The Unified Theory of Happiness - Part Four

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.