From dust you came, and to dust you shall return…

This fragment from the Catholic canon, pronounced on Ash Wednesday every year is to me profound in its simplicity. In this day and age, of doubtful relativisms, such language is complicated by the light weight response that that is only one way of seeing the world; that there may be life after death or reincarnation. Such retorts are common but seem to me, at least, to miss the point of the statement and its dark realism.

As a child, I heard that statement and it shook my body to its very core. A realisation of fallibility, that in spite of promises of heaven on earth and beyond as offered by other parts of the ritualistic prayers we recited, this one, offered each year along with a ritual crossing of each persons forehead with ash, was shocking in its truthfulness and its realisation on the level of the body. We are alive and have been born into the world, and one day that will come to an end.

Later, of course, I learnt of the physical truth of such a statement. That we do indeed come from dust and will begin to return to that state once we have breathed our last breath; It is a statement that frames our lives  whether we are aware of it or not. In fact, one of the points that separate us from the other animals is said to be this awareness of our own death. To be unaware is to be less than human on this count.

We are stardust, the song goes, and physics tells us that we are invariably made of carbon and water, the most commonly occurring elements that substances on this living planet ours. And while these elements are necessary precondition for life as we understand it, it remains a complete mystery as to why this planet has life, and as yet, only minute fragmentary evidence of life elsewhere in the universe has been found.

The search continues day and night and until this day with minimal success. The trouble is, that while we search for something out there we miss the point of it all. What is out there is largely a great expanse of nothing, and even if we examine the molecules closely, we will see this macrosphere of the universe duplicated at the micropseric level, ie, there is a hell of a lot of nothing in the dust that composes our very body and souls.

What we have between this framing of dust is life, a truly miraculous a mysterious living, and even more astonishingly, awareness of ourselves in the space in which we occupy. Humans are the only of the animals to have developed this sense of awareness, ad while sometime we fool ourselves that this is total, in fact, what marks us from other animals is only really a depth of awareness. A sick dog can be observed mourning and perhaps even fearing its fate. It mopes around unsure of its future, of whether it will continue on like other dogs or humans that it cohabitates with. It seems to know that it is on its last legs. in spite of this, something drives it on to live. That is the miracle.

Henri Bergson isolated this process as a force vitale or life force that motivates us and drives us on to death and dust.(Bergson 1911) I am drawn into life from the inanimate state to the animate, a force beyond my control comes from behind me and drives me into the world with a mixture of love and obedience. It can be observed at work in any living thing, any creation from the dust and detritus of the universe, the stardust which has transformed into a tree that never stops becoming a tree again each day, until the sap finally stops flowing and it has run its course. then it will begin to return to its composite elements, to the dryness of its reality, and the water will be free to evaporate and all that is left is dust.

I am no different to that tree except that I am aware of this process

both in myself and in other beings like me to varying degrees. I am born and become inducted into the present, and unwinding and progression of life, a constant moment, that for living things becomes marked by scarring from moments that we carry with us, just as a cut in the bark of a tree will forever remain noticeable, so too, our physical, emotional and spiritual scarring remains with us and we carry these past moments forward into each new present.

I am always already present while alive, full of the past realities and the future possibilities. As a human being I notice this commonality between myself and others of a similar being, ie, other humans. We, too, become conscious of other beings to a greater or lesser extent through our own experience of existence as a living human being. That is the gift and miracle of being a living human. (Merleau-Ponty 2002)

This is a view of what happens in between the dusty reality of our eternal existence. Humans and other motive animals, have a tendency to exacerbate scarring when it occurs which trees, for example, do not. Especially with humans, the emotional and spiritual scarring can also be exacerbated and aggravated long past the time when the original injury occurred. Our ability to reflect and ponder on our past, whether consciously or sub-consciously, can allows us to develop behavioural patterns and habits which serve to prolong the suffering already inflicted, so that the past comes to dominate the present, and the future becomes bleak and meaningless, even though objectively the present may be just wonderful and full of possibilities.

We are always moving towards our dusty, worm-ridden conclusion. Religions and spiritual traditions try to soften the blow with stories of paradise and rebirth. Often this is taken literally, and the possibility of Paradise and redemption is put off until the after-life, rather than grasping the promise of all these traditions, to have it here and now.

Guilt, shame and remorse of our actions towards one another, the products of our day to day actions coming back to haunt us as ghosts of the past, build to such a crescendo, that Dante warns us that without repentance for our unkindly and unloving actions, we are doomed to live out our days in eternity in Hell, hopeless and without ever seeing Paradise as God would want us all to do. It is only through faith in the world, faith in the fact that our life has meaning only when love is passed on trough our actions, that we can escape this eternal damnation.

Even repentance is not enough to reach Paradise. That will only free us onto the slopes of Mount Purgatory, where we can climb one day at a time towards our final redemption and salvation. But at least here, faith and hope are restored, so that the will to move forward is always with us. Only once we have caught sight of the light of Beatrice’s love can we finally have any chance of making it to Paradise, our souls purged from the scarring of our past life. (Dante 1984)

So, what exactly is this eternity that the Catholic tradition refers to? The Lord’s Prayer tells us that Heaven can be on earth and so we must believe this if we believe in Christ at all. He tells us explicitly in the New Testament that this is the only prayer we need. Merleau-Ponty gives us a clue when he describes moment of death as being the only eternal moment in life; that all previous life has been a presence in a series of moments that are perceived variably as past, present and future moments, but that the actual point of death is an eternal present, the last moment of life. (Merleau-Ponty 2002) To die a death in peace and harmony, and to pass to the eternal now, surely this is should be the point and purpose of palliative care and of preparation for death.

My grandmother told me many years before her death, that the only thing she wished for was to die in her sleep. Kenny Roger’s Gambler tells us the same thing when he sings: “The best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep”. Big statement: To be able to simply rest in peace as the sole purpose of life? It is implicitly seen in these statements as the end of a good life, a life freed from the past worries and an impendingly tortuous future, a readiness to meet our maker, to return to creation and be ready for what awaits us there.

To be prepared for this state is to be freed from our past, to have made amends and reconciled with those we had harmed by either our acts or omissions. A recognition of our humility in the face of our creator, an acceptance of our insignificance in the greater scheme of things. We pass from the unified body/spirit and become separated into the physical dust which during life is glued to our very spiritual being, and into the way we are remembered after we are gone. The Visible and Invisible components of our being separated at death, so that we live on in the minds of others and as a pile of dust to be scraped up and put in a vase, or buried for the worms to feed on.

for Anna Louise Searles who has taught me so much about life, love and moving to death…

Bergson, H. (1911). Creative evolution. London, Macmillan.

       

Dante, A. (1984). The divine comedy. Harmondsworth, Middlesex ; New York, Penguin Books.

       

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of perception. London, Routledge.

       

The Death of Comedy: Television actors and the demise of the stage

RIP Thursday, April 30, 2015

Timeshare by Lally Katz

Malthouse Theatre

Southbank. Melbourne

Malthouse Theartre (Contemporary Australian Theatre) in Southbank, Melbourne (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Don't get me wrong, I don't have an axe to grind. I love comedy in all its forms. This performance at Melbourne second major professional theatre simply rang alarm bells for me. Theatre in this city seems to be close to dying after a long, drawn out and painful withdrawal from funding.

The play was set on a fictional resort that straddles the International Date line somewhere in the Pacific. So far so good. The stage was like a large sand pit surrounded by tiling reminiscent of a swimming pool. A few deck chairs and sun umbrellas completed this minimalistic set design. The lighting was very basic.

The play nominally deals with the issue of Alzheimer's disease, ie, the play is didactic in the Germanic tradition. It has a moral purpose.

Marg Downey (foreground)

Marg Downey played the lead role of a forgetful mother on holidays with her daughter, played by Brigid Gallacher, who doubles as a resort worker, Maria. Her resort worker counterpart, Juan Fernandez, is played Fayssal Bazzi, who doubles as, Gary, the son of Marg Downey's character. Bert LaBonté plays the resort manager.

The lack lustre performance was directed by Oliver Butler. There were few redeeming features to this play which followed no known comedic schema that I am aware of, and as such, was so unfunny, that I felt physically sickened by the performance. I just wanted to leave ASAP. I was polite enough to wait for one round of encores that was it.

The accents were good, the set design, not bad, the lighting flat and drab. The timing of delivery of what seems like a poorly written script was non-existent, the casting was terrible for the plays theme of memory loss, costume was op-shop style, the performers were so unfit as to be showing visible signs of cellulose under the sub-standard lighting. The play was, in a word, just not that funny.

Fayssal Bazzi with Brigid Gallacher

Fayssal Bazzi and Bert La Bonte tried hard, and at least they managed to tried hard to energise their poorly written and directed parts. Brigid Gallacher tried hard and her portrayal of Maria did seem to have some life to it. All three sang in competent if not great theatrical style. Marg Downey just doesn't seem to know how to act or has simply forgotten what ever she did know. She didn't seem to want to sing or just can't.

Bert LaBonte

It saddened me to see this performance. I have nearly lost faith in the ability of the Melbourne stage to produce quality stage shows. Maybe it is the exporting of all our talent or funding cutbacks that have caused this problem, or perhaps it is the take over of the Melbourne stage by television stand up comics. Whatever, Timeshare was an abysmal display of performing arts. Apart from the strumming of a few chords backstage, there was little to redeem this performance which would have been more ably staged by first year university students, I sure.

My wife and I left the theatre feeling emotionally drained, cold due to the Malthouse's poor heating system, financially ripped off, and determined not to make the mistake of making the journey to a performance at the Malthouse ever again. Sad, as I love theatre and am finding it increasingly hard in this country to get my fix of the Bacchanallian arts. Maybe it is just our meanness as a nation that has robbed us of the joy of being able to playfully create pieces that entertain and educate.

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The eternal moment is always present if we only choose to look...

Flower (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

Life is an infinite collection of connected moments. There is, however, only one of those moments which lasts for an eternity, that being the final moment where we pass from being to nothingness. From dust you came and to dust you shall return...

And post-modernists argue that there are no absolute truths...

Whatever. We are born from nothing, we live, and then we die, passing to another realm perhaps, being in the warm loving hands of a power greater than ourselves, we return again to the bosom of the universe, the nothingness leaving behind an ever decreasing pile of matter. Entropy in action. We are at rest; at one with the cosmos.

My father died recently. He had a smile on his face. All around him were the signs of a man, a little boy who had grown old, pushing on. Slippers placed neatly under his bed, toothbrush next to the basin, razor sitting next to the taps. I cried knowing that he was not going to be there any more for me and also because my own life had suddenly become foregrounded against the background of his mortality. He smiled back at me and I kissed him. The warmth had left his skin as he lay there perhaps having answered the call to come from his mother.

So he lay there motionless and in a matter of days his body, having been embalmed and prepared for its final resting place, he would be lowered into the ground in his coffin. A priest would sprinkle some holy water onto the coffin and throw a few clods of earth on top once the casket had been lowered into the grave. Flowers and a crucifix were then thrown in for good measure and now it was again a game of the living.

Keku sarcophagus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I turned and walked silently with my partner towards our car. It was a nice funeral everyone agreed. In a way a celebration of having reached peace, an end to agitation and the beginnings of serenity, a stillness undisturbed beneath the grassy fields above.

I shook the priest's hand and thanked him for the serene way he had conducted the mass and burial ritual. The present is always already there right before us, if only we dare to look...

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Unintended consequences.

Image via Wikipedia

It's dark outside. Soon the fruit bats will descend to gorge themselves. The possums will come out to forage for food. They will come in pairs, followed by their offspring who are ready to leave the nest now, and run in a line along the cable TV wires. The soccer players are training in the park cross the road.

Many people complain of poverty and pending environmental disaster. Others that laws are to stringent or too lax: that taxes are to excessive or that they need to be decreased. Basically, we live in a world where conflict and its expression have become a way of life. Where hardly a day goes by without some new controversy that we are asked to buy into.

The sun shone today and it was warm. For early winter, it was a glorious day. A light breeze came in from the west of the city and gently caressed my skin. I chatted with a new friend I have met in the Ontario province Canada and we are discussing the finer points of life in real time. We are enamoured of each other.

I can sit here at my desk, in my break from law school, and in a while, when I have finished something that is half legible, publish it instantaneously to an international readership. Sure, more than likely few people will read this, but that is not the point. The very fact of the possibilities presented which is what makes these complainants look a bit foolish, when the very fact of their activity stands up to barely any scrutiny at all.

By any historical comparison imaginable, modern society, and particularly the rich Western counterparts, consists of some of the most fortunate people ever to walk the earth. And this does not apply just to the elites of those societies but to the overwhelming majority of the people to inhabit the planet on this day, an estimated 7,125,052,320 souls as I write this piece.

So, why all the complaints? Well, culturally we believe in the modern era that it is possible to solve all problems if only we wish to. All we have to do is apply ourselves to the problem, throw enough brain power and physical resources at the problem an it will go away. Of course, this type of thinking is totally at odds and in seeming denial of the late 18 C Hegelian of unintended consequences. Stated basically, for ever act there are two potential sets of consequences: One that is intended by committing to the act and one that this unintended.

Image via WikipediaThe beginning of this seems strangely mystical way of thinking seems to stem from a particularly optimistic analysis of the role of revolution in human society. Led by the American Revolution, funded in part by the way by Louis XVI and eventually leading to his downfall, and culminating with the French Revolution, these social upheavals were read as being a proof that humans could have some positive outcome on their destiny.

This reading of course is only possible when one glosses over the absolute terror wreaked on the general population -as well as the isolation and brutalization of sectarian sections within those once homogenous populations -  in the aftermath of the English, French, Russian, Chinese and European (WW I and II) Revolution, as well as the bloody American Civil War. To believe in the culture of complaint is to celebrate the death of the millions that went to make modern society of which we have all become interminable complainants.

This terror did not stop at the indigenous populations at its source in Europe either, but extended around the globe as modern society and its one sided policy of capitalist economic expansion decimated the indigenous populations of all the continents in its path of imperialistic domination of both material and human resources. 

The propensity to complain did not grow in opposition to this expansion as is often thought, but was an integral part of that whole mindset of expansion. The discontent of the people of Europe had its roots in onslaught of the bubonic plague followed by endemic fighting between warlords, and later between kingdoms, which really only ended in the absolute disgrace and discreditation of European culture and ideas in the aftermath of the European revolution (WWI & II).

This very tendency to disquietitude has driven humanity to increased production, consumption, population, scientific, technical and artistic advancement, and to the world we have today. To change the world does not require a continuation of this intemperate temperament, but rather an abatement of it. There is not a lot in reality to complain about. Sure, some go hungry as they always have, while others succumb to disease and illness. Still other fall victim to economic misfortune while a number still live in servitude. That is the way of the world.

Image via Wikipedia

There is no utopia and yet we do not live in a dystopia like some cartoon shows would have us believe. We just are in the world as our ancestors were in the world. Yes, there are more of us but in general they would swap places immediately to have a chance of living with a daily meal, a chance to express themselves and a means of making some sort of livelihood. Today, everything is just as it should be. Not saying that it's perfect, but that we need another way of looking at ourselves and the way we are in the world.

Today I sit here satiated, content and wondering how on earth it all came to this. 

The myth of Narcissus and Echo

The story of Narcissus and Echo has a pervasive presence in Western cultures. The essence of the myth perhaps gives us a clue as to why this story has intrigued many artists and philosophers over the millennia.

At the heart of this story is two lovers. Narcissus who can not return love as he is enamoured by his own self-image, and Echo who can not express love as she can only repeat the last words that are spoken to her by another, i.e., she cannot generate her own expressive language.

Narcissus can be seen as withdrawn from reality. He is locked in his own head so to speak, and is driven by an extreme ego. Echo, on the other hand suffers from a complimentary condition, in that she can only reflect what others have already spoken to her.

Narcissus enters the scene after her jealous mother, Hera, has already struck Echo speechless. He cannot relate to Echo’s amorous advances towards him, and eventually scorns her. She wanders and fades away only ever being able to repeat what others have said to her. This ability survives on after she has finally faded to nothing. He, on the other hand, continues to roam unawares that he too has been cursed, so that on seeing his own self-image he too will perish.

I am intrigued by this failure of reciprocity of the sense. Echo is too obsessed with the other; she has become totally reliant on the other to reach any expressive potential at all. Narcissus, because he is so self-obsessed that he fails to respond to the human expressivity of her advances, rejecting her out of hand because of her lack of articulateness.

Finally, upon seeing the ‘real’ Narcissus reflected in the pond, he is overcome by shock at his own image, having only ever seen himself before in his vain mind’s eye. His egoism detaches him from all of his sense of the world around him making him incapable of reading the advances of the beautiful Echo correctly. He dies and turns into a flower, a symbol of female sexuality reminiscent of the vulva (after Gidé).

Echo can also overcome the one-way street of her senses. She can only receive but not give, or rather can only return after she has first received. Narcissus can only give but cannot receive, so that a co-dependency is established in their meeting and with disastrous consequences for bot male and female protagonists.

The senses in a healthy human are both reciprocal and reversible (after Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Reciprocity occurs when I touch in that the very act requires that I am also touched; when I speak I also listen; when I see I am seen, etc.. These are the reciprocal nature of the functioning and aware human senses.

The senses are also reversible. I can touch with my words and with my sight. That piece of cloth looks woollen or silken. That food looks and smells as if it will taste good. This chiasm of sensation is absent at least on one level with these mythological characters.

For this reason, over the coming months, Samantha Thompson and I will be exploring this absence, looking for its implications in the telling of this story in pictures and words, and hopefully, contributing to our understanding not only of the myth, but of ourselves as fractured human beings.

I am pretending to be who I am listening to

At the station, a young woman eats a muffin-top, obviously unawares of Elaine’s desire to profit from her, and the fact that it is best if one avoids acting out episodes from Seinfeld in you day to day existence on this planet. Anyway, this muffin top eater is stunningly beautiful in her black hot pants and liquorice leg stockings and stilettos. Half way through her treat she packs it away for later, grabs her coffee and walks off proudly to ignore my gaze. In her heart, though, I think she thinks that she is not quite beautiful enough for the world. There is no confidence in her demeanour, just false pride. She fact fears the mirror far more than she does my gaze.

Photograph from The Age

The sun shines brightly warming the air. The flowers have finally bloomed, and the women who are out and about are more lightly clad than before.

Others stand around the platform warming themselves in the gentle morning sun waiting for the train to arrive. The birds are singing in the distant trees. It is the first hot day of spring, and a gentle sea breeze has picked up already against the deep azure of the sky. It is the type of day when everything has an intensity that on any other day would not be so noticeable: The colours seem brighter, the smiles larger. A young woman feels her hair, all nice and warm in the sun, her bare arms soaking up the rays.

Once on the train, people maintain a safe distance from one another, unfolding their broadsheets to hide behind, listening cocooned with their iPods and sunglasses on, or checking the messages on their mobile phones. I often wonder whether they are actually performing the task that such a gesture would imply, or that there is a deeper meaning to what they are doing. Are they reading or hiding. Are there actually any messages on their mobile, or are they just hoping to receive one and in fact are lonely? I will never know for sure, but what my body gives me the ability to do, is to allow their body to speak to me.

This is not a particular power I alone possess, but because I notice that I do possess it, I am willing to allow other bodies in space to have a similar ability at least to do what I can do. Of course, I can also go off on flights of fantasy, and imagine that other human bodies have the same capacity, as they are recognisably similar to mine, and different from other bodies that I encounter in my life, such as dogs, cats, cows and sheep. For instance, I may recognise similar attributes in an insect, but these are not of the same order, as I would think of a human body possessing. I can deduce from their behaviour the shared and separate characteristics, and notice that human bodies can change their behaviour to mimic that of the other bodies I encounter, but that these in turn can rarely affect such mimicry in return.

In the carriage as it moves along, people have already ordered themselves into something of a class system. Men and woman in suits tend to sit together, mothers and children with older women and a quiet single woman. The more raucous gather at the end of the carriage, and in this way, harmony is maintained to a degree at least. So long as this fragile order is not disturbed by someone unwilling to maintain there place in the order, all seems to maintain an uneasy but fluid structure. People, who come and go, leave and join this structure, read from the position of the others within the carriage as they do so: by the clothes their fellows are wearing and the activities that they are pursuing; whether it be talking loudly, sitting quietly and reading or looking out the window. As they come and go, they leave gaps in this microhabitat that are filled by new passengers or a reshuffling of those already present.

This is a microcosm of society in transit, but not just any society, nor even a representative cross-section of a particular sub-section of an historical habitat. It is both at one and the same time, a cross-section of all transitory movements of human beings and of all human society up until the train left its station and of all the possible human societies in the future. It is all present in this carriage to be read, but the reading itself disturbs the equilibrium of those read, as the reader him or herself is at one and the same time separate to and a part of this transitory historical train. I am both an observer and a participant in this historical moment, and so, it exists as part of me and me of it, and there is no way that I can extricate myself from this project and still remain an observer anymore than I can fully immerse myself and continue to observe.

I cannot escape my historicalness and be outside of myself. I am always trapped by my gaze and its mirroring by other sentient beings who also gaze on me, even if they do so by gazing at their mobile phones. I am in their smell just as I smell them, and it is not necessary that this sense be above a threshold to exist in actual fact. Even if the turning of the newspaper is masked by the sound of the steel wheels rolling over the cracks in the tracks, I can still hear this sound, as too can the reader of the paper and those surrounding him or her. But as much as they or I want to escape this particular moment we cannot, as we are surrounded by a factual world of sunshine and warmth, now doubt simultaneously here as across this entire city today.

  

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I am of my world and my world is of me.

Image by spanaut via FlickrI am sitting here on a sunny afternoon, and the warm air is entering behind me. I can hear a radio coming from my neighbour's kitchen. The odd door opens and closes. above the humdrum of the city that surrounds me, I can hear birds and gentle sounds all around me.

This is the background to my existence. I am amidst the world, not alone. The world was there before me and will continue after me. In another sense, I have always been and will always be a part of this world. That I have experienced life and that that life will pass, is but a miracle of the world I inhabit, and of the consciousness of it which i was born and educated into by others like me.

This is far from trivial. This forms the essence of who I am, and the perception I have been granted by the miracle of nature. These others who have come before me and will follow me share a similarity which i recognize. This recognition is so potent that I look and see it in other objects around me, and see those objects in myself and the other bodies who I recognize as equals.

Sometimes I try to mimic the bird calls i hear when i am out and about. A dog barks at me and I growl back in a distinctive more or less dog-like manner. I can snort like a pig, neigh like a horse, indeed, some have said that at times I am as stubborn as a mule. The human animal is remarkable precisely because its body can metamorphisize into that of others at will.

Other objects outside of me can also be rendered mirror-like into the terms of my own perception of myself and those I identify with as equals. The way the dog looks sad when I am about to go out, the cat that panics when i am preparing to move house, the horse that is startled by a small piece of paper floating through its field of vision. I interpret the responses of these other mammals from the perspective of a human: I have an empathy with them because I can see that they too are similar though different to me. They too feed there children milk, have emotions and behaviours that I can recognize as coming from a similar source and myself, and that they too are similarly a part of my family, if only distant cousins.

Image by ecstaticist via FlickrThis relationship with mammals is much more obvious than the way I see beyond into the world as a whole. The relationship between me and my fellow embodied humans and the environment we share, is an extension of this primary recognition of myself in others, namely my family, friends and the wider human society and even spreading beyond that as described above.I see the world itself as an embodied being. there I have a tendency to see it as a whole; a world or universe beyond my immediate environment.

This process is reversible in that I am the world and the world is me. While I am stardust the world is also there for me. There are constellations in the sky that I recognize as part of my tribe. Like the expansive ocean, it draws me too it, while its vastness fills me with awe and dread. There is a mystery to its very existence precisely because my own existence is tenuous. It draws me to toward it, to understand it and the patterning that seems to emanate from it. Even though I can recognize in the universe a beingness, it is a beingness which gave birth to me and my kind. More than that even, to all like me, both animate and inanimate. It's power transcends me and my kind, and yet, gives me power to act upon it.

Is it any wonder than that throughout the ages, people have personified this relationship with our creator the universe as a human-like being, which created us in his or her image? Perhaps such a metaphor is a truly honest and open expression of who we are. Sure, this personified God is created by us, but nevertheless exists as an infinite environment that we witness when we look at the stars at night, when we see the sun being drawn across the skies during the day, when I sit here typing against the background provided for it, and which my mind can imagine thanks to it, not because of it.

The universe doesn't exist for me to understand and exploit it, but it understands me and exploits me in its development. I am of it and it is not of me. The universe is my God and it is the creator of me. I can c
                         Image via Wikipediareate because of this God, and any god I create is less than. The universe, after all, my be just one of a myriad of other infinite beings. Even a glimpse of this imaginary scenario makes my head whirl. But there can only be one creator of me, and that creator is the totality of all possible universes including my own.

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Right there before my eyes, I can taste the changing times, and smell the colour of hope...

Image by subcomandanta via Flickr

If there is a world out there, and I have faith that other bodies that are recognisably like me inhabit that world along with me, then that world should be describable in a manner understandable by those other bodies. We share a space called a family, a community and a society.

Even if we don't share a global village as the half glassers would have us believe, the speed of travel and communications has reduced the distance between us; made  contact instantaneously possible across the planet, so industrial strife somewhere in the US is comunicable instantaneously to me in Melbourne, Australia; an environmental disaster is acknowledge before the nightly news has time to got to air.

I occupy a space that is social at its roots. Language comes to me from others and is only useful to me ultimately for linking across space, and time to other bodies who have a capacity to understand and to perhaps respond.

The point of all these ramblings, so far, is to establish that I am not alone in the world, that I share a world with others, and that ultimately that world is constructed and deconstructed simultaneously through communicative activity. This is the spirit world, this gift of language, which for some reason humans have as fundamental to our nature. We are not the only animal through which this gift operates, but it occurs in no other known animal to the same degree as it does in us.

The very ability to use the world us and for it to have meaning, implies a common bond. The neo-liberal chant that there is no such thing as society, only individuals belies the fact that in reality there is no such thing as individuals only society, that there is a common bond, the spirit of which is given to us through the hot air of the spoken, and the subsequent written word.

These two forms of language, spoken and symbolic, exist side by side and are in a dynamic relationship with one another. One fluid and airy in contest with the fixed and encased in grandeur. It is no mistake that the latter has a certain authority, and indeed the spoken words authority is easily increased if the speaker has the ability to write for others, such as a law maker or a priest. This ability to set words in stone adds weight to those uttered freely.

This ability to render the spoken word into symbolic form has always been at the centre of power. Those who do not have this power and yet are in a position to wield power are often open to being corrupted by those who lead them in this process. Such is a reason why nouveau riche are often rightly distrusted, being nothing but the noisy henchmen of the sectional interests who seek to control them.

This process is a common sight in the era of late capitalism that we live in, when the semi-literate are in cohorts with the anti-intellectual neo-conservative agenda. This alliance between the organised trades, financial marketeers, property developers and the intellectuals of the Western elites, has successfully sought to undermine the social liberal agenda of the post-war years in exchange for bigger television sets, a redistribution of wealth away from the creators and the poor eventually into the hands of the less and non-productive.

The cost of this to those left in the non-existent 'societies' has been enormous in terms of productive loss, social dislocation and disharmony. These controlling intellectuals and their collaborators have traded off taxation for welfare, that is, from a net loss to a positive gain, often cloaked under ideologies as diverse as Ayn Rand's anarchistic ramblings, the Dalai Lama's lame pronunciations and the hero worship of 'left wing' leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro.

To what end? Those left behind in 'society', otherwise called here the lifeworld, are left to pick up the pieces of those who threaten to fall through the 'safety net' constructed by the chameleons who write the laws who do not even believe that society exist. This is the fundamental belief of the ideology of neo-liberalism. Unions, bureaucracies, and community infrastructure has been diminished and denuded since Thatcher and Reagan began this attack on society in the late 1970s. There is no end in sight. Even the recent banking crisis was dealt with by a false Keynsianism that ignored those in the bottom half of society in favour of saving the butts of those in the upper half who do not apparently believe in society at all.

This use of language, indeed its perversion is often criticised by opposing factions of the intellectual elite, but they miss the point. Language has been co-opted and used to justify this corrupt disenfranchisement of the Lifeworld, and at the same time colonising the language of that world by simply displacing the bureaucracy onto the citizenry. The level of regulation may have decreased for those in the upper economic echelons of society but has increased substantially for those at the bottom end, at the brunt end of these social, philosophical and economic deforms.

Everyone gets an education just that some get a better education than other, or so the saying goes. While the best efforts of the political and intellectual classes has been to shelter themselves and their collaborators from the vagaries of the system their policies have created, this process has educated the those left behind in the Lifeworld to a reality that is cruel, negative and burdensome. It has shackled them with interconnected health, social and drug problems that threaten the very existence of any social and family fabric remaining. In return they are confronted with hostile texts which threatens their very existence as citizens.

Those in charge of the written word, the political, judicial and intellectual elites along with the middle class who have 'moved in on' the unsuspecting working classes, taking over their ruling bodies, come and go from the life world on a daily basis, ordering the production of new tomes, documentary propaganda and internet sites that to infiltrate the Lifeworlds consciousness. Those of us left behind are fighting back, however, and it is on the basis of language that we can do this. Language congeals our thoughts and focuses our attention before the hunt. It has always been like that.

Slowly, through the remaining available channels we are in communion with each other. Also, this connectedness is enhanced by the internet and other post-print areas of publication. It is up to those of us in a position to do so, to communicate at all levels of society to break through the ideological superstrate of the non-society by which we have come to be governed and take back control of the agenda of politics. It is my belief that the election of Barack Obama, the hung parliaments in Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia are the harbingers of this change on the ground in these modern Western democracies.

Taste is returning as the rancid smell of the fast food outlets is being pushed back, and the air smells sweet with the burgeoning hope of new times ahead, of a crisis that will force fundamental change in the way we think about economics and the environment, and of a return to the Great Society of which post-war generations dreamed, not the baby boomer crap we have been dished up with.

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The news is not reality

Oh dear, what have I been reduced to. Being psychoanalysed by suburban divorcees on popular dating sites. OMG as these illiterates constantly write. 'Your beaker's only half empty' begins the accusation. All I can answer is, 'no, my glass is half full and perhaps you'd be kind enough so as to top it up!'

Idiots.

They recommend self-help literature to me, the Dalai Lama being at the top of their lisps. Good luck to you in your search. i wont bother you any more. I'm going blogging instead.

Personally I prefer Maurice Merleau-Ponty to self-help books. has anyone actually thought that perhaps the very term 'Self Help' is a misnomer? The best I ever read was by Paul Livingstone (aka Flacco) entitled; Releasing the Imbecile Within.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm open minded and and willing to learn new ideas. i've read lots of Buddhist literature over the years. I'm sure the Dalai Lama has many wise things to say for himself.

Trouble is, I'm not Tibetan and have no desire to be, if they'd actually be stupid enough to give me citizenship in the first place. besides, i'd probably outrageously side with the Chinese, who do have a point when they argue that the clerics did nothing to provide for the locals in terms of health, education or democratization when the place was under their theocratic control.

Anyway, in my more reflective moments I do realize the poor buggers there are oppressed by an imperial power. So what, so too is Mexico and at least half of the South American continent. Europe, Canada and Australia have been little more than a tributary states of the US of A since World War II. So now we are passing the baton to China. Does it really matter? Is that really my reality?

Well, yes and no. I had an awakening several months ago. After being an avid news reader for many years, I finally awoke to the fact that the news is not reality. That in fact, reality, the whole damn lot of it, is there right before my very eyes. The whole universe is present before me in microcosmic form. It is really a matter of faith that there is a world out there and it exists. From my perspective it appears simultaneously as being both immanent and transcendent. Voila!

The whole world is present on the horizon. I can sense it. It is both tangible and visible whether i can see it or not. I can differentiate that world into a variety of constellations. All is possible if only accept the impossibility of sensing the totality of experience exterior to me. This is because much of what I sense is intuitive, that is, I sense both the visible, that which is given to me, and the invisible, that which only ever an always already there sense that there is something which is not perceptible but there in any case.

As I burn my toast in the morning, the universe is still becoming and evolving, entropy still continues and ceases to abate in spite of the best wishes in the world. This is so much background noise to my toast. The toast burns along with a village in Afghanistan; my coffee boils simultaneous with the earthquake relief effort in Haiti. The failure of world leaders to make any headway on agreement in Copenhagen is present as I spill the sugar into my cup and throw out the old toast, only replace it with fresh slices in the hope that I can maintain the semblance of manageability this time, cook the toast to perfection, and take it and my coffee out to watch my goldfish feeding in their pond. Just because I don't perceive all this extraneous invisibility before me does not mean it is not happening.

It both is and isn't happening, just as love both is and isn't perceivable, and that the forces of the universe's expanding both are and are not present as I prepare my meager breakfast. Whether I like to bring such thoughts to consciousness or not are a choice that my ego makes. Either it is or is not too much for me to cope with. Either I am humble before the universe or engrossed with the discontent of making my toast and topping it with jam and magarine. (Butter if you prefer!)

The inetervention that was in reality an occupation

I've just been around to a friend's place. In actual fact, she's the mother of my younger son. As I explained to him, he is not the product of a virgin birth, and so, in that case I'm his father.

Whatever, she wanted to talk about the government intervention in the northern parts of Australia where we both live. Two citizens sitting down for a coffee to hold discourse over this invisible problem. Invisible for us sitting in a kitchen in Melbourne's leafy east, less so for an aboriginal person living in the continents interior.

There is little to talk about unless you're prepared to get to the essence of the problem. The schwerpunkt of the matter would seem to be this: that the indigenous peoples of Australia, once originally free holders of all the territories now under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth of Australia whose head of government is the Queen of Australia, Queen Elisabeth II who is also Queen of England, having been dispossessed under an act of the British Parliament due to the fact of it being Terra Nullius or an uninhabited land, have once again been occupied by the military forces of the Government of Australia acting on her behalf.

Coincidentally this family of monarchs are also major shareholders in British and international capital, not least of which including the mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton which have a vested interest in subjecting the communities concerned to disorder and chaos by the use of implied force.

My friend was commenting on a television program she had seen concerning this intervention. The program, as related to me, was about providing shops in remote communities. As soon I heard this, and perhaps this is a failure of mine, all I could think of was the stupidity of the proposition being put. If these poor buggers had any money to speak of then of course there would be shopping malls built on every last square of their land!

No, no! They want co-operatives. Oh dear, co-operatives which have never worked anywhere else. Isn't the issue here that the aboriginal peoples, having been dispossessed of their land and their culture having been all but destroyed by generations of dispossession, allowing alcoholism and drug abuse to run rampant? Aren't domestic violence and sexual dysfunction well known side-effects of  these illnesses? Isn't it known that some peoples have a genetic and cultural predisposition to these insidious diseases?

All I can say is this. Leave the indigenous peoples of this land, and the world, alone. Sure, provide them with the services and access to those services that every other citizen has. For example, provide schools and universities, hospitals and health centers and food to these people by all means, give them back their land to be held in common so that they may maintain their spirituality, just treat them as equals.

Too hard. We want to worry about the guilt and shame of our ancestors, deny the ongoing destruction of the natural habitat, and instead help. Help? What a misused and abused word. The best way to help these peoples under attack is to help ourselves. A sick person cannot help another sick person. The settlers in this country need to work on themselves.

The air-conditioner next door runs all day and night. May I be comfortable so that you may suffer. Cars flood the streets as the temperature soars. Each piece of operating machinery, every computer and appliance, throwing heat into an already over loaded atmosphere.

Every occurrence includes within it the totality of human and natural history. The intervention and climate change, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, economic crises and the newspaper which fails to report yet another teenage death from the abuse of a combination of ecstasy, Ice and alcohol, all of these are present in every aspect of the cup of coffee I just consumed.

They are and are not present. In some place they are tangible and others not. Nevertheless, they are there if one is only prepared to reflect and contemplate. In any case, I remain grateful just to be able to witness this as human history unfolding: have faith that in some way equilibrium by human agency in concert with natural forces: and hope that more people will take the cotton wool out of their ears and stick it in their mouths so that they may hear the rumblings of a world under stress. Listen....

There is no escaping the present. Just as tradition and natural history bear down on every present, so to in present now the future. The present is full of possibility. Each possibility and the totality of possibilities is in inherent at each point along the continuum of time. At any point in time, certain passes are available to us. Some passes may be blocked to us, and others may be impassable due to the traditions we have inherited.

Let's hope our inheritance can help us to find the correct passes. At the beginning of Dante's Inferno, Dante is trying to find the pass to Paradise. he is confronted by three mythological monsters who push him back. Virgil suddenly appears and asks Dante what he is trying to achieve. When Dante finally reveals to Virgil his intention, Virgil calmly replies that the quickest way to Paradise is to pass through the gates of Hell, Hell being a place where hopeless, we live in desire. I think we're already well on our way...