The extended fracas over ball-tampering by the Australian Cricket Team in South Africa continues, with howls of disapproval and much hand-wringing from all quarters. From the Prime Minister down to the fellow being interviewed in the street, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. If we lived in Biblical times, there would be a furious rending of garments and ashing of foreheads. It's completely over the top and somewhat ridiculous, but consider why it might be so.

Australians pride themselves on sporting prowess and playing the game in the right spirit. Cricket exemplifies this and in fact is often cited as the measure of fairness itself. "It's just not cricket!" is an idiom that means something is unfair, unjust and not right. You can argue the point whether this is just nonsense, for in what sense is sledging a fair or just part of the sacred game? It's not, and is in fact just another kind of cheating to get an advantage. But the myth persists and informs much discourse on nationality and sport.

Football (soccer), for example, has often been targetted as "not Australian" because there is too much simulation, taking a dive, in the parlance. Cricket is frequently upheld as a contrast, a gentleman's game in which one's honour is as important as winning, participation and etiquette are merely sides of the same coin. "Play up! play up! and play the game!" is the line from a Newbolt poem that lionizes these attributes and perhaps at one time, this was the case. But gamesmanship ( a polite way of saying cheating) has crept in over the decades and we are where we are now.

But does any of this really matter? In the scheme of things, does the disgrace of a few cricketers count alongside the human-made problems of the planet - global warming, war, inequality, violence against women and others, even, a cure for the common cold? Or does getting our cricketing house in order prepare us somehow for these other challenges. Are the lessons learned in "playing the game" a training ground for tackling all the other stuff?

Alright, maybe that is a little absurd. But we have to learn good values somewhere. And we need to get wisdom too, but how and where? Can sporting contests teach us the basics? My decade spent playing soccer undoubtedly helped me to be a better person, but need it do so? Were there other choices?

steam rising like dust
soft breath of autumn receiving,
a lone swimmer, plying.

Epicurus gets a lot of bad press and most people grow up thinking that the philosopher from Ancient Greece was a hedonist. Epicureanism has overtones of excessive pleasure-seeking or gastronomy - a person of exquisite taste in wine and food might be thought to be epicurean. Of course, this is complete bollocks when measured next to the man himself.

At his most excessive, Epicurus was modest indeed, and would certainly have eschewed the kind of lifestyle he has wrongly come to be associated with. While he advocated pleasure as the highest good, this pleasure was necessarily restrained. In seeking to overcome pain, such as being cold on a winters morning, one may need a coat or a blanket, but one does not need a branded luxury item. It is good to be free from pain, but not a lot needs to be done to achieve it. I am guessing that if he were around today, Epicurus would be an advocate for sustainable living, growing just enough food to allay hunger, wearing clothes that did the job of protecting from the elements. In fact he held that mental pleasure was regarded more highly than physical, and the ultimate pleasure was to have freedom from anxiety and mental pain, especially that arising from needless fear of death and of the wrath of the gods. In death, our atoms were dispersed to the elements, our mind and senses included, so that no fear need arise.

I suspect the fact that Epicurus set up a kind of commune on the outskirts of Athens may have attributed to the false rumours that abounded and come down to this day. In many ways, he is quite modern in his thinking and his remedies for being happy (which is surely a pleasurable experience) are entirely relevant. If pain is allayed by the means of keeping it simple (that is, focussing on our needs), then we may achieve the kind of mental tranquility that is the highest joy in life.

Just finished Stephens West's excellent podcasts on Confucious and Lao Tzu. It is remarkable that two such influential and diametrically opposed thinkers should emerge from the same period in Chinese history, the Warring States era. Lao Tzu championed The Way, a life of inaction, of going with the flow. Confucious lionized a so-called golden era (the Zhou Dynasty), creating a conservative system of obligation and ritual down to the last detail. Of course, I hugely abbreviate the work of these two giants but that is not the point of this post. Both men considered the chaos around them, the fragmentation of China into warlord fiefdom's, and the subsequent uncertainty and hardship, and reached entirely different conclusions.

Today we see a not dissimilar process at work, though perhaps less extreme than the example above. In the West, political parties stake out positions at various points on the ideological spectrum. In Australia as elsewhere, conservatives think that less government and more freedom in the private sector are the best way of promoting growth in an economy, though the actual means of achieving this is contested. On the left, the role of government is more expansive, the goals less distinct. Is growth the most important task of government, or just one of many areas of challenge? Getting a balance right from any point of view is not easy, made even more so by the question of what a government should do.

Lao Tzu wanted as little government as possible, seeing it as an impediment to growing into wisdom, whilst Confucious wanted rulers who were virtuous and wise, according to a rigorous system of obligation and obeisance, society-wide. The two apparently met on one occasion, a meeting that any Chinese fly on a wall would have loved to overhear.

face up in water-
clouds unspool in long tendrils,
birds shoot the March winds.

swanky mall, autumn, I


ribbons of fallen light
patterned with cracked leaves,
up past the posh shops

The Grand Sumo Spring Honbasho has begun in Osaka. A few of the rikishi are absent through injury, including two yokozuna. The forced retirement of Harumafuji last year, combined with the casualties in the upper ranks, has made watching the tournament a little odd. But this does give other wrestlers the chance to move through the ranks or even capture the title, as Georgian Tochinoshin did last November.

It was 12 years ago that a group of us from Sanda City went to the Osaka Tournament. We sat in the boxed areas drinking sake and watching keenly as the megaliths took to the clay. It was a great afternoon in which the champion Asashoryu donned his golden mawashi and won, as expected. The great man, who fell from favour in yet another scandal, is seen below.

A busy few days gathering documents and trying to work out how you prove that you love someone. It sounds bizarre, yes, but that is how applying for a visa works. The onus of proof is squarely (and rightly) on the applicants. The words I love you and the many tiny acts that constitute two people being in love and living a life together cannot easily be rendered in humdrum documentation. Unless you go to great trouble collecting every letter, receipt, bill and the like, anticipating the road ahead in advance like a clairvoyant, then it's truly difficult.

Sure, if you have set up a sham marriage for the sake of obtaining a visa, then you are likely to have planned all of this in advance. You will be collecting and conniving because you are not in love but engaged in a process of fakery and the production of moments and paperwork is all part of the artifice. But if you have courted each other, fallen in love, exchanged marriage vows and begun to build a genuine life together, then these things count for very little and end up in the recycling or lost forever.

I have faith that love will prevail in the end, even though the path, tortuous be.

autumn ripples the pool
catch of heel flipper-glide,
chatter like leaf-fall

Our last trip to the South Coast unburied certain memories from my childhood past. Ann was keen to see the Figure 8 Pools in the Royal National Park so, despite what looked like very poor weather, we made our way to the Garrawarra Farm Carpark. This somewhat remote spot is at the head of the track to the Coast Track which runs the length of the National Park. For us this meant taking a right at Burning Palms in order to access the nearby Pools. Burning Palms! That name had been joggling about in the back of my mind since I had started plotting our walk a week earlier. Burning Palms....

And then it came back to me. Second Killarney Heights Scouts, circa 1971. Our troop had gone camping at Burning Palms, lugging backpacks from who knows where, pitching V-Frame tents and doubtless participating in lengthy and fruitless marches through bushland at the behest of the troop leader. The funny thing is, I have no recollection of that experience at all. I only remember the name, Burning Palms, and that we went there. Odd.

My modern experience of said place was wholly pleasant, for the rain ceased and the track proved easily negotiable. The south headland point was a little tricky (a southerly was producing a huge swell) and the Pools, which we had reached exactly at low tide, were awash in foam and spray from the breakers. One could only just make out where they were and it was impossible to get closer than 50 metres or so. Still, it was an enervating experience.

I am glad that Ann likes tramping in the natural world. I think she is made of stronger stuff than me.

Autumn has officially arrived though the seasons are no strict observers of such dates. But the turn into March invariably has a feel of the autumnal, not because I think it should be so, but because the nights are getting cooler and unmistakeably, the odd green leaf is yellowing. In a week or so the process will accelerate and many such examples will be apparent. This is my favourite time of the year, for though the events of autumn presage winter, yet there is still a long lingering of summer warmth in the daytime, the cooling of the night and the ever-so-gradual dimming of the days.

I have been dipping into a lot of books lately, my mind never quite settled on just one tome. I'm about half-way through A Tale Of Two Cities, a similar distance through a book on logical fallacies and have just begun yet another text on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In between times, I read quite a lot of old Chinese poetry, translated into English, of course. Most recently One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, by Kenneth Rexroth, has piqued my nightly curiosity. Rexroth tries to get to the heart of meaning when translating, so if it means that some textual accuracy is tweaked, he will do it in the service of the what he conceives is the poet's intent. The latter requires a huge amount of scholarship and a lot of poetic sensitivity. But Rexroth was a poet himself, so surely this gets him onto the first rung of the ladder.

Lu Yu was a late Sung poet and highly regarded both then and now. His poems resonate because despite the distance of a thousand years and a vast cultural gap, he is interested in the human condition. The later Lu was essentially in exile in his home province and like many poets, had a free affinity with wine. Such an affinity would destroy my ability to write, but not so with the Chinese masters! Lu was also able to further cultivate his Taoist and Zen inclinations, seclusion in the countryside being an adjunct to the process. As David Hinton writes,

"In (his) late poetry the Sung interiorization of tzujan (roughly, going with the flow, spontaneity) came to another of its logical conclusions, for the mastery of the poems lies more in their form than in any particular statement they make. They don’t just portray wisdom, they enact it by following the provisional insights of everyday life, and so demonstrating (the) understanding that ordinary experience is always already enlightened, that enlightenment resides in the everyday movement of perception and reflection, rather than in the distillation or intensification of experience into privileged moments of insight. It is this day-to-day transparency that represents Lu Yu’s distinctive way of weaving consciousness into the fabric of natural process, of making every gesture in a poem wild."

I Want to Go Out, but It’s Raining

The east wind blows rain,
Vexing the rambler.
The road turns to mud
From fine dust.

Flowers sleep, willows drowse,
Spring itself is lazy.
And it turns out that I
Am even lazier than spring. (Greg Whincup)

Night Thoughts

I cannot sleep. The long, long
Night is full of bitterness.
I sit alone in my roorn,
Beside a smoky lamp.
I rub my heavy eyelids
And idly turn the pages
Of my book. Again and again
I trim my brush and stir the ink.
The hours go by. The moon comes
In the open window, pale
And bright like new money.
At last I fall asleep and
I dream of the days on the
River at Tsa-feng, and the
Friends of my youth in Yen Chao.
Young and happy we ran
Over the beautiful hills.
And now the years have gone by,
And I have never gone back. (Kenneth Rexroth)