Sooner or Later

Holding to account

From my Instagram

Dear Reader

I am completely fascinated at the moment by contradictions, the more personal and political the better. I think about them all the time. I also think a lot about the corrective force, the karmic justice, the great steadying that mostly you see happening, too.

So, there’s quite a bit of that in this September newsletter.

Also, spring is here in the southern hemisphere, and it is perfect timing for me to become obsessed with gardening in a way I’ve never been before. Gardens are like little rooms! I didn’t realise. I spent the whole day today getting sweaty and dirty and accomplishing things.

In the words of Tennessee Williams, I am still nesting, resting.. but I am getting stronger, too.

Hope you’re going ok.

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A Place to Live in, Emotionally Speaking

I don’t mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don’t regard a home as a .. well, as a place, a building… a house.. or wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can.. well, nest.. rest.. live in emotionally speaking.

- Tennessee Williams

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Sooner or Later

You can’t go by nothing but your own convictions. Because if you don’t live the way you believe, sooner or later you will believe the way you live.

- James Baldwin

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People Were Losing Their Political Bearings

Yes, what the hell is happening? I am so pleased to see Naomi Klein write about this. This folding of the Left into the Right and the Right back out into the Left. (And how it happened that she became confused, in some people’s minds, with Naomi Wolf. They were once quite aligned).

I have put Klein’s book, Doppelganger on my Christmas wish list. I think about this stuff so much.

From Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times.

People were losing their political bearings, and none of it made sense. Klein had spent a lifetime analyzing the dominant power as oligarchic: relentless, resolute, delivered from on high. She was used to connecting dots, to mapping out cause and effect in the capitalist system — from Hurricane Katrina to proliferating charter schools; from Sept. 11 to the “homeland security industry.” But it was becoming increasingly hard for her to map out what she was seeing, let alone plot it on the old left-right axis. Here was a grass-roots movement that was demanding not egalitarianism, but nativism; not solidarity, but discord. Klein was trapped inside a hall of mirrors, and she was trying to find a way out.

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Case in Point

Today, I can scarcely believe it’s the same man. I’ve watched 50 of his recent videos, with growing incredulity. He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand.

It’s hard to decide which is most dispiriting: the stupidity of some of the theories he recites, or the lack of originality. He repeatedly says he’s not a conspiracy theorist, but, to me, he certainly sounds like one.

(From George Monbiot on Russell Brand in The Guardian).

Wasn’t it something to watch Russell Brand literally repeat the word ‘truth’ endlessly over the last couple of years, only to discover that pretty substantial accusations of sexual assault have been circling him for more than a decade.

Hmm.

To fixate on ‘truth’, not in spite of, but perhaps, because you are a liar. This is such an intriguing phenomenon about some people. That they sign-post their most repressed, most unresolved turmoil in these ways.

And, I can’t get enough of women speaking out and being heard in ways we never have been before.

I am even excited about young women re-evaluating what we told them about feminist sex. Go Chanel Contos. As it should be. But it’s confusing for us, 90s kids, isn’t it?

Contos is fluent in the language of power, her own as well as that of others. And she is not afraid to challenge what was sold to her generation as truisms. She believes that the idea that sex is an expression of love can lead to coercion. She believes that there is no ethical way to consume porn. “Pornography is everywhere but I think we need to have conversations about pornography and the industry,” she says. “I think we need to speak about problematic themes such as violence against women, choking, slapping.”

Where does this leave me and my sexual experiences, I really don’t know¹.

It’s a strange time. But even stranger, I bet, for the women from my generation who have just finished raising their sons to adulthood, and who are watching these young men now navigate a new framework for consent.

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NO ONE WAY WORKS,

it will take all of us

shoving at the thing from all sides

to bring it down.

- Diana di Prima

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Time to Remind You of One of the Best Essays About Politics, About Making Sense of These Times

‘A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof’ by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in GQ.

On the first morning that Felicia Sanders testified, I was seated directly behind Dylann Roof's mother, and because she is skin and bones, it was apparent that she was having some kind of fit. She trembled and shook until her knees buckled and she slid slowly onto the bench, mouth agape, barely moving. She said, over and over again, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.” She seemed to be speaking to her boyfriend, but maybe it was meant for Felicia Sanders, who was soon to take the stand. A communiqué that was a part of the bond that mothers have, one that was brought up by the radiant shame one must feel when your son has wreaked unforgivable havoc on another mother's child. Whatever it was, it was Gothic.

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Ramble On

“A little over a decade ago, a young illustrator named Nick Hayes was staying with his parents in West Berkshire, not far from London, while he worked on a graphic novel. One day, walking near a lightning-struck willow, he spotted a kingfisher, the first he ever saw. He hoped to show it to his mother, but as they approached the tree, a man on a four-wheeler raced over, announcing: “You’ve no right to be here. You’re trespassing.”

The pair immediately turned around. Hayes walked home, struck by the power of that single word. He typed “trespass” into a search engine, surprised to learn that his actions were merely a civil offense, typically punishable only in the case of property damage, and that trespass hadn’t always been considered an offense at all. The more he read, the more Hayes began to believe that the building of a wall, not the climbing of it, was the bigger crime. He began working on a book about what he was learning, taking himself on small trespasses around the country, climbing over the walls of large estates or slipping past them by kayak. Sometimes there was shouting, sometimes threats. Everywhere he found reminders of a long, ever-evolving relationship with the land. It was in the land use (the fox hunts and deer parks of the wealthy) and in the literature (all that wide-open walking in Tolkien and Wordsworth) and in the language: “Beyond the pale” originates from the Middle English word for fence, and acre comes from the Old English for “open field,” though the word eventually stopped meaning unoccupied land and came to define standardized measures by which land could be bought and sold.

“You can chuck a stone in England, and there’s a story of land dispossession wherever it lands,” Hayes told me when I first spoke to him last year. Fencing people off from nature, he believed, caused each to suffer: People felt bereft and disconnected, and problems like pollution or biodiversity loss became less visible, harder to care about.

Hayes became convinced that society put too much emphasis on the sacredness of private property and the accompanying threat of trespass. Kinder Trespass was evidence of that: “To cheer a man for walking through heather and likewise to beat him up for it are both absurdly disproportionate to the act itself,” he wrote. “But inside the logic of the bubble, such an act is tantamount to anarchy, because it threatens the spell.”

From “The Fight for the Right to Trespass” by Brooke Jarvis in The New York Times.

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Rewilding

There is no joy in the abstinence of living.

I will not be revered for modesty or reservation,

for numbing hunger, desire, rage, grief, delight.

I have liberated myself from golden handcuffs

and self-imposed fear.

Give me love. Give me heartbreak.

Give me failure. Give me regret.

Give me adventure. Give me scar tissue.

Let each cicatrice be the price I pay for rewilding.

- D. Coffyn, I Don’t Want to Be Demure or Respectable

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On Following Joy

Listening to patients, it feels to me like we’ve reached a real pitch of delirium regarding generalized advice, prescriptions, moral codes for behavior and images of some supposedly achievable balance. This infinite pedagogical universe was recently, and aptly, named the shame-industrial complex; poured out from every angle of life on social media, pushed by algorithms. In this vertigo we’ve forgotten that no one knows, or has ever known, what it really means to be an adult. Also that pleasure is hard-won, small, ephemeral; singular to each person. Wishes are historically overdetermined — meaning it really is your pleasure, and your pleasure only.

The more we could recognize the individuality and multiplicity of desires, Freud thought, the more judicious we would become as a society. There is no formula that fits all. There is no formula that even fits most. Our difficulty really letting loose — and even then, how conflicted we fundamentally remain about stretching our identities — should make us more empathic toward the fumbling, messy choices of others, without thinking we know what is best.

From Jamieson Webster’s ‘I Don’t Need to Be a Good Person. Neither Do You’ in The New York Times.

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Nobody’s Heart

Nobody’s heart is really good for much until it has been smashed to little bits.

- Elizabeth Bishop in a letter to Loren MacIver on 19th July 1949.

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Thoughts on Your Daughter Living Away from Home

Your body is away from me

but there is a window open

from my heart to yours.

From this window, like the

moon

I keep sending news

secretly.

- Rumi

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The Daughter

We said she was a negative image of me because of her lightness.

She's light and also passage, the glory in my cortex.

Daughter, where did you get all that goddess?

Her eyes are Neruda's two dark pools at twilight.

Sometimes she's a stranger in my home because I hadn't imagined her.

Who will her daughter be?

She and I are the gradual ebb of my mother's darkness.

I unfurl the ribbon of her life, and it's a smooth long hallway, doors flung open.

Her surface is a deflection is why.

Harm on her, harm on us all.

Inside her, my grit and timbre, my reckless.

- Carmen Giminez

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Immersion for Fear of Closeness

This one year performance art from the 80s, Rope Piece by Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano is so interesting to think about.

Towards the experiment’s end, there was a massive energy shift. “80 days before the end, we started to act like we were people. It was almost as if we surfaced from a submarine.”

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Beautiful Sadness

This at NPR is interesting about why we get a special pleasure from sadness in music and art.

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How Much Do I Love In The Mood For Love?

A lot.

I recommend this by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker on the aesthetic of that film and the influence it has had on us.

And then, of course, if you haven’t seen it already, I suggest you see the film. It is in my list of all-time favourite films.

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On Unnecessary Things in Art

This is a topic I love about art. Here is a great contribution to the discussion by novelist, Brandon Taylor over at Sweater Weather.

However, if you take a moment to divest yourself from this frame—that all attention endows an object, person, place, subject, etc, with an inalienable shimmer of the divine—and you pretend for a moment to be alive in, like, idk, 1955, you start to see that actually, it’s kind of a wild way to live your life. I’m not saying we should be chill with the depiction of say, the mutilation of children, but I do think that we should be able to at least identify when we are making a sensible moral claim and when we are making a claim that is more about our personal comfort. I think also it would help if we could, for a moment or two or a lifetime’s worth, ponder how it is we arrived at this particular place where any attention elevates a thing to a level of Grace. When did popular culture become invested with all this sacralizing moral force and why do we expect Game of Thrones to be some sort of agenda-setting treatise. Like, George R. R. Martin is not Upton Sinclair. The creators of the show are not Upton Sinclair. And we should mock them for pretending to be. I don’t think the question is “should art depict violence and trauma and cruelty and gore and sex?” I don’t think the question is whether sex and violence are necessary in art. I think the more salient question is: does this work want to be a moral intervention into power structures and life? Does this art seek social change?

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Nostalgia for Blogging

I loved the randomness of finding people’s blogs and admiring their writing. I loved the way people let it all hang out. It was like meeting someone at midnight in a bus station and hearing their life story. 

As a child, I used to wonder why we couldn’t call up strangers we found in the phone book and ask them questions about life. The early days of the internet made me think something like this was happening.

Thanks to John Quiggin for letting me know about this post by Yipes.

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On the Time We Tried to Build Community on Twitter

From Ian Martin’s “How Twitter lost the libs” in Unherd.

Clearly, if I could be shocked, it was because I had been hypnotised by the geniality of my magic circle. Perhaps following a few arseholes would give me some perspective. After all, we don’t like everyone in an actual community, do we? Even people we like wind us up now and then. Maybe mixing a few bad people into my Follows would make this illusory community more “real” somehow.

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On Occasion

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

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How to Answer the Phone to a Friend with Suicidal Thoughts

From Amanda Reid’s article on SBS.

I didn’t move, except to lift my phone. I still had battery. Could I take the 'phone a friend' option? Who would I call? Who could cope?

I picked an old friend Paul in Melbourne. Living in Sydney, I hadn't seen him in years, but we'd had late-night conversations recently. He picked up immediately and I woodenly outlined the situation.

He paused, then began to talk. About the first thing he could think of. Tomatoes.

Soothingly, he painted a picture of his garden, with fertile ground soil supporting beautiful tomatoes. Leafy plants were growing trustingly from seeds. There were high stalks now, patiently tended. He spoke of his satisfaction in seeing the sun-ripened fruit, swollen with potential. Luscious, full and red. Bringing vivid colour to the world.

He promised meals he would make: a nourishing salad or a rich, nutritious pasta sauce.

He spoke in calm, fearless tones, the creative complexity of his vision belying his humble, simple subject choice.

Paul didn’t try to persuade me to engage with police or leave the edge. I blocked out the negotiator and focused on the rhythm of his deep voice – even though rain on tomatoes seemed light-years away.

He made me laugh, and the policewoman thought I was crying.

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Something for the Estranged

It doesn’t matter how much time passes, the body remembers what the mind might forget. You possibly remind her on a somatic level of how she felt when she was growing up. As we get older, these reactions may get stronger rather than fading away.

From Philippa Perry’s advice column in The Guardian.

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In Celebration of the ‘Letting Go’ Parenting Model

‘This Simple Fix Could Help Anxious Kids’ by Camilo Ortiz and Lenore Skenazy in The New York Times.

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Liars

Gregory Alan Isakov is touring Australia soon. In case you are looking for a present for yourself.

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Now is an Accelerated Time

Stave off the “Sunday scaries” by watching Pamela Adlon cooking at home.

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Eat More Chickpeas

And, this recipe by Rosie Kellett is delicious. That tahini sauce!

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Finally

Look at me, I managed to get a newsletter out this month on the very last day of it.

Australia, there is a referendum coming up on the question of an amendment to the Constitution for the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and the creation of a Voice to Parliament. Of course, I support the Aboriginal sovereignty movement calling for something stronger, something more certain than just a voice within the system. But, I also believe in the power of consultative policy making². It is a real thing of change when governments are forced to consult with those whom they are making laws about.

Please consider voting Yes. If you are overseas and eligible to vote.. please, the numbers are not looking good, and we need your vote on this one. Speak to your family and friends, too. Come with me and vote Yes.

1. I will try to write more about this when I have finished thinking about it.

2. I mean, ideally collaborative policy making, or better still, co-design. But consultation is real change. When the door opens a crack, jam your foot in on this one.