This is. The part where I say, "I don't want it"

So I pushed myself to go to Europe, and, unexpectedly, Africa (though that was an easier decision). And on the whole it was good. I had some fun, some truly awesome fun, met great people, saw incredible landscapes and places, had some blues, misbehaved, hung out with some lovely guys, and only occasionally wanted to bolt, felt included and excluded in equal measure, was challenged and challenged back, and I saw some true colours of people that I didn't really expect to see. 

In the end, I've found myself feeling both strong and fragile. Strong because I know and understand my core values a little better. Fragile because, in the words of Jane Austen, "The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters" (Pride and Prejudice, 1813).  

Overall the experiment has worked I think. And a good thing to do in this significant-birthday year. It's interesting to see people pushing their agendas, communicating poorly. Perhaps I'm the same. 

It's time to wrap up this experiment though. I'm an old man and I crave my little comforts - the pillows that don't hurt my neck, smoke free air, clothes I haven't worn every second day for a month and that have been cleaned and dried in the air, soft towels, decent coffee, simple home cooking and an afternoon lazing in front of a good sized tv. And solitude. Quiet, blissful solitude.  

Obviously I have a list of things to do on my return. Some mundane, others a set of self improvement resolutions. Some things can only be seen with perspective. And I don't claim clarity in that regard, but the time out has been useful. Perhaps the only real challenge in life is to know yourself. Honestly. Properly. Brutally. Forgivingly. 

I agree with Shrek: ogres are like onions - they have layers. I feel that, while I'm still moving through layers, I might have moved this year into a different onion. It's different to how I've felt in the past. Time will tell. We all have our baggage. I can tell that I've discarded some through this process. Now it's time to repack what baggage remains - just a backpack, with the essentials. 

So thank you to everyone that has helped me on this journey. Yes, and to everyone less than helpful too. Everyone has their part to play. 

It's been good, though I feel bittersweet about it. I need my own space and my own company. Time to hang up the traveling bag and the universal power adapter for a while. Time to go home. 

With thanks to Ariana Grande

The Chamber of Missing Things

It's been dark here. Not for any terrible reason. Fearful maybe. But mostly just forgotten. Overgrown with weeds and sinews. 

Now I've opened the curtains. Rediscovered the place, like a ruined abbey. Or a disused sanctuary. It once felt safe and sound there, even though it never was - quite the opposite. 

As I look around its soft grey stone, is has a calming coolness. There is moss there, bright green, and soft leaf litter around the stones, like a glade in a deep forest. It isn't dank, or even wet. If it had been the site of a massacre there is no trace of it now. Except perhaps in the lushness of the ferns and greenery. 

In some ways it is like a engine bay of a giant machine, but one with the engine long since removed. Only the stone fixing mounts and brackets provide the hint of any such former function. And perhaps the compact shape that could forensically reveal its former occupant, like a frozen waistcoat, if you scraped away the moss and the soft forest floor. Confusingly the space is also small, and the scale is hard to pin down. It is both a jewel box, and the hall of a disused power station. 

It had been a place of memory and gravity. And deep sadness. Now that the boarding up has slipped away, and the curtains pulled aside and the light floods in though it feels peaceful. It feels lighter and still inside. A breeze flows through and you can see daylight across the opening. There is impression of hope in the negative space mapped out its former occupant. But that brings fear too.

Somewhere on the other side of the world a figure with a backpack still moves. Silently. Secretly. Not hiding. But not being found either. Exactly where he needs to be. Moving his cargo of playing cards, bottle caps and the tiny coins of foreign currencies. We only catch glimpses on grainy video, or unreliable reports of his whereabouts. But we can sense he is alive. And well. Secret. Safe. And free. 

I think he's holed up in some quiet pub, amongst strangers and new friends. I think he's having a good time. But the truth is that's all from one picture of him, in a dark overcoat and a wide brimmed double pointed hat, stooping slightly to enter the door of an old tavern, and turning back to look over his shoulder at the elevated camera. What happens after that is anybody's guess. 

The curator knows that it is time to have opened the space. Curiously, perhaps, because he didn't know the space had been there at all. What he also hadn't known was how heavy it had been. But in that first sigh that came with its the opening, like the cracking open of an old tomb,  perhaps a small dark presence, or echo, had been allowed to leave. Now it's sunny in there and airy. And lighter. 

The curator has a nostalgic idea that the engine may return to the sanctuary. And this could happen. But it is far from certain. And not necessary. There is a new space here. Despite its age. 

There is an illusion that meeting new people provides. A choice paradox. But it is a mistake to imagine that quests are so easily resolved. It's a trap. And the most important thing to realise is that there is no quest. 

So I will carry this mossy grey chamber with me for a time. 

Marriage Equality Sans Marriage

Is it just me? 

I'm so happy that I am not home for the horrific charade that is the marriage equality debate in Australia. 

Obviously I'm voting yes. Take out the words marriage equality from the equation and replace then with 'slavery' or 'women's rights' and all of the no arguments are the same. It's offensive really. 

What's more important is for my country to send the real and symbolic message that to be gay in Australia is not to be a second class citizen - that at a fundamental legal and social level it's ok. 

But don't hold your breath. Even if it's a resounding yes the Liberals, and the disgusting coward Fizza at its helm (complete with all his puppet strings) won't leap to change the law. It will stall and flounder until they lose government. Then Labor has pledged to pass the law within 100 days, but let's face it, their track record is nearly as disgusting.  

The bitterest message though in all of this for me is that I won't be marrying. All the single people my age, or age appropriate to me, have either given up, are crazy, or both. Not a productive field. I place myself in the first or maybe the third camp there. 

So every time I hear anything about marriage equality know that it is a double stab - first because it's clear my country thinks I'm second class, and a second because irrespective of any law, it's not going to change for me anyway. I guess I had my turn years ago. 

"And that is why my eyes are closed,

It's just as well for all I've seen

And so it goes, and so it goes, 

And you're the only one who knows"*

Perhaps that's the best way to cast a - well I hate to call it a vote because it isn't, but you know what I mean - vote; not for yourself, but for the benefit of future generations. 

Yes. It is just me. 

* Billy Joel, And So It Goes, Stormfront, 1989

Gesta non Verba

My first photographic exhibition was in 2015, and my first exhibition of paintings and sketches was in 2016. Despite this, I blush when people suggest I am an artist. It's not my day job, and though I think of it as more than a hobby it certainly doesn't pay any bills. A colleague of mine, a recent masters graduate in fine arts, told me one of the most important things he learned in his long years of study. One of the senior lecturers, in the very first lesson, said, "you may have a lot of good ideas for paintings, and you may spend some considerable time developing those ideas in your head.  But let me assure you, people who produce works of art in their heads, even astonishingly brilliant works are called dreamers: People who paint are called painters." He was in great company. The great Pablo Picasso would have agreed, saying, "What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing."

When my last relationship ended, the break up hit me hard. One of my friends asked me to picture a timeline of all the things we had done together, everything of value, all that we had done, talked about doing, our dreams and our expectations. Lay it out taxonomically, pinned down like butterflies on tickertape. Then to take an axe and cut that timeline, severing it at the point of the breakup. Everything on the left of the cut, he said, are the things that actually happened. All the things on the right of the cut, well, they didn't actually happen: they were just what you hoped would happen – your dreams, expectations and intentions. Think about each side of the timeline.

Of course when I began to look as he had suggested, and pictured the timeline as a dark ribbon, severed and each side now gently flapping about in the breeze, I realised how much talk and expectation there had been, and how little real action. And in my grief the most curious realisation came upon me – that the things I valued most and missed most about our relationship had been the things that were yet to be, the things for which I had hoped and worked, the expectations – these things were imaginary. Why should I be so harmed, and ache so much, for something that was only in my head? Perhaps I should not have been so surprised. "All pleasures are in the last analysis imaginary, and whoever has the best imagination enjoys the most pleasure. Only unreality gives value and is actually the only reality." So writes the Nineteenth Century German novelist, Theodor Fontane in Trials and Tribulations.

But it got me thinking about actions verses intentions. What if I set out to do something truly noble, outstandingly admirable, but it fails, and even harms.  Do my intentions give me an alibi, a degree of nobility? Do they exonerate me from the moral culpability of what I do? Conversely, do bad intentions corrupt good behaviour? What if intend to harm someone, or provide only begrudging, lacklustre assistance, only to have it backfire and elevate them instead – what then of my intentions?

I've come to the realisation that I am, or at least truly aspire to be a man of action. Like Alexander, Caesar, hell, like Batman, to be not what I think, neither what I hide, but what I do. And like any Hegelean hero, whose intentions don’t matter one bit, who I really am, what I really stand for, and what I really believe must demonstrated by my actions. Inserting some intention after the fact is nothing more than an elaborate form of self-deception. Funnily enough, when I thought back, Gesta non Verba was my high school motto: actions not words.  Perhaps it sunk in further than I had noticed.

I understand now why Batman is a loner. Or Logan, the Wolverine. Most people say they want things done, but mostly they want to talk it rather than do it. People say they want sensitive new age men, but when your car has crashed and its on fire, do you really want the man who runs up to the wreckage to say how much he understands and even empathises with your pain, or to rip the door off the car and carry you to safety in his bugling hairy arms without necessarily even speaking. In the words of Shrek, "Hey! I'm no one's messenger boy, alright? I'm a delivery boy." Careful what you ask for.

So if I'm ever in a position to start measuring out tickertape ribbon again, axe sheathed for now, by all means say I love you. Say it with passion and conviction. Say it because you can't hold it in any more. And say it because the words have formed of their own accord as a force of nature. But it's no get-out-of-jail-free card. I don't want you to say I love you – I want you to do I love you. I want it self evidently and overwhelmingly clear from your actions and behaviours. Keep your Hallmark moments. It's like most marketing I hear – If you feel you have to say it to make it true, then it probably isn't really there at all. Gesta non verba.

L is for Elsa or What Disney Princess Are You?

It's my 50th birthday today. Fifty of course is L in Roman numerals (I for one love Roman numerals) but I think perhaps it's not the right symbol to have tattooed anywhere prominent. A friend told me today that I should be looking forward to my 50s as a period in which "everything is just more in control and focus". Perhaps he's right. I feel like I've spent a long time trying to let go of controlling things, but if there is anything the universe has told me this last few months it's that if I want anything to be done, then despite whatever contracts or agreements are in place, no matter if it's the assistance of a best friend or just help from a paid consultant, if I really want it to happen, then the only way it will with any reliability is if I do it myself. I suppose that's the opposite of letting it go.

It got me thinking about whether I've been picking the wrong archetypes this last half century. And so, like a sick Facebook quiz that just wants to rape your email and spam your contacts, I began to wonder what Disney princess I was. 

Now I've been amongst the common people on more than one occasion, and more than once I've once had to ask myself if it was acceptable to be that turned-on by a young middle eastern man, barefoot, brown skinned, semi-topless and pantalooned... but I'm no Princess Jasmine. Certainly I've dated a few beasts in my time, and despite the love I felt for them they never seemed to take human form... but I'm no Belle. Cross-dressing and joining the military have never been on my bucket list, which crossed off Mulan. And while I've often felt like a fish out of water, I'm no Ariel.

Lately it's occurred to me that I'm Elsa, Princess of Arendelle, queen of Frozen. Not just because she's the newest, and by most accounts the most popular princess, but because at the end of the movie she's still single, and she's cold. Loosely based on the "The Snow Queen", a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, Frozen's Elsa character is actually a composite of two characters from the original story:  Kai, Anna's brother who is cursed with negativity after his heart is pierced with a shard of glass from an enchanted mirror, and the Snow Queen, fair and beautiful, but made of ice. 

More than that, though, as an overarching theme Frozen preaches the importance of embracing your true nature. But it's not without cost. At the end of the film Elsa doesn't get the guy... it's her sister Anna that does, and after a significant wrong turn. And he's no Prince, he's a cowpoke, well, reindeer-poke. It's a nice twist really, rustic and real. In fact, the whole story is a modern, subtle and subversive commentary on true love and relationships: Olaf is no Prince Charming. Prince Charming is no Prince Charming. True love isn't romantic love. The hero doesn't get the girl, or in this case the guy. And the world is full of trolls. Kids, it's a dark and brutal message about the price you might have to pay for being yourself and what you can expect along the way. 

Oh well. Let the storm rage on, the cold never bothered me anyway. What Disney princess are you?

Wabi-sabi

Who's your favourite sportsman? Mine is Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods. Now I've never played a full 18 holes of golf. I played nine once, and it was a mysterious and highly unpredictable game (even just in terms of knowing which direction the ball might head after being struck). I tend to agree with Harry Leon Wilson who wrote in his 1905 novel The Boss of Little Arcady "this new game of golf that the summer folks play seems to have too much walking for a good game and just enough game to spoil a good walk".

Following an outstanding amateur golf career, Tiger turned professional at age 20 in late summer 1996. By April 1997 he had already won his first major, and reached the number one position in the world rankings only two short months later. Through the 2000s, Tiger was the dominant force in golf, spending over 500 almost unassailable weeks from August 1999 to October 2010 as World Number One. Good natured, clean living and simply apple-pie. Perfection in plaid pants. I don't like him that much for his golf, impressive as it was. I like him for something far more impressive: his humanness.

Tiger's monumental fall from grace after the airing of his almost innumerable alleged infidelities was for me the defining moment of his career.  The sponsors dropped away like wounded birds and suddenly he was no longer outstanding in the field but just out standing in the field. No mere sportsman now, no freak with a big stick and an uncanny ability to hole his dimpled balls, this was a human through and through: flawed, and apparently subject to all the same vagaries and temptations as are we all. Suddenly he was real. It was his brokenness, his flaws that made him so appealing, accessible, real. Before, he had seemed, well, too shiny, too good, fake.

You could probably say the same about President Clinton, after he "did not have sexual relations with that woman". Slick Willie, was always my preferred moniker for him, so to speak, although the Comeback Kid has a certain je n'est sais quoi in the circumstances. Like Tiger, who rose to number one again in 2013, Clinton's polls actually firmed up after his fall from grace. Why is that? How? Weren't they both broken?

Wabi-sabi represents a Japanese aesthetic view centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. According to author Richard Powell, the Japanese term wabi-sabi "nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect." Buddhist author Taro Gold describes wabi-sabi as "the wisdom and beauty of imperfection." Westerners may be most familiar with its application in kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold or silver. Also known as kintsukuroi, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, understanding it is something to be celebrated rather than disguised. Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, the repair itself is literally illuminated. It is deeply beautiful (though Greek newlyweds may have a different view, if only for practical reasons).

Perhaps wabi-sabi is a concept for our times, as we roll our role models and elect leaden leaders. The first item ever sold on eBay, now a multi-billion-dollar e-commerce business, was a broken laser pointer. Even though the seller informed the buyer the item didn't work, it nevertheless sold for $14.83. I wonder if the buyer had it repaired in gold laquer.

Can kintsugi be practised in the realm of human relationships? I dare say Tiger and the Comeback Kid applied liberal amounts of gold and precious metals to theirs as the ground fell away from them (though I imagine these were lacking in laquer). Can you repair a broken heart with laquer and gold dust?

In Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler delivers the following speech to Scarlett O'Hara: "I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived." Lately though I've certainly found myself embracing a certain serene melancholy and gentle acceptance of brokenness. My own, that of lovers past and of those closest to me. I sometimes picture those fault lines as the richest seams in our interactions. Sometimes the right state of things is broken. At their best. Authentic. Real. Human.

Love and Gravity: The Event Horizon

Recently I made some bad investments in friends. I don’t mean I leant them money and never saw it again. I invested something far more important than money. I invested time.

Three moved back to destinations abroad (thanks for nothing Australian immigration). And whilst we’re still in touch, it’s not the same. But two others simply vanished right in front of me. What had happened to them?

The theory of general relativity, developed by Albert Einstein in the early 20th Century predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform space-time to form a black hole. It is a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape. I propose that what I have discovered is that natural forces (dare I even say the "L" word) can cause two individuals to be similarly compacted to the point that the only explanation is that they too have formed a black hole. 

We had all noticed that they seemed to be spending more time together. In the last few days we had seen them there was an obvious increase in their affection for each other, and a general dreaminess to their dispositions. As I reflect on it now, their attraction for each other escalated beyond all reasonable measure until it was like a kind of gravity. You’ve all seen it before. The couple had become inseparable: A singularity. That much was understandable, but there was more to come. 

Requests to catch up, invitations to brunches or parties sat unreplied to, lost in a background of self absorption. It was as though the messages had shifted to longer, unreadable parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Maybe their field of view had become more and more compressed until it was a smaller and smaller point in the space behind them, and they were unable to see us. Meanwhile in our field of view, outside the singularity, they had become distorted into blackness. Their attraction had grown to become so intense that nothing escaped; no words, no messages, not even light. The space around them had become dark to outsiders. It had formed an event horizon. A singularity protected by an event horizon. A black hole for two.

I think the term event horizon is the most poetic term in physics. Tantalising and poignant, the event horizon is the boundary of the region from which no escape is possible. Why? It marks the point at which the escape velocity of the black hole is equal to the speed of light. On the surface of the Earth, the escape velocity is about 11.2 km/s, approximately 33 times the speed of sound. Fire up a rocket to that magical speed and you’re off into space. On the moon, with a much smaller mass the escape velocity is a tiny 2.38km/s, not much more than the speed of a bullet out of a rifle. But the distortion of space-time around a black hole is so great that the escape velocity is the universe’s absolute speed limit, the speed of light, a ruthlessly unattainable almost 300,000 kilometres per second enforced by the laws of physics. 

At one magical luminous point on the very surface of the event horizon, called the photon sphere, light could reflect off the back of your head, orbit the singularity and arrive directly at your eyes nanoseconds later, allowing you to see the back of your own head in real time. This possibly explains the last incoherent fragments of contact that were had with the couple. Once they had crossed this, there was no going back. They had gone.

You know what I'm talking about. We've all lost friends to this "love" business. I suppose we shouldn’t be sad. For the couple, safely inside the event horizon, nothing else matters. Everything would seem normal to them, or so the theory goes. Well, we don’t really know what happens at the singularity. I certainly don’t. And at my ripe old age I’m certainly not expecting to find out. Sure I’ve had my fair share of gravitational lensing, but I ain’t holding my breath.

Perhaps they’re tightly held, compressed in a deep embrace. With all that light raining in on them from the photon sphere we could even call it enlightenment.

Bootstraps

This morning I gave myself a hug.  It was strangely comforting. Another in the long list of things that I do for myself.  Not through choice, but through necessity. I call this pulling myself up by the bootstraps. An absurdly impossible self-starting process. Putting on my face and my façade, gathering some semblance of impetus. It’s a routine. I often actually even picture the boots and lifting the straps, a pair at a time just to stand, cartoonesque yoga, solemn and foolish.  Because underneath there is now the overwhelming realisation that this is it.  It’s not bad, far from it. But it’s so much less than I had hoped for.

In one of those weird synchronicities, bootstrapping in computing is also a self starting process that supposedly proceeds without external input. But is has a very different etymology. The earliest computers were colossal empty engines of valves and wires until their operating systems were loaded. The British computers used paper cards punched with ones and zeroes to load the core software but the American ones used paper ribbons like ticker tape. Their operators called them bootstraps, because they were like the laces of giant shoes. So one ‘bootstrapped’ an American computer to get it started. And when it crashed, it’s where the term ‘rebooting’ comes from.

It’s January, rebooting the year, and of course there’s a list of New Year resolutions. I’m ticking them off, one by one.  Back at the gym – check (personal trainer thank you very much). Repair the outdoor furniture – check. Blogging again – check. But amidst these superficial restarts are a much darker, confrontingly honest set of resolutions that are finally being acted on. At long last, and arguably 20 years to late (though better than never), I am setting up for my independent financial security. Investing, consolidating superannuation, acquiring relevant insurances. It’s been a long time coming. But it’s a very real material step in a realisation that there is no prince arriving on his white charger to save me. I am that prince.

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." So begins Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield. It’s too early to determine if my role is hero, or something less, and I’m prepared to be optimistic about that. But it’s very clear that almost half a century on, and after ten years of, shall we say, unhelpful casting, the role remains steadfastly unfilled.

I sense that the ones and zeroes are moving on the tape that contains my operating system. So it’s just me. In fact it probably always has been just me. And I guess that, even though it seems a bit less bright from time to time, that’s alright. Thank you Morpheus – apparently I have chosen the red pill. Bear with me while the operating system adjusts – I’m a whole lot more complicated than mere bootlaces.