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.

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.

The Delusion of Moments

Very often, moronic pop culture will capture and distil big and complex ideas into affirmation posters. One such distillation has to do with the idea that life is made of moments. On one level, this just isn't true. A second's thought about what we mean by 'moment', as in, an incident or brief period of time which stands out from the rest of the tedious grind of living, will tell us that the proposition is impossible. But on another level, when once we recalibrate for the chicken brained incoherence of casual speech, there is a resonance of real truth. Life, as we live (or re-live) it in our minds, is pretty well exclusively made up of a more or less carefully selected highlights reel.

Now the self-congratulatory bum-patting machine of self help fraudsters wants us to believe that this is a good thing which should be embraced and harnessed. At least, I think they do, as in the language of hazy tropes which is their default for communication, they tend to put statements like, 'Life is Made of Moments' against a backdrop of a forest or happy children or puppies or whatever. But like so much of the palliative garbage these people peddle, what they are asking people to celebrate and embrace is a major, and arguably toxic, cognitive glitch.

We currently live in the most heavily mythologised age in all of human history. Sure, there's always been stories of heroes and gods, but the record of self expression which comes down to us through the ages shows us that this last hundred years or so has seen a massive expansion and democratisation of those stories. We have absorbed and co-opted these myths into the very fabric of our consciousness. Any time any person decides to undertake a fitness regime, for example, it's a very good bet that somewhere in their mind, a training montage will be playing. Whenever people try to explain themselves, the universal tendency is to treat their past as various stages in a Bildungsroman - a coming of age story. We look for the defining, climactic moments in our lives, and understand our current state in terms of a narrative which is not actually of our own making. And psychotherapists and self help gurus actively encourage this. "Look for the moment in your life when you decided you didn't deserve success," they'll say, and we'll scan back through our poorly maintained and sorted highlights reel to find, not necessarily a moment that was important, but one which fits the model we're being asked and expected to conform to. So we'll dredge up the memory of some teacher who told us we couldn't write very well, or some ten year old girl who mocked us for having funny hair or teeth or ears. And around this dubious framework we will construct a myth of the persecuted hero, or something equally ludicrous.

It's not uniform, of course. Fight Club is an excellent example of evidence that somewhere out there exists an awareness of this toxicity and a will to fight it. But Fight Club, for the very reasons it's appealing, is easy to dismiss. Because the delivery of this idea is also couched in exaggerated, mythic terms, and woven into an admittedly subversive, but still immediately recognisable Bildungsroman of growth, redemption, and acceptance.

I'm not saying that we should attempt to exterminate the natural and often laudable human tendency to narrativise everything - if we did, I'd be out of a job, for a start. And I'm also not enough of a Marxist to see deep evil in the energetic, free market way mass media has evolved to create a nexus of mutually performative supply and demand in the way it exploits our psychological foibles to give us what we want, and tell us what we want, in equal parts. I'm pretty sure all most purveyors of media want is our money and attention, and I don't really see a problem with that.

But where I do see a massive problem is where this mythologisation of everything - this blatant reduction of the entirety of human experience into signal moments and individuals - is applied to understanding of a complex and pluralist society, which understanding is so often translated into action. The process whereby we convert and reduce an issue or a history into a simple story of villains and heroes, a battle between the forces of good and evil, is brilliant for socialisation and the formation of tribes, but is woefully inadequate for the goal of responsible parsing of necessary action. It's no coincidence at all that the justification for movements like the KKK or The Tea Party rests on a foundation of blatant myth-making. This tendency to reduce life to a series of shining moments, while ignoring or deleting all the dull, sublunary, connective tissue which makes up the vast majority of real experience, is an open ticket to absolutism, hatred, and immense harm.

Yoga, Swastikas, and Pauline Hanson

Yoga is really old. Maybe not as old as Indian Nationalists say it is, but it's still very, very old. The earliest evidence we seem to have of it is cylinder seals and reliefs from the Indus Valley which appear to depict yoga practices as part of ritual activity. These date to roughly 3000BCE. In this time period, Yoga is intimately associated with ideas of universal order, the primary symbol of which, for the Indus Valley cultures, is the swastika. Some archaeologists date cave paintings of swastika to 10000BCE, and posit a link between yoga, tantra, veda, and paleo or mesolithic ritual and cult. I find all this kind of thing profoundly fascinating, but I'm well aware that in this I am practically alone. So I may as well get to the point.

Over the millennia, yoga transformed, adapted, and expanded into a wide variety of practices and applications to do with medicine, religion, and so on, but until about the turn of nineteenth century, it was very much an exclusively eastern product. The idiocy of Orientalism helped to bring an awareness of yoga to the west, with fantastic authors like Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Roald Dahl being sucked in by its mystic allure and contributing to its popularisation. As for the swastika, I don't believe there's any real need to recount the story of its transmission to the west. The point is that the introduction of this alien cultural material was accomplished in a way which has rendered it practically unrecognisable with reference to the original.

I don't understand much about the detail of yogic practice, but what I do know for sure is that its original function is almost identical to that of gungfu - a form of moving meditation designed to link or connect the body with external, universal forces. Which is really not at all what it is today. For the most part, yoga in the west has shed its religious and ritual functions, and is now firmly entrenched in the self improvement/self management space. The key word being 'self'. Talking to practitioners and reading their promotional bumf reveals an overwhelming tendency to view yoga as a way to connect to inner aspects of the self, to improve or otherwise harmonise physical and mental components of the self, to engage with and learn to love the self. Self, self, self. Which is much more in the vein of being an observation, rather than a complaint. But the importance of the observation exists in the metamorphosis of the practice. When we in the west absorb an alien cultural product, we make it very much our own. A core element of pagan ritual and medicinal practice becomes, in the process of transmission, a leisure activity focussed entirely on individual well being, individualism and leisure activities being fundamental to western modes of life. This process can be seen over and over again through tea, pepper, potatoes, astrology, martial arts, curry, medicine, theatre, and writing... the list of appropriated (in the neutral sense of the word) cultural material is practically endless.

Which is what monocultural reactionaries simply don't understand. Idiots like Pauline Hanson and her fan club see the ingress of foreign cultural material as a threat principally because they do not understand the ways in which such material is transmitted or absorbed. To be fair, they also have trouble understanding primary school level civics and words of more than one syllable, but that's probably beside the point. The thing about anglophonic culture is that it is highly robust. We in the English speaking world have acquired the greater part of our cultures from outside, while the tiny original ethnicities forming our internal basis are arguably more mysterious to us than the cultures we have conquered, colonised, or otherwise absorbed. Western cultures in general are not so much under threat as they are in an accelerated phase of absorption and appropriation (neutral again).

It is only possible to view culture as safe when static and under threat when evolving if the viewer is suffering from some sort of serious mental deficiency. This could be ignorance, cognitive incapacity, or the delightful combination of both represented by Pauline Hanson. So really, we should basically leave immigration and other such issues alone, and focus on stealing ideas from a culture that refuses to allow intellectually stunted imbeciles to ascend to positions of power. Surely, there's some tiny country somewhere from whom we can appropriate this idea.

Moby Dick and The Fallacy of 'Killing the Magic'

One of the ideas I encounter all the time is the strange notion that analysis ruins the experience of creative works. It most often crops up when I'm taking a student through film analysis, as film is usually the medium they also engage with voluntarily in ordinary life. I'll be talking them through various film making techniques and explaining how each element is designed to evoke either specific or varied reactions, and they'll almost always ask, "But doesn't knowing all this stuff kind of kill the effect?". It's a question I get asked so frequently, and so reliably, that I have to conclude that it's a widely held belief.

I think it stems from the kinds of magical thinking we generally foist on children in schools as part of the effort to tame and socialise the human animal. God can see what you're up to. Santa will reward your virtuous behaviour. Imagination exists in a separate and alternate universe to reality, so no, it doesn't work if you just imagine you're wearing pants. And that's the essence of it - the quarantining of imagination away from reality creates the superstition that the analysis of imagination's products will somehow drag them into the 'real' universe, thus destroying their impact and wonder. I call this a 'superstition' advisedly. It's emphatically not true on any level. Imagination and reality are not clearly demarcated. They're not, in fact, even securely defined, understood, or satisfactorily proven to exist. Given that, one of the most important duties of an educator of older children is to repair the crude scars of earlier and necessary cognitive training - to re-knit the internal and external worlds of human consciousness once the child has become 'reasonable' enough to make independent (if necessarily arbitrary) distinctions between reality and unreality.

As a part of this attempt, I usually use Moby Dick as an exemplar. Melville's astonishing, enormous epic is usually first encountered as monolithic, intimidating, and practically incomprehensible. Rather like the bible, it hits the reading mind as a gigantic, towering edifice made from whole cloth, impossible to ever completely understand. For some, this is sufficient to make it unreadable, whereas others read it over and over again, trying to parse the deeper hidden messaging which they know, with absolute certainty, must be contained within it. And there is where it usually stops. The outline or shape of the primary concepts of the novel sit in a sort of fuzzy pool in the vague mnemo-cognate we use to have and store vague impressions. To my mind, this is a goddamned tragedy.

When we come to analyse Moby Dick, one of the very first things which happens is that we lose the idea of the text as monolithic - a single object. Its vast scope and incomprehensibly broad range is discovered for what it really is: not a singular vision, but rather a set of deeply fractured and inchoate explorations of distinct ideas. Basically, just like the bible, or a chance-met stranger, closer examination erases the illusion of a consistent and coherent entity. At this point, someone usually interjects with a kind of QED: "See! You've revealed its flaws, which kills it as an experience!", which is of course entirely wrong. Getting to know a text is like getting to know a person (mainly because that's exactly what it is). The better we know someone, the more inconsistencies, blind spots, flaws, and failings we discover. Thing is, though, when it's the right person, these apparent blemishes actually enrich and enliven the experience of that individual. In the same way, understanding Moby Dick's serious structural and conceptual flaws simultaneously reduces it to a manageable size, while elevating it into a pure act of communion. From an intimidating monolith, the story of the white whale becomes a conversation with a human mind. Flawed, certainly, but real and alive. An abstract interlocutor who asks us questions, tells us what it sees, thinks, and feels, and invites us to contemplate the human condition in all its frailty and majesty through the mythical lens of a failed (or not) monster hunt, and a Gilgamesh/Enkidu style platonic love affair.

And then it all becomes stark staringly obvious, in a way. The very famous first line, "Call me Ishmael," tells us straight out that Melville has created a persona with whom the reading mind is invited to converse. About the tenuous frameworks of society, identity, religion, sanity. About the grand narratives of humanity and its troubled relationship with truth and the rest of nature. About whale penises and tobacco smoking. About anything and everything, really. Its greatest flaw is its greatest strength - there really isn't any requirement to experience this text either sequentially or completely. It's discrete sections stand alone in a way that would make a modern publisher despair, and which make the work such an enduringly rewarding companion. In the case of Moby Dick, as in almost all cases, deeper, analytical knowledge does not in any way destroy its 'magic'. What it does do, however, is create the kind of knowledge which is necessary for all genuine bonding with ideas, images, thoughts, and people.

Blackjack And Politics

The best time to grind out a few hands of Blackjack at the casino is a Monday afternoon. This isn't about maths, but people. Blackjack is one of the few games where, with careful play, it's possible to take advantage of a very slight swing in favour of the player. In order for this to happen, however, all players need to co-operate intelligently against the bank. Players who are selfish, ignorant, or both, will make decisions which swing the advantage back to the bank. A good example is when the dealer draws a six or less. In this situation, it's vitally important not to draw picture cards from the deck, as these are needed to help maximise the probability that the dealer will bust. Of course, it's necessary to hedge oneself a little, so it's allowable to hit oneself up to ten, but the common good requires that players do no more than this. Ignoring the table and going for an individual win will usually result in every other player at the table losing. And this in a situation where proper co-operative play would have most likely resulted in everybody winning against the house. This is why Monday afternoons are best - none but seasoned, dedicated players hit the casino on a Monday afternoon.

In western democracies, politics is a game that's quite similar to Blackjack. Sure, the odds seem to be stacked against us, with big money interests and aggressive lobby groups poised to use up all the available oxygen, and legislative systems so opaque that the whole game seems irretrievably rigged in favour of the house. But we see again and again that united popular will can and does beat the bank. Thing is, this can only happen when it's more or less united. When we have a situation where the people are mired in useless garbage - semantic disputes, arguments over statues and holidays, mutual name-calling, and idiotic recrimination - the house will always win. So just like Blackjack, where a responsible player always follows the probability matrix, there are ways to swing the balance of politics back into our favour.

• Ignorant participation allows interest groups to tailor the narrative to their own narrow requirements. If you're not across an issue, either get across it or shut up. Economics is a good example - hardly anyone understands it, but our insane insistence on talking about it anyway allows governments to fight elections around issues we do not comprehend.
• Play the long game - sure, it's about self interest, but if we let our neighbour's house catch fire today, there's a good chance ours will go up tomorrow.
• Default to the equal treatment of all people. Giving groups more rights doesn't destroy functional societies - it's taking them away which does that. 
• Fear is never the answer. The project of civilisation is inherently unsafe, which means that its survival is dependant on our individual and collective courage.
• Tribalism is the enemy of democracy. Any political view which isolates any group based on who they are rather than what they do, is almost certainly invalid. 
• Think. How we feel about something is not a reliable guide to what is right, or even to what is relevant. Politics is neither a sporting fixture nor a soap opera - it's a real life process in which we are duty bound to participate as intelligently and responsibly as we can.
• No-one can live in a world tailor made for them and them alone. Grow up and make room for other views.
• Find common ground. Demagogues love division. When the people are polarised, the popular will is atomised, and the bank will always be able to have it all its own way. 

Great experiments of connectivity have always been a bit bamboozling for humanity. It's worth noting that great collapses and wars have tended to happen at our periods of closest interconnection. 1177 BCE, 576, 1913 - moments of broad connection seem to act as the tipping points of history. The internet has created another one right now, and the confronting realisation that the vast majority of people can neither ratiocinate, articulate, or spell, seems to be causing us to shrink from each other - to fragment and fracture apart as quickly as we possibly can. Which is the surest and speediest way to ensure that the house will always, always win.

The Buddha, And Why We Can't Have Nice Things

The middle of the first millennium BCE was an amazing period in human history. For reasons nobody can satisfactorily explain, revolutionary advances in ontological and ethical thought suddenly occurred more or less simultaneously all over the world. Socrates in Greece, Confucius in China, and Siddartha Gautama in India, are all examples of this sudden flowering of radical intellectual growth. Some historians push hard for a kind of networked theory, contending that this simultaneity must imply much stronger global connections than current thinking presumes, whereas others ascribe causation to a whole range of historical, personal, and spiritual forces.

Whatever the truth might be, the important thing is that, for whatever reason, this period is characterised by serious and unusually productive contemplation of the perennial question of what it is to be a human, and what might be the best and most ethical way of manifesting this being. For the Buddha, the problem was characteristically simple, but not. The question, as he saw it, was the problem of 'suffering' - how to explain it, how to deal with it, and how to transcend it. It's difficult not to connect this to much later early mediaeval thinking about the problem of evil, and the inescapable conclusion is that the Buddha was in fact contemplating exactly that.

The Buddha's solution was elegant, appealing, and, unsurprisingly, still strongly resonant today. Suffering comes from desire, he says, and the control of desire, coupled with a focus on understanding higher truths, is the only real way to overcome the lacrimae rerum which is the human condition. What really makes the Buddha stand out for me, however, is the fact that essential to this framework was a kind of higher atheism. 'Have and worship no Gods,' says the Buddha on repeated occasions. As I understand it, what he was saying was that dependence on ritual relationships, worship, and the community of religion, were all more or less insidious forms of attachment. In order to transcend suffering, we must also transcend our dependence on supernatural agents, not only as intercessants on our behalf, but as explanation for our plight. Complete intellectual and spiritual independence seems to have been the Buddha's recipe for true connection with a world he very much saw as immanent, and as containing solution and meaning in and of itself.

I'm painfully aware that this is a very complex idea, and that I've possibly made a pig's breakfast of attempting to explain it in a short paragraph. Thing is, though, I'm pretty sure I understand it, regardless of how clumsily I might be expressing it. What's very clear to me, on the other hand, is that practically none of the Buddha's immediate or early followers can say as much.

There are many conflicting and complementary traditions of the Buddha's death, but they all tend to agree on the major points. The great man was dying and, in a manner hauntingly reminiscent of Socrates, used his own personal death as an object lesson in philosophy. He showed them the transcience of the flesh by baring his own withered body. He counselled them yet again to fight their attachment to his person, and to instead listen to his ideas. He forbade them from deifying, enshrining, or worshipping him in any other way. On these points, all the traditions seem to agree. Interestingly, most of them also agree that his last meal was pork. But that's beside the point. The point is that the Buddha was insistent, in his dying moments, that no religion be established around his identity. 'Become a lamp unto yourself,' he is said to have advised.

I imagine his followers nodded sagely, made solemn promises, did their kind best to comfort him in his final moments, this man who neither needed nor wanted comfort. What I know is that everybody knows where the Buddha died because a shrine was almost immediately set up on the spot, and that everyone knows who the Buddha is because of the massive global religion which has been established around his identity. It seems that his ideas were simply a bridge too far. Be kind to others? Certainly. Live a virtuous and moderate life? No problems at all, boss. Transcend suffering and evil by striving constantly for complete mental and spiritual freedom? Um... say again?

It's one of my favourite ironies that the reason I know about the Buddha's atheism and aversion to formal religion, is the de facto deification of his memory by the formal religions created by his followers. For me, this is emblematic of humanity en masse. We are constantly limited by the slowest and silliest among us. No sooner do one or a few of us reach incredible depths of understanding, the very act of communicating those understandings corrupts, dilutes, and normalises them. From Buddhism to Christianity, revolutionary, transcendent ideas have been cut and watered down until they fit the shapes of the societies which adopt them, generally becoming practically unrecognisable in the process. Perhaps there's some comfort in the possibility of this representing a process of incremental progress, but I doubt it. What it most probably represents is the basic impossibility of fracturing permanently away from the community of humanity - a thought which is simultaneously heartening and deeply frustrating.

Race, Representation, and White Saviours

This picture of Fagin is a silent comment on the 'progress' made in discussions about inclusion.

Inclusive writing appears to be all the rage these days. All sorts of advice is available to the aspiring or established author as to how to represent people from different races, sexual orientations, and socio-economic brackets, in a 'sensitive' and 'inclusive' manner. I suppose this reflects the recent discussions around cultural appropriation and controversies surrounding various authors presuming to write, with greater or lesser success, from within a skin colour which was not their own.

As an ethnic Chinese in a majority white country, I have personal experience of the impact of representation and inclusion, having been brought up in the long, long shadow of Bruce Lee, Fu Man Chu, and Charlie Chan. So why is it, then, that the idea of creators making deliberate efforts to include me makes me so uncomfortable? Sticking with the idea of the representation of ethnic Chinese, there are a few aspects of this whole culture of affirmative action which are highly distasteful.

First of all, the whole idea underpinning the concept is fundamentally racist. The assumption that my skin colour dictates the shape and nature of my mind is no different, in essence, to the kind of social Darwinism which informed much of the racial hatred and prejudice of the twentieth century. The idea that Chinese people exist in some kind of ethno-cultural quarantine zone which can only be explored with special sensitivity training strikes me as a rather stupid and counter-productive inversion of the whole concept of pluralism. The point of a pluralistic society is that difference of any kind, while interesting and potentially productive of corporate advantage, should be largely irrelevant. For difference to be elevated to the status of some kind of sacred cow is simply moronic - it misses the entire point and purpose of key liberal values.

I'm aware that much of the model for 'sensitivity' and 'inclusiveness' is driven by ethnic minorities themselves, but this is, if anything, even more offensive. The belief in some sort of yellow, black, orange, or rainbow privilege speaks to a belief in the fundamental difference of these people, which is all kinds of wrong. Common courtesy dictates that we not deliberately offend each other, but common sense equally dictates that packing a given segment of society in victim grade cotton wool is offensive in itself.

And then there's the whole idea of patronage. The strong implication of all of this effort is that I should be somehow grateful. Look at all the effort those lovely white people are making to ensure that I feel included. Which is also deeply unintelligent - whether it's positive or negative, division is division. Also, anyone who's ever been picked for a team because the teacher has insisted that the fat and the uncoordinated should also be given a go, understands exactly what this kind of treatment feels like. My ethnicity is not a disability, and even if it were, simple courtesy demands that I not have it thrown in my face in a patronising manner.

I was once asked whether I included 'diverse' characters in my writing, and whether I thought this was a good thing to do. My response was that people, and types of people, occur in my work for the simple reason that they occur in the real world. Because all fiction, regardless of the height of its brow, depends for its validity in the reflection of some sort of truth. If any author is unable to understand a person as a person, regardless of their ethnicity or their walk of life, they simply have no business writing them. This isn't political, it's a fundamental principle of art.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Donne's Meditation XVII contains possibly one of the best known and most frequently misquoted passages in all of English literature. The line is usually rendered:

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

It should be:

"...and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

It's not really an earthshaking error, and I'm generally pretty relaxed about it. The highly grammatical English of past ages is always subject to truncation and simplification, this process being one of the perils and joys of using a living language. What does infuriate me, however, is the truncation of meaning.

It's typical of our solipsistic post-modern slackness that, knowing only this tiny fragment (and incorrectly at that), we so often interpret this to be entirely concerned with our own individual mortality. I remember being taught this passage in school, and being told with the firm authority of schoolteachers everywhere that it meant that death comes to us all, and nothing more.

This is egregiously, painfully, incorrect. When we consider the whole of the document from which this quote is so often cherry-picked, we find that its primary concern is not mortality, but the interconnectedness of all humanity. This is the same meditation in which we find the line:

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent; a part of the main."

Which was taught us as if it were an entirely separate thought, coming from a separate document. It is not. The meditation moves through a beautifully constructed line of argument, establishing humanity's interconnection through the church, and therefore god, and therefore in all our joys and afflictions. We are not to avoid sending for whom the bell tolls because it is we who are about to die. That's a possibility, of course, but it's not the point of the passage. The point is that the tolling of the bell should never feel like some remote occurrence - the affliction of the alien or other. When one part of humanity suffers and dies, so too does a part of ourselves. Far from being some sort of grim reflection on our own suffering, it is an exhortation to own the suffering of others - to cease the endless contemplation of our own navels and join the community of humanity by realising the depth and magnitude of our very real investment in it.

With or without god, the argument holds valid - whether we understand it or not, it is very much a corporate effort in which we are engaged. We in the west have been so successful at this effort that large groups of people are able to claim, with a straight face, that the artificial construct of individualism is, in fact, the natural state of our species, and should be legitimised through law and society. This is either profoundly stupid, or the product of a severe disconnection from reality and/or the past. Whether we directly see it or not, humans in society are like fish in a school. The least turning of one turns us all, and those who wish to scatter the school, believing in their own solitary power, are condemning each individual fish to the maw of the leviathan.

Life as a Dead Person

I remember watching an episode of Band of Brothers in which an officer, counselling a private afflicted with crippling fear, advises him to act as if he were already dead. He informs the frightened private that the disease afflicting him is not cowardice, but hope - that his lingering hope of survival is the real malignance paralysing his body. Because in many ways, hope is like oxygen. It's essential to life but, taken in excess, it becomes corrosive. Hope is the harbinger of fear, and the precursor to despair.

It's unsurprising, in a way - every culture that has a warrior and/or comitatus structure (and every major civilisation does), from the Vikings to the Saxons, the Samurai to the Wudang - has a version of this idea. On one level, it's a relatively crude way to manage fear - accepting death as not just inevitable, but as having already occurred somewhere in time, makes it impossible to conceive of actions (or inaction) to avoid it. On another level, though, it's a sophisticated tool for navigating life.

What a philosophy based on this idea removes is the anxiety and fear arising from hope. This is not to say that its adherents live lives of despair, or have an existence devoid of goals or aspirations - far from it. What is missing is that desperate emotional attachment to outcomes which is associated with a hopeful outlook. The excision of this element is, somewhat counter-intuitively, a highly effective catalyst of personal power. Put simply, it is much, much easier to strive, risk and labour, when the eventual outcome is seen as irrelevant. And the balance and calm with which these labours are conducted ironically makes it far more likely that they will be successful.

There are obvious downsides, of course. A mentality such as this takes a great deal of mental and physical discipline to maintain. There's also the fact that sound, practical goals like financial security, or personal or physical comfort, often dwindle drastically in importance. And there is the constant, if low-level irritation of being consistently misunderstood by people who believe that they are very much alive. It's an open question how important any of this is, as indeed it is questionable how important anything at all can possibly be. Nevertheless, I would argue that such a philosophy is worth considering. The freedom to act, the purity of action which can become possible, and absolute freedom from the pettier varieties of fear, all strike me as being ample recompense.

Magic, Puppy Dogs and 'Post-Truth'

"To cure a headache, tie a thin bag of mixed foxglove and fennel around the patient's temples and have him recite ten Ave Maria. This cure is especially effective during the gibbous phase of the moon, or when his sign is in the ascendant."

If you're anything like me, the foregoing sounds completely insane. The fact is, though, that this is one of many headache cures recorded in various medical volumes across thousands of years of human history. Luminaries and authorities such as Galen, Aristotle, and others are known to have proposed similar cures, and it can only be assumed that they were widely trusted. We do have records of some controversy regarding the astrological aspects of physiology, but on the whole, astrological, occult, religious and downright loopy medicine was widely accepted and decidedly mainstream.

It's very easy to look back on the credulity of our ancestors with a certain degree of smugness. A commonly used cure for colic, as late as the eighteenth century, was to "hold a live puppy on the belly". Which is frankly ridiculous, until we remember that meaningful physiological analysis as we know it was not available until very recently, and that this treatment is based on the ultimately sound empirical observation that heat treats pain. Unless we have this thought, however, the tendency is to laugh at the puppy while privately viewing our forebears as critically stupid. Not at all like us.

A great many authors have bewailed the death of magic in the modern age. From Dickens to C S Lewis, there is a frequent tendency to view the simpler, mystical mentality of the past with deep nostalgia. Science, technology, and discoveries in both have frequently been seen as making fatal inroads on the liminal or fantastic part of our lives. It's reasonable to see the great revivals in mysticism and spiritualism of the early and middle twentieth centuries as rebellions against a rising wave of rationalism and skepticism. Arthur Conan Doyle's belief in mental telepathy and faery folk, and the general drug addled new-ageism of the sixties and seventies probably have their roots in this reaction against a perceived destruction of mystery.

I'd contend that none of this was really necessary. I really don't think our 'natural' capacity for reason is any better now than it was then. Sure, our frame of reference has changed, but I think that closer examination will reveal a lack of any substantive change. In the secular west, we claim to base our world view on science, but how many of us really understand the principles on which the relevant sciences are based? We all know the Big Bang Theory, but given the average level of understanding, I'd say we mostly know it in the same way that our ancestors knew the story of Adam and Eve, and that the fundamental basis of that knowledge is, for most people, equally mystical and faith-dependent in each case.

And then there's the fact of the staggering numbers of people who believe in the existence of various interventionist gods, conspiracy theories, alien origins, the ability of various commonplace foodstuffs to cure everything from cancer to AIDS, or all of the above. I say nothing about whether any of these beliefs is true or not, but what they certainly are not is based on any recognisably valid process of evidence-based reasoning. In short, our minds are just as wired for magic and delusion as they've always been.

Sure, we might be better equipped to fight this tendency in the modern age, but I think it's demonstrably apparent that we're not bothering. The bizarre realities we can access through the internet are not created by the new medium, but rather revealed and magnified by it. This is what annoys me about all this talk about 'post-truth' times. The underlying assumption is inherently invalid, as it's impossible to find an epoch in which 'truth' has ever been primary.

While we clearly have some ability to transcend our stupid monkey brains, only a few ever come to believe that this transcendence is our primary business in life. The vast majority of us use our capacity for thought solely in order to rationalise and justify our feelings and biases, a behaviour designed to perpetuate, not defeat, our tendency to view the world as 'magical'. Forever and ever, amen.

The Zen of Freedom to Act

Buried deep in the Hagakure is a snatch of commentary which captures, almost perfectly, the essence of the mentality of the whole. It appears in the popular version as a curt, almost redacted looking item, and in the manuscript is buried amongst dozens of similar comments and dialogues. In both cases, it sits with virtually no explanation

The passage runs thusly:

"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall was this one:  'Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.' Master Ittei commented, 'Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.'"

There is a surprising amount of internet discussion surrounding this little quotation. It appears it's not just scholars who have sensed its fundamental importance. It's indicative of the modern mindset, however, that the most accepted interpretations are based around "matters of great concern" being understood as complex anxieties, and the quotation as a whole being taken as a recommendation to pursue simple answers to problems we tend to overthink. I believe there is a much deeper meaning to both the maxim and the commentary - one which requires some synthesis and contextualisation to grasp, and which goes beyond Tsunemoto's somewhat crude interpretation of the maxim as being in praise of the value of research before action.

It's fair to say that the Zen mind can be seen as profoundly transcendental, in that it is underpinned by a belief in the illusory nature of the tangible universe. Put simply, the world which we perceive is seen as a trick played by the senses on our conscious mind. This isn't, of course, exclusive to eastern philosophies, and is well attested in a great variety of other schools of thought. The great majority of the arguments regarding immanence and transcendence in western philosophy, for example, centre around the question of whether the 'veritas rerum', or the real truth of things, is or is not accessible to our consciousness.

It can therefore be posited that a world seen in this way is one in which that which is most important - the veritas rerum, or that which is 'of great concern' - is not just beyond our understanding, but also our agency. Basically, the core of things and existence is something which we cannot comprehend consciously or consciously affect. This is an uncomfortable doctrine for the western mind, I think, being in direct opposition to the deep roots of enlightenment thinking and Aquinas' old idea that the 'veritas rerum' is not only accessible, but a path to truth through observation.

For a mind geared to the absolute necessity for action, which basically includes anyone who dedicates their time to some type of work or other, this world view is balm to the soul, for what it means is that the ineffable truth of things is not only inaccessible, it's also irrelevant. What a philosophy of this kind provides is the freedom to act. There is no necessity to weigh or predict the effects of our miniscule agency - all that really matters is the application thereof. It is the tiny, insignificant actions of our ant-like lives which are the 'matters of small concern', and yet, despite their ephemeral unimportance, they are still the most significant aspect of our limited selves.

This is best appreciated in conjunction with this idea:

"The way of revenge lies in simply forcing one's way into a place and being cut down ... By considering things like how many men the enemy has, time piles up; in the end you will give up. No matter if the enemy has thousands of men, there is fulfillment in simply standing them off and being determined to cut them all down, starting from one end. You will finish the greater part of it."

How often are we paralysed by the contemplation of things we can't control? Why should I act when my effects will be so tiny? Why should anyone do anything, given the high likelihood of failure and the certainty of pain and death? It's simple - it's because what we do is one of the very, very few things over which we have any control at all. So while it may be a matter of small concern, it should therefore be treated with the utmost seriousness.

Christmas - Feast, Famine and Fiction

I'd say I've always hated Christmas, but that's not really the whole truth. I've been in love with the abstraction of Christmas ever since the ghost of Jacob Marley scared the bejesus out of me by staring out at an oblivious Scrooge in the form of a doorknocker. It's the December/January shut down I hate. I usually find myself in one of two situations during this period - either paid to do nothing, or not. In the one instance idleness drives me to find new and creative ways to ruin my life and prospects, and in the other, I starve. This year is different. This year, I find myself with quite a lot of work to do and, somewhat unusually, receiving moneys to do it.

While I've always looked on the enforced good will of this season with a somewhat jaded eye, someone who loved Christmas with a fanaticism worthy of a better cause was Charles Dickens. A prolific author at the best of times, he seems to have extended himself when it came to seasonal fiction, his productions ranging from the unmemorable (and practically unreadable) Cricket on the Hearth, to his iconic Christmas Carol. It's in this second work where we see Dickens at his effulgent, heavy-handed best. This is really the man's true mêtier - a morality tale, simple to the point of crudity, hammered home with a variety of blunt instruments ranging from the pathetic (Tiny Tim) to the grotesque (Marley).

It's curious to note just how utterly childlike Dickens seems to have been. His adults, never particularly convincing, are even less so here. What anchors and redeems the novella is his disconcertingly keen insight into the inner lives of children. His description of the lone child at boarding school, Scrooge's grand nephews and nieces, are poignantly verisimilitudinous. And on another level, his conception of Christianity and ideal human relationships has more than a touch of the Mediaeval about it, an adolescent era if ever there was one. The whole book is, in fact, pre-modern, and not just because of its didactic insistence on the evils of modern commercialism. That heady mixture of fear, awe, pure love and open-handed patronage is classic, extravagant Mediaevalism writ large. This is what gives the book its most enduring quality - a keen, bittersweet sense of nostalgia. A yearning for simpler times, larger souls and purer hearts.

Compare this cockeyed idealism with the author I've always thought of as Dickens' modern-day counterpart, Terry Pratchett. The late great Pratchett had the same prolific imagination and focus on domestic detail. Both Dickens and Pratchett wrote quite a lot, hammered out quick and rough for money, but their works are saved from being trash by a core of keen humanity, intelligence and observation. But whereas Dickens pursues a childish fantasy of a decent world filled with decent people, Pratchett likes to look at deep origins - his fantasy is one of unbroken continuity. His Christmas book, Hogfather, inverts the feast in much the same way as the Carol, using Death as a flaneur to examine its traditions, but his focus is on paganism. Blood, ritual murder and snow. One gets the sense of a horde of blinkered, ignorant human cattle going through ritual motions they know not why. But it's vitally important they go through these motions because, if they don't, the conceptual world as we know it would end. Humanity is made of ideas, and it doesn't matter, according to Pratchett, whether we really understand them at all.

We see that where Dickens looks back with the eye of love, Pratchett looks beneath with a kindly, but sneering assumption of intellectual superiority. If Dickens is a mediaevalist, Pratchett is very much a benevolent Tory. Where both of them meet, however, is in pointing an accusatory finger at the essential hypocrisy of the season. Of a time when we all spout generosity and goodwill and lock ourselves in suburban fastnesses to gorge on plenty and ignore everything beyond our own little circles. Both of them point to the uncomfortable truth that care for the poor and downtrodden probably isn't supposed to be confined to a few weeks at the end of the year, and nor should it be limited to unobjectionable and photogenic little match-selling girls dying in the snow.

It's a bit dichotomous, this whole Christmas thing, and I think that's what I find most distasteful about it. That simultaneity of generosity and mendacity, the idea of households eating their fill in simulated joy while, just a couple of streets away, December is despair, empty pockets and a deep sense of failure. A season where you're significantly more likely to both get smiled at in the street and murdered by your partner. It's this dichotomy which generally flings me into such a slough of despond over the season. So it's a good thing, really, that I've got a bunch of work to do and will be far too busy to dwell on that sort of thing this year.

The Practical Navigation of Hardship

I can make a total of seven different dishes based on these.
None of them are nice, but that's not the point.

There's quite a bit of advice out there on how to 'make it' as a writer, but a lot of it seems to exist in a fantasy world of aphorism and affirmation. This strikes me as profoundly unhelpful. Sure, a few encouraging words can serve the purpose of making one feel briefly better about things, but once that's taken care of, what does one actually do?

I've been plugging away at this writing nonsense for a while now, and years of effort are beginning to manifest themselves in incremental gains. This being the case, I thought I might just jot down a few of the (sometimes very hard) lessons learned in this time, for the general betterment of humankind. And also because the vague hippie crap I've encountered along the way really annoys me.

DOLLAR DOLLAR BILLS

This looks bad, sure, but I can't actually afford a wallet.

If you're going to drop everything and 'chase your dreams', you're going to need a plan. And your head examined. Of the two, though, the plan's probably the most important, and by 'plan' I mean one that exists in the real world. The kind of aspirational maths used by small time drug dealers and Amway Ambassadors isn't going to work here. The inescapable consequence of exchanging security for creative endeavour is going to be financial hardship. Any plan needs to account for this and it's a far, far better thing to choose what you give up than to have it wrenched unexpectedly from you.

In my case I dropped eating out, buying clothing, buying technology of any kind, any and every kind of monthly subscription, drinking in any kind of bar with appealing decor or patrons, and practically any and every occasion involving going outside with other people and frittering away money (otherwise known as socialising). What I kept was food, tobacco and some of the cheaper ways of getting drunk, seeing these as bare minimum for the maintenance of physical and mental health. Of course, these lists are going to be different for each person, but I think their relative proportions are about right for this kind of thing. If you think this all looks a bit bleak, you're right, but it's really just a question of attitude. It's worse than useless to give way to anger or frustration, and the benefit of adapting to a lifestyle like this is the discovery of untapped reserves of discipline, which is always handy.

Apart from sacrifice and various other hair shirts, there's also a positive side to extreme penury if you're able to stay open to it. It's important to inculcate a willingness to do just about anything for work, and with the right attitude this can be a treasure trove of experience and material. I've worked construction sites as a labourer, done highly uncovenanted shifts in various kitchens, taught English and music (just like my Victorian spiritual ancestors), private investigated and written godawful hack pieces for everything from technical manuals to genre mags to international tabloids. If writing's about exploring new worlds, it's not possible to ask for better than this, and it's mainly accessible through developing a tendency to say 'yes' a lot, and some skill at pretending to know what you're doing.

But most importantly, it's time to brace. There's a reason there's a picture of Mi Goreng at the top of this piece. In a country as rich as ours, poverty can easily be bearable but it's rarely ever fun.

ALONE, ALONE, ALL ALL ALONE

Awwww... Nobody cares.

Nobody is going to understand what the hell it is you're doing. 

Okay, that's not a hundred percent true - it's pretty likely that other creatives will, but it's best to assume you're not going to meet any. While the world is full of people who claim to be writers, very few actually are. I've been unreasonably fortunate in this regard, having met a bunch, but fortune isn't something to be relied upon overly much.

So, back to nobody understanding. There's a few key disadvantages to writing as a profession. A big one is that nobody can tell the difference between a person who is writing and a person who is sitting around doing nothing. This can cause serious problems. I remember a long series of friends and relatives who more or less immediately lost faith in the idea that I was doing anything at all. The result of this is resentment and gratuitous advice. The solution is to strike out alone. I'm not, of course, talking about some libertarian bootstrap mission, but rather a willingness to be morally and spiritually lonely. Of all the things that have got me through, the support of friends and family have been important, certainly, but the primary thing has been mental independence. 

Like everything else worth doing, writing requires a lot of time alone and in silence, working very hard indeed without the slightest prospect of reward. This is difficult at the best of times, and it's next to impossible if you care about what other people think of you. 

THE GENERAL CUSSEDNESS OF LIFE

Insert Affirmation Here

When Anthony Burgess was incorrectly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, he was given twelve months to live. Being married and penniless at the time, he set to work on publishing enough material to provide a financial basis for his widow. It's difficult to imagine a greater sense of urgency, but even he found the occasional roadblock he couldn't immediately surmount.

He set himself a target of two thousand words of 'fair copy' per day, and then went on to attack this target in an admirably realistic way. By his own account some of the things which got in his way were rather petty. Hangovers. Arguments with his wife. Brief periods of despair. What this shows is that regardless of how driven and single-minded a person is, there are still going to be occasions where they fail and that this just isn't important. What is important is to just keep going.

I realise as I write this that it's very similar to the kind of nonsense you get on writing websites, usually broken down into a faux-aphorism and set against a nature photograph. This doesn't stop it from being true. It's vitally important to just keep going. Bloody-minded doggedness has achieved a great deal more than sensitive inspiration in just about every possible field of endeavour.

What's worked for me is to make a clinical assessment, at the end of each day, of what I've actually achieved and how I'm currently feeling (yes, gasp in shock). Then I plan the next day according to these factors. Do I need to push some stuff back? Recalibrate my short term goals? Spend a day in the gym or at the bottom of a bottle? Fine. Disappointing, sure, but fine. Just so long as I maintain an absolute faith that I'll stand back up tomorrow or the next day, it's absolutely fine to burn the day just gone. A lot of people will tell you not to beat yourself up, but I disagree. A minor, and above all brief, assault is both necessary and beneficial. And then you just carry on.

I've had a lot of advice from a lot of people over the years, ranging from, "Be willing to set your enemies on fire in a public square,"  to, "The only way to peace is to place a flower on their head in your mind." It all boils down to the same thing, though, as far as I can tell. Our greatest weakness is also our greatest strength - the appalling loneliness of our inner selves can be turned from a wasteland into a fortress, so long as we're willing to pursue a purpose we set for ourselves. I know this because I once wrote something like it for a fortune cookie.

The New Pornography - A Vision of the Future

Pornography is one of those words which doesn't so much have a monolithic definition as it does a broad collection of meanings underpinned by discrete collections of vague, culture-specific values.

When I come to power, lexical shenanigans like this will not be tolerated. A definition will be chosen and its usage aggressively promulgated and enforced. But the quality of mercy is not strained and so on, so the chosen definition will be a deliberately broad one, as a society cannot be totalitarian unless it is also somewhat inclusive.

Pornography: (n) Any material or representation, literary, visual or created by digital or mechanical means, which has been designed for the sole purpose of creating strong sensations in the audience.

Of course, we'll have to get the professional lexicographers in to clean this up, and maybe to suppress the etymology (pornes: prostitutes, graphy: come on, that's pretty obvious).

Sure, there might be some minor downsides to the enforcement of this new verbal rigour, but think of the benefits. Under my regime, everything created merely for sensation would be subject to obscenity laws. This would mean that publications like the Daily Telegraph would be wrapped in plastic and bought furtively at $14.99 a pop, and it would be highly illegal to expose anyone under the age of 18 to a Miranda Devine column.

In this new world of mine, I envision this redefinition of pornography sweeping across multiple walks of life, even unto political speech. Politicians like Corey Bernardi, Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump would be debarred by law from speaking in public. Those wishing to hear about their ideas would be compelled to do so in dark mirrored booths, dropping coins into a suspiciously sticky slot for every ten minutes they wish to spend furiously titillating their frenzied sense of outrage.

But by far the biggest advantage would be the sheer scope and variety of those who would be relegated to the obscurity of the porn shop. Hate speech consumers of all stripes would be forced to rub shoulders, amongst other things, within the narrow compass of the fringe, awkwardly avoiding each others' eyes as they browse the shelves, or await the onanistic ecstasy of absorbing the concussed parrot ramblings of Pauline, or the sloppy false syllogisms of Trump.

And perhaps, while they're waiting on line, they'll talk. "What are you here for?" a Hansonite might say to the angry Islamist next in line, which could spark a brief waiting room conversation involving the White Supremacist and the Young-Earther pretending not to browse their shelves. And in this situation of enforced, awkward intimacy, they could be brought to discover their essential sameness - the strong bonds of irrationality and hatred which they share to such abundant extent - and thus be brought to peace, if not with us, then at least with each other.

Silence and the Cult of the Sword

I knew a man who spent five years in total silence and isolation, contemplating on the sword. In some circles, he was thought to be taking the soft option by choosing to have an actual sword with him - an object on which he could focus his meditations.

Think about that for a moment. Five whole years, alone and in silence, trying to think about one thing and one thing only. And the fact he had that thing with him was considered to be tantamount to cheating.

I took a year-long vow of silence once. Of course, being a cream-puff city boy, it was pretty watered down. No lonely cave in the Wudang Mountains for me. I was allowed to carry on with my daily life, and to say functional things. I could do stuff like eat every day, answer direct questions, tell bus drivers where I wanted to go, and so on. What I wasn't allowed to do was volunteer information or contribute to conversation in any way. And I was absolutely forbidden from telling people what I was doing.

What I learnt from this is that the vast majority of what we say in daily life is utterly meaningless. And if you stay quiet and really listen, you can hear echoes of the lie buried in every human statement. The false, tinny resonance of the construction of persona, of people convincing themselves and others that what we say, think and do is important - that we are important. You discover just how much of our time is devoted to convincing ourselves that there are excuses for failure, and that our shortcomings are no fault of our own. I also learnt that keeping your thoughts entirely to yourself for a year is a very good way to go completely insane.

I think the point of it all was to gain a real appreciation of just how important contact and communication are. In the same way that no-one appreciates the value of food like those who have experienced starvation, the result of living with this kind of silence is the realisation of our own appalling weakness - our absolute dependence on the other. It's rather like that throwaway line in Fight Club. "What can you really know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" It's the idea that we can have no real understanding of our limits until we have visited some of them. It's impossible to push the boundary if you don't know where it is.

One of my old instructors used to goad us with this every time we thought we'd perfected some new technique. "Are you satisfied?" he would ask. "Are you happy with yourself? In that case, let me congratulate you on having reached the pinnacle of your life's achievement." The idea was that without that central seed of dissatisfaction - without that troubling sense of being able to do better if we just work hard enough at it - life is over.

And this brings me, finally, to the point. I hear a lot of chatter about 'mindfulness' these days, often from people who are engaged in utterly mindless activities. Now, don't get the idea that I think of myself as one who leads the existence of the purely mindful. I'm well aware that, for the most part, I lead the existence of a fucking idiot. The point is that I am aware of it. That I do not excuse it in myself, and that every time I fail (which is most of the time), my sole hope of redemption lies in the full and frank realisation of that failure.

I'm usually at peace with the adaptation and dilution of Eastern ideas as they're absorbed into Western culture. What a lot of angry purists forget is that this is a two way process - just look at the mongrel versions of 'Capitalism', 'Democracy' and the 'Protestant Work Ethic' which exist in China. But mindfulness is one that I simply cannot let pass. In the form it takes when absorbed into the fatuous self-help culture of social media and daytime television, it is completely worthless.

Mindfulness is emphatically not about finding a way to be 'happy' with ourselves. It's about the understanding of rigour, the knowledge of our incompleteness, of the impossibility of perfection and the absolute requirement to strive for it anyway. It has nothing to do with scented candles, crystals, personal milestones, or any of the other garbage we use to loudly pat ourselves on the back in the full view of those around us. And it is absolutely not an escape from the slings and arrows of daily existence.

It's an absolute. A way of being that aims to strip away layers of self-deception, not add more. Adapting it to fit an infantile culture of self-congratulation is not just futile, it's a breathtaking desecration of one of the most important ideas ever conceived.

Strange, Unhappy People

Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Barry is a poet. He used to be a bare knuckle street fighter, slugging it out for a pittance in the car parks of pubs, most of which were shut down long ago as raucously violent blots on the community. The world in which he grew up is long, long gone - the robust, optimistic, mono-cultural blur of the eighties. It seems he hasn't really noticed, though, because his focus has turned almost entirely inward, as it always will when your whole life becomes a process of getting, using and then getting more drugs.

For the past few years now his drug of choice has been methyl amphetamine, otherwise known as 'meth', 'cold' or 'ice'. This isn't something altogether new, though - no victim of the so called 'ice epidemic' is Barry. He's been shooting up heroin, methadone, dextro amphetamine and cocaine for decades. The thing about ice is that it's relatively cheap, in plentiful supply and, taken in toxic psychosis doses, will last for days and days. The other thing about ice, I'm told, is that it appears to have the property of staving off heroin withdrawal sickness. I can't personally verify this, but I have noticed that other background addictions like nicotine simply fade from notice while the ice buzz is on.

In drug-taking circles, Barry's a lifer. He's been around forever, and everyone knows him, so he's plugged into all the little communities of the more serious end of drug subculture. These are many and varied, and on any given day Barry could be hanging out with twenty something homies, ageing hippies, bikies, homeless buskers or middle-class underbelly tourists. It doesn't really matter much who he's with - it's all the same. The community of pipe, and especially of needle, is a strangely unifying one. The distinctions of culture and 'tribe' are all wiped out by the over-riding sense of otherness which comes from the sustained and serious use of any drug, and especially one so heavily stigmatised as ice.

The last time I saw Barry, it was in a drug house in Manly. This house has been raided and shut down for a while now, so I can safely talk about it without compromising or endangering anyone. It was pretty typical of such places - filthy carpets, perpetually blinded windows, walls yellow from tobacco smoke and an absolute bare minimum of battered, donated furniture. At any given time there'll be a handful of men, and maybe one woman, sprawled, hunched, squatting or pacing in various attitudes around the room. Every face is a study in constrained patience, or absent bliss, because it doesn't matter when you rock up at a house like this, everyone has either just received a delivery, or is holding onto themselves as they wait for another one.

In either case, obsessive, repetitive activity becomes deeply satisfying to minds flying on ice. Mobile phone games, assembling or disassembling stolen bike parts, folding paper, flicking through television channels or browsing for porn - it's not important what the activity is, it suddenly becomes the most important thing on the planet. From a distance, if you squint, a room full of ice users can look a bit like a meeting of twitchy mad scientists who have forgotten that they're not alone.

All this tends to change when a new person arrives, assuming that new person brings a fresh element of some kind with them. In Barry's case, he normally sweeps into a house in a hectic wave of energy, beat poetry and beers in brown paper bags which he will share with the house. This is usually guaranteed to start a general conversation. Sure, not everyone will be able to look up from what they're doing, but they'll be listening and contributing. And that's probably the most surprising thing about ice addicts and users. If we're to go with the received image, we could be forgiven for thinking their days are filled with random nihilistic violence, robbery and beating up on their mothers. The reality is, though, that these people spend the vast majority of their time sitting around talking to each other.

One favourite topic for conversation is personal history. A staggering proportion of these people have suffered serious sexual or physical abuse at some point in their lives. As a result, they often have an air of disassociated numbness when it comes to their own selves, and their accounts of their past lives are intricately woven tapestries of fantasy and fact, by turns funny, pathetic, bitter and manic. Like the story Stevo used to tell about the first time he went to jail. He'd been driving a stolen car and had been stopped by the police for some innocuous reason. All was well, and they were about to drive on when his mother, drunk out of her skull, pulled up. While she was in the process of being breathalysed and arrested, she turned to Stevo and loudly pointed out that he did not own the car he was driving.

Conspiracy theories are also practically ubiquitous amongst this set. Weirdly intricate frameworks of power and interest are constructed into a sort of murky, confused world view. The CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, various police forces, banks and governments are co-opted into a narrative whose burden is that the whole world has connived to block them from attaining personal success. Often, their knowledge of the organisations they suspect doesn't go much beyond knowing their names, but that's not really important. The point is that the game is rigged, the power sits with others from whom it cannot be taken, and it makes perfect sense, therefore, that they have opted out of life.

Other than that, they tell funny stories about themselves and each other, bitch and gossip, share Youtube videos and Facebook memes - yes, just like normal people. Because essentially, that's what most of these people are: perfectly normal, damaged and discouraged people. Of course, it can be said that their existence is entirely without meaning. Their whole lives are taken up with nothing beyond the acquisition of money in service of the acquisition of drugs, and they can spend days and days sitting in one stinking room talking nonsense to people they don't really know or like.

But when you think about it, you can't help but wonder just how different that is from any other person's life. We work, save and spend on furniture, holidays, alcohol, over-priced meals, all of which are consumed in the company of people we may not particularly care for, but to whom we hold on because a person is supposed to have friends. While many of us are happy, some of us sublimate our despair with these frivolities, and I simply don't see the difference between that and what a meth junkie does. Except, of course, that the acquisition and consumption of ice is by its very nature criminal, and the people who do it criminals by extension. And then there's also the fact that constant drug use is a much quicker and more visible way to kill oneself than, say, sugar.

Sometimes, when I see an addict twitching down the street shouting at himself, or searching frantically through a bin, I'll recognise someone I've seen in my travels. This forces me to reconcile the insane hobo image I see with the thoughtful, gentle and tortured person I may have spoken to, years ago, when I was on the same trajectory. I think that if everyone had to do this - had to see beyond the dirt and strangeness and into the actual person, they might be less quick with their judgements, and with their dismissal of these people as people. In the words of Palahniuk, "We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world," so who are we, really, to decide which of us is more or less crap than another?

The Calculus of Hatred

I don't know what it's like to be a Muslim in Australia. In fact, I don't know what it's like to be a Muslim full stop. What I do know, though, is what it's like to be an Asian growing up in an Australia dominated by racial politics.

I came to this country when I was two years old, landing in what used to be the rough and tumble neighbourhood of Surrey Hills. Some of my earliest memories are of drunks stopping me and my mum in the street, bowing and saying, "kon nichi wa", or shouting "Ching Chong Wah" into my face as they walked past.

The leftist narrative of the nineties says that John Howard attempted to garner popularity and unite the country by appealing to deep-seated and long-held cultural anxieties, calling for an end to multiculturalism and insisting that newcomers to Australia conform to Australian values and ideals. I don't know how accurate this is and I don't care - the whole thing strikes me as meaningless anyway. On the face of it, demanding that Australians be accepted and regarded as Australians and that they act accordingly sounds like a politically expedient truism that shouldn't do any real harm. I'm pretty certain that's what Howard and his people thought it was. As a concept, it's so vague as to feel completely unreal. What does feel real, though, is the subsequent ascent of the far right and Pauline Hanson.

The real world consequences, for me, were mild enough. Having to put up with 'Asians Out' plastered on walls in pretty well every neighbourhood, every conversation eventually turning to race, and reasonably regular, but not usually serious, violence. Looking back, I can sort of see it as a parabola, peaking some time around the millennium before taking a slow and steady nose-dive into the realm of bad dreams half-remembered.

Of course, it's all come back to the surface now, and I remember, with startling clarity, exactly what it's like to be the focus of the kind of negative attention Muslims are receiving today. Every day, just like for everyone else, is a collection of small - laughably small - negative incidents. An insult yelled out of a car window, filthy looks in pubs, the news constantly reminding people that you exist and aren't welcome, fist fights at bus stops and your friends and relatives being insulted, snubbed, called upon to justify their existence to complete strangers and, sometimes, spat on and abused.

In terms of the negative contacts that most people face on a daily basis, all of this is pretty small. The difference is, though, that it's constant. And more than that, it's very easy to get the idea that it's institutionally acceptable - that the majority of your adoptive country might shake their heads and tut but, at some level, they're okay with it. It's just how things go. It used to be the Italians, now it's you, now it's the Muslims, and next year it'll be some other group. This makes it okay - it's just the hazing ritual every newcomer has to go through and this is right and just and why don't you just develop a sense of humour for God's sake and get over it?

And you do - if you're not to go completely insane, you learn to laugh at it all. To play on it, to revel, in fact, in being the one who pre-empts the racist joke. But there's a part of you that knows you're being a shameful clown, that you are pissing on your heritage every time you join in on racist banter because you're tired of fighting, that you are a disgrace to yourself, the place from which you've come and the place in which you are.

And then there's the fact that every single insult and indignity you swallow pours another tiny dram of hatred into your heart, and inches you just that little bit further away from the community you so desperately love, admire and want to be a part of. And eventually, your cup runneth over, and you look up one day and discover that you are so far beyond the pale that you can't even watch television or read a newspaper without feeling like an alien in your own home.

Which is why I don't care about red or blue, left or right, who's to blame, or long, pointless conversations where people exchange half-baked, poorly understood factlets about Islam, Arab history, colonialism, or whatever else has been dragged into the half-arsed narrative we pre-chew and spew out to poorly explain complex ideas to the public.

The essential thing for me is that we're on the upturn of that parabolic procession again. Heedless of the past, we are creating yet another generation of newcomers to this country who will remember, always, that their existence rests on a precarious knife-edge of potential bigotry. Who are aware that the person smiling at them today was very likely the same one who threw food at them out of a car window yesterday, and may do so again tomorrow.

Meaning - the Payload of Narrative

 One question which is left unanswered by far too many authors is, "Why am I writing this story?"

While a certain amount of arrogance is required to undertake creative writing at all, it needs to be remembered that the fact of a story is not the reason for its being. If we start with the staggeringly egoistic belief that anything we might have to say will be interesting to other people, we're at ops state normal for a writer. This, however, is as far as it should be allowed to go.

Many authors seem to hold the strange belief that people read stories because they like stories. But narrative is not, and never has been, sufficient in and of itself. Story-telling is fundamental to the human experience as a form of communication. This necessarily means that something should be communicated. It is this burden - this payload of thought, concept or emotion - which is the sole justification for a story's existence.

It's a bit like the way children will recount the events of the day. On a superficial level, everything that's required to make a story is there: a sequence of events, characters, setting, etc., but these tales are never what you might call compelling. In fact, if we remove the eye (and ear) of love, it can be seen that these recounts are mind-bendingly tedious. This isn't because of a child's linguistic and technical limitations, it's because the tale being told doesn't actually mean anything. The child is merely practising the skill of recalling and recounting, and has no message to deliver.

Another example is when one of your friends falls victim to the delusion that their dreams are interesting to other people. Listening to a recount of a dream is excruciatingly boring, and this is largely because the thing which makes a dream compelling - the unique internality of the dream experience - is rarely, if ever, conveyed. There's a strong possibility, in fact, that it can't be. So we have a sequence of events which should be interesting but, shorn of meaning, becomes nothing more than a tedious catalogue of irritatingly irrelevant events.

As writers, it's vital that we ask ourselves what we want to say. If your story doesn't have a theme or a message then I'm sorry, but it's not a story. If you're not attempting to capture and convey an idea, a feeling, a way of thinking or being - in short, if you're not using your story to communicate something, then you probably shouldn't bother writing it. Because if you don't have a reason to write your story, no-one else will have a reason to read it.