My chook, Pesky, looking for a star to steer by

Stars to steer by; we need them, whether we know we’re using them or not.

A pilot needs a harbour light, a navigator a star or compass bearing, a car driver a traffic light or roadside edge.

But inside the mind as we choose how to steer, what happens there?  How do we ‘see’ the star, what thoughts do we have as we choose how to react to it?

At some moment during so many years in prison, Nelson Mandela chose forgiveness as his star.

So it was that when he was released from prison he won more power, and brought more peace, than if he had left with revenge or hate or bitterness in his mind and heart.

When I lose my bearings I try to remember to ask, “What would Mandela say?”  It’s a beaut question to turn to when things get tough, when things are said or done which might damage me or others.

The answer often brings me to a smile, or a moment of peace or silence or, best of all, laughter.

My chook Pesky asks, “What’s next to peck?”   Or, “Should I run away?”.  She is in perpetual zen, always in the moment – of pecking, or preparing to run, or sunning herself.

Just my thoughts,

M

“When Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality,” the Nobel commission rightly called her “the Mozart of poetry” — but, wary of robbing her poetry of its remarkable dimension, added that it also emanates “something of the fury of Beethoven.” I often say that she is nothing short of Bach, the supreme enchanter of the human spirit.”

To hear Amanda Palmer read the poem, it’s here:

LIFE WHILE YOU WAIT

Life While-You-Wait.

Performance without rehearsal.

Body without alterations.

Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.

I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot

just what this play’s all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,

I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.

I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.

I trip at every step over my own ignorance.

I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.

My instincts are for happy histrionics.

Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.

Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can’t take back,

stars you’ll never get counted,

your character like a raincoat you button on the run —

the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,

or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!

But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.

Is it fair, I ask

(my voice a little hoarse,

since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).

You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz

taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.

I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.

The props are surprisingly precise.

The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.

The farthest galaxies have been turned on.

Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.

And whatever I do

will become forever what I’ve done.

And there’s this one:

POSSIBILITIES

I prefer movies.

I prefer cats.

I prefer the oaks along the Warta.

I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.

I prefer myself liking people

to myself loving mankind.

I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.

I prefer the color green.

I prefer not to maintain

that reason is to blame for everything.

I prefer exceptions.

I prefer to leave early.

I prefer talking to doctors about something else.

I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems

to the absurdity of not writing poems.

I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries

that can be celebrated every day.

I prefer moralists

who promise me nothing.

I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.

I prefer the earth in civvies.

I prefer conquered to conquering countries.

I prefer having some reservations.

I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.

I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.

I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.

I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.

I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.

I prefer desk drawers.

I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here

to many things I’ve also left unsaid.

I prefer zeroes on the loose

to those lined up behind a cipher.

I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.

I prefer to knock on wood.

I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.

I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility

that existence has its own reason for being.

“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man hangs onto you. You want to save him but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
Anais Nin, February 1947

So it was with pleasure that I came across a book that explores silence.

Here are some morsels from an article about it:

“Smith was looking for a way to get at precisely that unrehearsed language, so the linguist suggested three questions to crack the shell of verbal habit: “Have you ever come close to death?”; “Do you know the circumstances of your birth?”; and“Have you ever been accused of something that you did not do?” Armed with a simple Panasonic tape recorder and dogged dedication to what was at first merely an intuitive insight, Smith made these questions the springboard for her interviews. She eventually stopped asking them, but the questions, she notes, taught her how to listen. She recalls:

After I asked the questions, I would listen like I had never listened before for people to begin to sing to me. That singing was the moment when they were really talking.”

The article begins like an outgoing surf wave that sucks my body and mind in:

“In his exquisite taxonomy of the nine kinds of silence, Paul Goodman included “the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear.” And yet so often we think of listening as merely an idle pause amid the monologue of makingourselves clear. Hardly anyone has done more to advance the art of listening in a culture of speaking more than artist, actor, playwright, educator, and enchantress of words Anna Deavere Smith, founder and director of Harvard’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.”

The article is How to listen between the lines by Maria Popova, and the book is Talk to me; listening between the lines by Anna Deavere Smith.

And those 9 silences?

Goodman writes:

‘Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.”

There is a recording of Christopher Ricks  reading Goodman’s poetry on WBUR’s Stylus program:

Go to, or as some say, “Listen up”.

M

An Arundel Tomb

By Philip Larkin

Bronte on my mind, in my eyes and on my flesh

An almost invisible, tiny critter a centimetre long – a baby praying mantis? – on the table in front of me.
Earth gifts me beauty, silence, peace.

Bronte ocean pool gives moments of beauty, simplicity

I’ve put on idleness like a pair of comfortable summer shorts.

Books everywhere on the floor around my bed and on my bedside tables like a still life mice plague, ungovernable.  Their numbers and mess say it’s January, when I reflect, read, plan. What was last year about, what did I do badly or well, what would I like to do this year? I pretend to find answers.

And there are movies, walks, morning swims in the ocean.

Watching wartime England reject then embrace then reject again the genius of Alan Turing in the film, The imitation game, I saw how shame can outdo intellect, generosity, achievement and honour. It’s said Turing cut short WWII by two years and saved millions of lives. (See it; Cummerbatch acts so finely.)  After the war Turing was convicted of a crime relating to homosexuality and chose the court’s offer of a two year course of hormone treatment by which he would castrate himself in preference to a jail sentence but killed himself after the first year; during this period the state left him to swing in the wind of prejudice, unprotected, unthanked, friendless.

The story of Turing, how his country betrayed him, and the role of shame in private and public man, brought me to the poet who has so much to say to me about love, loss, shame, hope and beauty – Rilke – and to this:

“I love the dark hours of my life

which deepen my senses;

in them, as in old letters, I find

my daily life already lived

and, like legends, distantly beyond.

From these hours comes the awareness that I

have room for a second life, timeless and wide.

And sometimes I’m like the tree, ripe and

murmuring, which fulfils that dream

above a grave, the one a boy in the past

- so that he could press it into his warm roots -

lost in sorrows and songs.”

I love the image of the boy of the past in the ‘grave’ who nourishes the grown man, especially the words, “ripe and murmuring”: they speak of hope, motivation and energy and encourage me to linger in last year’s moments.

Lily, the family dog, a King Charles Cavalier, who brought spontaneity and smiles to us all, who we loved, died this year. I can’t walk through Sydney uni’s lawns in front of the grand building without remembering Lily running full tilt boogy in circles in early winter mornings, the frost water flying in a wide arc from her suspended ears like a garden hose dancing; gods, there was joy in a mutt on the move, right there.  A native mint has been planted above her grave.  She barks and smiles and runs, still.

A borrowed book, Maestro John Monash – Australia’s greatest citizen general, by the former Australian politician, Tim Fischer, describes the genius and triumphs of Sir John Monash despite prejudice and institutional calumny.  From it I learnt how Sir Keith Murdoch, the publisher, and CE Bean, the historian, conspired to badmouth and to have Monash sacked, sidelined and unrecognised because he was a Jew.

By his high level of planning, imagination, robust review of previous strategies and intense level of integration of all things needed to make war Monash cut short WWI by at least a year. A highly successful engineer in civil life Monash applied analytical discipline to the planning and execution of the Battle of Hamel.  He planned it to last 93 minutes and it went for 94.  It became the template for the rest of the war and its success was repeated leading to the war’s end.

The English King George V gave more recognition to Monash than did Australians, and travelled to the French battlefield to knight Monash. The King’s respect, recognition and friendship with Monash made Australia’s then Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, jealous, who then did his best to keep Monash unrecognised and in England away from Australia after the war so he, Hughes, could campaign for re-election without the public being distracted by Monash’s widely recognised war achievements.

The least approachable of January’s books, technical, with no obvious heart or warmth, is a book that’s finely crafted, rich with extraordinary amounts of research and professional experience and which nonetheless ends up with a backbone of humanity; Affect regulation and the repair of the self by Allan N Schore.  I read it to explore and get another angle on Turing’s experience, and mine, to seek to understand how we humans react to the emotion of shame.

“The essential psychological lesion in these individuals . . to shame and to a failure to self regulate emotional experience . . . is that they do not have the capacity to tolerate or to recover from narcissistic injuries that expose negative affect, especially hypoaroused affects like narcissistic rage and hypoaroused shame, while maintaining constructive engagement with others.  The coping ability to affectively reconnect with an emotionally significant other after a shame-stress separation, and indeed to use the other to recover after shame associated narcissistic injury and object loss has never effectively developed in this personality structure due to its early practising experiences . . . Shame-prone narcissistic personalities are known to suffer from narcissistic injury-triggered, overwhelming, internal self-shaming tendencies and repetitive oscillations of self-esteem, which necessitate ‘endless attempts at repair’ . . . ‘the task of the narcissistic repair mechanism is to be rid of shame’ . . . Without a system to actively cope with and thereby tolerate this potent affect, the immature, undeveloped, archaic superego avoids risk experiences that are potential points of shameful self-exposure, thereby diminishing the expansion and the province of the ego ideal.”  (3)

Which brought me to reflect on today’s Australian political life, politicians and Australia’s civic ego.  I toyed with re-reading Richard Sennet’s, The fall of public man, which  explores this, but the weather, walks and beach had put me in too good a mood to linger on societal disappointments, so it remains on the bookshelf, unplaguing me or my floor.

Fortunately, I’d discovered Men explain things to me and its author, Rebecca Solnit.  Solnit’s shaken me up about thought itself, writing, reading and walking, and her books make up two of the still-life mice on the floor. I’ll read the rest of her works this year.

In Wanderlust Solnit explores the history, motives, ways we walk.  There’s a running footer (how appropriate is that?) through the book with quotes from dozens of writers who have described walking and it’s hard to choose between them and the text itself there’s so much to catch the imagination.  In it she mentions an essay by Virginia Woolf about walking and it’s a treat:

“No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil.

But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and

dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes,

and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the

builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the

pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a

pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the

greatest pleasure of town life in winter — rambling the streets of London.

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter

the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are

grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for

shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour,

too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.

We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine

evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.”

Woolf’s description of the chaos she sees and loves in the second hand bookshop on her walk suggests something of the January chaos in my room:

“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books;

they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a

charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in

this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete

stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the

world.”.

An old favourite, contained in The Penguin Book of the Ocean, washed up one of my favourite essays, The gray beginnings, by Rachel Carson. If you want an example of how to write about science this would be as good a place to start as any:

“When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea.  Fish, amphibian and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal – each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as sea water. . . . In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time.  Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea . . . ”.

Strangely, the news that Australia’s birds were the authors of birdsong and also the most aggressive in the world cheered me up; that seemed like a moment of backbone in the midst of Australia’s jellied body politic.  It’s described in Where song began, by Tim Low:

“The feature of Australia that is most revealing, I am convinced, is all the aggression between [bird] species . . . what impresses me is how often I see it in the vicinity of eucalypts, banksias, and their relatives . . . during six weeks . . . in Europe and North America, the only sustained bird aggression I saw was around a eucalypt planted in parkland near Los Angeles.  Hummingbirds were defending its flowers, and a hooded oriole its lerp, although they were only attacking their own kind . . . ”.

Whatever.

Of all this it’s walking and swimming which speaks most to all of me – body, heart and mind – and that’s when my mind is blessedly emptiest, the thing I am may hear, see and feel best.

The island photographed by Peter Dombrovskis that became the image for the campaign to save the Franklin river from being flooded by a dam

The only way to see the Franklin River close up is by raft or kayak.  You can fly over it, but to see it in all of its moods, to dwell along its shores, to see the platypus at play, you have but one choice and that is hop into a raft.

Alongside 11 other people led by three licensed guides, I rafted its rapids for seven days and camped in the wilderness under open skies or tarpaulins when it rained.

Constant noise from the start of cascading river water and waterfalls down the ravine walls. Wetness and trees everywhere, always, and my flesh wet always, too.  By day three I smelt doggish.

About six or so rapids were un-navigable – too dangerous, usually where the ravines narrow.  To avoid them, and to get the rafts and gear over or around is difficult. Ropes are sometimes the only way to climb these, where I pulled myself up by hand, standing out from the cliff face and suddenly trusting the rope and iron picks fixing the rope I’ve only just met, all the while with a 20kg pack on my back to share the moment with: I found this focused my mind.

Without mobile phones, no reception, no watches or jewellery it’s unavoidable to lose track of time.  Yesterdays became lifetimes ago.  The time of the day became marked by sun and shade. Without seeking it, the only time became now.

Me, a few days into the river

There’s nothing like rafting the Franklin to focus a man’s mind.

Life alternately shrinks down to, “Am I wet or cold, or, about to drown?”, and opens out to, “This is endless beauty, magic.”

We saw a quoll (well two of us did) and a platypus (I would write the plural of that but the unfinished debate among fellow rafters about the correct plural compels me to only say we saw two of them – it may be some time before I return to my previous proclivities for grammar, spelling and such).

Hard times were there from a growing tedious certainty that each morning I’d have to put on a wet cold wetsuit and undergarments.  Rotten stuff. After ‘wetting up’ (formerly known as getting dressed) and climbing on the raft so the body that was mine in it floated off for the first time of the day it was the risks and new world of the next bend and rapid which dispelled my cold wetness to somewhere  in what was becoming an expanding animal me.

Waterfalls, every 100 or so metres

Seven days and two good sleeps, the best on the last night.

Then what a note some of us ended on. Six of us took off in a seaplane in calm, generous sunlight.

The Franklin from our seaplane after we cleared it’s cliffs

The seaplane was only able to escape the river and scale the cliffs by banking through river bends ‘til, about three bends later, enough height had been gained for us, embraced in a new roaring noise this time from the one engine (that can’t be enough, I thought) to rise high enough to see the river that had been our home and heart for the last week.

But imagine this.

About 40 minutes later we had a two minute descent from 5500 feet down past a mountain dominating Hobart (Mt Wellington), and made a long curving half circle to land on the Derwent river, there to taxi to a wharf just 200 metres from our hotel, The Henry Jones Art Hotel.

Flying down to ‘land’ on the Derwent river then taxi to Constitution Dock where we walked to the nearby Henry Jones Art Hotel

Sitting under the shower there, washing off a week of sweat, smells and feeling the known – ‘sane’? – world return this much seemed clear; you got to do the hard stuff to know how peace feels.  At least I did.

[The food, Nant Whisky - like a butterscotch bikkie, and the clear light of Hobart can be seen in these photos - we soaked these up before the trip and I held on to memories of them:

Little did my smiling self know what the week ahead on the river held for me

• Kylie’s review of the Water by Nature rafting trip is here.

The same goes for me, anyone wishing to be ‘sustainable’, and all of us seeking to sustain our lovely Earth.

I’ve written about this in my column, Bathurst Burr, for The Fifth Estate.

I reviewed the book for Spectrum in the Sydney Morning Herald, here.

Enjoy

Michael