Out of wedlock

Yesterday, we sat in a circle in the lounge room of a cousin who lives near the beach at Sandringham where we commemorated the life of another cousin, who died ten days ago on the other side of the world in Holland, at the age of sixty five. 

I did not know this cousin well.  She was older than me and our paths rarely crossed, apart from during my brief visits to Holland and hers to Australia, but she is lodged forever in my memory and imagination. 

I don’t remember when my mother first told me that this cousin had been born out-of-wedlock.  Such a loaded expression ‘wedlock’, as if the institution itself is some sort of guarantee of imprisonment or security. 

My cousin was born in 1949, not long after the Second World War, and she lived then with her mother and for a short time, her father, who at the time was married to another woman.  He did not stay around for long. 

Imagine this at a time when illegitimacy and infidelity in marriage were far more unacceptable than today. 

We have such a craving for certainty in life, such a desperation that people and events meet our expectations and we look down on those who fail to comply. 

On another note, in my large extended family, the children of my many siblings, there is one in particular to whom I draw your attention.  She has joined me in keeping a blog.

Hers is a special blog because it deals with life and death at its core. 

I don't want to speak for my niece other than to draw you to her blog, A Loquat Tree.  She speaks well enough alone.  

Maybe if someone visiting here reads this blog, they might find a way of helping us all in the vast blog community to find a cure. 

I’m big on people working together, as much as I also snuggle into the notion that conflict is a good thing.  It’s necessary in order to allow for growth.  It’s not the conflict itself but the way it’s handled that determines its ability to be constructive.

And I am in conflict about sharing this blog with you because of other peoples’ sensitivities and concerns about privacy, but it seems important to go ahead anyhow.

I talked with one of my sisters yesterday, a sister and a Facebook friend, and she joked about my predilection to go on political rants, particularly in aid of asylum seekers. 

I thought then maybe I should stop shouting in order that my message be better heard. 

But in these two instances, that of my niece and the asylum seekers, I’m not shouting for myself alone. 

I’m shouting for all those of us who are vulnerable, who struggle and for whom life has dealt a rum hand. 

It could happen to you, or me or anyone of us, but these people by dint of circumstance - fate, chance, accident, whatever - find themselves in impossible situations, and they must deal with them as best they can.

As always, it helps to share the load. 

And then like my Dutch cousin, who – despite, or maybe because of her tough beginning in life – was a wonder at helping others, we die. 

Show yourself

At the dogleg turn on Trenerry crescent near Dights Falls in Abbotsford, a group of artists have created a makeshift gallery.  As you drive into the turn you face a stretch of wall that extends the length of the road and the freeway, presumably to block out sound. 

Months ago I noticed the first small offering, a portrait in the centre of the first section of the wall, soon followed by another couple of works, a treescape, a landscape, and a splodge of colour. 

More recently the number of pictures has trebled.  

There’s one that stands out: a take on an old classic, with a view of the harbour where a dark skinned and naked aboriginal man with spear in hand looks over the water to an approaching eighteenth century vessel and curses, ‘Bloody boat people’. 

There’s also a large photograph on paper of a native tribeswoman from somewhere like Africa. 

There are more scenes of trees and water and several portraits, mostly in oils, though there’s also one that looks to be a lithograph, judging by its texture and colour and a tiny piece on tin.

Some pictures are small, most on plywood canvases and some take up more space than others, but each nestles comfortably alongside its companion, as if this gallery were planned and arranged by some thoughtful curator.  Though that’s unlikely. 

I reckon this gallery has sprung up in the wonderful way these things do when one person inspires another to add to their own inspiration, and now we have this evocative, albeit temporary, gallery on Trenerry Crescent.

 

Temporary only in so far as the natural elements, the rain and sun and wind, will eventually destroy the images over time but they have been standing up to the worst of the weather for several months now and maybe as one dies – certainly the photograph of the tribeswoman on paper will disappear soon – maybe others will take their place.

This type of installation gives me hope in human nature at a time when the world seems grim. 

We have a state election to vote in today and without getting too caught up in local politics, it’s suffice for me to say my world seems to be leaning in a far right direction that’s terrifying. 

I heard on the radio today that our government had turned back a boatload of some thirty seven-asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, including six children.  Sri Lankan government representatives then intercepted these asylum seekers and took them into custody while they await trial for 'falsely leaving the country' or some other such crime. 

I don’t understand all the ins and outs of it but it makes me wonder about this business of being forced to stay in an unbearable situation, because no one else wants you, and the powers that be don’t want you to leave from under their auspice. 

I have been finding it more difficult to write about my life lately.  Some internal silencer whispers in my ear, you can’t say that. You can’t talk about that.  In case someone reads and is offended, in case someone reads and decides I have violated their privacy, in case someone reads and disagrees with my version of events. 

If I listen to these voices for too long, I am paralysed into silence. 

That’s another thing that seems to happen in the things I read.  The extraordinary pressure on people to say the outrageous, write something new, give us something to get excited about, but don’t go too far.

If you do, the naysayers will be out in droves and crucify you.

Has it ever occurred to readers that the writers who dare to put their writing out there have stuck their necks out, have exposed themselves, so why not tread gently with their critiques? 

I was once friendly with a woman many years ago and I realised too late that she enjoyed listening to me speak about all the things she could not/would not say, but she did not reciprocate. 

She did not offer any self-revealing versions of her own vulnerability.  It was up to me to provide the grist, on which she could chew and then she could spit it out or do with it as she pleased. 

I know that people are different, some are more out there and others prefer to keep things close to their chests.  I don’t have a problem in either case but when the quiet ones get their rocks off listening to the noisy ones and then condemn the noisy ones for saying things they should not say then I reckon the quiet ones need to take a turn on centre stage and declare their views, so that they too can take a turn at exposure. 

The joy of the gallery lies here.  

I have never thought before to write under a pseudonym.  It has always been important to declare myself, but lately I have wondered what would it be like, to throw your words out there into the ether under a pseudonym, so that no one will know who you are, even if they believe they do.

To take up the name of a man, for instance, and see what type of response I get.  To be able to write all the things I fear I cannot say here and get away with it because the person of the writer does not exist, except as a fantasy, like those anonymous artists who put up their pictures in Trenerry Crescent.  

And how’s this for a treatise on the notion of thought, another antidote to my grim thoughts, from Brevity’s blog?

Quinn Norton writes:

There is more than one kind of thought. There are thoughts you cannot complete within a month, or a fiscal quarter, just as there are thoughts that can occupy less than a vacation period, a weekend, or a smoke break. Like the spectrum of photonic behavior, thoughts come in a nearly infinite range of lengths and frequencies, and always move at the exact pace of human life, wherever they are in the universe. Some thoughts are long, they can take years to think, or a lifetime. Some thoughts take many lifetimes, and we hand them off to the next generation like the batons in a relay race. Some of these are the best of thoughts, even if they can be the least productive. Lifetimes along, they shift the whole world, like a secret lever built and placed by the loving imaginations of thousands of unproductive stargazers.

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.  

The luck of the draw

My husband let out a heart wrenching cry this morning. I heard it down the corridor. A long loud lament.
‘What’s the matter’ I asked when I found him in his office in front of the computer.
‘The news,’ he said. ‘The news on the asylum seekers, the ones on Christmas Island. It’s unbearable.’

My husband reads the newspapers from top to toe, and then checks up on the ABC news online. I can scarcely bear to read beyond what I hear on the radio when I drive my car. One hundred asylum seekers from Iran in a rough boat crashed up against the rocky cliffs off Christmas Island.

I must not get into a rant on the politicisation of the plight of these people here, still I cannot understand why we are so reluctant to be more welcoming to these desperate people and why the paranoia of terrorism should so dominate the public psyche that people are left to perish on rocks – young men, old men, women, babies, children – because they have to sneak in to this country undetected or else they will be sent back to unknown horrors.

I sometimes wonder how any of us go on living in face of such tragedies, how any of us can continue on our way when disasters like this happen on our shores, not just on our shores but in our neighbourhood. Yet we do.

‘You are too emotional,’ my brother said at our family reunion in Griffith, too easily distressed. I could not believe his words. Can’t he see: I’m not so distressed as he? My distress is on the surface, his is buried deep in his heart and body, caught there in the stent the surgeons put in to open up his artery; caught there in his blood pressure which rises almost visibly whenever he walks through the front door of his office at his work as accountant and panics.

Two members of my family work as accountants. My father was an accountant. My youngest sister and this brother both work as accountants, she with a major bank and he for an air-conditioning form.

When I was young accountancy was a profession of which my family were proud. When the nuns took the first roll call and filled out identifying details at the beginning of each year, she asked each of the class the question ‘What does your father do?’. I was proud to answer, ‘My father is an accountant’.

My father wore suits to work each day, dark suits, white shirts and black shoes. He traveled to the city. But he had wanted to become a chemist my brothers told me, years later. My father had wanted to experiment in chemistry. He wanted to invent things, develop new products. He could not do this in Australia and make a good enough income on which to raise his large family. Accountancy he could study at night. Accountancy was something he could move into little by little and make good money along the way.

So why were we so poor I wondered often when we were little. Why were we so poor, and others who lived in the houses around us in Camberwell and Deepdene, so rich.

Now I think the other way around, despite my anxieties about making ends meet, the fact that I am here and they, those asylum seekers are there, does not shift too easily. The luck of the draw you might say.

My analyst used to talk about the need to make the most of what you have. There are those who are offered a great deal throughout their lives who cannot do much with it and others who receive very little who achieve great things. It is not simply a matter of what you get, it is more about what you do with it.

I went to see a physiotherapist yesterday on the advice of my daughter’s boyfriend’s mother who advised me that my leg will only get back to normal if I work at it. She knows from experience. She broke her ankle some time ago.
‘It took me a year and they did dreadful things to me, but now I can even run again,’ she said.

I cannot run, the best I can get up to is a limping stride, and then it is more like an old lady hobble.

The physio, a young woman with dark hair and a gentle manner plunged me back into memories of my past when I was a social worker in a community care centre and worked alongside the physiotherapists and the occupational therapists and other so-called allied health professionals and doctors to deliver services to the local community.

I was one of them then, but not so now. There is a strange disjuncture between how I feel inside and how I am on the outside. It hits me once more. When I first began work as a social worker, my mother – then around my age now – said to me often,
‘I would not want to see someone your age. You lack experience’. I took offense. How could I ever catch up with her?

When I told the physio I did not understand why it takes so long for my leg to heal given that the surgeon said the bone is now completely healed, but it will take between eight months and a year to come back to normal, she went into a long and detailed physiology lesson about what happens when a bone breaks.

It is not just the bone that needs to heal, all the body’s nearby cousins – the tendons and muscles – need to recover. The blood supply to the area increases to help the process and in so doing contributes to the heat and pressure which cause the swelling that pops up around my ankle at the end of my more strenuous walking days. I must rest then.

We talked in detail about my idiosyncratic experience and the physio felt around my knee joint to get some idea of how matters fare. She dug her tiny fingers into the muscle that runs down the top of my thigh just above the knee joint. She wanted to loosen it, she said.

This muscle is too tight from non-use, and as a consequence, it is not working as hard as it should.

All day long my leg has ached. This is how it should be my daughters say when I complain that the physio has made things worse. This is how it should be when you use muscles that you have not used for some time. They ache.

If I keep using a rolling pin down the length of my thigh to loosen the muscle and if I keep up the exercises the physio has set, in time I will get stronger. In the meantime, my leg aches worse than it did before.

Healing can be a painful process, perhaps that is why I had avoided it. But I cannot avoid the news about the asylum seekers.