Hong Kong vs China

I know why the Brits handed over in 1997. The world looked different then. The USSR was a 'sick man' empire, China looked for all the world like it was liberalising, and besides, they'd paid for the New Territories and all the infrastructure that went with it. And besides, stealing territory and works from yellow people is something the British have only ever done when it was convenient, and not necessarily with any reference to what was right. 

But I'm not here to talk about territory or sovereignty or morally questionable deals designed to resolve morally questionable situations. I'm keen to use my privilege as a person with a Chinese face to say some stuff that other commentators might fight shy of. I'm keen to talk about colonisation - about some of the positives of colonisation, in fact. And about the moral duty of a parent. I know, but bear with me.

Speaking of parents, whenever my mother referred to people from Hong Kong, she'd always derisively call them 'Hongkies' while carefully explaining that they didn't like to be called that to their faces, and that they weren't really Chinese. Not like us Singaporeans. As it turns out, both of these things are true. Most Hong Kongers prefer to be addressed by their names, funnily enough, and they really are very very different to the mainland Chinese - about as different as we Singapore types, but in different ways. 

In Singapore there is a pardonable skepticism about the British and their legacy. This is evident in their having a whole damn museum dedicated to the day the Brits abandoned both us and the Aussies who stayed to defend us to the tender mercies of the Japanese. But that's all ancient history now, apparently, if we're to judge by the collective memory of the west. But we'll get back to that later. 

In Hong Kong, what I've always seen is a sort of cheerful mongrel dog. There is, of course, Chinese signage everywhere. Yum Cha is the preferred breakfast, and there's an abundance of distressingly (to my Hakka self) Cantonese manners. The way they yell out "M'goi!" repeatedly and in steadily increasing volume to get a waiter's attention. The way everyone's whole life seems to be solely about stuffing their faces with food and buying shiny stuff (sound familiar, quai lo?). The casual cruelty to foreign maids, the obsession with exam results and authority, the general insensibility to big abstracts like 'materialism' and 'nihilism'. All these strike me as classically southern Chinese, but that's mostly because of my own racism. 

But there's another and equally visible side of Hong Kong, and this is the colonised side. One of my earliest memories of Hong Kong is Maxim's, the cake shop. Sure, there were weird green things, and the sponge was either dew on spider web diaphanous, or seven egg house brick, and nothing in between, but this was a shop full of recognisably Anglo-French tea cakes, mechanised and weaponised with Chinese efficiency (it takes less than ten seconds for a Maxim's worker to pick, box and giftwrap a three tier sponge cake) and matcha powder. And then there's the 'Western Breakfast', which consists of a sad piece of fried bacon-shaped ham, a cup of tea with a whole sliced lemon crammed into it, and fresh eggs deliberately prepared to look like powdered eggs. Apart from the lemon, that's basically a British or Australian army breakfast. 

But where we most see a culture is in its film and literature, and in this respect, Hong Kong is a goddamn miracle. Deep social commentary, films about families corroded by poverty, knife-wielding youths destroying themselves and everyone around them through global mindless hatreds worthy of Compton or any other urban battleground, weird non-conformist love stories, and a kind of ebullient, deluded individualism - the hero will prevail, love will overcome, freedom will ring... so far so Disney, right? But then there's that beautiful added touch that everyone I met in Hong Kong called  cinematic villains 'The cool guy'. And that wonderful Chinese lack of insistence on a happy ending - sure, it'll be a moral one, but we like our morality to cost blood - lots and lots of blood. 

And there's the rub. The British Empire - the west in general - has not been kind to people who look like me. Whether it's force feeding us addictive drugs, creating racial theories which define us as subhuman, actively treating us like nature's dogs and butlers, or simply stealing our shit and then looking the other way when we're in distress, such has been the lamentable track record of the white man and the yellow man. But contact equals transference, and in Hong Kong we find a person who looks Chinese, but somehow, woven into the fabric of their being and world view, are some ideas that are extremely precious to us here in the west. Individual liberty. The right to spend the rest of your life sharing pictures of your cat while scoffing overpriced bijou foodstuffs. Defiance of the tyrant. 

Sure, territorially, and by every other sensible or 'Realistic' measure, Hong Kongers are Chinese of a sort. Always have been. But in the only way that's really important, they're your people. Our people. They are, deep down, westerners incapable of understanding the self-abrogation of freedom, the essential servility and stupidity of the mainland Chinese Communists. A people who cannot - simply cannot - understand why they should have to give up the real estate in their heads to a bunch of guerilla peasants who spit in the street. That's right - they're the spiritual children of the west. 

Which is why every July 1st they protest. Which is why if we look away again, if we once again fail to act as the protectors we've always falsely promised them we'd be, they're going to die like flies. And as the weird surrogate Frankenstein parents of Hong Kong, the western world cannot, in good conscience, look away any more. 

Conversations With Evil Men

I've spent an embarrassingly large portion of my life consorting with very bad men. Countless mad-dog-loner career criminals, staggering numbers of addicts and alcoholics, some of the kind who had poison for blood and hate in every thought, quite a few who claimed to be killers, and a very few who actually were. There was the guy who methodically knocked out every single one of his neighbour's teeth with a ball-peen hammer because he was late on a two hundred dollar loan repayment, the man who had spent the past seven years of his life sustaining his heroin habit by pimping out his girlfriend, another man who sustained his lifestyle by dint of extreme physical and psychological intimidation of his own mother, and a very softly spoken African of my acquaintance who had a little row of wooden figurines - one for every life taken - on his boarding house windowsill, and who was careful to explain that his collection did not include those he had killed at any distance greater than five metres. "It doesn't count if you don't see the light fade," he'd say, before donning his Dominos uniform for another night of delivering pizzas to pampered English kids.

The usual portrayal of men like this (and they're almost always men) is pretty two dimensional. The most sympathetic of fictional villains is generally, though not always, written by a person who at best has sympathy for them, but little to no real understanding. There are some stand-out exceptions. Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy spring to mind as authors who seemed to really understand what it is to be a bad man. Shakespeare, strangely, also makes that list. But the overwhelming trend is to hollowness - a sense that the villain exists as a construct to serve the righteousness of the hero, or the anti-hero, as the case may be. In fact, in stories which contain an anti-hero, this cyclostyling of the villain is often at its most egregious. The less 'heroic' the hero is, the more 'villainous' the villain.

In fact, the whole idea of villainy is prey to classist prejudice. The word itself derives from a French word for 'peasant labourer', and it's telling that of all the various terms for antagonists - blackguard, cad, devil, etc. - the one which has stuck in literature is 'villain'. There is a strong sense that the villain is somehow lower than the hero, that their desires are degraded and base, their motives carnal and worldly. One can see, in this binary categorisation, an echo of deep Christianity in the idea that simple human desires for power, sexual gratification, wealth, or revenge are somehow less worthy than more high-minded goals, and therefore deserving of defeat and punishment in the artificially just universe of literature. What's interesting about this is the fact that villains, like monsters, serve as unflinching mirrors held up to the very same qualities and desires which exist in heroes. The lust of the villain is offset by the purer spiritual yearning of the hero's love. The urge to vengeance in the villain exists as a counterpoint to the hero's high-minded service of justice. The villain seeks wealth and power as a bulwark against the world. The hero seeks it as a comfort and resource for their loved ones, or to perform some altruistic goal. The difference between the two is painfully subjective, and film and literature provide us with the illusion of objectivity by creating artificial flaws in the villain. Fanaticism versus faith. Random violence versus measured force. Fear and hate versus courage and love. But faith must always contain a seed of fanaticism, force isn't really possible without exactly that same rotten core of violence in the heart, and courage and love are practically dependent on fear, either as a thing to be overcome, or of the loss of that which is loved.

I remember sitting in a living room with three very bad men. Two were younger and one, let's call him One Shot, was older and acting as a sort of mentor for we three. It was the shank of a very long night, and we were enjoying that contemplative space in the grey of the dawn, sipping on the dregs of the alcohol supply and, for the moment, utterly relaxed in the strange liminal zone between an all-nighter and a three day bender. Moments like these can be very dangerous, as they are so often confessional. It's important, if you're young and inexperienced, that you be very selective of the people you do this with, as the confessions of some men can be fatal to the one acting as priest. But I digress. We were swapping stories about moments of fear. I don't mean stage fright or starting a new job or any of the other petty terrors of ordinary life, but rather the kind of fear which paralyses - moments when the balance of life and death hangs, pauses, and holds its breath for the kind of eternal brief second peculiar to existential danger. There were some excellent stories being told, of cars tumbling over and through roadblocks, kitchens awash with blood, knives and guns and mobs pummeling lone bodies with fists and bricks and bars, but I don't really remember them. Like movie villains, there was a kind of familiarity - a kind of sameness - to them all. Each one of those stories could have been mine or theirs or practically anyone's.

The one that sticks in my mind is One Shot's. I think I'd just finished telling some half-lying, mostly embellished story of being saved by dumb luck - the kind of story which is a compression, an indication, of a lifetime's worth of unmerited escapes. Immediately after I'd finished, there was one of those particular moments of silence which usually preceded one of One Shot's rare and quiet pronouncements.
"What about you?" someone had said. "I'm guessing you ain't scared of shit."
"Unconditional love," said One Shot, which, as you'd imagine, confused us enough to shut us all up. "The most scared I've been in my entire fucking life," he explained, "was when I had this woman. Longest I ever been with anyone. And I remember one day when she turned and looked at me, and all I could see in her face was pure, unconditional love."

I remember understanding this instantly. The terror of being suddenly naked before an image of yourself you know you can never live up to. A threat which cannot be defeated by anything in the armoury you've so painstakingly built, because the teeth of this enemy exist within the self. This has always struck me as the essence of evil men. Slice them how you like, at bottom they are formed by fear and necessity and pain, and so often the source of these is coded deep into the bones of a society which seems to simultaneously create, revile, and crave their existence. I've always wanted to catch that in a script or a novel or a story - in anything really. Mainly because there is a yawning gap in the portrayal of villains, and this gap is shaped pretty well exactly like that sudden revelation of One Shot's humanity. And because a gap in our literary portrayals usually corresponds with a yawning, egregious gap in our understandings of the world and of each other.

Democracy Has Always Been Elitist

The etymology of the word 'democracy' is often rather sloppily rendered as 'rule of the masses', on the strength of the word 'demos' meaning 'the people' or 'the masses'. This isn't really correct. A deme, in ancient Greece, isn't some amorphous population group but rather an administrative unit. I'd say that crossing the word 'electorate' with the word 'village' or 'town' (in a corporate sense) would be the most accurate way to understand what the term refers to. Which means that the idea of democracy, in its earliest and purest form, is more about systems of power than it is about some Marxist interpretation of popular rule.

And when we look at how Athenian democracy actually ran, we can see the template for all future kinds of democracy as well. In essence, once we get past the central idea, the actual operation of democracy is rooted in limitation or control of the franchise or, to put that another way, placing limits on who can vote and who is qualified to stand for office. In the Athenian system, this was done through the simple mechanism of citizenship. Some historians argue, in fact, that the whole idea of citizenship was invented to serve this franchise limiting function of democracy. The requirements for Athenian citizenship are actually quite draconian by our standards. It initially boiled down to ethnicity, with potential citizens needing to prove some generations' worth of residence in their particular deme, and/or membership of their tribe. Women were famously excluded, as were slaves, and so were many of the poor by virtue of needing to have completed a term of military service - the equipment and free time required to participate in the hoplite formation were beyond the reach of most poor people. Many of the most bitter constitutional disputes in ancient Athens had to do with citizenship - to whom to grant it, and what its requirements were. In the period following the Persian wars, the morphing of Athens into a naval power meant commoners completed military service at rowing benches, and foreigners flooded into the city. This caused quite a lot of Athenian heartache, and was solved by creating yet more controls in order to limit the influx of new citizens. So it can be seen that the first and purest democracy was primarily preoccupied with limiting or controlling access to it.

We can also see this pattern in communist countries, most of whom think of themselves as democratic. China is a good example, as at local and provincial levels they have elections, and they also have a kind of ersatz (though not well understood) parliamentary, or at least assembly, based system. In China, which is nominally or socially communist, we get the strange anomaly where membership of the Communist Party is actually quite exclusive. Political officers are present in most schools, and their role is to look for the most able and most doctrinally sound students in order to mark them for potential party membership in the future. Sure, the upper echelons of sovereign and executive power are not directly accessible by the people, but on many coarse measures, China is about as democratic as we are. Sure, it's an oppressive oligarchy, but the simple fact is that they are able to claim, without looking completely insane, that they have democratic mechanisms, and these mechanisms are very similar to the ancient Greek ones in that they primarily exist in order to confine actual power to an elite while simultaneously encouraging popular involvement and participation.

But by far the most predominant and egregious example is representative democracy - basically the system in use in most of the western world. The vast mass of the people are effectively cut off from the actual running of their country. The actual mechanisms of executive power are surrounded by a constitutional ring of steel, with the state holding more or less absolute monopolies on the enacting of legislation and the use of force. Every few years voters can choose the people who are going to rule over them, but like the hoplite formation, there is in fact an effective property qualification for office. Basically, the amount of time it takes to run, the licence fees, the cost of media - even simple stuff like the cost of corflutes and posters - make it highly impracticable for poor people to stand for office. Sure, it's possible in theory, but it's far far easier to run for office if one has access to property, leisure, and significant sums of cash. And then there's the attitudinal aspect. We need only look at the recent election of Zali Steggall in Warringah - correctly hailed as a breaking of the deadlock of the two party duopoly of Australian politics. If we look unflinchingly at what exactly made her viable and attractive as a candidate, some uncomfortable truths emerge.

What made Zali attractive? Well, let's look at the aspects of her which were used to promote her. Firstly, there was the name recognition and moral connotations of her past as an elite athlete. Then there was her highly successful career in the law - an elite profession which is further seen as eminently suitable owing to the fact that politicians are lawmakers. And then there was the perception that she was 'experienced at high levels', and talk of her more than average intelligence. Put simply, the thing which made her most attractive as a candidate for democratic office was not the 'anyone but Tony' aspect - multiple candidates have run against Tony to near zero effect. No, what made her viable in the public's eyes was the fact of her belonging to an elite - to several elites, really.

This kind of limitation of power is, at its best, designed to actually facilitate rather than debar popular participation in rule. But the important thing about a system of power is that it needs to be understood. I see a disheartening number of people with little to no understanding of how their state is actually run, and therefore of actual and existing avenues to the creation of change and the application of leverage. This mass ignorance creates a situation where power is more and more monopolised by special interest groups and lobbyists, who are probably the people best acquainted with these systems. And it also creates the very dangerous situation where the people cease to understand how they can interact within the system, which inevitably leads to apathetic non-participation, or a kind of frustrated impulse to either bypass or destroy the systems they don't understand and feel (technically correctly) are disenfranchising them.

Both of these are recipes for disaster, and it's actually down to each individual citizen to fix this. We can blame fatcats or media or alien lizards as much as we like - the simple fact of the matter is that we ourselves are ultimately responsible for the types of government we have, and we shape this reality through a combination of what we consent to, and the extent to which we can be bothered understanding it.

Strange Days

It's one of those depressing overcast days when the weather seems to hesitate frustratingly between fine and stormy without being able to make up its mind. This might explain why Katie is having her third shot of methamphetamine for the day, or it might not.

She's crouched on a milk crate under a rail bridge. Scattered around us are two men and a girl who can't be more than sixteen years old. They're all grubby-faced, like children who have wiped their faces with dirty hands. The other three all watch the progress of Katie's injection with hard, laser-focused eyes. She stabs the needle into a black vein which bumps and knots its way down her forearm. Once it's in, she wiggles it left and right whilst pulling back on the plunger until a tiny dejected plume of dark blood reluctantly flares into the barrel of the syringe. Satisfied, she pushes the plunger home, yanks the needle out, and covers the bleeding puncture wound with a grubby finger. There's no real change in her face or demeanour as the drug hits her system, just a hint of satisfaction in her eyes as its tense lines relax slightly. I'm reminded of the expression of a footsore passenger who has finally found a place to sit down. 

"I'd offer you one," she says, "but I don't have a clean. And you don't look like a tweaker anyway."

"You could offer me one," says one of the men. 

This is Ken, who I think is a partner of sorts for Katie, but this is difficult to determine as Katie is a prostitute and has offered me her services free gratis several times already while Ken was present. 

"Why? You'll just scab it off me anyway," quips Katie. This kicks off a long and circuitous conversation about who supplies more drugs to whom, a dialogue which peaks and troughs in emotional intensity with the regularity of a sine wave. While this is going on, Katie is fiddling with a drug bag which contains just under half a gram of crystal. She's got an old set of pipe-cleaning equipment - the kind with the scoop and probe - and is painstakingly lifting out individual clumps and placing them in the plastic spoon she's just used to mix up her own injection. When she's done, without really breaking the flow of her wrangling with Ken, she looks over at the young girl and says, "There you go, love." It suddenly dawns on me that this girl is her daughter. 

Once this is done, the others come forward with spoons, Ken first, still half-heartedly arguing with her but clearly dividing his attention between her and the specks of rock she's dropping into his outstretched utensil. Katie sees me watching and says, "My kids always come first." The others nod and make sounds of emphatic agreement. I watch them punch their blunt needles through their scar tissue into their veins and then carefully hide their syringes away about their persons.

"You can get done for self-administered, you know," says Ken. "A lot of people don't know that."

He's talking about the fact that it's a criminal offence in NSW to self administer a prohibited substance. The maximum penalties are a fine of up to $2200 or a two year prison sentence. Generally, a user found with a needle or a bong will be charged with this offence and strongly advised by the police to submit a written pleading. This is convenient for the police, being administratively easier, and they will often sell it on the basis that the accused won't have to attend court. The problems with this are that not attending court is a very good way to be sentenced to the maximum penalty in absentia, and that the vast majority of magistrates will not accept the simple presence of paraphernalia as conclusive proof. Some magistrates will even accept addiction as a defence, as there's a provision under the law for necessity or duress. A person with a strong support network and money for representation is most likely to get a caution or community service, but as with many aspects of the criminal justice system, the heaviest penalties tend to fall on the poor and friendless. 

Once they've all had their hits, they become far more talkative. There is a brief period where all of them are talking at once, three of them to me and one to himself. Ken is earnestly telling me a story about being beaten senseless by nightclub bouncers who lost patience while attempting to move him away from their corner. He had elected to meet his dealer there and then his phone had run out of battery. Unable to either explain this, or comply, they had dragged him into a nearby alley and taken turns kicking him in the head. He seems especially upset by the fact that they had referred to him as a junkie the whole time. "I'm not a junkie," he says. "I've never thieved anything in my life." 

Katie is showing me pornographic pictures on her phone and explaining the fine points of how to achieve the sexual positions depicted. "You gotta remember to clench your abs and plant your heels or they'll rip a hole in you," she says. "Men forget themselves in the moment, you know what I mean?" 

Her daughter, whose name I never discovered, is asking me an unbroken stream of questions. She wants to know what music I listen to, what school I went to, if I think she's pretty, what I think of bacon, if I've ever been arrested, what the law is surrounding strip searches - that's the only question she waits to hear the answer to. When I tell her what little I know, she then launches into a long and disjointed story about an illegal strip search she was subjected to at a music festival, concluding multiple times that "all pigs are pervs". 

The other guy, Cameron, stares at the sky and mumbles about finding spirit dragons in buried coffee mugs. "People don't know this stuff, but there's dragons hidden everywhere," he says at the end of every one of his brief vignettes.

"This poor bloke," says Katie eventually, referring to me, "we're all talking at him at once." There's general laughter, and Ken explains that it's not often they meet new people. 

"People avoid you if you look like a user," he says. 

I don't think that's true. My own observation is that beggars and users are basically invisible to passersby. Katie announces that she's got to get on again and invites me to come with her for "a bit of peace and quiet". We wander off down the street at the slow amble that's almost universal amongst the long term homeless. She links arms with me, explaining that she's "holding" and that I look respectable - she wants to use my respectable appearance (I'm dubious about this) as a sort of aegis to avoid being searched or, as she puts it, "verballed" by the police. As we walk, she apologises for her sexualised conversation. 

"I know what it's like," she says."I didn't mean to harass you or anything. It's just I've always used sex to get affection. That's all I want, really - for people to like me and to show me some affection. I know there's other ways, but it's the one I've always gone with. I guess it started with my old man. He started fucking me when I was about nine or ten, him and his mates. It went on for ages, but I was just a kid and I didn't know how to stop it. Eventually, it just became normal for me, you know? Well, not normal - it can never be normal - but I kinda just accepted that that's how to be with men. And it's never gone away."

We reach the corner where she's appointed to meet her dealer, and I take this as an opportune moment to say goodbye. She thanks me for listening and tells me to drop by any time. It's silly, but the fact that this conventional politeness is exactly what one would expect from a middle class housewife strikes me as extremely odd. But of course, why would Katie be any different in this respect? There's no reason at all. 

"Are you sure you don't want a fuck?" she says as I'm walking away. I politely decline. "Yeah, I don't blame you," she says, her hand unconsciously covering the track marks on her forearm. 

Names have been altered at the interviewees' request

On the Importance of Acknowledging Evil

I remember when I was in secondary school I would regularly cut class to go to the George Street Timezone. Whilst there, I met an older Chinese - he was probably in his early twenties - with whom I bonded over Double Dragon and a mutual interest in looking up the skirts of female characters in Street Fighter. I remember during one of our wide-ranging discussions he solemnly advised me against hooking up with a white girlfriend. "They don't see us as human," he said. "We're basically pets to them, or at best, accessories to prove to their foolish mates just how 'advanced' they are."

This idea is, of course, laughable, but I took it as gospel at the time as it does, in fact, have a kernel of truth. Where the truth lies is in essence rather than in detail: the world is a hostile place, and the vast majority of people in it will behave amorally the majority of the time. This might seem controversial, but I don't really think it is. Where people are consciously in control of their behaviour, the majority are moral while a minority are deliberately immoral. But just how much of anyone's behaviour is consistently under their conscious control? For most or all people, it's laughably little - so many of our actions, small and large, are reflexive responses to drives we're either unaware of or do not wish to acknowledge. This being so, it's always been axiomatic for me that people in aggregate represent the most dangerous type of threat - the one which is not cognisant of its status as a threat.

This way of looking at the world was, in my early life at least, pretty well universal amongst all the people I knew. But now, as I reluctantly advance in age and prosperity, I'm more and more coming into contact with people who think very differently and, somewhat more surprisingly for me, fast coming to the conclusion that it's normal to do so, and that my view is the anomalous one. The most prevalent world view I come across these days is one which consists of deliberate and wholly voluntary blindness to evil. It's interesting to me that the division falls roughly across class lines (with me being an obvious anomaly in that respect), and reminds me of Becky Sharp's famous bon mot from Vanity Fair where she muses that she would also find it easy to be "virtuous" on fifty thousand a year.

I don't really have a problem with people wishing to see things in this way, but I do wonder if they're aware of the implications of such a view. There are some crucial assumptions, almost certainly all incorrect, which underpin such a way of being. People who allow their bodies to become soft and dysfunctional in the name of instant gratification are somewhere deep in their minds assuming the invincibility of the civilised order. People who laser focus on their own tiny lives without paying attention to the rest of the world are assuming that history can't touch living individuals in the same way that, say, WWII fatally interrupted the plans and aspirations of millions, many of whom were very clearly caught napping. People who exempt themselves from political process or awareness are possibly making the most stupid assumption of all - that the systems under which we live are somehow natural and native to reality, rather than delicate webs of abstracts requiring constant maintenance and defence. The vulnerabilities created by these deliberate blind spots really do look, from where I'm standing, utterly appalling.

It could be argued that I'm just as skewed as anybody else. That I'm arguing from an equally deluded position located on the paranoid end of the spectrum. I don't think so. I know from personal experience as well as close observation of others that wherever we find within ourselves an area made up of rationalisation or excuses, that that area represents a critical vulnerability - a part of ourselves which can and will be destroyed by the Brownian motion of human interaction, and which might very well facilitate the destruction of the person as a whole. I'm not saying that everyone should work to coat themselves in the invincible armour of isolation - vulnerabilities are not just entry ports for hostile action, but also for the types of human connection which are the only thing that potentially makes the endeavour of human life worthwhile.

But what I am saying is that it's essential to manage one's interface with the world, because the world is as full of danger as it is of wonder, and it's impossible to manage threats of which one is unaware. And should we cease to match and manage ourselves accordingly, we potentially cut ourselves off from the good things in life, it being impossible to really experience anything when dead or broken beyond repair.

School of Mine

I'm generally quite proud of my school, despite the fact that it is unlikely to be proud of me. But this fact is neither here nor there - I'm proud to have been a part of it, proud of the outstanding education they delivered to us, and immensely proud of the school's broader ethos, which unlike so many others, has evidently carried over into the later lives of its alumni, even in my case, where the uptake of its values was delayed until far too late in my life.

I was not an easy child. Underhanded, sneaky, dishonest, vindictive, occasionally violent, and sometimes flat out criminal. I remember my first detention was handed out in my first week of year seven, for lighting a fire in a bin. I'm pretty sure the only reason they held onto me for as long as they did was my academic ability. But this is not to say that the school was without its own problems. There was a distinct issue with bullying, in which I both participated and was a victim of. Elitism and arrogance are the besetting sins of all schools like mine, and there was quite a bit of our student culture which would now be condemned as toxic.

And it's not as if my memories of school are un-mixedly happy. Failures on the part of staff and other students to understand certain aspects of life which I felt to be obvious, and critical failures on my part in the area of character, made for a generally troubled and turbulent school life. Every time a form master appeared at a classroom door, there would be a chorus of, "That's for you, Lake," - and just like in Greek tragedy, the chorus was generally unerringly accurate.

For all that, however, I still think it was a sterling institution. Whenever I speak to our alumni, a fondness comes over their faces when we talk about the old school. This is in stark contrast to the boys who went to other schools in our cluster - the Knox and Trinity and Riverview boys, who wax contemptuous about their school culture, faculty, impacts on their subsequent lives. For the vast majority of the old Aloysians I speak to, the days of our schooling exist as a pure and bright cul de sac of time-softened recollection. A place where values mattered, and where the old connections are still upheld to an extent I have never encountered anywhere else apart from the military.

Tutor Group, with Idiot circled in red

So it was with pardonable complacence that I heard the news of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse. My own personal memory could only conjure up a handful of incidents, disturbing enough in themselves, but relatively innocuous. A form master who once disciplined a student by strapping his bare backside - the strap was an ubiquitous punishment in my day, and I personally was strapped an average of twice a week, on the hands. A dubious relationship between one master and a student who, when it comes down to it, weren't that dissimilar in age. Dark rumours of faculty sauntering through the showers insisting that boys should be comfortable being naked in front of each other, but no corresponding action. Just the normal idiocy and weakness one expects in an institution, and which I'd always assumed was rigorously policed to prevent harm.

So it was with a mixture of quite unexpected emotions that I heard, through an old boys group, of the sentencing of two of our faculty for serious sexual offences. One was worse than the other, and both appeared to have taken place outside of our school at affiliated Jesuit institutions, but even this extremely peripheral view of the cancer of paederasty is disturbing enough. I remember the men in question. One was a Brother, actually wider than he was tall, so fat was he, who had a grating nasal voice and a habit of petty tyranny combined with the somewhat ridiculous habit of falling asleep at his desk in front of the class. It didn't take us long to figure out that leaving silently to pursue our own leisure was, in fact, the perfect crime. The other one I principally remember for a scathing thirty minute critique, mostly justified, of my character and morals, delivered at volume into my face in a small room. It's interesting to think of this in the context of the thousands of pornographic images of children he was subsequently convicted of possessing.

A picture of me, clearly thrilled to be in Concert Band, and unaware of the camera.

And that's the thing - the corrosion of my memory of the school has left me furious. Sure, I wasn't exactly its proudest son, but how dare these maleficent petty tyrants taint all of our recollections with their own sordid evil. How dare they. Not only have they done incalculable harm to their victims, for whom I cannot express enough sympathy, but they have also pissed on the childhood memories of thousands upon thousands of boys. Their gross betrayal of the credo that they themselves were the foremost in promoting is entirely unacceptable, and coupled with this is the chilling inference, given the delay in exposure and conviction, of the steps the school and church authorities both took and signally failed to take.

There has to be something positive to take from this, and to my mind it's a simple lesson, applicable across all areas of society, the state, and at every level. Never wink at evil to protect any institution, however great. This is not the first mass exposure of predatory behaviour in large and well respected institutions (though it might be the biggest), but it's down to all of us - every single one of us - to make it the last. If we're to learn anything from this, we must, I think, learn that this sort of thing cannot be allowed to stand.

Vote For The One You Don't Like

People often ask me why I hate populism so much - surely that means I hate the people, right? Surely the people are smart enough to know what they want, and how their country should be run - right? Right?

Well, possibly. But who, in fact, are the people? Are they the urban latte sipping elites whose top priority appears to be banning anything and everything which offends their delicate, Guardian driven sensibilities? Or are they troglodytes from Far North Queensland, demanding a ban on immigrants whom they have never encountered or had to live with because some idiot has asserted with no evidence whatsoever that their culture is under threat? Or are they the middle citizens, the quiet ones who are generally too busy being the engine of the whole damn country to have or understand political opinions, and who will generally vote based on whatever their mass media of choice tells them is the right way to vote?

This is the biggest issue, really. The people, en masse, are, in fact, critically stupid. Not because of average IQ or educational level - these are generally quite high - but because of the necessarily inchoate nature of a polity deliberately made up of disparate and competing interest groups. 

And that's the biggest problem with populism by far. A canny populist - one who knows what they're doing - will generally pick the biggest and/or most coherent interest group and tell them exactly what they want to hear. It's telling that in the Anglophone world, this group tends to be the xenophobic reactionary middle. But that's not the point - the point is, that they'll pick that one. A crap or incompetent populist will try to please everyone, resulting in the ridiculous situation where they'll be applying ten year gaol sentences to strawberry fiddlers one day, bringing children off Nauru the next, and then announcing vague plans to cut immigration while increasing immigration (WTAF) the day after that. The biggest single problem with populism is that it's a signal failure of leadership.

Most people - the vast majority of people, I'd be willing to hazard - are politically indifferent or politically moderate. Right up until the moment you ask them to state their position, at which point they vote Brexit not expecting it to pass, vote Trump in protest against the political establishment in the full knowledge that he's a fucking moron who won't fix anything, engage in flame wars about vaccines, corporate tax, international trade, or any other of the myriad issues which they know exactly nothing about, and generally just act like crazy people until the rush passes momentarily and they go back to work in the system which, once they've finished mindlessly excoriating it, they rely on for their livelihoods and well-being. 

So given the incoherent and frankly mindless nature of populist discourse, all a populist leader can actually do, in terms of concrete action, is address how people feel about an issue. Actually fixing it is an impossibility. Because the truth of issues like population, trade, or foreign affairs - the stuff people get really het up about - is that solutions are slow, complex, and usually highly counter-intuitive. So a populist solution is almost always good in the short term as it rubs everyone gently on the bum and tells them how smart they are, but disastrous in the long term, as such gains need to be disproportionately paid for in the world system. An excellent example of this is the trade deficit. Given our position in our region, it's both expected and desirable to run a deficit most years, but every single election both sides of the house will campaign on reducing or eliminating it, whilst shamelessly conflating it with the budget deficit. And we swallow it, for reasons I still can't explain. 

I understand that these arguments are probably not going to sway anyone in the populist camp, probably because they're reasoned arguments, and pay scant attention to how the people feel. This is because I don't give a fuck how the people 'feel' about the Iran deal, trade tariffs, price elasticity of demand, or any of the other innumerable things we shout about without knowing a damn thing about. We're really not supposed to know these things. What we're supposed to do is demonstrate at least as much sense as the average family dog, and vote in our own self interest rather than for some idiot who's clearly following us around and trying to stoke irrelevant outrage. Populism is to politics as a three year old child trying to live on sour candies is to healthy lifestyles. 

If I approached you in an alley in King's Cross and offered to sell you a diamond ring for a hundred bucks, and then spent the next few hours assiduously agreeing with whatever you had to say, however stupid, you wouldn't then decide to put me in charge of your household finances and career prospects. Or if I lobbed up next to you at a bus stop and started blaming all your problems and mine on mythical outsiders and 'the deep state', or a media conspiracy, I doubt you'd ask me to participate in decisions affecting the welfare of your small children. So please, for the love of all that's holy, can we please apply the same principles to selecting our political leaders?

The Magic Eye

When I first watched Training Day, I was a much younger and less experienced person. One concept which resonated, however, was the concept of 'the magic eye'. This was presented as a sort of eye for 'the street', a way of looking at things which would reveal that which is hidden, that layer of existence which lies beneath the manicured and regulated stream of ordinary life. Of course, Training Day being Hollywood, the proof of this was that the young police officer was able to spot a rape in progress, which is something I don't actually believe anyone needs a magic eye to achieve. But then, for a mass audience, the obvious needs to elevated to the level of the arcane.

Having said that, the magic eye does exist, and people who have it recognise each other. It's very hard to explain, but there's a few ways to look at it. The most basic and simple is to notice the way people look at people. This creates a different kind of look in the eye of the observer, and somebody who is looking at the way other people look at things, will become noticeable to someone else who's doing the same thing. This is how it works at the lowest level, and I generally remember it mostly from my youth, with recognition generally taking place amongst other youths. When older people would notice and comment on this to me, they would generally loom up out of nowhere, surprising me.

As we move forward towards inevitable death in that process we euphemistically refer to as ageing, habits of life and thought harden and submerge such that they are pursued both imperceptibly and ineluctably. Now, it looks utterly different. Instead of individuals connecting across a crowd in a sort of freemasonry, it is now a matter of scenery versus protagonist. The eye flicks over a crowd of people walking up and down a footpath, and the vast majority of these people have a gaze which is internalised and, to all intents and purposes, blind. It can be easily seen that what they are seeing is at least half made up of things inside their own heads, rather than that which is around them. These people fade into a kind of moving backdrop, interesting enough in and of itself, but rather like the sky in that unless something extremely unusual is happening with it, it's not exactly of immediate importance.

But then there are the others. The man who stiffens and moves his bag whenever someone comes within half a meter. The other man, next to him, who turns his right hip away from whoever he's talking to. The girl sitting on a wall whose glance goes from waist to hands to face, in that order. The woman who makes a point of looking over her shoulder every fifteen paces. Or the man who does the same thing, only instead of looking back, he looks up at the windows and rooftops above him. The people who are scanning the crowd and who lock gazes as soon as they encounter one that's doing the same thing - lock and dismiss when there's no threat detected. And in that split second between lock and dismiss is a sort of recognition. Not the happy or hostile recognition of youth, but rather a more matter of fact, sometimes quite sad acknowledgement that here is another person who is just as damaged, frightened, alienated, or just plain suspicious as themselves.

In my old neighbourhood of Manly, after the gentrification, I could go for days without seeing such a look. Where I work now, in Lane Cove, there's a grand total of three people (in Lane Cove you see the same people every day) I've seen with this look over the whole of the four or five years I've been there on a daily basis. But in the street where I live, which is not more than twenty minutes away, I see that look every time I go outside, multiple times. What is it about the street on which I live, that so many of the people walking up and down it have been sufficiently smacked around by the world to have the magic eye? It's not as if I live in a particularly rough neighbourhood - in fact, it's so not rough that the idea is laughable. I don't know, but as soon as I'm able to convince one of them to stop and talk to me about something that isn't the weather or the transit system, I will post that conversation up on this blog.

Work and Home

I live near a hospital, and there's a weird acoustic flaw where people standing and talking at street level across the road sound like they're having a conversation in my bedroom. As I spend quite a bit of time working from home, I hear quite a few of these little chats. What I mainly hear is people being comforted. I generally don't understand what is actually happening, as people have an incomprehensible tendency to never refer directly to what they're talking about, especially if it's important – a thing I don't think I will ever understand. Cancer, death – all horrific pain – is referred to as 'it', if at all. Sometimes, I'll pop my head out over the balcony and have a look. It's a deeply unattractive aspect of humanity, but whenever I encounter tragedy I have to see if the sufferers are beautiful, dumpy, misshapen, stylish, rich or poor, for no other reason than to project backstory onto their pain for my own private entertainment.

It's not just a hospital, there's also a methadone clinic and rehab as well. This means that I'm far from starved for entertainment. There was one night where a woman was screaming "Don't!" and "Stop it!" over and over again. I initially didn't want to do anything about that, not wishing to interrupt my highly important business of watching people fall over on Youtube. But this hesitation didn't last for more than a few seconds, so I went downstairs. At my appearance, the man who had been beating her ran away, and when I went to help the woman up, she screamed, "Don't fucking touch me!" and started screaming even more. So I went back upstairs and watched a video of people wiping out on waterslides.

The conversation I probably hear most often is people haggling furiously over prescription drugs. The price for Valium seems to be anywhere between one and four dollars per pill, depending on bulk, with good character, constant willingness to 'shout a shot', and length of relationship being the principle reasons given in favour of discounts. These conversations also often degenerate into violence, but I never feel even slightly inclined to get involved in those. Nor am I much interested in the occasional ice tantrum, usually involving one of those women who look like they're made of op shop leather storming down the street screaming imprecations at the tops of their voices.

One of the more interesting episodes involves a gigantic man with scars all over his forearms. He looks exactly like a GI Joe action figure, haircut and all. He's always humping a pack, always dressed in black, and always, always smoking. I would see him around the neighbourhood, looking like an action hero whose puppy had just died, smoking and generally staring glumly at the world passing him by. In my mind I called him 'The Happy Welder', partly because of the nature of the scars on his forearms, but mostly from an innate cruelty which I think I share with our entire poxy species.

Anyway, one day he happened to be standing in that spot over the road, so I went out to have a cigarette on my own balcony. He was visiting the rehab, standing outside and having a smoke with his case worker. He assured this man that things were going well. There were good prospects that he might get housing in the next year, and he hadn't attempted suicide in months.

These are the stories I observe on my street, before I head into the neighbourhood where I work and listen to conversations about which restaurants are new, and which are getting a bit tired, how unbelievable Tracy was at the last yoga class, and just how exciting and satisfying some new data centre project is. The distance between these two areas is roughly two and a half kilometres.

Observations On Teaching And Education

Education is in the news a lot these days, with quite a few people talking about systemic problems a la NAPLAN and so forth. As a tutor who is across something like one hundred and twenty students, I thought I'd put in my two cents about what I've been seeing in the world of secondary education.

It's always been axiomatic that school teachers are ludicrously busy. Apart from contact hours, there's the huge and ever-increasing burden of reporting and process, statutory requirements, extra-curricular duties, and professional development. As such, I've always known that my particular profession exists primarily to take up some of the slack which is created by the sheer impossibility of providing intensive one on one remedial or extension tuition for harassed, over-worked, and over-committed classroom teachers. It's telling also that a fair proportion of the tutors I manage are classroom teachers themselves, who freely acknowledge that the service we provide plugs specialist gaps which just can't reasonably be expected to be filled by the broader school system. I also tend to go in to bat for teachers when students complain that they've received no feedback on their seventh submission of a practice essay or whatever, explaining that these people are really really really busy. But lately I've found myself more and more called upon to defend or rationalise the indefensible.

The students who rolled up with printouts of the presentations their teachers have been delivering, still watermarked with the logos of Sparknotes or Gradesaver. Students set to study the difficult and abstruse poet T S Eliot who, for four of the six weeks allocated for the unit, were basically left to their own devices to Google the poet and poems, and then spent the remaining two weeks having their own (understandably terrible) research read back to them. The student who was advised not to choose The Iliad as a related text because it was 'too famous'. The class who spent an all day session on creative writing being actively encouraged to write stories on subjects that are specifically outlined in the syllabus as subjects to avoid. The class whose faculty has been setting them gruelling, multi-phase, multi-modal assessments which have eaten up most of the term's class time because their faculty apparently didn't understand the word 'or' in the syllabus. The same class whose teachers instituted a three week shut down in the middle of term as they suddenly realised they didn't understand the syllabus they'd had a year to adopt. The teacher who swore blind that the film Metropolis - a film which consists mainly of mass production machines killing and enslaving workers - had nothing at all to do with a critique of capitalism or class power.

And then there was the student who came to me with a voluminous notebook filled entirely with interpretations of Frost poems which ranged from the invalid to the insane. The same student who, when studying Strange Meeting, a poem self-consciously referential of Percy Bysse Shelley's Revolt of Islam, was given an interpretation which mentioned nothing about this. And when she asked her teacher if she should do some independent research on Shelley was told that the teacher "had never heard of that woman". Needless to say, Percy was a man. And then there was the teacher who marked one of my students down for pointing out that a poem which included a scythe, multiple images of 'reaping', and 'sleep' might just be talking about death, and the one who insisted that a poem with a rigid six syllables per line was in iambic tetrameter, which would require eight. And when asked what tetrameter actually was consistently, according to my student, 'ducked the question'. This is not to mention the multiple reports I get of whole classes spending weeks watching Netflix programs like The Crown for no discernable reason, teachers repeatedly informing classes of outright fallacies like, 'The HSC exam will never prescribe a Yeats poem to talk about', despite the fact that last year's HSC did, and one shining, gobsmacking example of a whole class who had been taught that Buddhism and Yoga were forms of devil worship.

Given all of this, I think it's time for some hard truths. The current system of teacher education does not reliably produce competent teachers, at least when it comes to the humanities. And then there's the input of the electorate. Every time we get outraged about inadequate education outcomes, the guaranteed institutional response is to add another layer of reporting and process, without necessarily allocating more funding. All this put together makes teaching an extremely unattractive profession. Sure, a small minority will be attracted to the profession as a vocation, but the reality is that most people work to pay the rent, and if working conditions are sufficiently crap, then so will be the pool of talent.

We need to get serious about education, and the only way to do this is to make teaching an attractive profession. It's really just a simple matter of paying more and raising standards accordingly. We can only lift the quality of teaching if entry into teaching is competitive, and it simply won't be if it continues to be an ever crappier job with ever crappier pay and conditions populated by the inevitable concomitant of ever crappier members of the profession. Paying salaries commensurate with the importance and demands of the job, requiring teachers of subjects - all subjects - to actually know their subjects at least as well as they know how to format lesson plans or fill in mandatory metrics reporting, and lifting the onerous and, let's face it, utterly worthless burden of process and reporting which was only ever instituted to appease the electorate without actually making any attempt to fix the system, are all essential steps in any effort to 'fix' education.

And it's not just systemic stuff either. It also comes down (arguably mostly) to our own attitude to what education is for, and our own practices in terms of demanding things from it. When government listens to the electorate in terms of what we want from education, what they generally get is inchoate gibberish. A thick layer of partisan outrage over-topping a bewildering plethora of demands for the education system to act as high end creche, ideological and spiritual coach, vocational employment trainer, high academic institution, life skills tutor, and general utopian fairyland in which no child is ever hurt, stressed, underwhelmed, overwhelmed, bored, or challenged. If we want meaningful change in education, we ourselves need to do some serious thinking about education on a systemic and social level, instead of just inundating government with shrill knee jerk personal responses along the lines of  'won't somebody think of the (my) children'. Because while education is very much about children, that's not all it's about by a very long shot. The product of our education system as a whole has a direct and significant impact on the economy, future social happiness, our viability as a nation. And it's not just economic - education is pivotal to the production of individuals capable of ensuring our future defence. In fact, our whole future viability as a nation. So why does everyone balk at the idea of spending on future defence the way we spend on, oh, let's say, defence?

It's possibly to do with the fact that we think about education stupidly, because for most of us, our education was the product of people thinking stupidly about education. It might perhaps be time to break that cycle.

Marking Time

I went to a raspberry farm once. It was in Tasmania, and was billed as the thing to go and see. In fact, it was represented to me as a thing to do, which would put it in the same category as writing a novel, having a jousting tournament with shopping trolleys, or walking long distances in the bush. A thing to 'do'.

When I got there, I found it surprising in several ways. First of all was the revelation that a raspberry farm looks like a vineyard, or a tea plantation, or like any other vaguely green space full of commercial agriculture. I am an urban creature, and that's really all I got from looking out at the neat green rows of what I presumed to be raspberry bushes.

The next surprise was the sheer number of things people are willing to put raspberries in. We went to a very nicely outfitted cafe/restaurant/gift shop type thing, where a six page menu contained an astonishing variety of dishes containing raspberries. There were pancakes and whatnot, as you'd expect, but also incongruous combinations, like a bacon and egg breakfast with, for no discernable reason, a raspberry compote. And even more intriguingly, a short list of items having nothing to do with raspberries, proof positive, I think, that the people running the place were well aware that they would be faced with people unwilling to tolerate their berry based whimsy.

But the most surprising thing of all, from my point of view, was the idea that going to a raspberry farm in order to eat a weirdly berried meal and look at some bushes constituted 'something to do'. I remember the person I was with stating that it was 'a bit of fun', and looking back, I think she did have quite a lot of fun watching me go from bewildered to nonplussed to irate. I can't help but wonder if that was her plan all along.

I wouldn't say it was a wasted experience, though. I did enjoy my breakfast, and I learnt several interesting facts about raspberries, though I think I may have forgotten most of them. But I also learned an invaluable lesson about people. Such activities have always been a complete mystery to me. I've always been vaguely aware that there are people for whom life consists solely of eating painstakingly made things in odd or new locations, but I always assumed that there must be some secret thrill to the whole thing. That in the same way I don't really understand people who are addicted to mindless MMOs or Valium or whatever, that there must be some intense pleasure or satisfaction to be gained from this mode of life. The biggest surprise of the day was that there isn't.

These people are just marking time, and doing it (usually in grim silence) in the company of their loved ones. And this makes me wonder about what we all do in our sophisticated urban environments. All those brunches and craft beers, our manufactured enthusiasms for manufactured trends and products - surely this is just a delusional version of going to the raspberry farm. It's all just as poorly qualified to be thought of as 'something to do', but because it's new and bright and colourful, and because we do it loudly and quickly, we deceive ourselves into thinking otherwise.

How to Analyse Poetry

Poetry, like fine wine, classical music, and art, is generally seen as an absolute quantity. Most people, scarred by their experience of it in school, are convinced that it is either the exclusive property of merlot sipping aesthetes, or that it's some sort of elaborate con and that there aren't any real rules to what makes poetry good or bad. Either way, this is a source of deep annoyance to me. Poetry contains some of the highest, deepest, and most heart-breakingly human ideas in all literature and, just like fine wine or classical music, it's only necessary to absorb a little bit of information to unlock a whole new world of beauty and experience.

To demonstrate this, I will step through the analysis and interpretation of a single poem:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

The first thing we want to do is determine structure and meter. This is often a simple matter of just looking at the poem on the page. We can see here that there are four groups of four lines, and that these lines are all of similar length. This means that it's a pretty good bet that this particular piece is going to have a formal structure, with fixed stresses, syllable counts, and so on. Stressing a line of poetry can be a mind bending experience, especially with more modern poets who like to play with classical stress patterns, but it's usually not too difficult. With this particular poem, I think we can agree that the stresses work as follows:

Whose WOODS these ARE I THINK I KNOW.

His HOUSE is IN the VILlage THOUGH;

So what we have here is a recurring pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. That particular kind of pairing is called an 'iamb'. If we count all of the iambs in each line, we can see that there are four, which means that this poem is written in iambic tetrameter - four iambic pairs of syllables, or 'feet', per line. 

The next thing we want to do is determine whether or not there is a regular rhyming scheme. This is just a simple matter of assigning letters to the words at the ends of lines.

Whose woods these are I think I know.	A
His house is in the village though;	A
He will not see me stopping here	B
To watch his woods fill up with snow.	A
My little horse must think it queer	A
To stop without a farmhouse near	A
Between the woods and frozen lake	B
The darkest evening of the year.	A
He gives his harness bells a shake	A
To ask if there is some mistake.	A
The only other sound’s the sweep	B
Of easy wind and downy flake.	A
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,	A
But I have promises to keep,	A
And miles to go before I sleep,	A
And miles to go before I sleep.	A

We can see, then, that all but the last stanza have the same rhyming scheme. This tells us a couple of things. Firstly, that a deliberate choice has been made to compose this piece in regular iambic tetrameter, and secondly, that there is more than likely some significant idea or event embedded in the last stanza.

Iambic tetrameter is the meter most commonly used in songs. The most famous example of this is probably Hernando's Hideaway:

The groupings of four, with stresses distributed iambically, are instinctively and intuitively tuned to the western understanding of song-like rhythms. This means that poems structured in this meter are going to contain direct appeals to emotion – that the poet intends for the reader to 'feel' at least as much as they read the poem.

That, you'll be pleased to know, is the end of the technical part. Often seen as the most intimidating aspect of poetry, hopefully we can now see that it's actually the simplest, easiest aspect of analysis. What needs to happen next is the much more complex process of determining meaning.

Depending on the literary era in which the piece was written, and the contrariness or otherwise of the poet, this is going to be either more or less tricky. The poet in question here is one Robert Frost, and he falls very broadly into a bracket which includes Yeats, Eliot, Owen, and so on. We can loosely call this Modern or Post Modern, though it should be noted that the use of classical structures and nature imagery means that an argument could also be made (and was made by the poet himself) for Frost being Romantic. It's not that important – we just need to place the poem in time so as to have the best possible chance of understanding the symbolism present in the language.

One feature of poetry sitting in that bracket between 1798 and the present day is that the poet often takes for granted that we understand the symbols that they use. A mower/reaper/scythe will be death. A flower/jewel/star will be poetry. And, in this case, woods will be a place of liminality, wonder, and/or fear, and winter will be approaching death and cycles of change. This is arguable, but it's probably not worth having that argument, as I'm right, and anyone who says otherwise is more than likely wrong.

It's vitally important that poems be read aloud, as one of the most significant aspects of poetry is sound. One advantage of modern poets is that you can often hear them reading their own work, and, unlike so many poets, Frost is actually a skilled and sensitive reader of his own poetry. 

As a soundscape, the poem has a sort of crescendo of pace around the second and third stanzas. If we need to establish that this isn't just some quirk on the part of the reader, we can examine the lines themselves. Upon doing so, it can be seen that many of the lines in these two stanzas do not have punctuation at the end of them. This is a technique called 'enjambment', and is designed to create a feeling of forward momentum.  

My little horse must think it queer        
To stop without a farmhouse near        
Between the woods and frozen lake      
The darkest evening of the year.           

He gives his harness bells a shake       
To ask if there is some mistake.            
The only other sound’s the sweep        
Of easy wind and downy flake.            

This increase in pace, combined with the change in rhyming scheme and content, tells us that there is a turning point, or volte, between the third and fourth stanzas.

So what we know so far is that we're looking at a song-like, experiential piece with a progression of ideas culminating in the fourth stanza. What those ideas actually are is a different discussion entirely, but I would point out a couple of salient features embedded within the poem, which can be seen as the poet pointing out important images or ideas to the reader.

Firstly, when stressing this poem, there are certain points when the sing-song iambic tetrameter breaks down. Most notably in the lines 'The darkest evening of the year', and 'But I have promises to keep'. With the 'darkest evening' line, the stress pattern becomes problematic owing to the enjambment of the foregoing line. Further to this, the order of concepts is a little strange – the information feels like a redaction or interjection, in that it's not provided in the sequence which we would ordinarily expect. The fact of this piece of information sitting flat and unexpected at the bottom of the stanza highlights its significance, and it's important to note that the darkest evening of the year is more than likely a reference to mid-winter, and therefore the symbolism associated with that.

'But I have promises to keep' is next to impossible to chant in sing-song. This is definitely a deliberate move on the part of the poet, to break the meter, force the reader to step out of the comforting rhythm of song, and thereby physically ascribe significance to a significant line. The ambiguity of the stresses in this line bring the rolling enjambments of the previous two stanzas to a dead stop, and set the stage neatly for the final repeating couplet. And as these three lines are made to stand out so much, by both meter and repetition respectively, it's a good bet that the whole point of the poem is embedded in these lines.

It's generally up to the reader to determine what a poem really means, and I'm sure you've noticed that apart from insisting on standard symbolic meanings, I've left this side of things very much alone. But it does occur to me that if you're still reading this far in, not being provided with some kind of interpretation is going to be seriously annoying. So here goes.

The fact of the woods as being a distraction or pleasing halt on a journey indicates that the poet is talking, on some level, about dichotomies of duty and pleasure. Significance can also be ascribed to the fact that the 'owner' of the woods is absent - is not, in fact, resident in these woods. Many people interpret this as having to do with the absence of god or, with rather more complexity, of being reflective of Frost's attitude to the relationship between 'truth' in a poetic sense, and the poet. Various meanings are given to the horse and the ride, but at a very basic and easy level, we can all agree that what we're discussing here is a journey, and it's therefore not too much of a leap to determine that the journey in question is the journey of life. And then, at the last stanza, 'promises' and 'sleep' in combination should create associations with the ordeal or experience of life, and the rest and culmination of death.

If you're still reading at this point, the hope is that your reward has been a basic toolkit for demystifying any poem, and also for punching holes in the pronouncements of pretentious 'artsy' types, who rarely ever have the first clue as to what they're talking about. But I also feel there should be some other reward for endurance of this caliber, so please enjoy this video compilation of raccoons doing funny stuff.

Vale, Simon Robert Agius

In the houses of my dreams, my bedroom is always in the sun room. A liminal place, not quite of the house, but not quite outside it. In my mind, that was the relationship Simon had with the world - marginal, individual, and quirky. But that's not a true image at all.

Simon was someone I mainly knew from school, so to talk about him, I suppose I need to explain a few things about the gladiator academy in which we grew up. I'm very proud of my school, of its standard of education, its standing in the community, and its honour roll, but I'd be lying if I said it produced uniformly kind and humble people. In fact, I can hear a great horse laugh rising from the sum of old Aloysians at the idea of kindness or humility ever being valued by the school. We're known for many things, many of which are positive, but what we're very much famous for is arrogance, entitlement, and that curious smiling intolerance peculiar to Irish Catholics.

When I attended his funeral last Friday, I met Pauline, Simon's mother, who said she had been initially annoyed by the long shadow cast by our school. She complained that he always had our motto, 'Ad Majora Natus' (Born for Greater Things) on his lips. She felt that this was arrogant, and possibly a little stupid. But then she looked into it some more, and found out about the deep Loyolan roots of social justice that lay behind this seemingly elitist message, and found peace with it. I understand this. When I think of Simon and my school days, I imagine The Great Hall crammed with boys soaking up the idea of themselves as some kind of special, chosen cohort, born to make their mark on the world. All except one – Simon – who must have known all along that the true meaning of this pat little saying was rooted in service to others. It helps to explain the way his entire life was shaped and pointed squarely at the single goal of helping the entire world to be and get better.

Simon was a part of the music department, as was I, and I believe that in the generosity of his heart he wished to be my friend. I took this very much for granted, and assumed that there was no requirement for me to reciprocate his many kindnesses, because I am the exact type of entitled arsehole which our school loves to produce. Simon was emphatically not this kind of person. As boys, we always put at least as much effort into being smooth and plausible as we did into becoming adept, and this was definitely a learning culture we received from the institution. I say 'we', but this was never true of Simon. He never seemed to care a jot for how he looked to others. He loved singing and songs, so he sang. He loved God and his church, so he went. He loved business, so he wheeled and dealed. He loved his fellow man, so he always and everywhere practised kindness and generosity. He loved Vanuatu, so he waded in, two-fisted, to fight for free market and democratic principles on that tiny island as if he were doing battle for the soul of the world. And never once in all of this did he seem afraid of looking silly, or worried about what others thought of him. It is with deep regret that I realise now that I never saw the enormous value of his immense heart and courage when I was a boy.

If I were ever to commit the gaucherie of attempting to 'sum up' a person in a few words or a single idea, I would describe Simon as relentlessly positive and earnest. The way he treated everything he encountered and liked was a kind of mad rush to embrace it. Simon had the kind of energy and commitment we associate with entrepeneurialism, despite having not a shred of the greed, mendacity, or selfishness which can all too often be the other side of that coin. He was passionate about creating, through business, that elusive invisible hand of Adam Smith. His big project in his final years was an app which would help people ensure that the produce they were buying was part of an ethical supply chain – organic, natural, and productive of fair payment to the farmer. Simon believed passionately in so many things, but it would seem that what he cared about most of all was the idea that by doing good, he could make the world a better place. His enthusiasms remind me of a knight of the crusades, riding out into a sea of iniquity to carve out a space where people might live in harmony with their highest principles. Simon was ever Utopian in his imaginings, which requires a greatness of soul few ever possess, and even fewer are capable of preserving into adulthood.

So it is with deep sadness that I farewell my old schoolmate, Simon Robert Agius. I don't believe in God, but he did, with an earnestness and love which has always confused me. But given that, it would be churlish of me not to wish him good journey in the manner I think he would have preferred. So I offer a prayer for his soul, casting it out into the ether in the hope that his faith was justified, and that the legion of souls who I know are pleading for his salvation are heard by a god as passionately in love with right and humanity as he was himself.

Pie Jesu Domine, 

Dona eis requiem. 

Qui tollis peccata mundi,

Dona eis requiem.