ANZAC's Lost Meaning

In Martin Place pre-dawn chill the Last Post’s last note fades. An Australian choir sings an English song – Kipling’s Imperial Hymn – that shuffles bent with age.

Lest we forget.

Governors and premiers, vicars and priests, MPs and generals and admirals and their spouses, schoolkids and veterans and soldiers still on call raise chapped, pink faces to the cenotaph. Cold bronze sentries stand mute.

Lest we forget

A solemn murmur from this place ripples, out to others ringing a thousand memorials. Rippling mumbles like Sunday Catholics. Uncomprehending psalmody. Words so oft-repeated the meaning is lost.

We will remember them, lest we forget.

Lest we forget the soldiers, known and unknown – the boys in khaki boatloads steaming for Far side of Earth.

Lest we forget they died for no good reason, butchered and burned before Empire’s empty tabernacles.

Lest we forget politicians and popes, kings and queens and newspaper barons, waving them off with slogans and keeping the home fires burning. Lest we forget we cheered them to their deaths.

Lest we forget how seductive is drum beating, bugle blowing, flag waving, myth making. Lest we forget the cost when nations equate their character and pride with war.

Lest we let our alliances draw our sons and daughters to foreign lands to die in wars that are not ours.

Lest we forget those foreign lands’ inhabitants, too, are human beings – that the cartoon bombs on news TV embed themselves in communities, in streets, in homes.

Lest we forget a life is a life, in Baghdad or Saigon or in Sydney.

Lest we forget invasion is invasion.

Lest we become accomplices, aiders, abettors.

Lest we forget to think before we fight. Lest we fall for conjuring tricks and causes. Lest we think we can know and impose Right.

Lest we forget and let ourselves believe

the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Lest we render their sacrifice vain, we will remember them.

Lest we forget.

PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE LITTLE STATUSES AND MEMES

Lots of passive-aggressive little Facebook memes and status updates. Every day, news feed jammed with the bleating of moral and emotional cowards.

Look at me please.

Watch me eat my cake and have it.

You? Oh, no! I didn’t mean you!

Eat my plausible deniability and choke.

If you have to resort to guilt-tripping someone on Facebook or twitter to make them behave well or get them involved in your life, chances are, they either: don’t really want to be in your life; don’t really deserve to be in your life; or were never really there to begin with.

Or vice versa. Any of the above.

Or, if you actually care about a person and your relationship with them, try this . . .

Try pretending it’s 1998. Pick up the telephone. Pretend it’s attached to the wall, or only has a few minutes of talk time in its enormous battery. Pretend there is no SMS or social media. Pretend they might be dead tomorrow. Call them.

Better yet, arrange to meet them somewhere. Look them in the eye and use words. Gestures. Communicate.

Be honest.

Be a human being.

Stop being a pussy.

PAEDOPHILE PRIESTS - What the Royal Commission Won't Say

The sex-abuse Royal Commission is in the news again today. They’re chasing down Cardinal Pell’s hush money.

The money was difficult to claim, implied no admission of responsibility by the church, and was used by some victims to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol. It’s an important strand for the commission to follow.

But it’s not the most important.

You’re unlikely to learn the most important facet of church sex-abuse by following the Hearings. I’ve come to believe it’s related to the Catholic doctrine of original sin.

Paedophile priests were protected. Their superiors hushed up their crimes and moved them on to different communities. Was this done to shield the church from scandal? Yes. To preserve the reputations of cardinals, bishops and monsignors? Absolutely. To shift the problem on to some other bishop’s patch? Almost certainly.

But there’s something uglier lurking underneath. Something inseparable from the old-style Irish Catholicism that infected so much of this country.

It’s the idea that the child is somehow to blame.

The idea that the offender is a good man tempted. Remove him from the source of that temptation and all will be well – for everyone who counts, that is. It was the child’s fault.

For a victim, that stays with you. It colours your entire world view. It does more damage than the original assault.

You carry it into every relationship you will ever have. The certainty that you don’t deserve to be there. That you’re never going to be good enough. That you don’t deserve to be loved. That if only you can be better, then maybe you won’t be hurt again. That if you are hurt, then you’ve earned it.

Of course, you don’t understand all this as a child. That’s the beauty part – you get to think about it for decades.

It’s where the real damage is done.

It’s the ugly scar that grows over the wound.

And, while the Royal Commission carries on, it’s worth remembering.

YOU GOTTA PAY YOUR DUES

Been writing music for the first time in years. Well, writing lyrics and arranging songs from snatches of music sent to me by a genius I know (the internet, the artist’s friend).

But I’m not a musician.

That’s not a title I’ve earned. And I have too many friends who have earned it; who’ve sweated for years, working crappy day jobs and burning their nights pursuing the dream; working the muso’s version of a day job, playing stuff they can’t stand in hope they can one day be paid to play what they love; playing elevator music to the drunk or uninterested in restaurants, museums and auction rooms; never giving up, always hustling.

No, I’m not a musician. I’m a guy who plays music.

I am a writer, though. A poet. Those, I’ve earned.

For far too long I lived a life far uglier than it should have been – but it was never pointless, never futile.

Through it all, I maintained a habit formed as a teenager. I carried a notebook, and I wrote it down. Impressions, conversations, descriptions – even with no aim in mind, you write it.

And, it turns out, you can scribble your way to sanity. To perspective. To a direction. Things come together.

Things come together.

But you have to do it.

Whether you’re an artist or an entrepreneur, a tradesman, a salesperson or an astronaut; whether it’s work or family, friendship or love, the world will cut you quite a bit of slack to get your shit together. Sometimes the world will even help.

But the world has to see you doing it.

Think about it, certainly. Talk about it too, if that helps, or don’t. But do it.

You have to pay your dues.

TEASER - The Last Man

A tiny taste, for anyone who may have wondered, of what I’ve been working on this year – instead of, you know, the morbidly introspective or shouty political blog posts.

Creating worlds is harder than fretting or bitching about the one you’re in, but infinitely more rewarding.

The priest I could have written myself. His appearance, that is. Had I written his character I’d have made him less virtuous – or at least more corruptible. But no, this was a man who earnestly sought to do good.

Thought at first this made him an idiot. Who knew such a heart could co-exist with such a mind? and in such a body – built so strong, so handsome almost, so seeming normal sitting behind his desk. Then he hoists himself and ambles on little crooked legs and you notice the outsize head, the shoulders all skewiff as he proffers that muscular handshake, smiling warm from somewhere near your navel.

So here he is, God’s little joke, welcoming me to my new home. And he’s gushing about clean air, expansive grounds and freshly renovated buildings, about exercise and contemplation, freedom and light. He speaks about freedom to heal. Not only a priest but a doctor as well, my gaoler; a scientist – possibly even a Christian – and he’s proud of his experiment.

Now he’s rehearsing his philosophy of healing.

“I’ve seen such cruelty,” he says. “Cruelty you can’t imagine.”

A hazardous occupation, I think, to guess at the limits of another’s imagination.

Doctor priest’s office opens on a terrace where we sit drinking tea, which he pours. Don’t know what part food plays in his theories but, today at least, there are pastries and cake. I sip tea and feed on cake and taste his clean air whilst he talks, and listen to the rustling leaves that hedge his expansive grounds.

“Here, we don’t believe in locking the unfortunate away and forgetting about them.” I wonder if all new inmates get this speech, or if it’s just because I’m special. “What good does it do for the insane to be treated like prisoners, to be shut up in the dark with only their illness for company?”

I am not insane, believe that. I always know exactly what I’m doing – even if I don’t know why.

“After all, insanity isn’t a crime is it, Donatien?” He uses my first name, not my title or “citizen”.

I mouth something agreeable and continue to think about his cassock. Did he have it made to order, or simply shorten an ordinary one? It’s a fetish of the soldier who rules us now that all government and church officials should be identifiable by their uniforms. Gone is the fashion of revolution. Suppose it’s easier for a deformed priest to find a cassock than a suit. Gaiters would still be a problem, though . . . .

Hoped it would be the priest showed me to my lodgings. Don’t walk so easily these days and he’d have set a less arduous pace. The big orderly he sends me off with is kind enough, takes it slow and keeps pausing  as we traverse the hall, ascend the staircase and turn left at the first floor corridor, but I feel I should go faster nonetheless. My cell is at the end of the corridor, looking out from the château’s rear corner.

            I say cell, but it’s really a suite of rooms. Kind of thing I might have rented in the city if I didn’t require privacy. The servants have brought up my luggage while the priest and I talked. Could only bring the minimum but I’ll ask my son to send along my books and some tapestries, and maybe a nicer chair and a couch for the sitting room. I'll need my writing desk. My mistress has my engravings and some other little comforts. I can do all this. It’s not important to my persecutors that I suffer, only that I stay.

            Beneath my window the estate runs down to the river’s edge, trees and walks – I spy some of my new neighbours taking the afternoon air and sun under supervision. Equidistant in the opposite direction the road passes by, meandering to the city.

           

“The brain is like any other organ,” the dwarf priest had said. “All is connected. If the mind is hurt, the body cries out; if the body is suffering, the mind rebels. Don’t you agree, Donatien?”

            “Yes, abbé,” I told him. “That makes sense.”

            “Here, we believe in treating both. We believe with the right balance of activity and rest, kindness and discipline, community and quiet reflexion, we assist nature in simply taking its course. Do you see? Above all, we don’t believe there are any incurables. All our charges, with the proper treatment, can achieve some measure of felicity and usefulness to society – whether it’s inside these walls or out.”

            Walls . . . and so endeth the presentation.

            “I can see already you’re a reasonable man, Donatien. I knew not to believe everything that’s been said about you. I think you’ll be comfortable with us.”

            At least he didn’t say, happy.

            I’m tired. Thankfully the bed looks serviceable. We started out before dawn this morning and I need my exercise, then sleep. Nature takes its course.

            Have some thinking to do. I am not made for chains, or even silken bonds. Mustn’t become complacent.

            They will not keep me here.

CARRY

There’s a story old women tell in Eastern Europe or the Middle-East. I can’t remember which and it doesn’t really matter. A story told by old women in one of those places where old women – mothers and grandmothers, sisters and wives – understand suffering.

I may embellish it in the telling, but that doesn’t really matter either.

The things that have hurt you, the old women say, will never leave you. They talk about a box.

You can’t keep that pain inside all the time, nor can you keep looking at it, so you put it in a box. You can’t rid yourself of it, but it can no longer touch you. It’s part of you but outside you.

You’re attached to the box – maybe by an umbilical cord. To move anywhere you have to carry it. Occasionally, it will get too heavy – you’ve been living life one-handed – and you’ll have to set it down.

This is when you stop, open the box, and remind yourself what’s inside. You remind yourself it’s real, a part of you, and that you’ve been able to bear it.

There will be more in the box than last time you looked. If you’ve been paying attention the new pain will be different. Variety is important here – you don’t need to carry too much of any one thing.

If you’ve been paying attention you’ll have learned not to let anyone load you up unnecessarily.

You’ll also have noticed you can’t carry anyone else’s box and nobody can carry yours – but by some mystery the right two people can make each other’s seem lighter.

You breathe deep, close the box, pick it up with one hand and – holding, if you’re lucky, someone else’s free hand in your own – you carry on.

Nice story.

HEAD

“I am the warm little centre that the life of the universe crowds around”

 – Chuck Palahniuk

Fight Club

This is fantastic! Why did nobody tell me?!

Technology delivers on paradise promise.

Early adopter I am not. If not Luddite, suspicious and nostalgic. Wary eyes in undergrowth. Let others eat the berries. No need iron, still have plenty stones . . .

Have a laptop these days. Mobile phone (Nokia 5110) inserted in typewriter wouldn’t connect to interweb. Made typing hard.

Have smart phone too now. Smarter than me. Nokia second hand. Nicely three years ago.

Touch screen no. But . . .

iPod!

iPod iPod! iPod! (Microsoft spell-check recognises not)

Used to have walkman. Discman. Clunky. Junky. Battery eating unwieldy drop and break it chew cassettes and scratch CDs. Bleh. Leave at home.

Left at mercy of world. Had to pay attention.

iPod. Fits right in pocket. Own little world next to house keys. Music best injected straight in head and mixed in brain. Outside a vague hum between tracks. Everything bliss.

Street life glides by a mime removed.

What’s that, man at bus stop, whisper lips and charades? You like to kiss your fingertips? Oh, you’d like me to kiss your fingertips? No, thank you. I’ll just walk over here and finish my cigarette.

Yes, woman outside train station, that is a nice palm. You should be proud of it. I’ll be here again tomorrow. Maybe you can show me the other one . . .

Supermarket scrum. All out of courtesy, so everyone wants that last mango. Escalator dominoes. Sonically beta-blocked flat line bp. A sweet smile and fuck off outta my way. Machine gun Zen.

Phone rings out in pocket vacuum.

Autistic Valhalla.

Untouchable.

Uh-oh, bus.