Perfection

I know a Sanskrit prayer that I learned at school, it translates to

That is perfect
This is perfect
Perfect comes from perfect
Take perfect from perfect and the remainder is perfect
May peace and peace and peace be everywhere

Unlike numbers that are liable to be divided, Hinduism says perfection is not lessened and doesn't somehow decrease when it is divided. I started to think of humans as a prime example, endowed with a full gamut of emotions, thoughts and behaviours and capable of producing another human endowed with a full gamut of emotions, thoughts and behaviours.

I can't think of any thing or entity other than life itself that is not diminished by extraction or duplication. Even the proliferation of cancer cells is the blossoming of perfection in their infinite capacity to reproduce perfectly functioning disease cells.

Energy isn't lost or created. It just rotates around the universe weaving in and out of living things like a big tapestry.

Walnuts

I have no bad things to say about love, I have only disheartened things to say about the human mind which is liable to screw things up because it's wiring was set when we were small people and it can be troublesome to convert an old machine to run with new software.

You might have had the gift of having your heart broken, and then having it broken, and broken and rebroken. Or maybe it just happened once I don't know. It might have made you a little less lovable and unloving. But nonetheless notice how your heart has persisted with love, how it wants to be in relationships and how it still yearns to care and be cared for. The mind of a child screams "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? THIS WILL HUUUUUUuuurrrrrttt....." in the tapering fading way that children's admonitions sometimes go, and you think maybe that you are really stupid for allowing yourself to love again, and you crawl towards love with your tail between your legs and hissing a little bit, unsure whether to bite or run or just sort of hang around. Experiences as a child with bee stings and broken glass have taught you to be discriminating, because not everything beautiful brings pleasure. Yet we don't consider that the most beautiful thing is already inside us and is the thing that perpetually drives us to give of ourselves.

Let your heart break and break again because the breaking reveals the unbroken love inside.

Black squares and awkward silences

A few months ago I was at a photocopier in a library and made a useless copy of a page. I threw it into the waste paper box, where I saw a white sheet of paper covered in a black square. Someone had left the lid of the photocopier open and let it scan the space of the room above, which rendered a black square. It looked like an overexposed polaroid or the black Malevich. 

I kept the sheet of paper, because it reminds me of the phenomenon where what looks like nothing actually contains the information of everything. When you look into the blackness of the sky at night you're looking into infinity, even though it appears blank.

Similarly silences in conversations reveal as much as words. What isn't said explains the way you understand the people you talk to, the way you distrust and what you trust in. Sometimes absences have a presence that we're not used to looking for. 

Dropping stuff

Nothing ever tells you to want less, everything tells you to want more. So you go around collecting lots of stuff, lots of nice things. You turn your home into a wunderkammer jammed with things you like, a mausoleum for the things you don't like (because you hold onto those too) and then you open it up like a museum when you take part in small talk. Shelves of opinions and prejudices sit and collect dust, you might take one down and rotate it, talk about it for a while, then place it back in its spot where it's been for a long time.

We keep our opinions and prejudices, expectations and preconceptions just like we keep our toys from childhood, we keep our milk teeth, we pick up books we won't read, we stack up diaries already written, letters already read. Jewellery that doesn't suit us, clothing that's stained or too small, food that's gone off.

I've come to a situation where I need to lose the things I've gathered in order to move forward, and it's difficult because I've never needed to before. I collected lots of ideas about myself and ideas about how to meditate. I would line up rogue thoughts and tie them in bundles and throw them off cliffs, just to try and clear my head. That took up a lot of energy and they kept coming, like lemmings. Meditation became difficult and I slowly lost hope for it being what I had expected: silent, calm, expansive.

Then I spoke to a really lovely man who told me that I don't need to wrangle my thoughts like wild horses, that in fact I have to let them go. It's not like unpicking a hem, it's like taking your clothes off. It's not like exfoliating your feet, it's like being a snake and shedding your old skin.
You don't need to commit to laborious work to undo habits, just open your hands and let them fall and focus on something else.

Perspiring prose

The months between February and November in this city pass only to soften the memory of how hot the summer is, how persistent the flies are, how loud the cicadas sing. In November there comes a warm day when it seems like every dormant fly egg hatches, and you remember with a sweaty lucidity what summer in Sydney is like. You remember the swearing and swatting of the mosquitoes, the bubbling and peeling of the soles of your feet, you remember the sweet smell of crisped pine needles. Faded tinsel makes a reshow and in every district there is a wealthy street where the neighbours can afford to engage in healthy competition with their Christmas light displays. At night cars drive 3km down those streets and families walk through to see the various arrangements of spitting speckles on strings spasmodically illuminating the drawn curtains and venetian blinds in the windows. It must be hard for them to sleep. Santa flaps around, inflated by a strategically placed fan or flops on the tiles, withering.

It’s hard for anyone in Sydney to sleep in summer. Even at night you can coax egg whites into opacity on the red bricks of fence tops. In the right suburbs, the soulless ones, night time is abuzz with languages and laughter and dawn brings a warm stillness despite the petering out of chattering people. The sun opens its tired, billion year old bloodshot eyes to see us heating up. The moon passes over like a plate thrown across a party – most of us are too busy tossing and turning trying to sleep or having sticky sex to remember its movements. I like summer here, because we all go a little insane, we’re all a little tired from the year. We just want to go to the beach, even if we don’t like the beach.

Maybe everyone is silent, maybe they'd realise if they stopped talking.

I wrote about it when I first met it. It made a return visit a week or two ago and I got to spend some more time with it. It's hard to know what to explain about an encounter where nothing happened.

I was lying in bed and realised my body. I felt my giant dried palm frond hands, curled and fallen on a mount of torso. My body a tent, my silent body an orchard in which was buried something living. Someone watching everything in sight, with eyes that are not eyes.

It's difficult to acknowledge that person as myself. I acknowledge that I can spend time with that person. I don't know if I see them, or see from within them. They are usually wrapped up in a solid mantle of temporal backwash that when the mantle cracks and fizzles away the person inside is so foreign that I feel schizophrenic. However it's hard to be afraid of someone who's contented with existence and doesn't want for anything except to exist and be acknowledged. 

When I was a child there were four people I knew in bed at night, now there are just two. The one which I am most of the time is really just a shell of sorts, a carapace grown from ideas, feelings and reactions. The one which I have only met a few times is there all the time, but just gets ignored in the same way that the roots of a tree get forgotten. When I was younger the outer shell hadn't formed properly, it was awkward and gelatinous and my real self was more fully exposed. When everything was quiet and dark and all the activity of a day had slipped away I was aware of three other people. One in constant activity, one constantly in the doldrums and one with a razor-sharp acumen. 

In 2009 they came back when I was in Mongolia, like people who never age they were exactly the same and yet on this visit they manifested in my actions. Perhaps in a strange way I became three separate people, or maybe I remained myself but was shared between three other consciousnesses. Maybe the altitude was too high for my brain to function as it had previously.

I have feared before for my sanity, but now have the conviction that I'm not crazy for being calm and quiet when I have temporarily departed from the noise and colour of ephemeral phenomena - the hooks, barbs, spines - that are advertisements, a picture, sentences, concerns, emotions, attachments, movements... 

The other week when I somehow fell into a deep vast self I felt aware of having no need for words. Language corrupts. That self was silent, it hasn't any need to build a vocabulary; it has nothing to say. 

Because everything else was and will eventually be silent (in a literal sense), the silence of my self is made from the same silence that is reserved for the time before and after every thing that exists. It feels like a part of death, a part of a place unseen, in communion with a place out of space time, eternally present. 

I talk in this language, dead people talk in dead languages

Today I am upset because whatever culture infiltrated my family history has been blown away. It's not something I can repair because customs and stories are shared and evolve. It's not something I can repair because I feel disentangled from my family. We got scattered geographically and psychologically by circumstance and choice.

I'm also angry and embarrassed of my English heritage because of the way England assaulted this country. Conquest happens everywhere, and everywhere there is heartache for homeland. White history sleeps in carved stone objects that memorialise dead troops in foreign countries while this countries history sleeps in unmarked river stones, worn away by water and the blood of massacres. 

Pulling oars

Have you ever really loved a book or a film yet when someone asks you what it's about you can't even answer them? You might have forgotten because it was a while ago when you last saw or read it, or perhaps it expressed an intangible essence in a subtle way and so its details are hard to describe but the zeitgeist is strong. Such an instance occurred today when someone told me they owned a book that they hadn't read, which I have read and found profound, yet I couldn't explain the narrative.

My life isn't a book or film, but people turn lives into books and films and in a way this blog reduces my experiences into silent written words. The benefit is that they are clear and precise, less velutinous than the instances they speak of.
I come into trouble when something subtle and ubiquitous slips into my life... The weather report reduces climatology to a symbol, it doesn't account for the colour of the sky or the merging of the clouds or the smell of body odour which are the ways that we experience weather. In a similar way I doubt the capacity for this space to hold the girth of something that is native to a world without an alphabet.

I'm shifting a silence into language. It's a dance, it's a game. It's guilty without guilt. It's a colonial invasion complete with disease and foreign architecture. I'm building a house for a love that wants to live in a place with walls made from trees and carpets of grass, chandeliers of stars and the gulf of Carpentaria for a bath. This is just a holiday house, just a place built from phonemes... not luxurious but elastic enough, perhaps.

I am in love, it's hard to describe but I'll keep trying because it feels to be the deepest and widest ocean that I've sailed through. I've no desire to chart the waters, only to occasionally catch a fish, to look at the sea so black that it merges with the night sky and feel how heavy the water is and enjoy that it can be difficult to row around. 

Crafty explosions!

Over these past three days I have become a recycling machine turning things I already own into new things I didn't know I had the potential to create. I've shaped the mold for a lost wax ring, carved a woodcut block and made prints, begun two collages that I mailed to the woman I love to complete, arranged tassels, sequins, fabric and card into four pairs of nipple pasties, sewn and hemmed a fox fur collar and today I will commence that most 70s of crafts: bead tapestry finished with macrame edges. Many of these pursuits don't coalesce with my wider aim to create artwork that is aesthetically and conceptually rich, but they have an equally important function of NOT DESTROYING MY SOUL.
Plus who isn't enticed by lime sequinned nipple pasties with pompom trim?

I need to have fun, because recently my capacity to laugh has been limited to a bitter chuckle when watching others in pain or publicly embarrassed, and that's the lowest form of humour there is. University put a tap in my brain and then turned it on full blast until the reservoir completely ran dry and a possum went and set up house in the tank - the bottom of which was subsequently coated in a pungent layer of possum faecal matter. Perhaps I shouldn't liken my brain to an empty black hole with possum shit at the bottom, but that's honestly how it felt by the end of this university semester. So now I'm doing what any sensible person would do: filling it with funny pretty things as quickly as possible so it stops feeling empty and black and smelly.

At a point when all my brain juice was gushing from my head and I felt woozy and weak, one of my most lovely friends commented that the problem from his point of view was that he sees me as an artist who is being asked to spend all of her time in academia where the demands of reading and writing don't leave much space for any sort of connection with the material world and a creative engagement with it. Indeed I had begun to feel like I had no body and that I was just a brain floating in space, used to calculate the appropriate locations for full stops in citations for essays... the last indicator that I had a soul buried somewhere deep inside me was evident in my eyes which, despite the hunched and weakened image of my form, would stare with a penetrating longing at any artworks shown to us in lectures, taking in the elements and principles of design as a sort of war ration. When times are tough we revert to the elements and principles.

I love reading and writing. I'm here now writing so that in the future I can read this. But I can't live inside words alone and neither can I live inside images alone. In fact I love instances when they commingle and interblend... for example in many religious scriptures. I think this gives me the feeling that I'm being fed wholesome food for my left and right brain.

There is a slight concern regarding the veracity with which I apply myself to the making of things. I tend to leave a trail of canvas and glitter glue and block ink and varnish as I puff like a little tornado through the flat, propping up an animation disc against a chair in the dining room and setting up an easel in the kitchen. Eventually it peters out and I end up lying, smiling in a small nest of sandpaper and wood shavings. At the time I feel incapable of stopping. I'm not being romantic about that, there's a tinge of hyperactive obsession about it and it becomes quietly aggravating if I can't devote complete concentration to the task at hand.

I suppose from here I need to learn how to rest and how to clean up.

Dealing with my own problems in a sort of round about upside down incoherent way

Sometimes I feel that this space has been created for me to write about the things I discover that aren't connected to my individual existence, but are universal (I think) in an attempt to avoid the trap of mulling over problems and whinging.

But I made this space, and I'm the sole contributor, I never set any rules, so I will write about myself.
And my individual experience isn't meant to be entrapped in my head or my body, because if that were the case I would be a rock. I was made with a mouth and a mind and so were you, and I guess that makes us similar enough for my story to resonate with whatever yours is. Once the words are out there minds connect and dialogue flows and from that point, unity is approachable. At the moment our society is a bunch of gravel on a driveway... we're just little rocks that get run over all the time and we can't even talk about how much it hurts. When difficult things happen in our lives I think it is crucial to be capable of talking about them without feeling guilty or afraid or alone. Shame fear and loneliness will eat your soul.

Essentially my current situation is understanding what "otherness" is. If I were an anarchist I would say that it doesn't exist, but there are trends in human behaviour and any trend results in a norm, and any norm excludes others that don't conform to it, so "otherness" does exist. Simultaneously there are communities of "others" in which their "otherisms" are common custom, so depending on what level you want to observe society you could say that otherness is irrelevant because others create a space to house their own breed of normalcy, or you could say on a grander scale that we are divided into the normals and the abnormals.

Being "other" means this: having a distinct self-awareness of your inability to be average. Everybody in some way is different, and their differences can be like giant red arrows hovering over their heads in particular situations, like being half the height of most people for example. Or their differences might not be visible. Maybe there are perks to being half the height of everyone else, I'm not sure. Some people enjoy their inability to be average, sometimes it's painful, sometimes it's irrelevant, sometimes it's consuming. Sometimes it's forced from you and sometimes it rustles through other peoples comfort zones.

I think I am okay with the ways in which I am incapable of being average. It's those invisible comfort zones that act as floaties around the waists of people adrift in a sea where who knows what weirdos swim that one doesn't want to accidentally deflate because that can cause thrashing and panicking... But it's their responsibility to learn how to swim and you can't carry around a packet of band-aids to plug up all the punctures because they get wet in the water.

What I grapple with is how love can cause other people pain, although I feel that the people who will be pained might be seeing things from a superficial vantage and not comprehend the simplicity and honesty of a situation that isn't about them anyway... 

Why I like stories

I have figured it out!
I now know what I only half knew, and only knew through experience rather than cognition!

I love metaphor because it allows me to express what I can't touch, taste, smell or see in a concrete way. More carefully I am paying attention to the physicality of experience and thus it follows that those things which are too obtuse to manifest in particles find their way into recognition through words that link them to imaginative scenarios which are palpable, which squeak or sparkle.

On the just use of starvation

Sacrifice is synonymous with loss and surrender. Forgoing the things that are precious to a higher power.

Maybe there will come a time when you are surprised to realise that your eyes are closed. It might interest you to know that you've seen the world only through your hands - fingers for eyes - for who knows how long, and it will frighten you to see wholly that which you've only known in touch. You were content with your former mode of experience, limited as it was. 

Opening your eyes is akin to sacrificing limitations. Our limitations are precious to us, we hold them so closely that we can't see them and often we become them. And we all know how hard it is to see the self.

Build a scapegoat of all your limitations and send it off into the desert where it won't feed off your consciousness, let it starve to death. You will become more your self.

Some Great Gardens of the Soul

Here I am in a garden. It's paradisical like Eden but sober like Gethsemane.
It has something of the enchanting diaspora of Dandaka. Maybe Humbaba is waiting, hiding between cedars until we dance past, but probably not.

Be bewildered

Talking about your own confusion is something difficult, because it makes you vulnerable to the intelligence of others who may be scathing or just be disinterested in you, because you can't communicate at their level.

But if you can unstick your attachment to the idea that other people have to like you then talking about confusion is a gift. It takes a coherent person to communicate inchoate or irrational phenomena. Allowing yourself to be incoherent signifies that you value the intelligence of those in your company, you value their capacity to piece together disparate ideas. You want them to join you on the journey through your head.

I'm not advocating insanity because I don't know a productive insanity. I'm a fan of productivity and I'm interested in finding ways to live in this society without destroying ourselves, and I think one way is to let our brains play, often, everyday. Things are more interesting and fun, and the thing that will kill you is stress and monotony. There are plenty of books, and here I am writing about it again - but it comes down to your decisions to do strange things. Don't put a toothpick in your eye, do lie on the footpath at 2am and watch the moon for a while, if you want to.

Confusion is the stuff that questions are made of, questions are the stuff that answers are made of. So you actually need your confusion, you need it badly! It's like a recipe for a Chinese dish. Sweet and sour are not similar but put together they make a fusion that is surprisingly delicious. 

Go and ask someone something you don't have an answer to.

Say thanks to your homo habilis grandma

I really ought to take more care in attending to and using my body, it's a machine that's been squeezed through millions of birth canals to be here now, growing and changing as it went, morphing behaviourally and physiologically so that now I have a big brain and walk on two legs.

We are the evolutionary inheritors of a technological process that is magic, never in our hands, to large to be within sight, almost to large to imagine. If you feel lonely imagine all the animals who made you, it's hard to feel disconnected when you're the child of fossils. 

Domesticity of the soul

Talking to a friend today she said that people keep trying to build houses inside her, I said I'm still trying to build a house in myself. It was such a lovely analogy, and I know the behaviour she alluded to - the desire to make investments in someone else, the desire to inhabit the edifice of someone else's soul. 

A house you build is built by you. A house you build is designed according to your desires, it's a colonial building, an extraterrestrial architecture. How can you design a structure for terrain that you've never seen? (and you have not seen the inner side of someone else's life). The resulting building is the result of your own projections and won't sit well in its surroundings... might sink into marshy ground, might look ugly, might be in a  desolate area despite being inside someone else.

The problem with allowing someone else to build a house in you is that you don't know what they'll construct. Even when you don't give them permission people unintentionally set up little shanty towns, dig moats and build windowless rooms inside you. Sometimes on the inside it looks like any large city: slums and mansions populate different areas but all are included. 

It's best to make your own home inside you because after all a house inside someone else isn't a permanent residence. Once everything is to your own wishes, ziggurats and domes, then welcome people in. If your house has enough space then there is no need for other people to build other houses inside you. If you like someone enough, build extensions. 

Listening to nothing in the midst of everything

Things make sounds. Sound of an aeroplane, sound of thoughts, sound of angry dog.
Things also have their own silences, silence of potential and silence of completion.

Silent potential of an egg,
Sound of the chicken,
Silence of extinction.

With so many dead things in the past and so many living things to come we're wading in silence, it just takes a trained ear to hear it.

The past is present

When I paint the Australian landscape I see in my images the hand of my grandfather, when I sculpt I see the humour of my father and when I draw figures and patterns I can see the beautiful work of my mother.

Human beings like stars are sometimes hidden. Stars still shine in the daytime, we just don't have the eyes to see them. As the sun sets they become visible, when I make things the aesthetic of my family becomes visible. And I love that.

Geometry of self

I remember my geometry teacher in primary school. He was special to me because unlike my normal classroom teacher we didn't see him all the time.

His eyes seemed to bulge out from his face, I realise now it is because his brain was so full. Despite having bulging eyeballs there was a deeper calm that radiated in his quiet attitude and smile. When the whole assembly had their eyes closed during grace I used to watch how his eyelids would remain half open with his eyeballs rolled back. The whites would scare me and I would think he must be very deeply involved in the prayer to not notice how uncomfortable his eyes must have been.

He taught us that to draw a circle with a compass you need to start by drawing a tiny dot on the page. Then you spike the dot and twirl the compass using mostly your fingers, not your whole wrist. Every circle starts with a point.

I feel like I am a circle and also a point, the point is the part which came first, which makes the rest possible, which has no direction or magnitude or dimension and the circle is the chemical elements, the atoms and molecules, the systems and combinations, the body, the television, the family, the architecture, the history, the pet dog, the feeling of hunger, the role of the sister, the role of the mother, the chewed fingernails. All things seen and learnt, all skills gained, all ideas acquired, all feelings felt, all actions carried through... The circle doesn't have fixed ambit because it seems to grow relative to circumstance. I think maybe it's nicer to consider it as a sphere (just to make things a little more wholesome).

And one day the circlesphere will be erased, and I'll be a point somewhere in space with no magnitude, no meaning, unattached. At the heart of our circles we're all points, and points are omnipresent.

Yearning, longing, dreaming.

Desire is never with us, it's pawing with a past relationship or pushing its nose into a half-baked chocolate cake. It never looks through your eyes, it cuts out little almond-shaped holes in a sheet of paper and hopes that the silhouette of eyes signifies sight. It's not entirely convincing, but like the concentric patterns on a butterflies wings you habitually respond to the illusion and are lead into assuming that when you see the object of your desire, you're looking with your innermost eyes, your deep set eyes that sit in the sockets of your soul. I don't really dig that, most especially because being desirous is essentially putting love beyond your reach in the past which is dead or in the future which doesn't exist.

How do you curb desire? I've no idea.

Jesus and Krishna

I was reading through some old exercise books from my primary school years and came across this statement in a scripture book:
"My favourite person in the bible is Jesus because he never lies and he was born in a manger."
Basically, my criteria of value hasn't changed: if you're honest and generous in sharing your stories (everyone has an interesting story) I'm bound to value you.

Something else I thought incredibly funny as I was leafing through a Vaishnava Educational Alternative Publications activity book for children is this rule for a board game:
"You have actually realised that you are not this body. Take an extra turn."

How funny and wide and lovely was my early education!

We never say what we mean, we never mean what we say.

These words are a battle.

They pick misleading paths through vocabularies that grow like wild forests I’ve never been to, I don’t know the topography or the ecology. There are flowers which grow in your jungle that I’ve never seen before.

I’m just hacking my way through language with a blunt machete; its dull glint is nothing but an image in your mind.

Birth of a difficult child

Pain is the child of change. It lives and kicks and cries and screams, so nurse it gently, rock the crib slowly and speak to it in a hushed tone.

Sometimes when pain grows up it turns into a big pain, and sometimes when pain grows up it turns into acumen - be a foster parent to your pain, acknowledge its existence and know that any child of yours is not you, it has it's own ideas and will walk along its own path.

How can we raise pain into a beautiful and intelligent being who in the end we can learn from, not one who eats our hope? Every time I have been in pain it is because of change: changes in relationships with other people, places, ideas, objects, situations... relationships disintegrate, shift, transform, exceed or don't meet expectations, maybe without a clear reason or maybe for a very clear reason.

If change gives birth to pain, consider not how to avoid change but how to be a good midwife.

Solidarity in multiplicity

There's nothing more frightening than the question "who are you?"
It becomes a precious baby nursed at the nipples of ego.
It's hard to answer, it demands stability, it implies uncertainty.

I've been thinking about the self existing as relationships. Instead of being Emma (or EmB or Embi or Em~B or Em Bee) the person, I am the contact between sight and the things seen, I am the contact between words that come from this mouth and words that come from another mouth. If we all existed in this state imagine how expansive and pervasive your self would be. In fact, what would divide us? What would stop us from all being one self? We would fish the oceans as we wash our bodies, we would cultivate the Earth as we brush our hair: with sensitivity, with measure.

Relationships can be tenuous or strong, meaningful or flavourless, harmful or joyful. Your relationships are manifold. In this worldview, articulation becomes the skill through which you become more yourself. Relationships are the resting place of your soul. What else do you have in your life?

The moral may be to give more fully. If you close your mouth and eyes towards the things and people that surround you, you exist in a silent darkness. If indeed you are your relationships, the more fully you give, the more human you are.

Claim nothing; enjoy!

The title of this post is from the Eesha Upanishad: a text so old that it's authors are unknown.
Proclaiming you have a right or title to something is like eating sand: doesn't make sense, isn't natural, not much nutritional value. You do it because it's an option... maybe you do it because everyone else is a sand eater. Don't be a sand eater.


Don't hold onto things! What do you own now that you owned as a baby? What function does a pacifier, a rattle, a perambulator hold for you as an adult? As you grow the things you possess shift beyond your needs.


Don't hold onto ideas. They rot. You change and so should they. There's nothing embarrassing about being a communist last year and a democrat this year. Allow your ideas to be shaped by your life, don't allow your life to be crippled by your ideas. 

Even the body you have always lived in will become refuse.
There is a tremendous surrender in renouncing possessions and you become free.

paths blah blah blah

There are painful roads to travel marked by responsibility and expectations, hard work, musty traditions.
I'm cautious not to quote Frost as for me that that poem is too romantic but I must admit these sentiments do smack of the jaundiced trees.

I would like to talk in simple terms. Some of the people I know who haven't gone the common route (career and family) are tormented by their perceived errors.
Occasionally these people are proud and happy: find those people and befriend them if you feel any tingle of revolt towards convention.

Find a person who is the paragon of the virtues you want to assume.
And if you exceed them in possessing some value you find important then exceed them only in that. Hubris blinds. 


Above all you need to be comfortable in your self. Once others see that you accept you, it's hard for them to reject you. 

The old look on the young as an elephant looks at a fish

We're born with no experience, and the older a person is the more respected and mysterious their wisdom seems to be to the young.

I love talking to people who are older than me because they talk about such abstract things as marriage, divorce, careers and parenthood... I have absolutely nothing to offer on the subjects and thus probably make poor company for these friends, but they give me a glimpse into a place I feel I might never enter: middle age. 

Because we're born without a voice and we grow our own vocabulary as we age it can be very difficult to make oneself understood while we're little. To worsen the situation our perceived inexperience in terms of years lived is looked on most often with a general disregard. Of what worth or interest is someone with no solid opinions? No background? No fixed grasp on their own reality? It's hard to counter that except to say that children have a psychological liberty from the cemented adult mind that makes their companionship just as interesting as my middle aged friends.

There's poetry in children's speech.

There's injury in the ideal of adulthood.

I remember as a child being impatient for my own adulthood because I felt that once I was there, I would be listened to and asked questions of. I felt that some of the adults I encountered spent very little time listening to or asking anything of me.

I recall a particular event when I pulled out hundreds of sheets of drawings to show to a family friend who I had met maybe a few times beforehand, he seemed kind and his character not too domineering. I remember sitting with him and taking great pains in explaining the narratives pertaining to each of my drawings whilst his wife and my parents talked at the same table. These were ideas I had spent a large amount of time visualising (I was undertaking the project of creating a religion). At the end of my explanations he made an exhausted and sarcastic remark about my use of time. He used false praise to mock my efforts and I found it disquieting and disheartening. I guess he must have been tired and drunk and unenthused by a child's art. He was a nice person, but must have misinterpreted my capacity to read his turn of phrase. 

There are other such events that mark a piercing intersection between outsiders and my private world of artmaking as a child, I won't go into them. 

The seed of truth in all of this is that in any kind of communication, when the other person looks on you (not at you) with a sardonic smile it does not inspire confidence in your value as a person.

Front of your head

Having drawn them for a long time I find now that human faces all look the same in the end. I'm not too vain, I don't look at myself too often - only to focus on squeezing a pimple or applying mascara. So when I do take a considered look at my face I am alarmed to see that it doesn't align with who I feel myself to be.

A silent blank face is like a vacuum: sometimes appearing to be a mask of nihility, but then shocking in its ability to break into an ebullient display of meaning, letting us into a personal world view.

Whenever I feel cynical of people I don't know, I like to think about the people who I perceive as valuable and interesting, the people I cherish, and I think of how they are also probably looked on with cynicism by certain people who don't know them. A face is a facade, behind walls are rooms filled with the stuff that makes up a life.

The world is big and you're allowed to look at it

It's rare that I would give a review of some media product in such a formal domain, I'm more likely to tell you about it when I see you and I'm not a big consumer of media anyway.

I went to the world press photography exhibition at the Mitchell library on Tuesday night. The whole event has a peculiar air to it: there is so much drama in every photograph but never melodrama because these crises are real. The faces are captured in a simple honesty, in most situations it's not likely that the person with the camera is the main concern of those subjects during the onslaught of whatever provocation they are faced with. The faces are so direct that I feel I have really met the troup of illiterate young policemen in Afghanistan and the drug addicted prostitute in Ukraine. 

I have respect for media that is used as a weapon against ignorance and this exhibition really does explode.

Coming home

I can't really teach. It's not a case that the learner comes to know, it's that the knower meets what they already know, and it's a feeling of coming home.

I never excelled in maths, and it wasn't because I had ineffective teachers - it's because I have no aptitude with numbers. Failure in learning isn't a failed attempt at teaching, maybe there are more important things to learn in a particular situation than what's mandated in a syllabus. Perhaps it's more important for a particular person to learn that places of education can offer positive experiences and a sense of belonging before trying to master their times tables. Especially if the person doesn't belong or experience positivity in many places.

Also, you can't expect to change a person, you can only use your own actions as models of behaviour that are common to all humanity, and act with consistency and transparency and hope that students recognise your approach in their own selves. By this I mean that a flautist can't just give their fingers to a student, the student has her own and she has to realise them as mediators of music. 

The centre of my moil

This morning I will write about something that sometimes squeezes my heart into a tiny little knotted muscle of angst and sometimes floods my heart with grace. I am talking of course about that most beneficent of Austrailan organisations, Centrelink.

For many people the idea of receiving a benefit from the government evokes images of the unvacuumed carpets of community housing, debilitating illnesses and most often  flaccid work ethics.

I admit that there are unvacuumed carpets in my life, but they rest in that state because I am in a state of consistent activity. I work hard studying and really I am grateful that we live in a country that has any system of support for people who for whatever reason can't support themselves as well. I also feel indebted to use my life beyond study providing a service to our communities (and I am not very patriotic). I guess that's the bind they get you in: everyone else thinks you're a lazy slacker - so you better work doubly hard to prove your value later on.

Situational garb

If you're feeling a little choked by your situation, "wear it all like a loose garment", so they say...
Can't dance in tight pants.

Remembering exactly what you are

There are times when the task you have to complete seems too big for you to grapple, and you feel like you're being asked to carve the next David out of granite, underwater, with a toothpick. 

And maybe you feel really lonely as well, like you don't have a mentor through this ordeal and you're too caught up in trying to make the thing work that there isn't any time for you to stop and ask a friend for help. 

Well I don't have any nuggets of advice, except to say that sometimes I come up against these situations, and in hindsight it seems that a lot of the stress and fear is welded in the foundry of your own heart. 

I'm sorry... you're not an industrial work site, you are a human and your faults are human, remind yourself and remind anyone who expects something too far fetched from you. And love yourself.

Sometimes I think I'm too young to know so much and I expect to die soon

The people you love most will hurt you the most. Ask whether that pain, anger or sadness is the result of your own desire to possess. Realise that the sadness is the manifestation of your own ideas and let them all go. Forgive yourself.

If your negativity isn't the result of your own desires then let go of whoever hurts you so much. Forgive them and let it go.

Women and the never-ending walk

When women are appreciated primarily for a sexually appetising appearance, the rest of us are left feeling inadequate and wondering what real women do. There are conceptions that frame our understanding of gender: the femme fatale, woman as allegorical of a virtue, women as flighty and emotional, women as docile and concerned with commitment.

I'm sure I can create a similar list with masculinity, but my concern is with female experience because that's what I know. 

I accept that I don't fit into any of these limited boxes and that all people are different, but on occasion just the very existence of these stereotypes becomes so disturbing that they deserve my attention and concern. 

It's so sad that feminists need to justify their position against the notion that feminism equates to outrage and hunger for power. Equality has always been the benchmark ideal, and in that spirit men also should not be afraid to fight for the acceptance of multifarious masculinities, so few of the men I know are strong and emotionless. 

I don't think these stereotypes rule people’s lives but I know that in a way they shape our behaviour and attitudes.

Essentially, you know yourself best and you are the greatest spokesperson for your own rights. Don't walk unquestioning through the low-ceilinged fluorescent lighted regulation carpeted corridor of socialisation (a walk that lasts a lifetime).

The loss of phantasmal limbs in metacognative accidents

When difficult situations arise it's best to approach them holding your pain in both your hands (i.e. not shoving it in the laundry basket).

Acknowledging your inner pain cauterises you: you lose a little bit of something you loved, some history, some person, some part of yourself... but it's also a process of healing, becoming lighter and becoming able to move with greater freedom.

Zen from Manly Dam

The wind has no sound, but conjures those things it moves through into sounding.

Be like the wind, quiet and abiding in your direction, igniting discussion through your actions.

The ocean is not blue, it's just a mirror to the sky.

Be like the water, let yourself take on different colours but remain pure and transparent.

Hope springs eternal

It is a gushing rushing surging sort of feeling when you're hopeful against the odds. It does spring eternal and there's an infinite ocean out there to drift on... Got to remember you phone and wish for good reception.

In your head is a map that you seem to be able to remember, but truth is you're just making up the continents you hope to find.

There are real roads we travel, the kind made of bitumen, and walking down those roads is the way to stay afloat the ocean of hope in your heart which, at times, seems to leak out into the real world. Walk in the direction you need to go in and meet what you find when you get there.

Waking up to your self

Extremely late or very early one morning I woke with a dead arm that was resting above my head. At first I thought there must have been something long and heavy that had placed itself near my head, I lay there for a while, unperturbed because the thing wasn't breathing or making sounds at me. Eventually I reached up with my other hand and realised it was my own limb - wow!
Then I was wide awake, I realised this is what it's like when other people touch me, because the dead arm couldn't feel a thing, I might as well have been shaking hands with the Queen for all I knew.
I touched my own hand, noticed all it's wrinkly bits and how it felt surprisingly dry and weathered. This was amazing, it struck me as being the kind of experience I want to have more often. I think we're all a little obsessed with the idea of getting into someone else's head and coming to know what it's like in there: but re-meeting your own body as though you'd never inhabited it is something altogether creepy/lovely/new/POSSIBLE.

Sometimes when you are drifting off to sleep or sitting still in meditation you feel like you're falling or you have elephantitis of the hands, or that your hands are miles apart, or that your hands aren't even there at all.


Every now and again you are forced into acknowledging a part of you afresh.

Sadly, I like metaphors. I'm a metaphoralomaniac: embarrassed but attracted by my own allegories. Like a teenager fixated on a pimple.

Loving someone should be like walking into the front door of a party and playfully tossing a bottle of red wine to the host.

I mean that it’s a gift, you give it away. Don’t always expect to share in the drinking: your host might be an alcoholic and down the whole lot and look to you in a drunk stupor foolishly asking for more when they were too hasty to enjoy the first lot anyway. Or maybe your host is too dim witted to even see it coming, maybe they misunderstood the little upward jerk of your eyebrows that said “Ready?” when you tossed the bottle and it smashed on the floor in a million little pieces and made a big red hard-to-scrub-out stain on the carpet, in the foyer, for everyone to see.

It’s up to you to make friends with people who aren’t that slow and aren’t that greedy. Hopefully you befriend someone who has two wine glasses in their cupboard, or mugs or bowls, or any vessel that could contain a fluid, or if not doesn’t mind passing the bottle between you. Maybe you’re connoisseurs at this and swill and sniffle at the fumes and talk about different ‘notes’ and vineyards, but it’s more likely that the reason you’re there is because you both just enjoy the company.

For the meantime I don’t drink.

people are de-centred and multi-vocal

People can change, and people don't always say or do wise things. They might be angry and say something cruel, but they're not always angry and cruel.

Make allowance for that and you'll free that person from fitting a narrow expectation, and free yourself from being hurt.

Obsession

It's admirable to be enthusiastic, degenerative to be neurotic.
Realising the difference is important, having the capacity to stop is critical.

The difference between doing something well and overdoing it is being awake. Awake enough to know that you're tired or that is looks resolved or that you're hungry or that there are other things that need doing also.
Drawing is like digging a hole, getting in the hole and digging until you can no longer dig. You get deeper, it gets darker. I don't draw that often because I've always felt there has been a capacity to get lost and I like knowing my bearings.

This is very indulgent, enough.

Truth

People would prefer to know the truth than not know the truth. As far as I can see, the only truth external to our often opposing perceptions is that we are here, together.

Who I am (upsurging through a mortal mind, enfolded in the linguistic lung)

I think writing about this is not sacrilege because I think writing is an abstraction of existence. I've written about that before, and seem to restate it a lot. It's what makes writing breathe - the gap between my life and these words form a lung which insufflates its own space, a living, breathing space that is prone equally to collapse (build some sort of climatology, become an aeronaut, study pneumatics: that is the readers job).

Inside meditation, which is as unstable as the lung of language, things emerge from spaces unseen and move on rapidly, or sometimes stick and drag along a trailing mess. Those things I am reluctant to name, but suppose they are commonly understood as thoughts or feelings or memories but are better described as hybrids, misappropriations, overstatements, aliens. They go on all the time, meditation reveals them.

Living alongside those things, there is no choice but to live trying to cope with distraction and division. In mantra meditation, hearing the consistent sound of a mantra is a difficult task because these other images and sounds are relentless. But today it became apparent that the person listening to the mantra is me, and that I am someone nobody else has ever met.

I am the only one who can hear that sound, it is information exceptional to my experience in that moment.
Avoiding all activity and simply listening to that sound means I have the opportunity to spend company with the thing that listens. Imagine spending time with the quiet part of yourself that nobody else has met, the part which just listens. It's like meeting somebody for the first time: but someone who doesn't talk, isn't biased, doesn't argue, won't complain, hasn't been hurt, isn't unfair, wouldn't lie. Just a person who observes, which is what everybody is underneath the temporal bedlam of social interaction and identity crises.

Being calm, collected, and cool in the kinda way that bullies would respect.

Even if you are the kindest, nicest, most compassionate and complacent person in the world, there will be someone, maybe more than someone, who makes you angry.

I spoke with two friends tonight who helped me to put things into perspective. The most important thing is to know how you feel, wring your hands instead of wringing their neck, and at the right time make sure you are heard.


And even if at that time you aren't heard, tell that person again at the next right time, and then the next, and the next, and the next... And if they still have cotton wool in their ears, don't be sorry that they're confused when you exit that situation, because you did tell them so.

Flattened mates

They've started talking about the characters in sitcoms as though they are real people e.g. "wow, do you know how hard it would have been for him to say that?"

Language is the gimp of creativity

Passion is something that gets under appreciated in academic learning. I guess academia is about empiricism... But we bastardise so much. If the arts were primarily about empirical research then there wouldn't be any artworks for art conservationists and art historians to dissect. And the whole art world just would not exist.

Creativity is the soul of art making, but I feel like it gets ignored in some ways, maybe because we can't decided what it is or where it comes from.

The UNSW motto is "manu et mente", and I thought, in first year, what about "heart"? Cor means heart in Latin, and it's where we get "core" from. The tricky realm of feeling is the core of the existence of the humanities.

I'm starting to sicken at the amount of theoretical content that needs to be ingested to earn a degree in education. Because theory seems like a mirror, it gives us a pretty trustworthy reflection, but it's flat and hard and cold. What it doesn't reflect is a whole internal world of processes that are inherent to our area of study. And I feel that it is causing a schism between what we do and how we talk about what we're doing.

Our washing machine

Similar to my prior post about our cold tap, our washing machine is a function bestowed upon our humble abode that has gone unused for a long time. In fact, the whole time we've lived here.

Once, I piled my clothes inside its mouth and bespeckled them with washing powder, twisted the taps and turned around to see our neighbour, who explained that it belonged to him and that it no longer works. Retreating in neighbourly apology I took my half-slimed (why does the washing powder makes it slimy?) garments in my arms and climbed the stairs to the bathtub, the vessel where my washing has been washed ever since.

Today one of my flatmates called the real estate agent to enquire about having another cold tap installed in the communal laundry so that we can get a machine put in. She was informed that the machine there was put in by the landlord for us to use, and is not made available to the flat downstairs (inhabited by the man who had let me know "owns" the device).

Well, lovely big old universe has done it again! The neighbours door was seen being rapped upon and his face was witnessed by the real estate agent... And just like that, I can enjoy the wonderful commodity of an electronically powered washing appliance and stop spending Saturday mornings scratching the crotch of my underpants with sunshine soap.

Doing the wrong thing

Often I look at behaviour that extends beyond binary options and feel a sense of affinity, but also uneasiness. Sadly I judge plenty of choices as having right or wrong outcomes. I wish that I wasn't taught to judge things so simplistically. Life isn't really about making the right or wrong decisions. Choices can be auspicious or inauspicious, but not correct or incorrect. Life is four dimensional, it spreads out in all directions... everything you do has the capacity to be both good and bad (and everything else) at once. Kissing a person in front of someone else who once loved you ignites bitterness and sweetness in one mouthful. If you could taste the things you do, it would be quite unpalatable. You'd spit it out and wouldn't do anything ever again, because the taste would be acrimonious but sacchariferous; like vomiting honey. Confusing, distasteful, insulting to your senses and your innocent ideas about how you really act.

I'm saying that choice, by its very definition cannot be wrong or right. It's about selection of an option. Options by their definition are multifarious, irreducible to good and bad. Not simple, not easy, not fatalistic.

Why is it that we don't get told that when we talk really we shout? Speaking isn't a means to an end, it's not just the journey of a thought from brain to mouth: it keeps travelling in other peoples heads. If you think about something long enough it turns into habit, behaviour, and you can't unthink things. Certain occasions get forgotten but the general sheen or ethos of an era carries on in our values.

And it makes me sad to think that children grow up to learn that girls do girl things and boys do boy things, running ahead and crossing the road without holding hands is wrong. Those values are accepted and sometimes used to negate pain or danger, but the point is that we are told our actions are right or wrong, which ironically, is the wrong thing to do.

I don't eat bodies

This is as much to remind myself as to demonstrate to anyone else that it's possible to be a healthy, poor vegetarian.

Walnuts, boiled egg, steamed field mushroom with garlic and butter, steamed broccoli, brown rice with Greek yoghurt and honey. And orange juice.

I just ingested this. I reckon this meal probably cost less than $6, and I only ate two thirds of it so I saved the rest. Sometimes I don't eat so well, especially when I'm out at uni or just too busy to be bothered cooking properly. However I already had the rice and boiled egg cooked so this didn't take long at all, probably 15 minutes.
So I hope that this urges the capacity to remember that eating well is possible. It's also important.

That soft and sick funny little feeling

Something that needs to be acknowledged is that I do get sad.
Especially if I am going to teach, I should try and know what it is that makes me sad so as to grasp it by the feet and fling it elsewhere or otherwise hold up a shield and deal with it later.

I promise myself that I will always try and be practical about sadness, because I actually have that choice. I used to allow myself to become engulfed in emotion, but now I sort of just let myself live with it. Fighting it is exhausting and bewildering (what is the cost of losing in a fight against yourself?), ignoring it is not possible at times. Those are choices that I can make, but I know that the most sensible, life-preserving choice is to know how I feel and know that I won't always feel that way.

When it's extreme, I feel unsure of what to do. And it's bizarre because I also love that sort of low, even if it's hard and lonely and generally difficult to understand, because I can tell that when I'm not like that, I will be capable and calm and awake and generally quite good at the things that I want to do. I don't feel that my sadness is something that always defines me, only sometimes does it define my outlook.

I wish it was easier for people to talk freely about mental illness. My friend Seema is creating a space for expressing mental health problems, from my understanding offering creative non-fiction stories from other peoples lives as well as all kinds of positive support not only about depression but wider social issues and actions that we can take. She says it is hard work creating a support network like that, I don't doubt her, but I know that work isn't for nothing. Hearing other peoples stories is a supportive and constructive thing.

my God is Real!

I don't like using the word God because it means "big man" in my head. That's why I like the Hindu god Brahman who is gender neutral, not to mention the Atman (inner, personal self in all people) is recognised to be a droplet in the ocean of Brahman which I find far more pervasive and personal than a god who made us and then decides our fate.

But I am not Hindu (one has to be born Hindu to be Hindu). Without having ever written it in such definitive terms, to me god is the consciousness in all living things. I told that to my friend the other day who has an interest in biology and neuroscience and he told me that there is a little part in the back of your brain, under the nape of your neck, which if snipped renders a person unconscious.

And for the next two days I was quite sad. Because the beauty and mystery of perception was up until that point a wonderful secret of the universe that I was enjoying respecting and living through. But turns out no, it's all physiological.

However now I do not think scientific fact makes it any less miraculous or less worthy of reverence. If anything it confirms the reality of being. You must be careful not to deify something as fleeting as your life, be humble about it. Also do not reify consciousness, because then you cannot appreciate it. I believe there's a balance in which always being awake to sensory perceptions allows you to fully exist in the present.

Our cold tap

Well. Somehow (I was not in the room when it happened) the handle of the cold tap in our kitchen sink became separate from the faucet and remained that way for many, many months.

Thankfully, the good old universe fixed it for us when by chance an old friend of my flatmates came over for tea yesterday in his plumbing uniform and united the free floating handle back to its virtuous position in no time at all.

I'm such an optimist now that I can twist laziness into surrender to the universe.

Further notes on balls of hair

Thankfully nobody has choked. It was a close call for a while there, but turns out the recipient is of a sane nature and capable of understanding my experience. I could relay it but it's very difficult to pinpoint the exact nature of this love, except for its universality. It shall have to suffice to say that in a wakeful moment the underlying ubiquitous love that is in everything made itself seen in another human. I hope not to sound romantic because there is no romance in the fact. It's a truth I'd like to see more often and in all things.

Last night I learnt more about different kinds of speech as defined by advaita vedanta philosophy (four kinds: arising from the navel, heart, larynx or tongue), and my tutor said to us that speech arising from the heart holds qualities of truth, is free from impediment and occurs when the speaker is talking about something they truly love, and this kind of speech carries with it freedom. Well, this was exactly my experience. 


I had not explained this encounter with "true love" to anyone because it seemed sacred and I would have liked to leave it undisturbed. But it seemed to ferment, and I could feel delusive notions of romance binding the experience into some sort of insubstantial fictitious fantasy which was a bastardisation of the real thing. This whole reaction took quite an unconscious form for the most part, only being fully acknowledged upon my explanation of it to the person who evoked it. It was probably ignored because I did not want it to happen. And once I had described the event, even without a response my heart was liberated from my scheming mind and I felt at peace.

Who knows if that made sense. It did to me.

A hairy ball

Also, before I bash in my eyeballs for some sleep, I feel that I may soon become quite disaffected with my own growing sense of word fluidity, languid language practice, liberated locution, whatever you call this big bursting desire to write, due to an act that may, in hindsight, be considered a rash display of simplistic honesty.

Here's a little metaphor so I can shield my enfeebled conscience from having to run over the details: it may be quite dismaying to realise your cat has delivered a hairball straight from the oesophagus to the woollen turtle-neck jumper. But the cat certainly felt some relief. Without feeding it too much thought (because I do not like being distracted), I've been building up a bit of a hairball over the last two-ish months regarding love, and I mighta kinda sorta puked it up on someone. Really underneath it's no more than a breath of fresh air, but it's the anticipated reception that might transform such a sweet pure exhalation into cat vomit.

Olfactory fallacy and assessment of the academic cage

It's wonderful how addictive it is to just write what it is I feel like writing without having to type a perfectly punctuated reference, worry about my syntax or even logical fallacies. For example:
You may be, aware that the majority of people have a sense of smell. Therefore smelling is good.

But it still feels slightly wrong to write words that aren't highly structured or referencing anything in particular.
I still feel like it will be assessed at some point. And that disturbs me, because I would like to feel free to write my ideas without apprehension.

The currency of truth

We have this idea called Freedom of Speech. I like the idea but I'm not sure how much it is believed in, or practised. It means everyone is allowed to say what they think and even air ideas that aren't popular. My friends parents remember a time when politicians tried to persuade people of their position, now I get the feeling that powerful people persuade politicians of what their position should be.

I'm not that educated in national politics, but it seems to me that if the people in charge of running the country can be told what they should say, and say what they're told, it's not a very good starting point for a nation that reveres its entitlement to free speech.

I'm going to give an example of the manipulative power that authority can have over truth. Last time I visited my mother, I spent a good part of the eight hour train trip home listening to the conversation of two people behind me (they were loud, I think most people on the carriage were listening). Firstly they spoke of where they were going: one, a young woman, was returning home to Sydney after staying in Tamworth for the past fortnight. The other was taking the train to Sydney, then finding his way to the airport, catching a flight to Beijing and then another one up to Shenyang (twenty-something hours of travel).

Then they spoke about education, the devotion of Chinese parents, the one-child policy, valentines day, arranged marriages and culturally specific dating habits. Then they spoke of their careers: she had worked in politics for many years and had recently retired from that position. I now forget what her new job was. He had been a millionaire, then started a non-for-profit organisation providing white goods to unemployed Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, when that eventually ended he decided to be a teacher and now teaches conversational English at a private college in Shenyang.

Then they spoke for a long time about their personal projects: she had just been interviewing Aboriginal people in Tamworth about their heritage and the traditions still alive in their families for the past fortnight. She had come into contact with some Indigenous people through her church, and this was just a hobby she had developed. She edits the tapes she makes and gives them back to the people who she's interviewed.
He had been writing a book for the past three years about people he had met who were implicated in World War Two. It started with his neighbour who he gradually came to know through many over the fence conversations. He decided to write down the amazing things this old man was telling him. He eventually collated quite a few stories from different war vets he met, but there was one which was really going to sell the book once it was published.

The protagonist of this particular tale is the son of a ridiculously famous Hollywood actor. The details here become a little shrouded in mystery, but this actor was around and somehow negatively entangled in Nazi Germany. The son of the actor, who related his story to the man on the train, spent some of his childhood in horrific war conditions. Apparently the story is a captivating snapshot of a child's involuntary entrenchment in a political tornado and so well told that its merit lies primarily in its innocent truth, not its connection with an acting star.

The man on the train writing the book was invited to have dinner with the son in the home of his wealthy father. The man made clear his intentions to publish his book. At this the actor tried to buy him out. Because Hollywood is owned by Jewish families, an actor with such a blemish would never again find work, so this story is a big secret. The integrity of the author was such that he declined copious amounts of money, attempted to reunite father and son, and has kept his book to himself for the meantime (I'm assuming until he can accrue an iron fisted band of attorneys). But the silencing is enforced firstly (albeit inexplicitly) by the power of the Jewish Hollywood lords, secondly by the power of the actor and his money, and thirdly by the personal choices of the author.

I know that was long-winded, but I enjoyed relating it. The moral is that we do have choice, even if the choice is to keep quiet. It's not a failure to refuse to act in some situations. Gandhi's starvation strikes were non-acts, but these absences of action raised widespread awareness. It can be frustrating to remain silent, and on some occasions silence is an act of freedom of speech. And often it is infinitely more frustrating for the opposing authority... Any teacher who's had a student who refuses to communicate knows what I'm on about!

I hope my man on the train eventually publishes his book. In the meantime it's heartening to see that power and money need not always buy out the truth and there is identity in silence.

how God is like a fart

I was just taking part in some light hearted conversation between my flatmates, telling one that her girlfriend farted earlier, such a rare and special occasion that it deserves public recognition. 

Shortly thereafter we started talking about God. One of them believes that God isn't real, the other one believes that God is to believers as an imaginary friend is to the child who speaks to it.

I think that God is much like that rare fart: it is real, but ephemeral. It dissipates into the surrounding atmosphere. Only in the moment it was experienced and only for those who had the perspicacity to hear feel or smell its entrance in their lives does it hold any meaning. Also, someone had to make that fart for it to have ever been around.

Snippets and smidgens...

When you are young and you leave home you acquire some strange furniture combinations, and also adopt all sorts of unneeded objects.

For instance I remember collecting numerous colanders from my flatmates fathers bunch of things he didn't want. Why do you need more than one colander? You also learn to be quite flexible in your usage of material goods. A colander makes a very fine rat nest. We had a very old electronic organ in the kitchen that didn't work and a dishwasher in our laundry (why?). My garden grew in saucepan lids hanging from hat racks and clothes racks. I didn't pay anything for my bed, wardrobe, drawing desk or writing desk and all other furniture in my room was made from crates.

Something compels you to hoard everything because it you don't own much. But you feel that you're floating in a white cubic sea where the flotsam that gathers about you is sort of shifting and piling up. Made from chipboard and mustard coloured velvet. You do feel adrift.

I'm writing about this now because I am sleeping on a new couch that we acquired just today. We actually acquired two couches, a lounge chair and a bookshelf. We only paid for the bookshelf and the other items were given to us by my flatmates father. A lot of my things are currently piled on my bed because we shampooed the carpet and it hasn't dried, so I cannot return the things back under the bed.

It's fascinating how well you get can by just waiting. Every piece of furniture I own has been given to me, and I've eventually culled it down to a bunch of pieces that don't look to kaleidoscopic with each other. Other things I've been gifted: a bike (but it got stolen), all my bed sheets, all the cutlery/crocery I use, a great deal of my art supplies, huge majority of my books (and I think it's a cohesive collection!) not to mention a lot of my clothes. If you wait long enough these things sort of come to you, and if you wait some more, you begin to hone the skill of selective culling until you own a collection of possessions that isn't incredibly meagre, and also not too gaudy.

I do feel incredibly lucky.

Cars

I live on a main road and there is a constant hum of traffic. It doesn't vary too much, except for in the wee wee hours of the morning when I love to hear a car coming. I can't often tell which direction it's travelling in, but I just love hearing the barely audible rattle of a car going over concrete rifts and potholes a few kilometres up or down the road and then its descent into silence again.

So in the daytime when there is a consistent motorised murmur it's hard to tell where one car starts and the other ends. I hear the peak of each one as it passes directly below me, but its whistling departure is smothered by the next tailgater, and the next, and the next.
This used to annoy me when I would meditate on sound, because it was difficult to hear each sound draw out to its end. But I think now that I enjoy it. I guess I'm reminded of a spawning ground for fish. I feel like I'm always at the party, even when it's over and most people have gone home and I get to sit and listen to the last person leaving and pattering off into the distance, taking their noise pollution with them.

Even more lovely is a late Saturday night pricked with a deeply profane tune blaring from a rolled down window that's halted at the traffic lights "HEAD DOWN ASS UP THAT'S THE WAY WE LIKE TO FUCK, HEAD DOWN ASS UP THAT'S THE WAY WE LIKE TO FUCK, HEAD DOWN ASS UP THAT'S THE WAY WE LIKE TO FUCK, HEAD DOWN..."
It's shocking enough when it arrives but once it's departed it's blissfully ironic. All that noise about sex and then the speedy loud exit maybe accompanied with a screaming laugh or some shouting is a proclamation of existence. Well, I am here once they've moved on.

Where am I?

YOU, my friend/lover/enemy/self/anyone who's reading, are at the centre of the universe.

Here's a little tale from Sartre to help us out: A man takes a walk in the brisk morning air and enters a park, he is pleased in surveying his surroundings, perhaps he notices the way dew renders the area of leaves it sits upon silver, perhaps he is aware of the morning calls of various birds, perhaps he is relishing the crunch of the gravel under his feet. He walks for a while, observing the area. And then he notices another person enter the park and is threatened: he is no longer the centre of consciousness in the scenario. The other person is like a black hole sucking in sensory stimuli, equal and opposite to the protagonist. In fact, this other person renders our protagonist an un-protagonist, just another player vying to be in the centre.

Similarly I think there is a general fear most people harbour towards other people. We don't know what's inside their heads, we can only glean some inferences by noticing what gets sucked into the edges of that black hole and what occasionally gets spat back out. Who knows what that person thinks of you? Who knows how they really feel towards you? It's frightening, it's alienating. It renders us all equal.

I'm going to inject a bit of science in at this point. Because we live in an infinite universe, every point in the universe is the centre of the universe.
Six inches behind you head parallel to your eyes IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!
That same spot behind my head IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!
The tip of a rock resting in the Gobi desert IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!
Some place somewhere in outer space that has no name IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!
ALL AT ONCE!

Now I'm gonna chuck some metaphysics into my idea soup: your consciousness always inhabits a place in space, because your consciousness resides in your body. It's not often that people experience life externally from their bodies (although it has been known to happen). Wherever you go, there you are! Your consciousness is with you when you walk down the street, get on a bus and ride all over town - it moves with you. There isn't any physics that can locate exactly where in your body your consciousness resides, but it's in there. And that elusive space is ALSO the centre of the universe.

So really there isn't much need to be frightened of that impossible yet rationally true space in other people. You may not know what it looks like to be someone else looking at you, but you know what it is like being you looking at someone else (it's the same equation but inverted), so you know the processes.

Finally here is a little bit of magic to make it all stick together nicely: you need to come closer towards you own self to understand somebody else. It seems to me that if we're all parallel in our capacity to perceive and we're all simultaneously at the centre of the universe there isn't much separating the way that we function. Because we're in our own heads, it's best to try and understand who we are, and then we can know that the same thing exists in everybody else. It's our outlook that builds walls.
We can either see each other as competitors or companions... which I suppose we do already.

Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.

There's a lot said about that guy, so much that the very thought of him turns me off.
I have lost the will to develop an opinion about him. I don't want to think about him, my eyelids roll in their sockets and my neck turns at the sight of him. I am speaking of course about our saviour, Jesus Christ.

I'm not anti-Christian, I'm not a hating atheist. This isn't about religion, because it goes beyond religion. It's about what the guy said, but not about language - because I think his message merely use human language as a net for capturing human nature. "The truth will set you free."

Admit that it's true that you will most likely not develop a marital relationship with that person you met once who lives overseas, and you will be free from imagining your wedding dress. That's a positive thing, because instead of imagining your wedding dress, you could be reading an article or boiling some pumpkin or learning a song.
How is it that we can be so irrational? How do we believe the stories we cast ourselves in? Desire is an ever hungry beast and we love to feed the bastard any little scraps we find lying around: another cookie, a newer iphone, a bigger bed, a larger pay check, a deeper experience, a bit more time, a fraction more attention, a slither more of cake yet a hell lot more of an attractive body.

We can see what those things look like in our minds eye, and they look so beautiful in our lives. It will be wonderful, satisfying, ingratiating. But there will always be newer releases of iphone models and always, always more slithers of cake. So the question squeezes out, between sloppily licked fingers and embarrassing crumbs around our mouths "when do we stop?" Well, you probably won't stop. Because there are no messages for you to stop in the places where you most often rest your gaze.

We are not living in a market economy, we are living a market economy. And we're taught to live it. Unlearning societally taught ways of living is difficult if there isn't anyone new around of massive influence who is unteaching it. But there was some dude a while ago who did have some big insights. So big that they still get thrown around (from pulpits, but also in blogs now?): "The truth will set you free."

The solipsism of this statement is so beautiful I nearly leak a tear: there is so much glory, so much rhetoric, so much sacred imagery surrounding the man who said it that sometimes you don't even want to know whatever it was that he said/did... But the truth is that these constructs are merely constraints from which you need to remove yourself, so that you can be free from the heavy sickle of hundreds of years of Church indoctrination to hear the simplicity of the statement, consider it in relation to your own life, and be free to see its truth.


(title quote is Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888)

Flying

It is so important to let yourself be. Don't get too involved in yourself.
Don't get all up in your own business, demanding the impossible from yourself.
Don't always put yourself down; realise that you always put yourself down.

Those ideas are costumes we weave to please other people. We spend vast amounts of time sewing together different garments: church vestments for when we want to appear professional and sober, lingerie for when we want to attract other people. It's all a well-staged act for other people.

I am in the process of sewing a parachute for my mind, so that I can survey my life with a mental construct that will help me to fly instead of plummet when my life is throwing me overboard. Because those situations are about me, not pleasing other people.
Consider it like this: what good is a pair of knickers when you're falling from an aeroplane?