Sweet 16 And Never Been Whipped

Earlier today I watched as the aptly named Black Caviar won her sixteenth straight race, and her seventh Group One win.  Yeah, so what, you might well rhetorically ask, there is always going to be some champion horse/dog/human/whatever popping up and standing out, what makes this so remarkable?

Well it isn't the facts, that's for sure.  The facts are rightly impressive, certainly; she's beaten very good horses, consistently, carrying large weights in handicaps, and in pretty much all her recent streak she's won by a very large margin.  Even in the notoriously cynical 'there's-always-someone-whining-that-this-horse-isn't-a-patch-on-so-and-so' world of Australian thoroughbred fanciers and punters it's virtually uncontroversial to claim she is very much the best racehorse in the world right now.  Today's odds in the Group One Patinack Farm Classic at Flemington were $1.03.  Yep, the bookies would only pay you 3 cents for each dollar you risked.

Watching her outwardly unremarkable win today though I had one of those literal visceral feelings.  I felt that hollow sensation we associate sometimes with awe, or fear, or anticipation in my solar plexus, spreading out and down throughout my abdomen.  Yet it was not an exciting race.  It didn't even have a turn, being 1200 metres down the famous Flemington straight.  They jumped from the barriers in a nice line, Black Caviar settling easily second, there was no jostle or hustle at any point, and come the 400 metre mark regular jockey Luke Nolen let her proceed at her own pace.  Thus, by the 300 metre mark she had cantered out to a 3 length lead.  Then she just relaxedly motored home as the horses going flat-out behind all fought it out for the minor placings.  I can't remember now who took second and third but they were good horses all.  I realised afterwards, as she was winding down to turn around and trot back up to scale, what it was that was missing in the race.  She never actually galloped.  She seemed to just canter along, and then canter a bit quicker.  Amazing.

Commentator and former champion jockey Simon Marshall (whose quip I have lifted for the title of this post, thank you Simon) said something very telling today about her.  He related what her trainers and riders have all noted - that when you ride her in work or in a race, you never have to "ask her to go" - referring to that moment when a jockey urges a horse to speed up - it rather being a matter of "letting her go".  She knows.  She has decided luckily to allow her riders to ask her at times "not to go".

It's not the facts, it's the way she goes about her life and vocation.  If you're the sort of person who sees racehorses as simply livestock used by man for competition then you've not even bothered to read this far into what is clearly shaping up to be some sort of ode.  I know that horses are just as individual, embodied with personality, smarts, feelings and some......other sense that we humans recognise as sharing too.  Maybe you'd call it a spirituality.  There's a quality that racing aficionados refer to known as 'class', and that is related as well.  It means something akin to gutsiness, the will to strive and get in front, the thing that in humans we think of as 'digging deep' to push ourselves to go further, faster, to respond to pressure with greater effort - to conjure something special.  And what we have here in Black Caviar is an outlier in all these ways, not just sheer speed.

She's a large mare at 16.2 hands, and covers a furlong in nine strides, as opposed to the average eleven.  They're facts, and yes, impressive, like the weight a bodybuilder can bench-press.  But we're talking about something much deeper here.  It's not the facts that gather the crowds who throng racecourses to see her run, who make costumes and wear masks in her colours (black spots on a salmon background) or fuel the mad cheering as she runs home first with ease.  So many of the bets placed today on track will never be collected, not because it's a bit silly to get your 3 cents from a dollar bet, but so that someone has a souvenir betting ticket; proof they were there on that day.  We don't cheer champions because of the facts of their winning - we cheer them because they touch us in some deep way.

And horses like this one reach across the species barrier that much more easily I think by dint of their extreme power of 'person'.  I'm not saying she's closer to human, or more intelligent or anything along those lines, I'm saying she's charismatic, like some elite human athletes are (and like some strive to be but aren't, not for want of trying; I'm looking at you for example, Usain Bolt).  We feel the resonance within us, if we pay attention.

Most people in modern western society have lost their level of comfort around horse.  We don't live with them every day like we used to only a couple of generations ago.  Every child at the start of the 20th century, even in a crowded city, would know the basics of safe horse sense, and be able at a glance to understand what a horse is saying to us.  That's because they'd have seen horses in the flesh every day, just like you might see a dog or cat for example.

In Black Caviar what we're seeing is a horse whose sheer purity of archetypal horse-ness, almost as if she's a perfect avatar of the ur-horse made flesh, gets through the coldness of that distance.  Her animus vibrates that magnificent emotional receptor (and some say transmitter) system we share with equus caballus, the enteric nervous system, in a deeper and more easily noticeable way than other horses, even great ones.  Everyone is programmed to respond, biologically, to the sound and feel of a bunch of horses thundering past, it's in our blood, but Black Caviar makes horse felt on a different plane entirely.

I'm comfortable with horse, I have always had a good relationship generally with most horses.  I think I was lucky to have had a great horse train me in the way they communicate and what is important in life to them.  But I'm not special.  Anyone can share this experience, and I hope one day you get to stand in the presence of one such outstanding creature.  She's supposedly coming to Perth in a few weeks, and we plan on going down to see her.  To see her win, easily, most likely, but mainly to pay our respects.  To thank her for incarnating, for choosing to live with us as an exemplar and ambassador of that thing we need, that we constantly seem in danger of losing, one of the most brightly coloured yet ancient connecting threads that bind us with our own natural history and species selves, the thing that is horse.  Words will fail to describe or articulate it, I know, and even cross-species communication legends like Monty Roberts or Temple Grandin or Linda Kohanov have not yet fully managed to do it justice.  I suppose because it is just one of those things.  The spirit kind.  That immeasurable energy transaction.

Or what Bruce McAvaney might call, simply - ....."Special."

Bacon in the End Times of the American Empire

Y'all know I keep a fairly keen weather eye on the American polity and general zeitgeist.  I guess apart from having so many friends there it's for the same sorts of reasons that 2000 years ago a culturally engaged citizen of Judaea might be very keen on knowing what's going on in Rome.  By the way Australia, I'm happy with this analogy as is.  Let's not take it any further and be the birthplace of the next Big Religion, OK?

Anyone who has spent more than an hour on the internet in the last few years will know all about the US-centric phenomenon that is BACON MANIA.  Bacon not just as an object of obscene comestible lust but also as a sort of geeky statement; as kitsch, fashion, an in-crowd/cognoscenti sort of thing, and a mad fad that has spun off more websites, pages and products than a whole room full of young hotshot marketing and Web 2.1 startup nerds could come up with over a chatty hilarious long night of pizza and bucket bongs.  The pizza would have bacon, and possibly the bong water too.

It's a phenomenon already commented upon, certainly, so I shall simply steal the most-quoted paragraph by way of explanation for those who may not be quite aware of the depth to which this bacon mania has infected the suppurating pores of the reeling American Hegemony.

"There is: bacon ice cream; bacon-infused vodka; deep-fried bacon; chocolate-dipped bacon; bacon-wrapped hot dogs filled with cheese (which are fried, then battered and fried again); brioche bread pudding smothered in bacon sauce; hard-boiled eggs coated in mayonnaise encased in bacon -- called, appropriately, the "heart attack snack"; bacon salt; bacon doughnuts, cupcakes and cookies; bacon mints; "baconnaise," which Jon Stewart described as "for people who want to get heart disease but [are] too lazy to actually make bacon"; Wendy's "Baconnator" -- six strips of bacon mounded atop a half-pound cheeseburger -- which sold 25 million in its first eight weeks; and the outlandish bacon explosion -- a barbecued meat brick composed of 2 pounds of bacon wrapped around 2 pounds of sausage."
 ~ Arun Gupta

Hungry at all?  I bet quite a few of you are, such is the power of bacon, and the list goes on.  However I was moved to write when I spotted something so outrageous to my sensibilities that I - link-bait hardened internet denizen of yore that I am - was actually shocked for a second.  It is THIS:

 To save you the trouble of going and being horrified by the product endorsement page, in essence it claims inspiration from a published report on infant brain development pointing out that early stages were vital, that the brain was 60% fats, and that a food very high in fat and protein (bacon being 65% fat) could be of huge value to infants.  They go on:


".....Yet babies are not able to consume this most delicious of meats because they lack teeth and digestive systems that can break down solid foods.  So we consulted with pediatricians and began to experiment with drying and grinding bacon into a fine powder, then applying a patent-pending process to concentrate this powder into the most essential nutrients and ingredients for brain development. This potential infant superfood was then added to a test....."

Claims are subsequently made of amazing functional development.  By now, I hope, you've realised that this is not a real thing.  But many, many people did not when it hit the interwebs in - clue - a very early date in April.  There were two reactions, broadly, and the disgusted one was not really in the majority.  Most people seemed to think it was perfectly OK, miraculous even, a "why didn't someone already think of this" moment.  Huffington Post was certainly taken in, their article starting "So this exists".  It was so wildly successful a ruse that the 'makers', who are a real live company of "bacontrepreneurs" had to publish again saying that "the FDA had pulled the plug" on them and their claims.....and apologised to both those parents who wanted in on the trial release for their kids and the media who were conned.

I recently re-read an article from 2009, one of a few such at around that time, proclaiming that the bacon mania was at an end.  Well, that was wrong.  Still the answers remain for the begging.  Indeed, why?

"But bacon tastes goooood..."

Celebrity chef, traveller, writer and unrepentant omnivore Anthony Bourdain has called bacon a "gateway protein" for its legendary abilities in luring vegetarians back to the fold; but then again he's the guy that gave us the line "If you're slower than me, stupider than me, and you taste good, pass the salt".  It has been said that bacon possesses six ingredient types of umami which elicits an addictive chemical response.  And we all know how totally immersive the practice of modern marketers is now, right?  They now do their jobs right inside the very molecular level of the 'food' that is sold to us every day. The salesmen run the product now, to meet the market.  Or at least the market as they would have it.  It has been a very deliberate ploy on the part of fast food manufacturers especially to create addictive behaviours, leveraging the sort of studies that they knew all about but which we are only finding out about lately that show, for example, that high-calorie foods can be as addictive as cocaine.  There's also that saying in the foodservice industry in the US - "if in doubt, throw in some bacon and some cheese".

But this isn't the reason for bacon mania.  Bacon has pretty much always tasted 'good', even if it did used to actually taste a whole world better than the torture-facility-raised, synthetic-hormone and antibiotic-laden, chemically 'cured' product that passes muster most places these days.
(Garbage in = garbage out, as they say).

The taste and the price (it can be very, very cheap, and is hugely subsidized in the US) stand as enabling factors, but the mania is not caused by them.

I think that bacon mania is a cipher, an outward projection of the mass-consciousness that expresses and encapsulates as a meme a poignantly terrible - or terrifying -  combination of reckless, desperate desire, dashed hopes, a disrupted sense of self-worth and a pernicious, creeping nihilism in modern America.  It has spread beyond that Fair Land's borders to be sure, but it's there that we see its cultural roots and centre.

Bacon is, after all is said and done, Death.  Beyond merely being deceased and partly-decayed flesh, the thing that is modern bacon speaks to us of great darknesses of the soul.  No-one is truly ignorant of the Dark Side of bacon, whether they understand full well the horrors of porcine production facilities (but choose perhaps to avert their inner gaze of conscience therefrom) or simply its misused and overblown role in the average diet as emblem and embodiment of the high-fat, high-salt, health-destroying denial of self-nourishment and the triumph of sensual addiction over personal and social wellbeing.  Everyone knows that in the modern sense, bacon hurts.

Once upon a time not very long ago, the process of raising pigs, mainly done by smallholders in mixed farming, and the timeworn noble tradition of honouring the sacred offering of this life and carrying it forward - preserving the flesh that we might carry over valuable protein, fat and sustenance in leaner times, to augment and enhance our staple foods - was a far more natural practice; one which was well understood and respected.  One which was respectful of the life of the farmer, the butcher and charcuterer, the cook, the consumer and most especially the donor animal, in a way that our industrialization of flesh as product has completely erased.  Bacon used to be a most valued, almost venerated thing.  Perhaps we overeat of bacon partly in some perverse attempt to regain some of that lost meaningfulness in our lives, that more spiritual and communally-sensed sort of nourishment we imbibed at the hearth, the heart of home and community.  Maybe we seek it in this quitessentially concentrated caloric-bonanza superfood.

Most every educated American (so, most of them) know about hog raising today, about the industrialized hell that is the CAFO.  I am struggling to think of a greater insult to all that is natural and sacred, a more egregious blight upon this earth than a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, and perhaps the nastiest is the intensive indoor piggery.  I'm not going to even attempt to describe the apocalyptic nightmare that is a modern pig farm of up to 800,000 'production units', or the effects such a life has on the pigs or their soon-to-be-consumed flesh. The effects on human health of living anywhere near these monstrous abominations are legion. That's how so many of the smallholder communities were destroyed; not just by being bought out or monopolistically out-competed by corporations suckling at the teat of government largesse, but simply by building a CAFO nearby, and making all the residents so sick they have to leave.

But for a CAFO to exist, there still has to be a market for the product.

CAFOs, social and farming malpractices aside, the substance itself is now so far removed from being a natural product, so laced with the incredible cocktail of drugs the pigs are fed and all manner of chemicals to cure the meat and - yes - enhance the flavour that has been bred and fed out by a program aimed at producing carcass weight at all costs that most modern bacon is virtually toxic to our bodies in and of itself.  Never mind the overindulgence in fat and salt, the denatured compounds in modern bacon maim our health just as surely.

We love this stuff though, right?

Does the bacon mania exist despite the traumatic blight that is its production and its place as the poster-food of the obesity and other health epidemics sweeping a majority of the population into an increasingly impaired and helpless future - or does it exist in part because of these things?  Is it that we are just dumbly addicted and in a spiral of denial about the ills of baconophilia or is the horror somehow causative?

Bacon is America.  The turkey might be the official mascot of American food, with the whole Thanksgiving rites and so on, but really it should be the pig. The pig speaks to the tough, survivor side of the American image.  Not a particularly elegant animal, but street-smart, resourceful and one of the last animals you'd want to pick a fight with - also, fated to squeal with delight as it wallows in mud.

It's the bad-boy, rebel thing.  Wearing your love of bacon on your sleeve says "fuck you Diet Dictocrats, I'll eat what I want, I can handle anything thrown my way".  Perhaps no food is more guilt-producing than bacon.  Prohibited by different religions, decried as unclean, disdained by doctors and dietitians, and produced in one of the most environmentally rapacious and soul-destroying methods ever devised by man.  But America has a deep and abiding hatred of being told what to do, or not to do, by anyone.  Bacon is bad?  Fuck you, it tastes good, and I can.

Bacon's cheap ubiquity celebrates the American Dream: That everyone has an opportunity to get wealthy and wallow, to live 'high on the hog'; the physical and chemical reactions that such a fullsome rush of flavourful umami and mouthfeel produce elicit an enormous, but fleeting, sense of wellbeing; one that we might well argue is slipping further and further from our grasp as time grinds forward.

For we know, deeply, America knows - everyone knows - that the End Times are nigh.  Climate change, the collapse of the mass hallucination that is global finance and money, overpopulation, water and arable land shortage, peak oil, and every single bit of it directly caused by our profligacy and greed.  Produced by the logical, natural extension of what has come to be the prime underpinning of the American Libertarian Capitalistic Way - self interest.  But while the bacon flows, all is not lost.

We (affluent baconivorous Westerners) can make ourselves morbidly obese and lay waste to the land; modern medical science will save our 'bacon' as diabetes kicks in or we need our second heart bypass.  While America remains the currency leader, in monetary and aspirational culture terms, Americans can choose between their self-protective responses through bacon.  They can haughtily lift a middle finger to the environmental doomsayers and Big Government health do-gooders, or perhaps more softly just self-soothe, with a nice extra serving of salty/sweet, toothsome cured bacon.  And maybe just an extra serve more.  Is there a more perfect solace to be found anywhere in the sensorium of the carnivore than bacon?  We know how far we will go to delude ourselves to get what we need, as addicts.

While the bacon flows, all is not lost?  Yes, but the bacon mania is also a syndrome emanating directly from the certain knowledge that all is very soon to be lost.  We know, at our core, that the CAFO and such modern industrialization of 'food' production took us to a whole new level of arrogance and distance from the world we actually inhabit.  We know, without doubt, that we cannot go on like this. We know that addictive consumption is the root cause of everything wrong with how we live; a neat encapsulation of the self-love we do not make real through moral action, yet crave so powerfully that we compensate by gorging ourselves on the oleaginous fruits of this holocaust, and calling it a good thing.  By shouting the mantra, all together now; "OMG....baaaacooon!!"  It's the only way we can handle the truth.

This is that other definition of decadence.  You know, as in decay.  In the decline of Empires, the pattern is nearly always the same.  Both bread, circuses and sacrificial rites increase; the denial of the imminent reality rupture becomes ever more strident amongst a large swathe of the populace, judging those who would cry out for reason as Cassandras, doomsayers and buzzkillers.

So anyway, for me, bacon is perhaps a perfect summation of all that ails us in society right now.  We treat those pigs with the same attitudes as we treat our fellow man.  And we drool with delight at feasting on the potent flesh of victory over our adversary, and our power over nature.

Still, I don't think it's too late.  We could just, if we get a few things changed pretty radically pretty soon, save our bacon.

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My personal bacon recycling fund is still open here:

http://www.gofundme.com/My-Natural-Burial 

Snap, Crackle, Pop!

Last night I physically felt my mind change.  I cannot recall another such episode of such a swift,  radical and pervasive shift in the way I understand the world which was not precipitated by a major crisis of some sort.

What did it feel like?  Well, actually, my sinuses popped - you know, where your hearing suddenly gets louder like when you're descending a steep hill in a car or coming in to land on an aeroplane.  As well as that, the sensation was at first noticeable in my head, the brain region, as a vague sensation of uplifting, like the top plates of my skull were gently being pulled up counter to gravity, and as I consciously noticed that, I imagined I felt some very subtle but pervasive thrill of having a teeny, tiny, indeed sub-microscopic switch thrown in every cell of my body, cascading outwords from my centre-line (or chakras, if you prefer) in a matter of no more than 60 seconds or so.  Slightly crackly-electric, with the minutest snaps of spark imaginable.  Then, I had the thought 'out loud' as it were.  I thought "Wow, my mind has just totally changed".

Waking up this morning the afterglow remains.

Is this something that happens to us all the time and we just don't notice, or is it an instance of something truly rare and noteworthy?  That's probably not something we can ever answer, philosophy and the Mind being what it is, but it's a relevant-seeming question nonetheless.  I'm not going to try answering right now though.

So what happened exactly? It was a confluence of stimuli that set this momentous sensory and nomos-disrupting event off. I can roughly enough point to a conversation 24 hours prior about firestick farming and the various ecologies extant in Australia before white settlement, the arrival and enjoyment of a couple of inspiring and entertaining manifestos by Seth Godin and a documentary TV program that touched upon, among other things, systems theory and the notion of 'ecosystem' as a thing.

I'm not sure I actually got much - if any - new information of earth-shattering importance in all this, I suspect it was more a case of a whole tranche of closely-related puzzle pieces falling before me in a certain, pleasing pattern and resonating with some inner sense of 'truth' I seem so fond of.  Which is ironic, when you see what I mean.

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that I'll be able to explain anyway. Still, I'll try, since I obviously care enough to want to write here about it. (breathes deeply)

We don't often spend much time questioning the deeper assumptions behind our thinking and worldview, but last night I saw just to what extent so much of my expectation of How Things Are was bound up with the idea that natural systems tend towards a point of equilibrium. The thing is, I know that this idea is not some immutable law of nature, because I know there are so many examples and evidences to the contrary.  I have spoken of the mysteries surrounding this idea in different ways before. But it's a really pervasive idea, this underlying-system assumption.  Learning a little more about the historical background behind our theories of ecosystems, feedback loops and computer science (from the documentary) poked me stumbling into a wall of all the assumptions I still rely on in probably half my daily doings that I knew were erroneous but was too lacking in conscious integrity to even see, let alone change. 

And prior to that I had just felt like I'd totally agreed with Seth Godin that We Are All Weird; that essentially the whole cultural and societal move towards 'mass', in the sense of 'mass marketing' or 'mass transit', as has been the case this last many decades in every sphere and facet of society has well and truly had its day.  That a situation where 'normal' used to be an increasingly centralised notion and besides, a desirable state, is no longer at all the case.   More and more, in large part enabled by a fabulous wealth of choice in all things and the speed and reach of communications tech, we are choosing to find our own personal definitions of 'normal', so increasingly we are all becoming outliers on the bell curve.  Fattening the normal curve, if you like.  Now we CAN meet and hang out with people that share our own peculiar foibles and preferences, via this thing you're looking at now for example, so this new tribalism, albeit a really fluid one, is the new normal.  We are all weird now.  And the great freedom of that is that we're getting so much better at respecting others' weirdness.

There was an auric, tingly static hiss as these two things came into each others' proximity in my environs.

I think that might have been the snap, crackle pop bit. For once you bring that light of clear mindful awareness to bear on the murky quantum bubblefoam of unquestioned, hackneyed determinants of perception that we all carry round and wear like dirty spectacles in order to navigate the world, the sudden increase of energy agitates the foam and just like your bowl of rice bubbles, a series of rapid gas explosions occurs. A chain reaction of fizzing, bubble-forming-bursting activity ripples through our reality catchment filter destroying all the dried-out, rusted-on synapse connections made of outdated beliefs and wrong knowledge, until eventually deceleration becomes noticeable and things settle anew, to a new ecosystem of mind. Minus all the gas.

Which is a neat segue, back to where this point started. Ecosystems – indeed any systems with feedback loops in them, tend not necessarily towards some point of equilibrium, nor necessarily straight down the vortex of entropy. It is not always the case that order emerges from chaos, or vice versa. It is that these two things can happen, and so can anything else.  Anything at all.

This whole overlay of certainty about things like the inherent stability of natural systems – an environmental notion I've long said is outdated first and foremost because the planet is changing so quickly lately as to be beyond return to any 'pristine' state anyway – is simply fallacious.  Things can indeed just fall apart, and there is pretty much no firm bet that any new order will fill the vacuum.  More chaos can ensue. Order may not give way ultimately to chaos either. Order can breed more order.  Fractal geometry is pretty and it occurs in nature, but not all nature is fractal.  This samadhi applies to Everything.

Now I see how pervasively I have taken on this one little seemingly natural law, that there would be some underlying pattern if we could just see 'small' enough; a hope I harboured subconsciously, hidden away from conscious reason. How I'd just taken it in faith like gravity or the laws of thermodynamics, and how sneakily we can employ really bad reasoning subconsciously to make ourselves feel comfortable.  I took a circle and made it for me a square, and then decided that since I thought I had gotten rid of this worldview mistake (by doing so consciously) that my sight was clear.  Now I doubt pretty much everything I see or think about in a new light.  Everything.  This is the simplest way to describe what's happened in my head: a piece of enlightening reason, falling under the category heading of You Can Never Know Anything Anyway, has rattled, slipped, ground and at last perfectly meshed itself down from the ground of my intellectual appreciation and wonderment into my very deeply felt subconscious.  My Interface With Real Stuff level. Not only do I Get It, but it now sits as me, sans internal unexamined conflict.

Truly, I feel broken open, and it actually hurts a bit in the chest and abdomen today.  Vulnerable, unsure of myself, and sublimely, newly, unexpectedly free.  The weight of that limitation, the circumscription of a notion that there even might probably be a certain pattern I could perceive here or there, that is somehow useful or good for me to do, as a reassurance of the explicability of the world, has been lifted.  And all along I thought that the first notion; that this idea of a trope towards stability was freeing.  It was like a faith-in-god thought, really, in that it was there as some comfort in the face of a terrible mystery.  Of something too large and unfathomable.  Nope; it was just a defense against the immensity and an attempt to support my ego; my separateness from the Big.  Now, I can relax a whole new stratum of me, one I didn't even realise was so tight.  Ahh.  Or was it just a hot flush?

Hope I get a rest before we barbecue through to the next oniony layer.  ;-)

Thanks for letting me share.  Hope it made some sense, somehow.  This is definitely one of those posts I'm not re-reading just now.  I have to just go with it.  Enjoy!

EDIT: OK, so I re-read it and fixed a couple of lines for grammar and extra readability.  I don't dislike this post.  But I'm glad it's over now.  If I am blessed with another, say, year on the planet, I'll enjoy looking back at this one, I'm sure.

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My Colin Barnett Story

He's the man of the hour right now, today, what with all this nascent Queen-welcoming, CHOGM - hosting, Amity-beach-mayor-impersonating (kill the shark!!), high-handed treatment of Indigenous landowner etc etc behaviour of his making news lately.

I'm going to let myself off a leash just a little here in this paragraph too, I hope you don't mind, and you know how distasteful I find name-calling but once I had this thought I couldn't un-have it and it feels dishonest not to disclose it up front.......doesn't Colin look just a teeny bit like bufo marinus to you?  (You know, a cane toad?)

Anyway, here's my Colin Barnett story, set back in the late 1980s so adjust your set design accordingly.

INTERIOR: Greenpeace Perth offices, half a flight of rickety stairs down from Joynt Venture (yes the notorious bong shop) on Hay St.  I'm sitting with our uber-dude, salty old sea dog Roy.

Let me describe Roy to you.  Everybody knows Roy.  He's that tall, large-framed guy with a long beard, woolen beanie perpetually affixed in all weathers, with a mainly calm and reassuring presence, but with an oddly soft and high speaking voice.  A man whose never-seen anger you would fear if you thought about it, but whose outbursts generally took the form of a slightly bumble-footed mania, a squall of incensedness that would blow over as suddenly as it had arrived.  A man who had what seemed like only one set of clothes, to go with his one life companion, a gorgeous and highly evolved Malamute called Ben.  Roy is my boss, as head of Greenpeace Perth, and was one of the Original Greenpeace folk.

Roy is sitting behind his desk, leaning back so as not to appear overly fatherly in his advice to young idealot me, as he explains one more time that I don't have to do this at all if I'm not ready, it's no bad reflection on me if I want to watch him do another one or two first.  He's talking about doing a school talk as a representative of Greenpeace.  As well as canvassing for donations and magazine subscriptions (how I earned a measly living at the time) and the odd local protest action (when the US brought her nuclear fleet into port for example) we did such community outreach to schools and other groups.  A standard-ish spiel with some suitably graphic and emotive video to play, outlining Greenpeace's ethos, activities and questions for society to address.  Saving the whales was still very much the hot-button emotive issue, as well as the anti-nuke fleet thing locally (Sydney and other cities had become nuclear-free zones after all) and we still rode a wave of cachet on the back of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior 5 years earlier.  Did you know the French called it Operation Satanique?

No, Roy, really, I think I've got it.  And I know you'll be there to back me up if anything I can't handle happens, and yes I'm nervous but also really excited to be doing it.  I mean (I thought to myself) how cool is this to be the public face of Greenpeace ffs at the age of only what, 20, hanging out as equals with legends like Roy and all that.....at Guildford Grammar!!  I'd been in Perth long enough to know that this is THE boys' school.  Populated by wealthy pastoralist's and rural magnates' sons boarding there during term and a good smattering of old money from the big smoke as day kids as well.  Conservative but not overtly so, very high educational standards a greater priority than that, and it was to be my first flight at the controls.  Roy would simply wait off in the wings and only swoop in in the event of an imminent major crash.  That was the plan.  And yes, it's time to get in The Van for the 45 minute drive out to the Grammar.  Let's go.

INTERIOR: Greenpeace van, in post-peak hour traffic.
No really, Roy, I'm fine.  Thanks.  I've had enough coffee.

EXTERIOR PAN: The manicured trees and expansive lawns that surround the functional but graceful early and mid-twentieth century architecture of the school.  Glimpsed in the distance in the manner of a spectral, watchful presence from the glorious past, an original building from the century before.  Just reminding us of the relative gravity of the surrounds.

INTERIOR: Backstage anteroom of a lecture hall.  The subdued rabble of a well-enough disciplined bunch of 16 and 17 year old boys filing in next door can be heard, the occasional wry admonishment from a teacher chivvying the stragglers and outliers.  Present in the anteroom are myself, Roy, and the Economics Master (if memory serves - forgive me on the little details after all this time) who organised our visit.  the Master is warm and brisk, but seems oddly distracted and not quite engaged with our discussion as to the order of proceedings.

In through the door behind us comes two men.  One is clearly faculty, ushering the second man in - a roundish fellow, with (in my memory's eye) just a touch of bufo marinus about him, who has an air of not-quite-sureness about him surveying the room and our little trio, despite being led directly here.  He sees before him a smiling neutral-coloured bespectacled teacher type, a swarthily bearded gent in practical clothing and beanie looming there like an oversized refrigerator momentarily shifted from its habitual place for cleaning and a stringy beanpole-type young man sporting jeans, boots, a black t-shirt emblazoned in great rainbow block letters with the word Greenpeace beneath his jaunty summerweight homburg-lidded face.

Ah, Mr Barnett, welcome - this is Eric and Roy from Greenpeace WA; you'll be sharing the stage with Eric today, I understand....

FREEZE FRAME: blackout but for spot downlight on the trio of Roy, Colin, myself.  Colin and I with hands extended towards each other - eyes locked but heads ever-so-subtly troping towards the Econ Master as if enlightenment, or at least confirmation of the sudden mutually held sinking feeling of having been expertly set up lay in that direction.  A series of dramatic camera POV swings on this freeze - over each person's shoulder, showing the faces of the opposite numbers.  Colin is still off-balance but quickly regaining his sense of composure, Roy is halfway between resignation at a typical upper-class trick and suddenly panicking that already the Econ Dude has conversationally confirmed me as speaker - no switching available now! - and I'm doing my best to hide bafflement at the new twist by leveraging the psychological advantages of height and pretending like I knew this would happen anyway.

FREEZE DISSOLVES, LIGHTS UP

Mr Barnett is head of the chamber of Commerce in Perth and we all thought it would be more interesting to have you both here at the same time to contrast the issues of economic development and environmental awareness you see, I hope you don't mind (smirk); so we thought if we could get you each to do 10 or 15 minutes opening remarks and speeches and then the boys have prepared some questions during our studies this last week......as Colin and I lock hands, sharing a moment of genuine and deep cameraderie; a minor reflection of that ancient gladiatorial moment as strangers suddenly are made foes for another's cruel enjoyment.

I now don't remember much in the way of detail.  It comes iin flashes - an auditorium of the oldest, most mature and well-dressed looking schoolboys I'd ever seen, about 150 of the buggers it seemed, all intently focussed.  A pair of lecterns on a stage.  Roy going to say what we both knew he was going to say to me but him stopping himself one last time and instead just sucking it up, doing his best confident smile and squeezing my shoulder.  The video - I did play the 7 minute mainly anti-whaling video, and saw that hardened as most of these boys wanted to be, there was some effect that got through.  Mainly what I remember though, was that I knew my shit.  I was of course a True Believer; having lived the environmentalist life a couple of years already and being a fervent learner and natural spruiker, coupled with an already battle-hardened canvasser's experience stood me in good stead.  I mean, I spent 4 or 5 hours every evening dealing with all the objections the public can come up with to Greenpeace's mission and an environmental consciousness above profit motive, unlike poor Colin who would be used to preaching only to a fan base.  I leaned heavily on the simple premise of no environment = no economy, and to put it most simply, I fairly frigging wiped the floor with him.  Aided and abetted, in fact, by the way that most of the questions from the boys (many at the urging of their pastoralist fathers, I'm sure) were squarely-aimed 'gotcha' questions designed to shoot holes through my agenda, but I was FREAKING WELL ON FIRE just getting off on the glory and revelment of having such a rapt audience and my quarry on the ropes for the whole 3 rounds.

I did not glance across at Roy once, the whole time.  I would have lost the mojo, been distracted and started second-guessing myself with "what would Roy say?" and all that.

There was morning tea afterwards with some faculty members, and a slightly surprised, but impressed Econ Master.  Colin did not grace us with his presence and Roy dragged me away very quickly before my ego could undo any of the good work.  Smart man.

INTERIOR:  Greenpeace van, smoking a cigarette whilst driving in light traffic, sun coursing down on a gorgeous Perth day.  Neither of us is speaking.  I am beaming quietly, so much that my face hurts slightly, but I am also getting that adrenalin comedown, and starting to want more coffee, anything, to keep the buzz up and stop the little tremors of anticlimax.

Well, I'm happy for you to do the talks on your own now.  They won't get any harder than that one, I think.  That was pretty much all he said.  I've no idea what he said to others back in the office but in my presence all he said was "it went well" and forswore gainsaying any of my wild-eyed commentary about it.

I have a feeling I didn't make much money canvassing that night.  If memory is serving and if history is a guide, then the pub was probably a pretty lively place for me after work that night too.

And for years afterwards, as his career put him more and more in the media spotlight, the first thing I'd remember when he popped up on the news was another freeze-frame moment.  My POV, looking across the stage at him after I'd just laid out a masterfully succinct precis of how if we can't eat then we can't have an economy, opening the floor with my glance to his right of reply, and seeing that "fuck you" look fleetingly pass like a rushing cloud across his amphibian jowls as he formulated some weak riposte about the necessity of business to *pay* for environmental actions and remediations etc etc.......unkind of me, wasn't it?

Now when I see him I have a pleasingly neutral sensation.  I seem to have worked it out of my system, to the extent that only the rantings and ravings of a friend taking up bitter (and entirely laudable, understandable) opposition to Mr Barnett's idiotic stance on this 'rogue shark' bullshit non-issue has prompted me to remember this episode afresh, the first time in ages.

And that's my Colin Barnett story.

Pretending charity; how cynicism is damaging people in genuine need of a hand.

I got an intriguing largish envelope in the mail the other day.  Personally addressed.  It was from the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists (Pty Ltd).  The envelope contained the following:

• Covering letter in faux-handwriting addressed to dear sir/madam etc.
• 8x assorted Christmas cards, various artists and styles, mainly carefully secular or semi-secular in design and wording.
• 8x envelopes for said cards.
• 2x printed bookmarks with artwork
• 1x 'Pocket Calendar', a card with a picture, a tiny 2011/12 calendar and a list of important dates.
• An order form pre-printed with my name a details, and a range of products for sale from Mouth and Foot Painting Artsists Pty Ptd
• Small-format envelope addressed to sender, to put the order form in.

Of course, the mail was entirely unsolicited, and presumably has come via some mailing list purchased by them from another party.  I'm guessing it was Silver Chain most likely, an organisation that assists with low-cost home nursing, and which is itself partly funded by donation and partly government subsidised.  I am on their mailing list because I got a visit (free of charge) once from a specialist stoma care nurse (they have ONE such person covering all of Western Australia btw) after I had my tube placed.

At the top line of the order form, it says "YES! I have decided to purchase this package and enclose the $17.00....."etc etc or somesuch.  Underneath are tick-box options for ordering more products of a similar ilk.  The cover letter, whose faux-handwriting font could almost be seen as a feature specifically designed to make you not want to read it, is full of blather about the life challenges that people without hands and/or arms face - all real enough of course - and that your purchase would help them.  Well, the ones employed by this company anyway.

For that's the thing.  Christmas cards are by now a familiar fundraising venture for many charities, and this little unsolicited effort not only jumps on that bandwagon, but one-ups the genuine charities in the process.  Genuine charities?  Yes, because this is all set up to seem at every turn a charitable enterprise, yet it is nothing of the sort.  It is a Pty Ltd company, set up to make profit, like any other company.  It is not a registered charity, nor does it make any reference to using its profits to help the wider community of handless folk, or anyone else for that matter, apart from paying a dividend to the artists themselves (presumably in the form of purchased rights to their artworks).

Then there's the guilt factor.  It's cleverly constructed.  There is no mention of obligation in the cover letter, but the order form comes with this clever little phrasing: "Please send the whole order form when ordering, and do not send the form with unwanted goods.  Please note: these goods are sent without obligation".  So, they never ask you to send them back, but suggest in the most weaselly fashion that if you're not buying, you really *should*.  Think of the poor handless people.  That return envelop is nicely sized to fit the order form, but not the cards.  And it needs a stamp too.  Plus, you know tat if you could find an envelope big enough to take all the stuff then it'd cost more than a regular stamp and so.......the implication is that keeping the cards is stealing, sort of, or somehow not fair, even though they make it really hard for you to send this gear you never asked for back.

It's creepy, dishonest, and worst of all demeans not just those folk who do genuinely need some assistance with their lives without hands but also everyone else who has ever relied on needed help from a charity in any form, cheapening as it does the whole transactional framework.  This company has really lowered the bar for decency not as it applies to everyday businesses - after all they can stand or fall on their reputations and take the consequences themselves - but by branding itself as a charity in all but actual word and tax status it casts a new and negative pall across the whole realm of charitable donation seeking.

Thus, despite the fact that some of the cards are rather nice (if printed on cheap and flimsy stock and overpriced compared to usual store-bought assorted sets of better quality) I am entirely disinclined to reward this company with my cash.  And it's a shame, because had it been done differently, had I been sent for example a simple coloured single-page catalogue of designs I could choose from and order, rewarding the artists more directly, or under the auspices of a genuinely constructed charitable enterprise, I may well have found exactly the Christmas cards I will need (insh'allah and all that) this year.

Why am I even giving it oxygen then?  Because I have mixed feelings.  It'd be great to see a successful outlet for these artists, and for that I wish the enterprise well, but for what this little exercise in cynical marketing says about the way we must have become that such a thing would be contemplated and, just perhaps, successful, well........I dislike it.

So here's what I'm going to do.  The first 8 people to comment with a single-word theme for me to work from, please also private message or email me with your mailing address.  And I'll write you a haiku or tiny poem on one of the cards incorporating your word theme and the cover image.

Because I don't want to use them as Christmas cards, and I'd hate for them to go to waste.  this seems like a lovely translation of energy.  And you get some old-fashioned mail to look forward to.

This might be a bit of fun, eh?

PS: Speaking of the qwirly nexus of money, commerce, charity and transforming energy, those who are so inclined may still donate to my Natural Burial Fund here.  I'm not even going to mention how much of that word that starts with "o" and ends with"bligation" isn't involved with this notice. :-)  Thank you for the thought, regardless.

http://www.gofundme.com/My-Natural-Burial

A Winnowing

Lately I've started writing a blog post or some stuff for my 'other' book a few times only to have it all sort of fail.....in a very patterned way.  Has that ever happened to you?  I get it now though, so it's not a failure, really.


I've set out to write about things external to myself in each of these instances of subsequently abandoned writing, but each time been led back as if in a circular corral to the simple truth that it's me I'm speaking about.  And that I'm just being coy and overly concerned about perceptions of egoism/narcissism etc.  But everyone who ever writes knowing there's an audience there is writing about themselves all the time, aren't they, so how about I just get over that, eh?


To the subject at hand then.

There's a winnowing going on.  As we toss the unhulled grains up into the air for the simple power of the wind to remove the chaff and leave us the shiny pearls of goodsome sustenance behind, so it is happening with things in my life, at quite a pace, at the moment.  Of course when something's going on for us we see the pattern reflected everywhere (some say we create the pattern everywhere, or co-create it with Other forces and factors in play) and that's in large part why I kept setting out to expound on the things I'm seeing beyond my ostensible sphere of influence.  There's more to say about what we see outside than in.  Both perspectives serve a purpose, but without the foundational acknowledgement that it's what is going on inside that counts, nothing I say will ring with any truth.


All that being said, there's a lot of this winnowing going around right now.


Being a pattern, it affects all of me, all of my life, and it's wonderful when I can have these moments of stepping back and just observing how it affects each facet of being in different ways.  Getting out of the road is also the essence of winnowing well too, isn't it?  Offering up the harvest to the sky, over and over again, that the chaff might blow away and back to earth, thence to return to the great cycle of life, etcetera.  No point just throwing it all over yourself, and you'll never get far fast by getting all dainty and hand-picking out the grains.  Which doesn't stop so many of us from taking that exact approach to change in our life so much of the time.  Little steps, done without reliquishing of control or trust in the wind to know what's chaff, what's grain, and to work with our intentions.


One of the things that winnowed out for me is the ancient wrestle about what can be known anyway - the limits of my ability to be sure about anything, which relates directly to this question of what is inside, and what is outside, and if there's any difference.  Because the grain that's left behind for me is that there truly is no difference.  Making a distinction between what is me and what is not is just something useful we can do with our minds to achieve certain things, but that being totally in thrall to either the separation of us and other, or to the wrestle with how much it's possible to prove one way or another, is just a really fraught and distracted, unsatisfying way to live.  Well, you realise it is once you've had an actual experience of living without that question.

I was joined up to this online Philosophy Debate Group in Facebook you see, by a relatively new FB friend, and this after reconnecting with a wonderful old friend who's really into such stuff (PhD and all), and going on this ultimately madcap ride, a fast-track helter-skelter relentless, strapped-in-tight experience of the Philosophical Lines Of Argument And Inquiry.  Of course, I'd been that way inclined all my life, but this was a nutshelling of the process.  And in the course of a week, with the help of some 'others' I saw the whole thing, the entire intellectual framework of inquiry into life and meaning and the search for Truth and God and Ethics, laid out cleanly in my mind.  And saw its ultimate futility.  A bit of a samadhi moment, that was.

Those who read here regularly or at least lately will have seen this winnowing at work in the world of my people connections too.  You'll recall a couple of weeks ago my tale of discovery about discernment vs. discompassion and the difficulty I had with a relationship with a mentally ill person (for want of a more nuanced description).  Well the process I saw going on then has continued unabated, and I've seen it at work in many of those around me too.  Quite a rash of people doing things like discussing Facebook de-friending, leaving FB and social networking in general, and dealing with issues about who comes into their lives and who needs to be left behind now.  The support groups and boards I belong to have subtly but tangibly shifted in vibe as well (and this can't be 'all me' surely).  The tenor, tone, and actual, as opposed to ostensible, purpose has changed.


Yes, but changed how?  What's going on?  Hard to hit my head on the nail with this one, but it has a flavour of letting go of over-caring.  There seems in the wind - and we're even seeing it in global politics and such - a growing acceptance that only so much can be done to enact change.  That we're not omnipotent.  That we really can't save others, or even help them sometimes.  That waking up to the new zeitgeist (a-ha! That's what I'm on about!) is the responsibility of the individual.  Not that there's any great lack of caring, far from it.  Just that there's a new and seemingly beyond-the-point-of-no-return level of understanding that suffering cannot always be averted, and that a way of being - individually or as a social whole - that is as afraid of suffering and the 'negative' as we all have been this last few generations is not just futile but is itself prone only to create further suffering in the long run.


What I'm seeing is people waking up, more and more.  And I'm so totally not being elitist at all here, or making any special claims on my own profundity or enlightenment relative to anyone else's.  Only to how I was just a couple of weeks ago.  I figure it's a good sign when you can honestly keep saying to yourself "geez, I'm amazed at how stupid I was only two weeks ago!" and smile.

Anyway, whatever I can say about it all in generalities and through resorting to prosiness can only mean so much.  Maybe better to stick to what it means in 3D and Heartland for me.


It means I'm defriending a bunch of folk in Facebook, which is a trivial gesture but important for starters.  I'm not outright leaving the social networks at this point, in fact I've half-migrated over to Google+ now.  I'll be much less active there from now on though, and am treating the world of people interactions much differently already.  Winnowing out the whole intellectual need thing (even allowing for predictable backslide due to ingrained habit and the occasional primacy of the Dumb Machine Mind) has set me free of much of the need I had.  I'll still stay involved with the BD and other tubie help groups, because I like to help there and I always learn much too.


And it means I've found the way back in to writing what I want to write.  It feels like I had to get something out of the way.  I have no expectation that it'll suddenly be easy, but there's a soft and refreshing light on the path ahead now, not just spooky oppressive shadows with the faint glimmer of a glittering thing out there, probably, somewhere.

Perhaps most fundamentally, and this realisation came last of all, as almost an afterthought, a surprise bonus extra, it means I have found (INSERT FREAKY CO-INCIDENCE HERE wow, I'd tell you about this thing that just happened as I am writing this but I can't, so sorry, other people's privacy and all that) a new level of peace not just with my upcoming death (the satellite obviously missed, haha, never mind ;-) but with my ongoing life - suffering and all.  I feel OK with it in a whole new way, and you regular readers will know I was going through a wrestle with that not long ago,the ironic fear not of dying but of living.  Again, not expecting it to be all easy, but some whole layer of fear and harshness has lifted.

The take-home message from this, I guess, is if you see me around a bit less, this is why.  It's no bad thing.  If you want to hang out with me some more, make a new or more intimate connection, sure - just email me or something.  That would suit me fine.  And my funeral fund is still going, and growing too.  We're past half way now, and you can still help me on my way with my natural interrment.  Since that satellite window passed uneventfully, I still have no date.  Thing is, now I'm in a place where I could accept a date so much more easily. In a way, I'm sort of......ready.

Link's here, thank you.

http://www.gofundme.com/My-Natural-Burial

.

The Tyranny of Normality

Just the other day a very large worldwide study showed that Australians are the world leaders in self-delusion when it comes to being overweight and obese.  About a third of the population believes they fall into these categories, when in fact over 60% of us are overweight or obese.  Australians are far from alone in the self-delusion stakes here, it's just that we're the most shockingly out of touch with reality. To add to this, Aussies are just as delusional about how much exercise we believe and say we do compared to what we actually perform, ditto regards the health of our diets.  Of course, there are a plethora of reasons behind the phenomenon of mass fatness, but what lies beneath the self-deception?

It's never simple to nail these things down perfectly, but I think one mainspring of this mass delusion is the tyranny of normality.  It's the fact that we're just used to being, and seeing, big people now - familiarity breeds contempt, so it has been said - and we thus adjust our mental settings for a new normal.  We see a different societal body norm now from, say, 20 years ago.  Overweight is the new majority, thus, normal.

Humans want to be normal, largely (no pun intended there).  Sure, there is individual aspiration, the urge for fame and to stand out to one's peers or society, but more and more this is about succeeding in achieving some grand form of normalcy.  Everyone's 'plating up' food now, where just a couple of years BMC (Before MasterChef) we simply served, or just ate it.  Foodie aspirations, experimentation with and chattery, competitive talk about food are normal today too - see also above, 'obesity'.  But what we want at heart as a communal animal is to sit comfortably in a place in the herd, engage with or at least not fail in the ubiquitous struggle to rise in the pecking order; to relate to our peers and preferably excel within the 'rules'.  Think about so-called "Reality TV", and the rise of the 'normal person' celebrity.  That's where the normalcy comes into play, and once the majority of people are porky, then.......well, a couple of things might happen.  Firstly, when you see your chubby self in the mirror you might not see a problem at all.  You're just large-framed, or you compare internally with your peers, finding 'worse' examples, and feel contented that you are quite normal.  (No surprise by the way that men are far less likely to see themselves as overweight or obese than women, and this applies globally). Secondly, it just may be that there is a subliminal urge to maintain (even gain??) one's size.  After all, aren't those skinny, eat-nothing health freak folk outliers now?  Or thirdly, you might just not see a health problem there at all.  After all, you look, well, 'normal'.  And the ubiquity of weight-loss advertising and awareness campaigns simply in the end highlights the normality of being overly large.

The weight issue is but one example among so many we could point to when it comes to the tyranny of normality.  And it's not like it's a novel idea; we've been a social, normatized animal since forever really, but I think we're at some sort of unprecedented peak here.  Perhaps that as our recent history has been one where the only seeming constant is constant change, we need to put so much more constant and persistent effort on keeping up with what 'normal' is, and thus unconsciously are getting better and better at adjusting ourselves to fit the 'now' normal as we go.  A sort of eternal feedback loop that works towards greater and greater homologation in society. Reminds me of the Borg, now I think about it.

As has been commented upon recently in the meta-mediasphere, advertising right across the modern media spectrum is not only becoming increasingly dumbed-down and preachy in its messages, with edginess and risk-taking as strategies on the wane, it is more and more careful in its elicitation of the 'normal' person it is portraying and speaking to/of/for.  The "busy mother", the "working family", the "young couple", the "average man" and so on.  I cannot recall before seeing quite so many advertising actors and spokespeople so carefully cast in that thin space between being 'attractive' in a model-like, idealised modern beauty sense, and non-threateningly average.  You know, good-looking enough to be pleasant on the eye and acceptable to the base hind-brain judgement that sexually they could be an attractive mate yet not so 'perfect' that they're in any way threatening to their own gender compatriots. Many are just a little overweight.  (Combine the two, advertising and the normatization of heftiness and you get the third spoke of the wheel - chunky Reality TV 'contestants' and weight-loss shows).  Normal is indeed the new thing to aspire to, even and maybe even especially in the consumer space.  Again, this is not exactly new, but its pervasiveness and the seemingly overwhelming primacy of this technique and zeitgeist for advertising - arguably the force in our world that does the most to influence individuals' self-perceptions and self-image - has attained some hitherto unknown level.

One could make several good arguments about why this new depth of normal-as-desirable thing could be a positive, perhaps.  Or at least have some slivers of silver lining.  But I'm struggling to find any for this level of extremity.  Just having normative values is the cohesive stuff of any society after all - without a shared consensus on some norms we could not function as a community - however once it gets to the stage that we've reached a sort of strangling takes place right across society. There forms a subtle erosive force upon the sense of 'us' we recreate by all the little things we do and say and think and see each day that contrive to tell us we are not each (all) alone, isolated, disconnected.  That we are a 'we'.

Consider for example the normatization of our society as being in a permanent state of conflict, and the ramifications of this.  If we look to America for the cultural lead for a moment, depending on how you want to figure it there's been a constant state of was since the start of WW2, or perhaps even earlier.  More concerning still is the new norm of the 'War On Terror', a truly insidious term that builds on all the 'Wars On (insert any example here)' campaigns trotted out by leader figures this last couple of generations.  Think for a moment if you can of how it feels right now to be a Palestinian or Israeli; both peoples who well and truly feel themselves to have experienced personally generations of constant war.  Trapped in an angry, self-righteous, defensive/aggressive mindset, they have totally lost it would seem any notion of the normality of peace.  Of harmonious conduct.  Young bright thinkers are positing peace-promoting ideas in these places as truly revolutionary concepts, as if the history of humanity is not one largely made of just getting along fairly nicely, thanks.  Thus, having to pretty much reinvent the wheel of progress towards an inclusive, unafraid society without martialism at its core.

And that's the thing about history, and our reading of it in the flash-information age.  Everything gets condensed into its newsiness, to appeal to our enjoyment, to retain the reader/viewer, and that means the action scenes.  We view history - and thus are doomed to have a default view of our present - as an overarching series of dates and instances of war and turmoil, scandal and calamity.  Which is, frankly, so much BS.  Most people in most of time have mostly just......gotten on with life, in a more-or-less peaceful way, and this is what constitutes our real history.

Think again of your Israeli or Palestinian (yes I'm generalizing and appealing to stereotype; hang in there, there's a reason for it) and project that now onto the face of your everyday American, living under the spell of terrorist enemies and a defensive martial mindset.  Children who have only known this, for whom it is unquestionably normal.  They will soon be our adults, in fact the first few are coming of age as I write.  It's not just an American-led cultural meme though, this is globally pervasive.  And I'd venture to suggest that there is more, and more highly politicized, normatized conflict occurring across the globe now than ever before.

It's not just war - that's merely an extremely newsy manifestation.  Think of the dynamic political tensions gripping the major democracies of the world at present.  Those societies which have largely driven the industrial and technological revolutions, responsible for enabling the population boom, the massive inequality of wealth, the amazing increase in health and longevity and also the mass destruction and deformation of the environment at large.  The nations that were early adopters of the ground-breaking adaptation of the 'least worst' system of governance and social inclusion and spread the ideas of capitalism and individual freedom ironically through conquest across the world.  The Australian parliamentary reality of two major parties so close to each other on policy (and oddly out of touch with so much of the general public's real sentiment) yet divided by an implacable enmity that disables any chance currently of compromise or bipartisan agreement.  The same is clearly evident in the US.  Modern capitalist democracy everywhere seems stuck in a bind between two irreconcilable sides of some distracting argument.  Some theoretical debate.  A red herring diverting our energies away from the more pressing issues of our continued planetary survival.

The more normal the state of conflict is, the more people are taking sides; it's a feedback loop.  When there is such a conflict, when ideas and notions on governance, polity, and the 'right' way to run a society (all ciphers for "how can we survive this dire state of the world we cannot bear to look at squarely") the more we need to find a solid 'normal' to sit with, to belong to.  And it's always been a quirk of the human intellect and experience that it's easier to define what one is by what one isn't; what one is against.  One sees the other as the abnormal, and one's self as normal.  The more we are able to define each side - us and them - by our differences, the more we are in essence trying to strengthen our own case for normality.  Thus the groups form and split, yet share at their core two fundamental, indivisible realities - they're in conflict, and they're in thrall to the same inescapable environmental reality.  This largely explains the desperation the conflict is attaining; the deterioration at every point of the environment around us.  Whether you see that environment as primarily natural, economic, political, cultural.....or any combination of ways, it looks essentially the same - in danger.

In danger, because this tyranny of normalization, this seeking of identity in sameness in the face of constancy of change, is so obviously a doomed way of being and a false hope for contentment.  It's powerfully anti-logical, and yet it's such an intuitive thing we do.  It stops us from remembering what 'normal' in the sense of healthy, holistically sound, sustainable and life-affirming actually feels and looks like.

This constancy of conflict is not normal.  Patently unhealthy self-image is tellingly not normal.  We are not, in a grand irony, behaving normally at all.

Yes, there have always been crises.  And this same phenomenon has happened before, perhaps.  Maybe it's part of a cycle, but this tyranny of normality is stifling us all the same.  A threshold has been crossed; the regular old ways of social cohesion and normatization have been left behind in the wake of our perversions; this acceptance of eternal conflict, of negative and unhealthy self-image, of unquestioningness.  Yes, that's another great irony.  We now have the tools to facilitate great individual questioning of exactly how we live together, and I see more and more people doing just that, every day, yet at the same time there is undeniably the most powerful and omniscient push I can think of in all of global history towards accepting as normal these perversions of what it is to be human.  A really shitty definition of 'the human condition'.

Perhaps I'm just describing a point in the ancient pendulum swing between conservatism ("let's only change slowly, cautiously, with greatest emphasis on maintaining existing tradition") and progressivism ("let's enact social change by fiat based on the best available theory that isn't what we're doing now").  Certainly there's evidence enough of this.  Just look at all of those of us essentially doing what we can to opt out of the conflict duality.  To express compassion, to detangle the arguments with reason and heart both, to transcend the fear that drives the spiral.  But the more I consider it, the more I see that we're almost playing the normalization game on a new, massive global level, and the normals that we're reinforcing just aren't the ones we need, nor is more of the same way we've been going.

It's just that I wish there were more of us doing it more often - the opting out of the conflict and living more via compassion and instinct than analysis I mean. My guess is that at some stage a tipping point is actually reached, where there can be rapid and meaningful change, that steps outside of the reformist/conservatist paradigm, that engenders a whole new model.

Where the definition of normal is reclaimed from the intellectual - whose endpoint always seems to lead via conflict to nihilism - back to the experience of heart and spirit.  The truly numinous as everyday life.

Utopian?  Certainly.  But I ask you with all seriousness - is that wish not, in fact, normal?

END NOTE: On the subject of normal everyday things we don't pay attention to, friends have been reminding me to post a link to my Natural Burial fund on my blog.  I set it up because many people asked how they might usefully help, and I eventually got humble enough to let people give to me in this way.  I still need further help to cover the cost of my impending interrment (unless the satellite company's insurance covers my death via hurtling space junk, which is still Option A for me) and trust it will work out well in good time.  You can go here if you wish to donate, thank you.

http://www.gofundme.com/My-Natural-Burial

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Discernment vs discompassion.

Those of you who know me through things like Facebook may recall a little while ago I was having some difficulty finding my 'core' response when it came to things like accepting friend requests, culling people from what has become an almost-too-large-to-manage-or-be-meaningful list, and so on.

Well as usual, the Universe has helped me along a bit.  As I maintained a bit of a focus on watching myself in my moments of discomfort - and those more frequent moments of ease, I must add - circumstances and the behaviour of others, seemingly out of the blue, lined me up for a showdown with my need-to-know.

What am I talking about?  I'm talking about self-examination.  My habitual wish to understand myself better; why I do the things I do, make the choices I make, attract the fates I attract, and so on.  Someone once said an unexamined life is not one worth living, and there's something in that.  We all certainly can name a bunch of drones we know in our lives, those who go around seemingly oblivious of their own motivations and processes, or if aware then uninterested in changing or growing as people.

Yet I KNOW deeply that self-knowledge, intellectual understanding,m is a blunt and limited tool at best, and just muddies the water with imprecision, the weight of personal history and memory, and the bias and skew imparted by the simple fact of employing language at worst.  I KNOW that just shutting the hell up and getting still and clean inside is all that I need to do to live well.  And yet.....and yet......there's this rattly old insistent mind going on.

As inside, so it is outside, que no?  Just lately I've been confronted with ciphers of my noisy and persistent intellect (thinking back though, when *haven't* I been, d'oh!) in the guise of others.  Good, ordinary humans all, but ones with definite agendas or worldviews or driving wounds or at least modus operandi that make them just right for chafing on my......what?  On my 'need to know' cicuitry.  My stubborn desire to find my truth, and live it openly.

How can that be a bad thing, you might ask, to find yourself closer and closer to you core being?  To God, as it were?  Well, sure, there is learning to be had, but it's expensive, and when it comes via the tools of the mind........see above.  The price to pay is endless conflict, friction, and wasted energy.  But if I am to have an opinion on things, and it is challenged by another, is it not my duty as a student of life to see where I might learn from the challenge, to test my truth against another's truth, to have it strengthened or indeed changed?

Actually, what I keep forgetting is that the answer to that question is not just "no", it's that the question is irrelevant and no basis for a contented life.

So once again, as I did near the very start of this blogging adventure, I am wrestling with this whole banana about having an opinion.  Being able to articulate a worldview.  Because that's ultimately where it comes from, a desire to express my experience of life, and the only way open - or so it almost always seems - is using words, these obtuse and clumsy sylllabic chunks of line and sound.  Ironic in the extreme too, as my speech and even typing abilities go downhill.  You'd think I'd be a better listener.

But then, sometimes, the Universe forces your hand with a bit of extremism.  In this case, it was an extreme other person (extreme in my experience that is, of course) who posed me quite the dilemma.  You see, this person has serious anger issues, and personal mental health issues which affect strongly the way they relate to others, and people thus affected can see their emotions towards others (and themselves) veer wildly from love to hate, and so forth.  Naturally, compassion is called for.  But then, I am also responsible for my personal space, and my sense of wellbeing.  The question arose; "where do I draw the line at allowing and accepting angry outbursts, irrational anger and venting etc as necessary to my duty of compassion to this person, versus my duty of compassion to myself and others who may share a space I have created (eg a Facebook feed)?"  Because much as I seek to be opinionless, to be beyond discernment (just a fancy word for judgement really), to be friggin' *enlightened* I guess, in the meantime I can only act by my own best way of being.  By choosing based on the most loving way I can accomplish in *me* and trust that this works out for others.  Hard though it is to have a true self-love all the time.

I procrastinated and thought about it for so long ("to unfriend or not to un-friend, that is the question") that my hand was forced, pretty much.  I am ashamed to say I was relieved at being relieved of the responsibility for action by this person pulling out of my life.  But then, not really ashamed, to the extent that it was an outcome that is good.  The shame is just a "should" shouting out from the ol' ego wanting to be running the show via the mind and concerted action again.  Urge to exercise control, again ironically.

Really, it's such a relief and it has made an enormous difference, just this one act of being un-friended, in my whole deal.  Because now I have lost - and I hope this feeling lasts, I'm certainly cultivating it - my hesitancy in discernment.  Discernment this time defined as "getting the hell out of the way and letting my first reaction stand".

In practice, it means there will be a day shortly where I cull a few FB friends.  In a nice way, you understand.  More importantly, it means my home relationship will change for the better yet again, and this is always something I want.  To grow in love with my closest friend and partner, of course.  For the hesitancy, the self-doubt, leaked out all over.

I don't doubt that I may fail again and again at this.  But a watershed has been passed.  I feel like my compassion flow has been re-energised, and in the third stated irony of this blog post via the mechanism of no longer extending my acceptance of the outward manifestations of an angry, struggling person in my space.  To remember that sometimes compassion from afar is what is right and it is no less real and good for all that.

Thanks for listening.  I could have done it without you in theory dear reader, but I didn't - I had you there in my life for a reason.  I appreciate you all, and love you, for your challenges as much as your supports. <3

I think the blog posts might run a bit more freely now too.