Outrunning the bears

Have you ever had the sensation of lying in bed at night alert to every sound and thought such that sleep evades you?  Of course you have.  Sleeplessness hits us all at one time or another.  

Last night I had fallen asleep for an hour or so but then I woke around midnight with the awareness that my daughter was not yet home and, although she is an adult and midnight is not late for a young woman of her generation to be out and about, I could not get back to sleep.  

I started that awful process of listening for the click of the door.  I wanted her home and then I could sleep.  I wanted to hear from her that she was okay.  I wanted the click of the door, the front lights to blink on at her arrival, the key in the lock.  I went through her mobile number in my head again and again as I do on such nights when I keep hoping one or other of my daughters will arrive home safe. 

My thoughts fluctuated between telling myself to go to sleep, be patient and the urge to dial those numbers.  Eventually I text messaged her.  I spent some time rehearsing the message.  

‘I trust all’s okay.’  

I pressed the send button and then resumed waiting.  And the waiting got worse as we rolled onto one o'clock in the morning.  You see, I knew my daughter had gone out on a blind date.  You know, the sort where you do not know the person you are meeting.  

A dinner in a restaurant which must have been over by then.  She’s an adult, I told myself.  She’s over twenty one, stop worrying. 

Thoughts of myself at that age ran through, all the crazy things I have done, endangered my life.   My mind ran amok.  The days events ran through.  

I had been to the Freud conference, that wondrous annual event where two or three speakers, usually of international renown, get up and talk about things related to psychoanalysis and how psychoanalytic ideas features on the world stage in practice and applied.  

Yesterday Julian Burnside gave us an inside look at the lives of certain asylum seekers that makes me further ashamed to live in this country and turn a blind eye to such profound injustice. Earlier Nancy Hollander had talked about the situation in America where Latino migrants are treated equally badly in the United States.  She thought in terms of the systemic nature of these abuses, and how important it is to recognise them and the impact of the social world in analytic work.  Traditionally in psychoanalysis the emphasis has been on the internal world.

Hollander told the joke about a man who goes shopping in order to prepare for his camping trip.  He goes into a camping store and buys his tent, his sleeping bag, all the stuff a person needs for such an event, but as he rocks up to the counter, the shop keeper says.  

'What about your runners?  You’ll need runners.’

 And the man says.  ‘No, I won’t need runners.  I’m going on a camping trip.  You don’t need runners for camping.’

 And the man says, 'you’ll need runners to be able to outrun any bears that come along.'

And the man says ‘I could never outrun a bear, runners or not.’ 

‘But you could outrun your friend.’  

The joke ended there and we all laughed nervously because the point was made.  This is the essence of neo-liberalism, the idea that the fittest survive and the rest serve the purpose of the fittest – as food for the bears. 

Better the bears get the asylum seekers, the unwanted migrants. Better the immigrants take all those crumby jobs, while we who are more comfortable maintain the status quo.

I feel even more ashamed of myself than ever before.  And then after the talks in the early evening, we went on a tour of the Cunningham Dax Gallery, an exhibition of art works mainly completed by inmates of Royal Park, some over fifty-seventy years ago, paintings that reflect the pain of their mental illness and their incarceration in a mental hospital, and I felt further ashamed.  

Then one of my companions at the talk said to me over a glass of wine: These people here, these other folks in the audience – including, I presume he meant, he and I – will go home feeling unsettled for a while, but then we'll go back to our everyday lives cleansed of our distress and ready to resume our busy full lives, strangely refreshed by the experience, as if we have done enough in simply hearing the talk.  Nothing more we can do.

Helpless as I felt last night with my daughter out in the dark with a stranger and me fearing the worst, I feel worse about the asylum seekers, not far from here and scattered throughout Australia and beyond  living desperate lives in no man’s land waiting for asylum after enduring the most appalling experiences elsewhere.

 I cannot write here all the stories that Julian Burnside told us, especially of the man who sent Burnside a videotape of another man whose relatives watched while guards gauged out his eyes and lay the eye balls on a towel nearby.  This man had been refused asylum and now feared this fate for himself.

And I worry more for my daughters to be growing up in a country whose behaviour emulates that of the Nazis in Germany some seventy years ago. 

We know and yet we turn a blind eye. 

How many of you reading here will abandon reading at this point.  I realised as I listened yesterday to Julian Burnside that I did not want to hear what he had to say, that he was planting images in my mind of such horror that I could barely stop myself from bursting into tears.  How can we continue to allow such cruelty in our treatment of asylum seekers?

And then there is my daughter out in night with a stranger and what can I do?  It’s not enough to sign petitions – the easy thing – Julian Burnside reckons, better to write to our local member and his/her opposition counterpart.  Write a letter tell them your vote depends on this.  Ask questions and when you get the standard pro forma back, write another letter.

Burnside then acknowledged that the two dominant parties care only about the marginal seats, care only about securing their votes in order to retain or gain power.  They therefore pander to the sentiments of the ‘unsafe seats’, many of whose constituents are the most disenfranchised of our society and they perhaps most of all resent the incomers and fear there is not enough to go around. 

They endorse the cruel treatment of asylum seekers in the belief that there will be more for them but in terms of what I have recently discovered as 'biopower', they along with the rest of us who remain silent actually support the state infrastructures, the government ruling class that means we wind up policing our own, via the introduction of such things as the privatisation of asylum seekers, whereby those who care for detainees are merely prison guards and asylum seekers who have broken no laws are treated as criminals.

You must be exhausted reading this, not nearly as exhausted as me, for even after my daughter texted me finally at 1.35 am to say that all was well and she’d see me in the morning, I still could not sleep. 

If she has elected to stay out with the stranger I trust her judgement.  I must.  She’s a grown up, but the world is so cruel and terrible things can happen and I have not seen her yet and all those atrocities happen in this ‘fair’ land day after day in the name of the law and in the name of good governance and I feel sick to the pit of my stomach.  

'Throwing like a girl'.

This morning I went to pull up the bedroom blind and hesitated as I often do.  I have trouble getting the blind to retract without its flapping all the way to the top and over such that it’s hard to retrieve the cord the next time I need to pull down the blind.

            ‘Hold onto the cord,’ my husband tells me repeatedly ‘that way it won’t run away from you,’ but still I get it wrong. 

I lack coordination in such matters no matter how hard I try.  It’s a familiar feeling my distrust of any capacity when it comes to things physical.  Too clumsy and uncoordinated.  

I've been reading Iris Marion Young’s essay ‘Throwing like a girl’ which seems to connect.  She writes about the way girls tend not to use their bodes in the same free and easy way their counterpart males do. 

My brothers used to laugh at me and my sisters, the way we ran.  Running like a girl/throwing like a girl are derisory expressions used to reflect a certain discomfort women have with their bodies.  How are we taught these things?

I don’t remember anyone saying to me that I should or should not use my whole body when throwing a ball but I remember a pressure to keep my body out of the equation.  I always put it down to wanting to remain invisible from my father but lately I’ve observed that other women also feel some pressure to remain invisible even as women are also the ones most likely to be looked at, the ones who feel great pressure to put their bodies on display, especially the young women. 

‘Didn’t your mother teach you to pull up blinds,’ my husband asks half joking.

‘No,’ I say.  ‘I only remember Venetian blinds.’

‘Posh,’ is my husband’s reply. 

I have never thought of Venetian blinds as posh but I can see now they were when they first came into existence.  Before we moved into our new AV Jennings special – a triple fronted cream brick veneer on Warrigal road in Cheltenham – we too had never seen the likes of Venetian blinds, but we had no blinds ether as far as I can recall, only curtains.  So I did not get to practice the retraction of the cord. 

These blinds remind me of my body.  Out of control.  I felt it last week after I side swiped the car to which I had failed to give way. It was almost as if I was in a dream.  I pulled to one side slightly up onto the footpath and felt my foot trembling on the brake and for a moment there I feared I could not even stop the car and I saw myself rolling into several other cars that were parked in front of me in the car park.

I pulled myself together in time to stop but the sensation was one I often have in dreams where I cannot stop no matter how hard I try, though in dreams my sense more often is of getting into reverse and not being able to get myself back into a forward motion.

These things come to me now as I reflect on my clumsiness in all things physical.  My lack of physical strength relative to the boys and men in my life.  I know men are believed to be inherently stronger and often times are bigger but as Iris Marion Young suggests women tend to underplay their own strength relative to their size.  We could be stronger she implies if only we could convince ourselves it’s okay to be strong.   

Crash, bang and bingle.

Most times when I set off in my car I contemplate the possibility of an accident.  It’s standard for me, a typical thought - today might be the day on which I crash. 

In the thirty years plus that I have been driving I have endured a number of bingles.  And yesterday’s was no exception, a bingle and worst of all it was my fault. 

I took a short cut through a few narrow streets around the corner from my house as I routinely do, my thoughts ahead of myself.  I did not notice the car on my right as I turned left. 

The damage to both cars was minimal but enough to make an insurance claim, on my policy of course.  It was my fault.  The fellow into whose car I had collided established that fast.  No sooner was he out of his car than he asked a woman standing nearby to be his witness. 

My hands shook as I filled out the details on a sheet of paper he provided.  He was unshaken it seemed to me and when I asked if he had insurance he said yes, but did not know with whom. 

‘The wife takes care of that stuff.’ 

Perhaps that’s why he was unshaken.  The wife might be the one to get annoyed about the damage to the car.  The wife might be annoyed that some stupid woman wasn’t looking where she was going and the wife might then have to deal with the inconvenience of getting the car fixed.  

At least she won’t have to pay.  Small consolation. 

Am I trying to shift the blame here by noticing this? 

I’ve been in both positions, bingles that have been my fault and bingles that were not.  In any case the worst of it, besides paying the excess and watching my annual premiums go up, is the inconvenience of having to get the car off for repairs and doing without a car for however many days it takes.  

The worst of it for me is the sheer humiliation.  The sense of being a dunderhead, an uncoordinated klutz. 

‘No self recriminations,’ my husband said to me, kindly I thought. He who rarely has such accidents.  ‘There’s no point in going over it.  That’s why you have insurance’.  And as the insurance person said when I phoned to make a claim, ‘At least no one was hurt.’ 

All this rationalisation helps of course but it does not take away from my sense of humiliation, and the ripple of anxiety that still runs through me after the event.  The memory of that loud crash, still ringing in my head. 

My chopped-off penis

At the back of the East Camberwell railway station there is a track that runs through a concrete grey underpass out onto the edge of a cliff that overlooks the railway tracks.  This path begins its journey at Canterbury Road, cuts through the slope of the park, down past the electricity output station and then onto a narrower path that runs all the way to the Camberwell shopping centre and Burke Road. 

I have not been on this track since I was a child but I reckon it’s still there and I have it in my mind that I must re-walk this track soon. 

I was with my sister and two of my brothers on our way to the shops when the thought occurred to me, the thought more of a question: what must it be like to have a penis? 

And no sooner had this question troubled me than I imagined my imaginary penis being cut off.  Just like that.  Blood everywhere in great spurts and no one to clean it up except me in my imagination.  What a relief it was then to be a girl with no excess bits to cut off. 

I had not yet encountered Freud or his notions of penis envy but when I did read about this concept I wondered if my childhood fantasy could indeed point to my own penis envy or was it something else?

In those days I cannot remember even knowing the name for penis, or for vagina or for anything else down there.  We did not talk of such things in my family.  So I write about this memory now looking back with the authority of an adult.  Back then notions of body and body parts both terrified and enthralled me.

One of my daughters has recently pointed out this thing called ‘crip’ theory.  I had not heard of it before.  The notion that we are all disabled in one way or another by virtue of being human and that it is necessary therefore to acknowledge this in some way. 

In the past the pressure has always been on us, especially those who write essays at school, at university and the like, to seek the perfect and complete product. 

Crip theory argues in favour of uncertainly and incompleteness.  It argues for the messy realities of our lives, for the fact that we can only know things in incomplete ways and a realisation that it’s okay to include our uncertainties in our writing without feeling the pressure to be conclusive in our work. 

Needless to say I enjoy this notion.  It gives me permission to continue on my messy way, throwing up ideas that come to me seemingly from nowhere like my fantasy of my soon to be chopped off penis and I do not need to fit it into any category beyond the memory that it once was.  

Living in the seventies

Eric Whitacre.  Have you heard of him?  I hadn’t until last night when I went to see him in concert at the Robert Blackwood Hall at Monash University. He's a composer and conductor currently settled in London but originally from the U S of A. 

Eric Whitacre is a man of extraordinary talents but to my mind almost too good to be true.  It’s not his talents per se but the whole package.  Between conducting his songs and music he talked briefly and wittily about his life, his wife, his passion for music and poetry.  The audience loved him, encore after encore.  

My daughter was singing in the choir and glorious singing, too, but Whitacre stole the night.  His wife, he told us, was for once able to be there and she added to the overall allure.  Here was a man in love with his wife, after a fifteen year marriage.  In love too with his seven and half year old son who came along to the concert as well.  His wife, Hila Plitmann, is a famed soprano with her own extensive following of admirers.  

See how often I write the words 'also' and 'as well' here.  These attributes pile up, one on top of the other.  

Before the performance began the son scrambled past me with his beautiful mother as I flattened myself back into my seat to make room.  I had noticed this young boy as he approached from one side of the theatre.  I could not but notice him.   As he slid past each person already seated he pointed to their programme on the front of which an image of his father took pride of place. 

‘That’s my dad,’ he said.  ‘That’s my dad,’ and he squeezed past me while his mother half apologised, half laughed at the antics of her proud and equally beautiful son. 

All three were blond, the son, the darkest in hair colour.  All three beautiful in that movie star way.  Whitacre's hair reminded me of this advertisement: men using women's shampoo.  Hilarious and almost surreal.   

Ash, the son – Whitacre told us his name during the performance but I may have spelled it incorrectly –  wore a grey suit not unlike the suit his father wore on stage.  Ash featured in many of his father’s stories about how Whitacre came to compose this or that particular piece of music.

I'm not usually taken in by so much beauty but as I say it was the entire package.  Not only the man’s ability as a composer but also his ability to present himself to the public, his warmth and generosity.  It took me by storm.  

A voice inside kept saying this cannot be.  It cannot be so picture perfect.  But why spoil it with my doubts?  Am I envious?  Why want to tone it down with a few hard edges?  Even the overall effect for me became a hard edge, but why can I not trust to the appearances and enjoy the ride?  Why so cynical?

I stood around afterwards for at least half an hour chatting to my daughter and her friends and when I left there was still a queue of people waiting to ask Whitacre to sign copies of his CD.  The queue stretched the width of the Blackwood hall and I felt for this man who after the fifth round of applause had raised his hands to his mouth in a gesture of drinking.  He then looked upwards as if to say to the audience, enough adulation no, let’s all go upstairs for a drink. 

No drink for him I imagine till well after midnight, but I suppose it’s all part of the deal, the price of fame, and it sells CDs. 

I gave a talk myself on Friday afternoon to a small group of psychology students at Swinburne.  I’m not an accomplished speaker but I tried hard to present material in such a way that they might be interested. 

From the onset, as I spoke, I noticed a man directly in front of me about five rows up who sat beside another man.  Both were older men, older relative to many of the students, and they chatted openly to one another during the prepared part of my talk. 

I had the impulse to stop speaking and to ask them if they had wanted to leave.  For the first time in my limited lecturing experience I knew what it felt to be a teacher with unruly students.

At one point the instigator of the chats, at least as far as I could see, stopped chatting and turned  to face the side of the small lecture theatre away from the other man.  He sat that way for at least half of my talk.  I kept waiting for him to leave.  I wanted him to leave, however much it might have seemed like a public thumbs down from him. 

This man gave me no sense of confidence in what I was saying but I ploughed on.  I knew in time I would play some you tube versions of therapy and that we could discuss them altogether and that the event might become more alive, more alive than having me simply drone on.  

Not that I droned on but I had worried that students these days do not value being lectured to.  They prefer interaction. And indeed things came more alive after I had explained where I was coming from and launched into a discussion of other people’s performances as therapists as portrayed online. 

To my surprise when it was all over the disruptive man came down to me at the podium and expressed his gratitude for my talk.  He introduced himself and offered to show me his written feedback, which he must have written during my talk.  

It was the strangest of feedback wherein he described the first part of my talk as like ‘Skyhooks - Living in the seventies', because I had described in some detail my origins in the field, and then he told me that the discussion part where I explained my position had completely changed his view on ‘this caper’, as he called it, this caper by which I presume he meant psychology. 

He was fifty years old he told me and new to the field.  How strange.  I could not get him out of my mind for some time. I still do not know whether he was critical or pleased.  He seemed to hear my words despite his chatter but what he has made of them I suppose I will never know.

The person organising the course made a fuss of distributing the feedback sheets before the talk and her intern collected them after the event.  Somehow to me the collection of feedback sheets so close on the heels of my talk felt a little like people throwing money at me as if I had become a busker.  The more money paid the more successful I would be.  The better the feedback the more I deserved to be paid.  Another strange feeling. 

I do not intend to make a habit of these talks and so I tell myself the feedback is not of such huge consequence  but of course I dread the thought I may have bored them silly. 

I am no Eric Whitacre, such a talented man, but I thought I had something worthwhile to say.  My only hope now is that I could be heard.  Isn’t that why any of us do these things?  To be heard?