever she describes, so that what comes off the page is somehow more vivid and sublime than the real thing.

I went back to my own half-finished offering after the group finished feeling curiously dispirited and inspired (impossible, I know, but true). I just had to get some of that same vividness into it. Writing about erotic love, I realised I was sentimentalising, vaselining my lens. I was missing the irregularity and uniqueness of my subject. Everything was getting emulsified, and in the process actually losing its eroticism. So - the method of successive approximations - I started trying to write in these unexpected, even jarring elements. My perfectionism can be a killer, but it also means I get better, I hope. I'm always seeing the David (Malouf?) in the marble and trying to chip him out.

Update

2008-12-13T11:32:00.004+11:00

For the legions reading this blog (hey Luke, did you find it?), at last an update. I finally finished the story that wasn't working back on my 'bad writing day' in July (July! Can't believe it!), and it was just accepted for publication in Meanjin in September next year. Also, my story 'Salt' was just published in New Australian Stories, by Scribe. It didn't, however, get anywhere in the Boroondara Awards. Nothing. Nix. Boo hoo.

In more evidence that mine own worst enemy is mine self, I met up with Louise Swinn of Sleepers fame the other day (hey Lou, did you find it?), and gloomily recited to her the plot outline of my novel-to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-question. She seemed to think that I knew what I was doing and what's more, that it might even sell! (I felt a bit bad about this possibility. If it's likely to sell, doesn't that mean that it's kind of crap? :) ) Well anyway, I left this meeting with a spring in my step. Maybe I really do know what I'm doing! I still feel unready to really get stuck into the writing of it, but it has been congealing in my mind since then...

I'm not giving the game away here, but the book is based on my grandfather Osmar White, who wrote Green Armour, a classic first hand account of the war in New Guinea in 1942. I have about 100,000 words of letters he wrote to my grandmother over the course of WWII, a veritable gold-mine. The difficulties are numerous - not least is the problem of fictionalisation: too much, too little? I can't rewrite Green Armour, his own marvellous account of the experiences that left him scarred, transformed and deepened. But I am starting to see a way forward...

Years ago, before I was a writer, I dreamed he gave me a manuscript to complete. Perhaps it was just about continuing the line of writers, writing on the unfinished family story as it were, but I had the sense there was something he regretted having left unsaid. So I choose to take the dream more literally, to try to finish something he failed to complete. As I have no idea what that is, I can only trust that something will lead me to get it right in the end. Perhaps that sense of an imposed mission is the only thing that will give me the confidence to actually write a damn book.

2008-09-07T12:06:00.004+10:00

Well, it's been a while. Guess I'm not so good at the daily blog thing. Last week my story 'This Old Man' was published in Award Winning Australian Writing and I spoke at the launch. I talked about the autobiographical nature of the story, or at least its autobiographical basis, and I suggested rather sweepingly that all stories are autobiographical, even if they are in costume, so to speak. Perhaps it was a statement that needed more explanation, since subsequent contributors got up to talk about how their stories had nothing to do with their own lives. Perhaps my original statement was a little extreme, a little provocatively put. But I think there's a defensible point there. All stories must come from our own inner life, whether or not they follow the factual details of our life story. Perhaps it might have been better to say that autobiography is the richest source of stories we have available, and that even the stories we tell that have no superficial relation to our own lives are informed at a hidden level by the experiences that have shaped us into who we are. Enough said.

Thanks owing to my writing group - a little band of former contributors to the Sleepers Almanac who have taken to meeting monthly to workshop our stuff. They gave me some incredibly valuable help with the story that eventually became 'Salt' and which I have now submitted to the Boroondara Literary Awards. I'm not expecting first prize again, but it might rate a commendation or something, who knows?

I've made something of a discovery this weekend - writing freehand is a far better way for me to develop a first draft that writing on a computer. It has something to do with the messy imperfection of my handwriting - mine more than most, let me tell you! - and the fact that there is no capacity to cut and paste, or go back to obsessively 'refine' what I just wrote. My notebooks are turning out to be a far richer source of ore for stories than the innumerable fragments I have in the 'abandoned' and 'in progress' folders on my hard drive. I often love the stuff I stumble on in my notebooks, but frequently find the computer stuff to be lifeless.

Something else I have learned is that meditation helps my writing. It is not only the ability to focus in on the core of one's experience tat meditation teaches, but the discipline of staying with. I find there is a moment (well, in fact, many moments) in writing at which there is an impulse to spring away, to make a cup of tea, tidy my room, check my emails, whatever - anything to escape the discipline of staying with the work. This occurs even when I am on a roll. There is a part that kicks in saying, 'Okay, well done, that's enough for now.' The precise same impulse occurs in meditation - a restless desire to jump up, or at least to escape from the discipline of concentration into some line of fantasy or meandering thought. Meditation is teaching me the importance of pushing through these impulses, going deeper, staying inside the discipline of writing.

Yesterday was a good writing day - I riffed on the theme of a lost lover and found myself moving into a state of poetic intensity, a sort of rhapsodic, hypnotic lyricism. I stand by my statement about autobiography - our personal experiences of loss and love must be the well from which such creative outpourings come. Our writing always reflects the state of mind it was written in. We cannot write with life and passion and originality about things that we cannot experience from the inside.

A bad day at the office

2008-07-26T17:47:00.005+10:00

Oh crap writing day! Yesterday was supposed to be a writing day, but instead it got frittered away on nothing, because I could sense in myself that I was empty. So today I tried again, determined to make a better fist of it. I took a notebook down to the Green Grocer in North Fitzroy (where the granola is the best on Earth) and sat in front of the fire, not writing but reading. Two glorious short stories from the Best Australian Short Stories 2007. The first was 'Speak to Me' by Paddy O'Reilly. If you haven't read this story, it's worth the price of the whole book, I swear it. Of course this is a personal thing, but I haven't been so thrilled by a short story in a long time. Forget Nabokov (I've been labouring through his collection) - read this! The other one was Cate Kennedy's 'Tender', as beautifully observed and simply written as all her short stories, and on any other day I would have been wowed. But Paddy O'Reilly's alien in the underwear drawer made it almost pale by comparison.

So after two lattes and two stories I went home again, having written zilch, and then decided to sit in front of my computer and have a go at something equally brilliant as 'Speak to Me'. Yes of course! I realised. All the possibilities that the surreal has to cast light on the human condition! Why hadn't I realised it before? Why was I so earth-bound? Everything is possible in fiction, so go for it...

Nothing, of course. A horrible emptiness. I'm brimming with the sense of everything that's possible, but I got nothing. I open up a story I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It's terrible. Some nice passages, but each nice paragraph, instead of adding up with all the others to something great, cancels out the others, so at the end when I try to deliver a punch line of sorts it's got nothing whatsoever behind it. It's pitiful, laughable. So the protagonist discovers that he cares. Pity that I, the reader, don't.

Still, there's gotta be something that I can salvage from all those fine words. Okay, so how's this bit:

It was the year I first got drunk, up there in that empty space full of echoes and moonlight and scraps of electrical wiring. I suggested an experiment. We would see how far it was possible to mentally resist the effects of alcohol. I’d read books and I believed the mind could do anything. I forced down gulp after gulp of the cold wine until my face went numb and my words slurred. The moonlight sloshed over us and I sprawled out on the bare floor and watched the trees through the window spin without ever completing a rotation. The wine bottle got knocked over and glugged out a great purple stain.

Where will you go? I asked him.

I dunno, I don’t care, he said. His cigarette end moved like a firefly. He was saying that a lot now, about not caring. He didn’t care about school, about the future, about his mum and dad. Anyway what was to care about? Nuclear war was bound to come sooner or later. We’d been expecting it for years. When we were younger we’d made plans to bury tins of food up on the Black Spur. We’d have mountain bikes and leave food on the doorsteps of people with less foresight than ourselves. Even now we still thought a little wistfully about the possibility of nuclear holocaust. At least it would be dramatic.

He opened the second bottle and I guzzled straight from the neck. Yes, hell, who cared? Through the window I could see the house I’d grown up in. It was as familiar as a face, like a big square head with windows for eyes, a head full of memories. But the last lights had gone out, its lids were drawn down. It slept unaware that I was out in the construction site next door, watching it with cold, unsympathetic eyes.

I kind of like that. Gotta be able to take it somewhere. Somehow I've got to make the thing cohere, got to bind the whole narrative together into something tight and compelling, the way those three paragraphs are. So I try starting again, but after two sentences I hit the little red x at top right. Do you wish to save? No thanks. (Which reminds me of something irrelevant but amusing. My nine-year-old son downloaded a picture of Everest from the internet. When he went to save it, he got a message saying 'Mt Everest already exists. Do you wish to replace it?' He found that hilarious, and of course I then had thirty minutes of variations: your arm already exists, do you wish to replace it? etc etc)

I'm labouring against a headwind today. So then I opened up my story 'White Summer' (due to be published in Sleepers Almanac 2009. Pre-order your copy today! Oh. You can't. Never mind.) Love that story! My mother tells me it is miserable, which is sort of true, but it is beautiful too, and ends with redemption of sorts. I have no aversion to sadness in my stories. I opened it to remind myself that I can write, and also because I'm thinking of using the character as part of my novel. I got to the end and thought Yes! I love it! and immediately opened up a blank document and started to write the first chapter of my novel, for the second time. One paragraph before all inspiration had haemorrhaged out of me onto the page and I was left staring at the blinking cursor. It was mocking me so I closed the page.

In the meantime, I was running my 'Word Learner' program in the margin, a little application I've written that helps me to learn, you guessed it, words. For some reason I believe I can multitask while writing the great Australian novel. I stare at the procession of obscure four-letter words that are all worth four points in scrabble.

leat inro neal rial aune raun trin sean ...

Then I go to see if anyone has made a move on scrabulous or chess pro...

There's a guy in my writing group who's written 70,000 words since November or something. He loves it. I hate him.

I check my emails. There's one from a friend I've never met whose life consists of following her diplomat husband across the far continents of the globe, playing scrabble and penning prettily written short stories about her gardeners and the diplomatic parties she has attended with self-important dignitaries where she'd wanted to dance naked on the cream cake. She's a great critic, and I'd asked her to read a couple of my stories, including the bad one that I hadn't realised was bad at that point. I'd then sent her a follow up email begging her not to read it after all, in fact to destroy it all costs, knowing that this was futile, and she was only going to be all the more likely to read the damn thing. She'd sent me a harried email from what I'd imagined was some windswept hut in the rain shadow of the Andes, but which turned out to be a local library in Northern Ireland, where she was having a holiday from her taxing schedule of horseriding in Uruguay. The email said she'd get to the stories when she had a moment, and informed she'd been paid twenty pounds for a story that had been accepted on an internet writing site.

Twenty pounds! Ah this is the life eh, writing? The glamour, the women! The twenty pound notes to throw around like petals at a wedding. The fast cars. The dizzying social calendar. The awards.

Which reminds me. Those champions of fine literature over at the National Jazz Writing Awards rejected my entry! A grand total of 57 entries, and mine failed to reach the short list of ten. The email of doom kindly informed me that this failure didn't necessarily mean my work was no good. It might just not be the right piece at the right time. You don't win the award, but please accept this condescension prize. Ah well, such is life...

It's dark now and raining. My bad writing day has come to an end. And look! Someone's made a move on scrabulous!

Excerpt from 'The Wasps' Nest'

2008-07-01T22:10:00.002+10:00

The following is a short extract from my story 'The Wasps Nest', currently unpublished.

In the visits centre Alan was sitting hunched at the plastic table, so shrunken she hardly recognized him when she scanned the room. She was looking for the big strong mechanic she’d married, who’d so often boasted about the dodgy parts dealers he’d bested at the garage — not this frightened old man with his unshaven cheeks and edgy, fast-moving eyes. It was noisy and heckling in there, the kids bored and screaming while their parents huddled, bracketing their snatched intimacy with their backs and trying to grope one another out of sight of the officers. Alan stood and pulled out a chair for her — that was him all over, always polite, knew how to treat a lady. It was why she married him, that old-fashioned courtesy. A true gentleman, she always said. A gentleman at a time when her body and soul thirsted for gentleness like water. The bruises had faded, the bones mended, but after she escaped her first marriage she still suffered a terrible tenderness in her skin. A harsh word made her shake, the abrasion of a doorway hurt like a blow, even the hard light of summer assaulted her and had her wearing her dark glasses again, hiding in them like a shellfish. She had thought she could never bear to let a man touch her again. But then there had been Alan, courting her with flowers, the old-fashioned way.

And she’d told him. She’d said to him that if his intentions weren’t honourable then he could forget it right away; she wasn’t like that. Of course she knew she was damaged goods and was lucky to have him at all, someone to take her to the pokies on a Saturday night, or drive her to Target when she needed a new pair of shoes. But it had given her such pleasure playing the role of someone she wished she’d had the chance to be. Forty-two and acting like a schoolgirl who’d never been kissed. It was such silliness yet such dizzy pretence. And Alan opening doors and kissing her hand, for goodness sake. She shouldn’t have been shocked at the proposal, when it came. Alan was a man and even the sweetest of men won’t wait forever. She’d just hoped to play the game a little longer. Of course she said yes, and then she wept, and Alan thought it was happiness. She let him believe it; how could she ever have explained her grief?

Writer's block

2008-06-22T17:28:00.005+10:00

Recently a writer whose work I very much respect mentioned in an email to me how she had no new work. I wrote back that this was splendid news, and that there is in fact nothing more heartening (apart from winning awards) than hearing about other writers' struggles, blocks and dry patches. It sounds like schadenfreude, but it isn't. It's about recognition of the common ground of being a writer. Even writers I admire get stuck, agonise, feel that horrible confidence drain that can kill your productivity (and your creativity) stone dead. As I said to Jess, hearing about her great pile of nothing makes me feel that my great pile of nothing might be a talented pile of nothing like hers!

I have suffered major bouts of writer's block since I started writing my first short stories about three years ago. The first one of these followed my winning the Boroondara Literary Award. Before that I was happily scribbling away without imposing any expectations on myself. Suddenly I felt that everything had to be award-winning, or it wasn't worth bothering with. I knew what was going on, but try as I might, I just could not wriggle out of my own trap. My brother had a good, logical suggestion for a cure. He said I should just sit down with the determination to write, say, 1000 words, regardless of quality. Just crash on through as it were. Great idea. Pity it didn't work. I couldn't keep to the discipline, because what I was writing was crap, and I knew it, and writing crap provides no satisfaction. Nor does it necessarily lead to writing anything better.

It's a bizarre sensation to look at stuff you've written a few months earlier and think, 'How the hell did I do that?' You look inside yourself and find nothing. During this time I started twenty, thirty stories that petered out after three sentences, a page, two pages. Rarely any more than that. The sentences were nice, the paragraphs held up, but the story? What story? After months of this going on, you naturally start to find many excuses for not sitting down to write. I have one day a week reserved for writing, but after completing all the suddenly necessary administrative tasks that needed doing, after playing my next online chess move and making my moves on scrabulous, and perhaps adding a few refinements to my pet programming project... I usually had about half an hour left for the grusesome chore of churning out a paragraph or so of another failed story. Naturally you start to question yourself at that point. You start to flirt with the edge of the abyss of not being a writer any more. It's a bad feeling.

I cannot claim to have any magic cure for writer's block. If I did, I'm sure I could sell it at great profit to half the world's writers. But a combination of things broke the deadlock for me. Firstly, I believe in the power of intention. A firmly held intention has a way of flowing around obstacles. I was incredibly determined to come through the other side, because the thought of not writing any more was just too awful. My dreams provided guidance. And then I had a very simple, very conscious realisation: in every case where I have finished a story, I knew when I started the story where I as going. If not the exact ending, then at least the general gist. On the other hand, in every single case where I failed to finish a story, I had no idea where I was going or (in one case anyway) I discovered that the ending I had planned was not going to work. This was a critical insight. I learned something about the way write. I cannot ad lib as I go. I write teleologically, with a destination in mind.

David Mitchell, one of my favourite contemporary writers, said that a writer should not wait for an earth-shattering novel idea before making a start: write a bad novel and then pull it up by the bootstraps until it's very good. Well, I'm still prevaricating on the novel front, and should take his advice no doubt. I certainly know it works well for short stories. My recipe now is this: start with an idea and write that story, but always be prepared for the possibility that you will end up telling a very different one. Always be open to discovery and change. My most recent story 'Salt' started out as a story about poker machine addiction and duty, and ended up being about morphine addiction and murder. It seems to matter less that I know where I'm going than that I think I know where I'm going.

Excerpt from 'The Changes'

2008-06-20T22:34:00.003+10:00

The following is an excerpt from my short story 'The Changes', submitted to the Australian Jazz Writing Competition:

... Julian came to Melbourne from Sydney in 1967, the year I was born. He was twenty-three years old. It was that year in a man’s life when his freedom dawns on him. It was the Summer of Love, and even if Australia was six months out of sync, seasonally speaking, still he could feel the changes moving, something momentous and signifying behind the somniferous hum of lawnmowers and bees. Restlessness was in his skin, an itch for wind and loneliness and sunburn. When he played his guitar it was all diminished scales, edgy and unresolved, evading the root and rolling on like a tumbleweed.

He’d been seeing a girl himself at the time, kind of seriously: they’d even moved in together. But as he lay in her arms in the old Balmain weatherboard they were renting, the mosquitoes whining in the dark and the moon making a slick of light on his chest, he’d felt her slipping off him, like a drowning person slipping from a rock. With every inhalation of the redolent summer air he felt he was growing bigger, too big for her, this pretty, good-natured girl. Her arms were slipping off his gigantic chest.

So he left, drove away down the grassy drive, her image bouncing and shaking in the rear vision mirror and her tears still salty on his lip. It was already late afternoon, and the sun burnished his cheek and the wind through the open window was warm and smelled of wisteria and exhaust. He forced the gear lever into second and caught a last glimpse of her turning and walking back towards the house. Then he faced the road that climbed ahead of him, still hot enough from the dying day that at the crest of the hill a puddle of sky leaked into the bitumen, evaporating as he approached.

Internet writers' groups: birthing ground for new writers or deadend refuge of the talentless?

2008-06-18T17:59:00.000+10:00

I've heard the theory that internet writers' sites are for people who will never get published anywhere else. And if you've spent any time on these sites you will recognise that there is more than a speck of truth to this. Some (okay, most) of the writing you find on these sites is pretty bad. I can't claim vast experience, but I've spent time on three such sites, and the overall quality is similar, despite attempts by some sites to differentiate between the good and the not-so-good through various mechanisms. I'm thinking of writelink.co.uk, where I spent the most time. Writelink had 'spotlighted' writers whose work had averaged four star or above ratings from other users. (I think the system, and the whole site, has more or less broken down now since a rather ill-conceived attempt to jump on the blogging bandwagon). Unfortunately, many of the users were as poor at recognising quality as they were at producing it, and they heaped entirely unwarranted praise on some pretty ordinary stuff. They were also constrained by the usual desire to be liked by the writers they were reviewing, with the result that the ratings were inflated and fairly meaningless. Some reviewers offered poor advice, 'corrected' things that were actually right in the first place, or just failed to 'get' subtle work. There were some astute and insightful readers there too, who offered good advice, but I imagine it could be hard for a new writer on the site to differentiate the insightful crit from the bumsteer.

The reviewing process on writelink was always fraught and controversial. The site used a star rating system, which had the advantage of giving writers a quantitative means of measuring the reception of their work. It was not entirely unsuccessful. 'Five star' work was generally at least readable, sometimes very good. 'Three star' work was generally awful. However, there were inevitably noses put out of joint. An ill-fated 'quill' system was introduced to allow reviewed writers to review their reviewers (!), but this was howled down by the members - a case of the site owners getting too clever by half. Inevitably, egos and jealousy came into play. As a 'star' in the tiny writelink firmament, I was flamed on more than one occasion for posting honest (and I thought, constructively critical) reviews: comments suggesting that in my glory I shouldn't need to tear down others as well to get my jollies!

I feel for sensitive writers. As my blog title suggests, writing is often an expression of our inmost selves, our souls. No matter how humble the forum, it takes courage to put one's writing out there for others to love, hate, shoot holes in, as they will. You are putting yourself on the line, and until you've gotten used to that experience, it can be quite terrifying. I have personally never been overly senstive about people's comments on my work. Occasionally I'd find myself ruminating angrily over some (to my mind) wrong-headed remark in a review and I'd have to remind myself to lighten up. That is one thing that writers' sites can provide: a lesson in desensitisation. You can only get better if you take on board feedback. Over-sensitivity just gets in the way of becoming a better writer.

Another site I posted to, writersdock.org, didn't have a star rating system, but was more or less a simple forum, with users posting work as a new 'thread', then other users posting reviews or comments in that thread. This is the way most such sites work. Good work was distinguished by being selected 'pick of the week' by an anonymous group of behind-the-scenes reviewers. This system seemed rather hit-and-miss, and I came to question the judgement of these all-powerful beings. A piece that I still consider one of my finest was ignored for the honour, one that I now consider pretty poor received it. The reviewing culture on this site seemed less polite than that at writelink - more critical reviews were posted. A good thing, if the quality of the reviews had been high, but I found it lower than at writelink. Some readers 'got' my best work. Others were puzzled: where was the murder, the dramatic denouement, the character who turned out to be a ghost?

Despite these limitations, writers' sites do offer the beginning writer a lot. They provide a community, instant (or at least pretty quick) feedback on your work, and, ironically, they can teach you a lot about writing by exposing you to heaps of bad work. There is a spectrum of quality on these sites from truly dreadful to really very good, with the vast majority falling somewhere more towards the bottom of that scale. You can learn almost as much from others' mistakes as you can from the good stuff. If your work's any good, you can build yourself a little fan base, which is kind of fun, let's face it; we all want appreciative readers. Nevertheless, you tend not to find many really good writers on these sites, writers who are getting published regularly in the 'real world'. There's a good reason. Work posted to an internet site, even a 'closed', membership-only site, is deemed by some publishers to have been 'published', which means they won't touch it. The risk can be overstated - I'm sure many publishers wouldn't care - but why would a writer who knows the merit of his or her work take the risk? Also, what does such a writer have to gain by posting their work on such a forum? Praise is predictable, criticism likely to be off the mark, and there's certainly no financial incentive!

So what happens with many sites is that a certain stable core of writers develops- the 'usual suspects' on a site. These are usually writers who are good enough to be well received in the fishbowl of the site, but not good enough to make it in the bigger pond of 'real' publishing. This is not necessarily to be looked down on. Many of these people obviously love writing as a hobby, and the internet group provides an audience and a community of other enthusiasts. But the risk is you become stuck swimming in the fishbowl and never take the step to grow your writing beyond that level. It is a big leap, and a potentially demoralising one. Even the best writers get their 'fat letters', and the gratification of publication, though far greater than that of seeing your work on an internet forum, is anything but instant.

I won't be returning to writelink. But I still feel gratitude for what writelink offered me. If you are a beginning writer, I would certainly recommend the experience, but I'd suggest trying a number of sites, since they vary significantly in their 'culture', and always bear in mind that the world of real publishing is much, much more demanding. In the end if you want to succeed as writer, you will have to elevate your work to a much higher standard than what passes muster on an internet site.

Excerpt from today's work

2008-06-16T18:43:00.000+10:00

How did it go wrong for you? She sometimes asked in her mind as she looked into those pale, hate-filled eyes. It seemed to her that there was a knot in him that every experience only drew tighter. Can the soul form a knot? And if it can, what can untie such a thing, how can it ever come loose? She wished she knew more about these things. She’d offered to move his bed into the sun room so he could look out over the garden. At least then he could watch the birds disporting in the bird-bath, see the wind move through the trees. He might live long enough to watch the jonquils spring up again. She imagined that when you are dying the beauty of such things would be focussed like sun through a magnifying glass. Perhaps the bright spot it made in your heart would sear, but who would not welcome a burn like that? Surely we all long to be purified, and with nothing more to come, no more errors or losses or compromises, the spring garden could have the last word, the final say on it all. Wouldn’t anyone want that? Well, not Jack. He refused to be moved and when she tried to ‘jolly him along’, taking him by the arm he actually struck out at her as if she were trying to lure him into some form of involuntary euthanasia. So he stayed in his dark, musty room with its mouldy walls and its sweet stink of cancer. Go ahead, she thought, eat up your own misery. Knock yourself out. She sat on the side of his bed and tried to get a few spoonfuls of pureed vegetables into his mouth, but he was like an infant, with the added faculty of cunning. After long exhortations, he finally opened his mouth for the spoon then spat the stuff out in a spray all down his front, knowing she would have to find and wipe up every spot. She could have cried. She could have killed him. How ironic that would be.

Alan Marshall Short Story Award 2008

2008-06-15T12:33:00.000+10:00

Last night I was presented with the Alan Marshall Short Story Award at a ceremony at the beautiful Eltham Library Community Gallery. It was a very happy night. Although I won a similar award two years ago, this was different. For starters, unlike the Boroondara Award, I knew in advance that I had won first prize, so I was able to invite friends and family along. At the other award, I turned up alone, expecting a commendation or a third prize a best, and was somewhat stunned when I was announced the winner.
The judge of last night's award was Cate Kennedy, whose address was inspiring and surprisingly moving - she read a short excerpt from Alan Marshall's work that illustrated the 'compassionate heart and eye for detail' that she said is what makes a good short story writer. It was simple and devoid of literary ornaments or dazzling 'technique', but it spoke directly to the heart, and there wasn't a person in the room who wasn't moved by it. I saw Cate speak before at the Melbourne Writers Festival and her intelligence, warmth and total lack of pretension impressed me then. It impressed me again last night. She is a natural ambassador for the Australian short story form, and Australian literature in general.
My story - along with the winners of the local and young writers' sections - was read out by a local actor. It was a deeply rewarding moment. I chose the title of this, my new blog, to be 'cri de coeur', because that is the way I see writing. Perhaps the term 'cry of the heart' sounds a little piteous, but it is the best way I know to put it. Writing is a way to give voice to a sort of shout from the soul that says: I have been here, I have seen, I have suffered. It is a way to bear witness, and a search for the expression of truth. The story 'This Old Man' that was read out last night was not pure autobiography, but it was neverthleess the best possible expression I could find in myself for things I have witnessed and that matter: the relationship between fathers and sons, the pain of separation, the impossibility of sheltering those we love from pain. To have this story heard and to see it move people, to know that it struck the place it was meant to, was immensely satisfying.
I am grateful to Nillumbik Shire for supporting the award, and to Cate Kennedy for the sincerity and finely honed sensibility she brought to the task of judging. Congratulations to the other prize winners and commended entrants; Cate made it clear that it was a very close-run thing, and on another day - who knows? - someone else might have taken top honours. To all those who entered but didn't get anywhere this time around: Don't worry, I've been there. Keep writing and good luck!