WRITER'S BLOCK

It’s one of the oldest clichés: the awful silence; the blank page, glaring and menacing; the lonely writer driven to despair by the keyboard’s mute mockery. The image is powerful – just like all myths.

            But there’s no such thing as writer’s block. No writer worthy of the name is ever unable to write something. Writing is a kind of mania: it happens to you whether you want it to or not. “Wanting to be a writer” is a daydream indulged by people with other things to do.

Like any other mania, it alienates people upon whose understanding you may have presumed. Like any other mania, it will drag you by the hair to an absurd peak and show you the view; then – just when you’ve begun to feel safe in your own omniscience – it will dig its fingers into your throat, fuck you with a broom handle and hurl you from the precipice. Like any other mania, you either manage it or you don’t.

            No, the blank page doesn’t frighten real writers. The truly terrifying thing is the full page. Writer’s block, if there is such a thing, isn’t the inability to write – it’s the utter certainty that nothing you have written is of any use to anybody. Or that it will hurt someone you’d rather you didn’t.

            Great writing is like music. From the ether it springs, perfect in pitch and rhythm. Sensuous, unintellectual, it enters the mind only via the soul. By the alchemy of the word it transforms impressions into experience, evoking, transporting, caressing. It makes the general specific, and the personal universal.

            Good writing is like sculpture. The muse of merely good writing is Memory. A sleight of hand, it tricks the mind into seeing and feeling. You start with an ugly, unformed mass then pare away layers until something beautiful, recognisable, or at least functional is revealed. This is the hard kind of writing, but you keep chiselling away until you’re satisfied.

            No writer worthy of the name is ever satisfied.

THE GOD CONFUSION

You may be surprised that I never really address the atheist/faith debate in this space. Enough people are certain enough of their ground to do enough damage, and enough discord is being sown, without my chiming-in. That’s been my feeling, anyway.

My thoughts on the spiritual and its relation to science, history and psychology are a little too fluid and nuanced (not to say, “Fuzzy”) to express in a five-hundred word blog post or throw-away tweet. Suffice it to say, the standard arguments on both sides strike me as equally selective and dogmatic; equally irrational; and equally childish.

            But, having ranted enough about politics – a theme I’m currently unable to ponder without collapsing into suicidal despair – I figure we might just as well break the other social taboo and talk about religion for a bit (Unless, that is, you want to talk about sex. Anybody? No? Then here we go ...).

My Shepherd is Right, Your Goat-herd is Wrong

“If another mass attachment takes the place of the religious one ... the same intolerance towards outsiders will ensue as in the era of the Wars of Religion, and if differences of scientific opinion ever managed to attain a similar level of importance for masses, the result would be the same for this motivation as well.”

 – Freud,

                                               Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ‘I’

Nobody can deny the damage that has been done whenever one group, fired by zeal for the certain righteousness of its cause, has sought to impose its religion on another. It is fundamentally important to recognise that modern, proselytising Atheism – typified by Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling – springs from precisely the same psychological ground.

            It has, although forever invoking its name, nothing to do with science. We see in the New Atheists the same narrow focus; the same belief that a benighted world, in thrall to false idols, can be delivered by their own special brand of Truth; the same blindness to any possible virtues in the enemy; and the same willingness to twist accepted facts – or invent them – to suit their argument as we see in any Genesis spouting evangelist.

            Richard Dawkins is a superb scientific communicator. His books and documentaries on evolutionary biology are classics of the genre. He is also, behind the calm exterior, a textbook zealot. As soon as he climbs on to his hobby-horse, any “scientific” objectivity, any semblance of scholarly argument, is abandoned and he becomes dogmatic – even shrill. His attempt, in The God Delusion, to counter a standard Christian line by asserting that Hitler was a practicing Catholic is an instructive example.

            (Since we’ve mentioned him, AC Grayling deserves a look-in too. He has been known, using that spectacular sophistry only a professional philosopher can summon, to argue against the idea of “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” – an evil and malignant precept if ever there was one!)

            Zealots are rarely zealots in one area alone; Saul of Tarsus, however brilliant his mind, was undoubtedly a bull-headed misogynist even before he fell from his horse and became Saint Paul, the Apostle to the Roman World; and so it is with Dawkins. His decades-long feud with the geologist, Stephen Jay Gould, over the correct interpretation of Darwin is again illustrative – Darwin is made the Prophet and only Dawkins, and those who agree with him, are blessed with true knowledge.

           

The Knowledge of the Wise

The world was brutal and frightening. Starvation, pestilence and invasion were always on the horizon, and they weren’t discouraged by the evolution of societies and cities. People craved certainty. Even their rulers needed someone to look up to.

            A pattern repeats itself, from the priests of Egypt and the Magi of Mesopotamia; through the Temple of Solomon and the early Christian communities; to the grandeur of the Orthodox and Imperial Roman Churches, and the desert storm of Islam.

            People looked to the secret men – the wise. Dressed in special robes, the knowing-ones disappeared into holy places to do mysterious things; to commune with the spirits over things the ordinary person didn’t understand. As they tried to unpick the screen separating world and mind, the ordinary person accepted their pronouncements on faith. And, lo, there was certainty. Civilisation progressed. It was no permanent settlement, but for a long while things went well enough – as long as nobody incited the ordinary man to go and kill infidels.

            Thankfully, it was just a stage. We’ve evolved beyond that kind of simplicity now. We were blind, and now we see. Not for modern cafe guy or Arts graduate that kind of ignorance and prejudice: cafe guy knows about science. He’s read The God Delusion – or at least heard of it.

            Now men and women in white coats disappear into laboratories to do things cafe guy doesn’t understand, and cafe guy accepts their gifts; civilisation progresses. He views the entire universe through this half-comprehending prism, but cafe guy finds certainty in that soothing word, science. This is not at all like blind faith.

            And, oh, the delicious zeal with which he – although unable to tell the difference between a pulsar and a proton – berates those religious types for their stupidity. He knows better. He is not at all self-righteous, merely right. He has it from on high.

The Uncertainty Principle

“What is ‘Truth’?”

 – Pontius Pilatus

            The Dawkinses, Graylings and cafe guys of the world are entitled to their beliefs. Just don’t say that it’s science. Don’t claim to be ridding the world of the Plague while you spread Ebola. Maybe someday we’ll evolve beyond religious bigotry but, if the New Atheists are any indication, we’re not there yet.

            Science is more than people with Bunsen-burners and telescopes – it’s a habit of mind. It infers laws from evidence. It doesn’t twist evidence to fit its theories. It remains alive to possibilities, looked for or not. Selling dogma in the name of science is no better than invoking a god of love on the way to war.

            Kierkegaard posited that it’s impossible to prove or disprove the existence of god; that we can only examine ourselves and make a decision – a conscious decision, not facile posturing based on no more than prejudice – for or against. Both options require courage. Either way will be hard. Either way, we accept the consequences. And either way, we decide for ourselves and no-one else. That seems about the most honest treatment of the question.

            Wisdom begins in admitting we don’t know something. Ignorance – and bigotry – begins in thinking we know something we can’t.

AUSTRALIA DECIDES - WHAT, EXACTLY?

“For those who’ve come across the seas we’ve boundless plains to share,

With courage let us all combine to advance Australia fair.”

So, here we are again, election time. Most of us have already made up our minds, based on what we’ve heard on talk-back radio or what we’ve seen on breakfast TV and the front page of the newspaper.

The rest don’t care, just want it to be over, and either won’t vote at all or will vote for whomever we hate the least. Politicians are all the same.

            So are elections. Lost among the Who do you trust?; the Costings! Black hole! Surplus! Surplus! Surplus!; and the Yeah, but what are you gonna give ME? is the main reason for having elections at all. We don’t just choose our government, we also decide who we are and who we’ll be as a nation – either deliberately or by default.

Psychopaths Dressed as Clowns

First, discard the idea that politicians are any worse than they’ve ever been. If you doubt me, spend ten minutes reading up on democratic Athens and the Roman, French and US Republics.

            Politics is no more than the art of dealing with us, the polity – citizens (Interesting word, “citizen”). Most politicians have always been, by nature, timid creatures, and god knows it’s not easy for them.

            Imagine spending your whole career trying to please, on the one hand, powerful economic interests with strict demands and the means to make your life difficult; and, on the other, a polity with a five-minute attention span and no idea what it wants until someone tells it – which thing it then wants fervently and immediately, for five minutes before it wants the opposite.

            Granted, every now and then you get a politician with ideals and convictions, and that can be either good, or very, very bad. The rest are condemned to glib sloganeering, and perpetual posturing to appear nicer or tougher than they really are.

            Politics is a feedback-loop – and interactive multi-media and a twenty-four hour news cycle have amplified it to a head-splitting whine. Between tweeting, dancing for us on cooking shows and panel discussions, and digesting a different, ridiculous poll every few minutes, is it any wonder the poor darlings don’t have time to think about running an economy or building a nation?

Change the Government, Change the Country

The last time we had a choice between two leaders with a clear vision for the country – and some vague notion of how to achieve it – was 1996. Before that election, Paul Keating famously said that if you change the government, you change the country. It’s something of a chicken-or-egg debate, but he was right.

            A friend once remarked that he saw no evidence of the “Keating Vision”. There’s a good reason for that. While John Howard spent eleven years burying it, the ALP back-pedalled frantically away from it – for fear of being seen to have any notions that might challenge us.

            Howard didn’t remake us in his own image. There’s a good reason for that, too: he didn’t have to. We are him and he is us. Conservative – not to say, reactionary. Insular – not to say, xenophobic. Nostalgic – not to say, hidebound. Aspiring to comfort – not to say, complacency. Wily, cautious, suspicious and greedy.

            So, after a brief experiment during the eighties and early nineties with having a modern, responsive economy; with having a mature, compassionate, outward-looking society; with trying to grow into a new division rather than occasionally punching above our weight; we walked with Honest John, hand-in-hand into his new version of Old Australia.

            (I’m not going to waste time with details. If you’re interested, turn the iPhone off and go read a book: I recommend Paul Kelly’s – not that one – The March of Patriots, and Ozonomics by Andrew Charlton. For a start.)

            Why the historical digression? Because what Howard did remake in his own image was our politics. John Hewson said of Howard, “He ran on prejudice, not policy. He would have spent his way out of any problem, and taken any opportunity to play the race card [... he] is a great hater ....” Sound familiar?

            Kevin Rudd is Howard without the political sense or discipline. Tony Abbott is Howard without the caution, restraint, or baseline sanity. Neither of them has Keating’s imagination – or balls. To paraphrase Denny Crane, We all speak Howard now.

Deciding

So, we vote.

We think we care about the economy, but few of us have the faintest clue how it works.

We think we care about the environment, as long as caring for it doesn’t cost us anything.

We think we care about a compassionate society – a “fair go” – as long as nobody else gets more than we do. Especially if they come here clinging to the shadow of a boat. Or if they’re a single mother. Or out of work.

Maybe this election we should just get to grips with what we’ve become: a frightened, immature, navel-gazing nation of delusional bourgeoisie and wannabe real estate speculators with no real idea what we have – and no intention of finding out – but who are nonetheless certain that millions of brown-skinned terrorists are on their way to take it from us. Or ...

Maybe we could stop paying attention to “news” shows that will tell us anything, so long as it fills two minutes of airtime. Maybe we could tune-out the pompous, bloviating talk-back jocks who are no better informed than their audience. Maybe we could ignore the “newspapers” dictated to by a crooked billionaire who doesn’t even live here. Or devote a bit more time to thinking about our politics than it takes to scan our newsfeeds.

Maybe we could decide to try being that great, grown-up nation Paul Keating told us we could be. It’ll take time but, trust me, our leaders will follow us.

We have the world’s most boring national anthem, but the second verse – the one we never sing – is really quite good. Maybe we could adopt and aspire to it:

“Beneath our radiant Southern Cross

we’ll toil with hearts and hands

            To make this commonwealth of ours

                        renowned of all the lands.

            For those who’ve come across the seas

                        we’ve boundless plains to share –

            With courage, let us all combine

                        to advance Australia fair”.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering: when confronted by a choice between two mobs of clowns, I’ll go for the one that doesn’t see everything in terms of boats – if you don’t already own a good one, or can’t conjure one out of thin air, then you deserve to drown – every time.)

THE THING YOU HATE THE MOST

Half-life. Interesting expression. Multi-faceted. Technically, it’s the length of time your body needs to dispose of a given drug in a predictable cycle ­– therefore a measure of addictiveness. The same term is used for elemental decay on a cosmological scale. It’s how carbon-dating works, and how we can estimate the age of the universe. Reverse alchemy: everything precious or powerful turns inexorably to lead or coal.

Half-life, la demi-vie, also describes pretty accurately a junkie’s mode of existence. Days dictated by an eight-hour elimination cycle, you’re never truly alive, and always one miscalculation from death. Trapped in the half-life, the only constants are alternating degradation, pain and oblivion.

It’s no coincidence that so many artists, poets and writers have been addicts of one kind or another. Addiction, la demi-vie and the associated plunge into le demi-monde are their own metaphors. The metaphor is the only thing that makes the experience worthwhile. And you needn’t be a writer – or a junkie – to make use of it.

The Con

Half-life is also the con they sell you when you move from junk to methadone. Heroin has a half-life of eight hours; methadone three-times that. You’ll be able, they say, to break out of the thrice-daily scoring pattern and constant search for cash for your next fix. You’ll be more stable, they say. You’ll be more free.

In truth, you’ve just chained an anchor to your waist and dived deeper into la demi-vie. Whatever its drawbacks, the heroin cycle at least kept you on your toes. That eight-hourly itch dragged you closer to life. Three times a day, you had a chance to think about changing. Methadone doesn’t make you more stable, just more complacent. Semi-comatose, you lose touch with reality. You gradually lose the ability to hope for something better.

Like all such swindles, you’ve already signed-on to the con before you realise its true cost. That cost, again, is half-life.

Your body eliminates half its store of heroin in eight hours. The next eight hours, half the remainder, and so on. You’re ten cycles or three days in before the worst withdrawals hit. Ten more cycles – three more days – and most of the drug is gone; your body can begin repairing. Ten or twelve days and you’re beginning to feel better. Six weeks or so and you’re “cured”.

Now, multiply all that by three and you can see the favour methadone has done you. It’s kept you alive – half alive, anyway – and given you time to think. All good cons seem to pay-off big at first. A steadily reducing dose brings moments of clarity, and you start making plans. You rediscover that most precious of things, hope. You feel well, you feel strong, and you take the big step.

A week in, you think you’re doing okay. Ten days and you’re starting to wonder. A fortnight brings the crash. After five weeks you can’t help feeling hope has turned to coal in your hands. C’est la demi-vie; on ne la peut pas échapper.

                                                Control

We all surrender control to something. We do it out of love, or because it’s the least-worst alternative. We always grow to hate the thing we surrender to – and to hate ourselves for doing it. William Burroughs called it the algebra of need: the less you have, the more you need, and the more you need, the less you have. And everything decays.

It doesn’t have to be a drug. We elect governments then hate them because we elected them. We project our hatreds outward, because they’re unbearable to hold on to. We fall in love then grow to hate the very qualities that attracted us in the first place; not because we hate the loved-one, but because we hate our surrender. We hate our need, but we love to be needed. So we stay, in our drug, in hate. Or we try oblivion.

The metaphor at the heart of addiction and recovery may be translated thus: you can’t remain breathing and opt-out of being. Happiness can exist only when its opposite is acknowledged. Even pain can be precious. Everything is, and nothing and no-one is of itself. Everything decays, but only after it finishes growing. Nurture prolongs growth. Some surrender is necessary. So is the odd fight.

Die. Or, stay alive and stay awake.

Half-life is no life at all.

THANK YOUSE

“Lucky me, my days are bright and sunny

just because you’ve been

so very good to me.”

–         Johnny O’Keefe

To the trusted mentor who saw enough of his young self in me to think I should have the heroin experience too, thank you. It really did expand my poetic vision – for about a fortnight during which I was, sadly, too stoned to write. And for kicking my ass onto the street in the middle of the HSC when you finally figured out I wouldn’t be Rimbaud to your Verlaine, thank you.

            To the dealers: “Hey, where’s the missus? You know, you two are my favourite people. Whaddayou need, a quarter? You be careful now, it’s strong. Take care; I’ll be seeing you – soon”. Thank you.

            To the staff at the methadone clinic, so friendly, so solicitous, so willing to keep taking my money for another decade or two if I’d been willing to keep giving it; your barrage of concerned phone calls, when a guy you set your clocks by for thirteen years suddenly vanished for thirteen days, has been touching, really touching. Thank you, thank you all.

            To my one-time wife, it’s each other we have to thank that we’re both still alive and able to carry on, stronger. Only you know how truly ugly I can be. You’re family, always – thank you.

            To my family and friends, loved ones all, who never let their worry show more than their faith; for having the grace to realise that a life isn’t wasted until it’s over – thank you.

            To old friends found anew, for reminding me of what I was before drugs and chaos took hold – and for not running a mile from a thirty-something junkie – thank you.

            And to the Lady: other half of an explosion that tore my life apart, burning away complacency. Yeah, it’s you – and that ain’t bad. Thank you.

            My mistakes are all my own; my virtues largely learnt from others. I intend to reward the patience of those who’ve suffered for and through me. From the bottom of my raw but healing heart, thank you all.

THE COST OF SUGAR

Although based-on-fact, parts of this narrative have been fictionalised: for reasons of continuity, several marsupials may have been combined into one; the author has at no time actually worn razorpants (Note: the author asserts his rights as originator of the word “razorpants”. Any unauthorised use breaches intellectual property laws).

Four-thirty a.m., day four of detox; you discover you’ve run out of not only cigarettes, but also sugar. It is now you realise that you are truly alone. It’s intolerable. You’re sure you remember something about this in the UN Charter of Human Rights: No person shall be deprived of a cigarette and sweetened coffee on his or her balcony – especially if he or she is withdrawing from methadone.

            There follows a mad ransacking of cupboards and drawers, searching for the magpied remnants of a hundred hotel stays. Triumph sinks in despair when what you thought was a sachet of honey turns out to be salad-dressing. For a moment you wonder how vinaigrette would go with coffee, but abandon the idea. There are those stock-cubes, though ... no, it’s hopeless; you’re just going to have to go out and get some.

            That Vegemite toast you forced yourself to eat might have been a mistake. This occurs to you while you’re exercising in an effort to spike your endorphin levels. Sometime after the thirtieth sit-up you find you can’t sit-back-down again. You hear a noise like a goose being throttled, and take a few seconds to realise that it’s coming from you – this is because you’re distracted by the fact that your legs have seized-up too.

After an awkward minute resembling something from an advanced yoga manual – or a pretzel recipe – you collapse back on to the rug, catch your breath and steel yourself for your coming shower. You still have some self-respect – some – and before you leave the house you want to wash away as much as you can of the stink of your condition: that broiling meat smell of detox sweat, and the other little pleasantnesses that accompany the male version of opioid withdrawal.

You feel a little better after a shower, the way one might after resting a while on a bed of hot nails. Then your deodorant collides with the histamines storming your body: now you’re going to sneeze – a lot. If anyone has ever actually died after sneezing their brains out, they were probably a recovering junkie.

Pulling-on your two baggiest jumpers and your largest pair of jeans, you’re surprised to find they feel not nearly as bad as you’d anticipated. You’d expected to feel like there were razors sewn into the seams, but instead it’s only like you’re wearing sacks made of echidna quills. Things are looking up.

So, this is what your life has come to. It’s five-thirty on a winter morning, and you’re walking to Campsie – on purpose (That little tobacconist next to the station opens early and you resent paying service-station prices for cigarettes). The night and fog aren’t a worry, though; thankfully the shower has turned your ears into heat-lamps to guide your way. You’re Rudolph the Red-Eared fucking Junkie.

You decide withdrawal-psychosis is kicking in when a possum, attracted by the light of your ears, emerges from behind a bus-shelter. It’s not so much the possum that makes you think so as the fact that it starts talking to you. It may well have something important to say but you’ll never know; you’re too busy trying to ascertain its species to listen to it – if it’s a honey-glider, it might have a stash of sweetener nearby; and, having discovered its stash, you’ll also have discovered its young, which you can hold hostage until it returns with your smokes.

The possum apparently gets your drift, because it darts over the churchyard fence and into the darkness. The odyssey continues.

Having successfully acquired cigarettes, you stop to think about the sugar. Woolworths will be open at seven, but the sun will be up by then. You have to get back indoors before you start melting; nothing for it but to swallow your disgust and pay four times as much at the Seven-Eleven.

Twenty minutes and three cigarettes later you’re back in your kitchen, making coffee with the kind of fervour you once reserved – in similar circumstances – for heroin. It’s going to be so good. You pry the lid off the coffee tin with your teeth while ripping open the sugar bag with shaky hands; you’ll sort out the jar later, no time now. As the jug comes to the boil you bound across to the fridge, fling open the door, and realise you forgot about the milk. Weeping silently, you try to imagine going back outside. Unless ...

Is it possible to milk a possum?

JAMES GANDOLFINI, GANGSTER FILMS AND GETTING IT

James Gandolfini is dead. Those extraordinarily beautiful, savage, expressive eyes are closed. Gandolfini became famous playing a series of, to say the least, morally ambiguous characters in films and on stage. As much as his physical appearance, it was probably his ability to show the human side of these figures that landed him the lead role in The Sopranos.

            When it ended, after seven seasons, there was a lot of bitching about The Sopranos’ final scene. Me, I liked it. It provided the only realistic coda to the story of this monster we’d come to love.

            Tony Soprano is sitting in a New Jersey diner. He’s arrived ahead of his family, and kills time by picking a song on the juke-box and ordering some onion rings. Having just come out on top in a brutal mob-war, Tony feels relaxed; comfortable; safe.

            The story-arc that’s brought us here has seen nearly everyone close to him killed. His shrink, after years of soul-searching, has finally figured out Tony’s a psychopath – therefore, worse than incurable – and cut him loose. As his wife and brat kids begin arriving, the camera hits a note of dissonance. We see a guy emerging from the men’s room; another sitting at the bar – is he just taking in the surroundings, or was there something in that look? Is Tony paranoid? Are we?

            Many viewers felt cheated that we didn’t get to see that bullet pumped into Tony Soprano’s head. They miss the point the filmmakers are trying to get across: this is it for Tony; whether now or later, it’s coming. If he doesn’t die of lung-cancer in a prison infirmary, chances are that, sometime, his kids will have to see his brains blown out all over his onion rings. He can never relax. Tony’s life is not glamorous; not something to aspire to; at best, it’s a treadmill of tedium – at worst, a nightmare for him and anyone unfortunate enough to be near him.

            As Channel Nine prepares to launch yet another season of Underbelly, rhapsodising yet another thug/pimp/murderer, it’s worth taking a moment to think about how we react to gangster films. Most of us just don’t get it. To quote my friend Parkstreet, Underbelly: the Golden Mile turned Kings Cross into Disneyland for wannabe gangsters. We see, in these films and TV series, people with money and power; people who are respected or feared; people to whom the normal rules don’t seem to apply. We glamorise them and miss the ugliness at the heart of their stories.

            Mention Scarface and someone will almost certainly come out with, “Say hello to my little friend!” The abiding image is of a guy with a machine-gun-mounted grenade-launcher, taking on all comers after snorting a mountain of coke. Most forget that he ends up dead in his fountain, riddled with bullets, after murdering his best friend and seeing his sister shot before his eyes.

            Even Michal Corleone in the Godfather films – a man who genuinely wants to be good – for all his power and wealth, dies alone and tormented. His family has been destroyed, his daughter killed in front of him by someone trying to kill him. He feels like he’s sold his soul for some beans.

            When asked why he made the endings of Godfather Two and Three so dark, Francis Ford Coppola said it was because the audience somehow missed the point he was making in the first film: that what these people are doing is bad.

            And that was James Gandolfini’s triumph: to create a character so human, so commonplace – and at the same time so truly appalling – that we have to relate to him. If we pay attention we can see ourselves in him, and know that he is nothing we want to be.

            Some actors last for decades, recreating themselves time and again. Others, it seems, are born for a single role which burns itself indelibly into the collective consciousness. James Gandolfini was the latter. I’m glad he was with us a while.