Yesterday, after my shift at 2RPH, I wandered down to Thai Town (Campbell St area) to buy the usual requests for my family. The city seemed livelier than I can remember in a while, with more students about. Cafes looked fuller, shops busier. The coronavirus is still very much a presence (with new strains forever on the horizon) but some people seem to have relaxed into the risk, perhaps more than they should have. I wear a mask pretty much all the time when away from home but I am in a very small minority, perhaps about ten percent.

Later I caught my usual inter-city home and noticed people queuing with bags at one of the gates. The Indian Pacific was lined up on Platform 3 ready to its long journey across the continent. Porters bustled with luggage carts and people said their goodbyes. I would love to do that trip.

From one train to another.

Autumn Thoughts

An end-of-summer sun in March
Surprises me,

Hot prickle after so much rain,

Sweat of my back and snap

of leaves,

I dig the earth to free the roots,

Lie flat and gaze at clouds again,

No telling where or when,

A leaf may fall,

They spin and dive behind my back,

They crackle from the stem,

Cunning in death,

As for the clouds,

Some bunch and fade and tack,

Others like buddhas sit,

So still, as if to take a breath.

Congratulations to shin-sekiwake (new third tier ) Wakatakakage on winning the Emperors Cup in Osaka yesterday, beating sentimental favourite Takayasu at the last gasp. The exciting playoff was held after both rikishi lost their final day bouts and were locked at 12-3 each.

It looked like Takayasu was about to push his younger opponent from the dohyo when the latter sprang a last minute twist and belt grab. It was a skilful escape from a man who may well be challenging for Ozeki status in a few tournaments, if he keeps up the good work.

A few posts ago I wrote about the dismal start that Shodai had made to the tourney (0-4) but we were all left eating our words. He finished 9-6 and snapped his kadoban ozeki status. Omedetto.

That move.

Coming into Glebe on Thursday to prep and present the Newcastle Herald, I was confronted by a new piece of technology for the session I was about to do. Studio 2 had a new desk, sleek and black with a range of mellow lights and calibrated levels for volume and such like.

As I began to set up the computer for the reading, I mused whether this new control panel would offer any challenges for someone who had never seen it before and had had no training in using it. A techie emerged eventually and gave me a Cook's about what was different and what was the same about the new desk. With 5 minutes to go before going live it was certainly cutting things fine.

It turned out okay but it took a little getting used to. The panel is much better than what it has replaced and I'm pretty sure will improve the quality of broadcasts over time. I think the unit is upwards of $30,000 and we are getting three of them!

The page in the foreground is from the NCH and gives you some idea of what we are reading from. But that will change too soon when large tablets are installed and readings will be from a screen. I can't wait for that!

It is often seen as puzzling that men and women, having tasted freedom, can seemingly embrace, or at least accept, authoritarianism, once again. There are many instances in the 19th and 20th centuries, ours as well, that demonstrate the idea that people can willingly surrender hard-won freedoms in order that someone else might give them a firm direction to go or certainties to believe in.

Erich Fromm, whose Escape from Freedom I read many years ago, examined the phenomenon in the 1920's and 1930's ( a fruitful time for authoritarians) and concluded that the freedoms that people had achieved over time (from say, the relative security of being a middle ages peasant in a small village, born with a status, a profession and a belief system), could engender feelings of hopelessness and perhaps fear. What do you do with all that freedom? How do you act in the world?

Even a country that touts itself as a beacon of democracy and freedom like the United States is not exempt from this process. How else do you explain the genuinely popular support for Trump, an authoritarian in democratic clothing if ever there was one? It is too simple to say that these voters were fools or idiots or bad people. Clearly many of them were well-educated and perfectly sane.

But Trump, I think, touched a nerve in the realm of cultural and personal freedom (and a backlash that had been building for some time), that spoke to the idea that there was too much choice about how one could live one's life, who one could be or become. Identity politics, so called, did not help sway people otherwise.

Many people hanker for certainty and what they think is how things should be - simple and straightforward and easily measured - and are prepared to surrender political freedoms to get back to that imagined place. It is just that, imagined, but it behoves us to try to understand, rather than condemn.

The commencement of the Grand Sumo Spring Tournament brings a welcome distraction from the troubles of the planet, if only for two weeks. The current tourney is in Osaka, the same prefectural gymnasium I attended in 2006. That occasion remains vivid for me and confirmed my feelings for the sport, ones that I hold to this day. That same day a young rikishi named Hakuho was just starting to make a name for himself. Of course, the rest is history.

At Day 4, the field is wide open though Shin-Ozeki (the second highest rank) Mitakeumi is looking impressive after his promotion. He is famously known for being inconsistent in Week 2 but clearly someone has been working hard on his psychological outlook.

The same can't be said for fellow Ozeki Shodai, who at 0-4 looks like a lost sheep in the ring. Despite his size and obvious strength, he is being out-muscled, out-thought and out-wrestled by opponents he should be beating, nine times out of ten. He appears to have no injuries, so something is going on inside his head. Or not.

The venue.

Clouds

Clouds are knuckle friends,
The last to stay -

They stick around,

Hid by night,

Aimless in the day,

Such light clay for fantasy-

Shapes that bend and play

Into a thousand dreams-

A horse, a whale, a face,

A ship that's bound

Who knows where?

A waterless sea.

Unmoored, adrift,

Ghost cargo to

A nameless place,

No load to bear

Just a buoyant mist,

At any angle

And every idle glance,

They lead us on

A capricious dance.

One of my many time-wasting activities (according to my wife) is my numerous attempts to relocate on google maps an image from one of the Japanese-themed subscriptions I have on FB. Call it boredom or call it an unhealthy fixation with the country I once lived and worked in, but I really do enjoy getting a match, whether it be a temple, restaurant, landmark ort beauty spot. Sometimes it takes a few minutes, sometimes an hour or two. Quite frequently I have to concede defeat.

In the case of the following two shots, I had to do a work-around. Google maps would not let me stand in the spot I wanted to, so I took myself across the road and captured the reverse image, more or less - looking back at where the original photo was taken from. The train line is San-yo Railway from Kobe and this spot is very close to Shioya Station. The other direction is Akashi.

The most most rainfall, which drenched and then drenched again an already sodden earth, cut a maze of trenches and watercourses throughout the garden. The grassed area of the driveway was left looking like a miniature of the Western front in the Great War, with two muddy trenches facing each other.

I decided to fill each small ravine with a line of bricks, then stones and finally earth. So I began digging further down and discovered that someone, quite a long time ago, had sunk a lower line of bricks in the very spot where I was lining mine up. 

I felt a little like an archaeologist might have, as he or she gently excavated a site in the hope of finding signs of an earlier civilisation in the layers below. Mine is a lot more recent - certainly within the past 60 years, but pleasing, nevertheless.

With a lot of time to kill being indoors as a result of the big wet, I have probably been watching too many British crime dramas, English football replays and allied YouTube offerings. Ordinarily I would be out cycling, working in the garden or just staring into a sunny space with a book of verse in my hand.

It may be that I have watched Thai-themed video channels before (most likely Thai music), but lately a lot of recommendations from YouTube are Thai-centred, albeit from a foreign perspective. One such surprising offering is a channel devoted almost entirely (or so it seems) to the experience of Western men coming on holiday for the sole purpose of hanging out in go-go and beer bars. It goes without saying that their intentions go beyond the mere consumption of alcohol, their misadventures being the subject of much of the content on the channel. This involves a huge amount of naivety and self-deception on behalf of the men, some of whom appear to have tipped their brains out on the journey over.

Now, I haven't lived a saintly life and the bar ladies are undoubtedly both clever (at parting a sucker from his money) and beautiful, but in my travels to Thailand I have never considered spending time in such a bar a legitimate part of seeing and experiencing Thailand. None of the letters written by these men to the channel host ever mention temples, Buddhism, museums, rain forests, wildlife, interactions with ordinary people - you get my drift. It's all bars and bar ladies.

Moreover, these poor fools really think they have a shot at true love, having fallen for the patter, the charm, the whole schtick that goes with successfully plying the trade. I feel sorry for them - the warnings are out there - but they just keep coming. I'm not saying I'm any better. I just don't get it.

Suffering is an inescapable aspect of the human condition. It has been written about and reflected upon since ancient times and most religious traditions have something to say about it. The Christian view, for example, holds that the world is 'fallen', that suffering and death are inevitable, that God is with us during these times and that suffering can bring out the best and noblest of human responses.

Many people, when they undergo a period of intense suffering and pain, for whatever reason, will not be comforted by formulaic responses. Being told that Jesus suffered and therefore understands us will not help a person who doesn't believe. It may not even help a believer.

My wife is a Thai Buddhist who holds, as you'd expect, that it is the desire for things in this world, the selfish craving for pleasure, objects, wealth material that leads to suffering. Christian ascetics in the early Church came to similar conclusions, though from a very different position.

This may only partially allay the questions that suffering raises for modern people. This is not an age of faith. Existential thinkers like Camus and Sartre wrote about ways of being in a faithless world and (like Nietzsche's ubermensch,) argued that one has to see the world as it is, without illusions, and then make one's life through action. One sees the suffering and goes ahead anyway, creating a life that gives some solace, if not meaning.

In Ambulances, Larkin wrote how the sight of an ambulance in the street, forced us to "sense the solving emptiness/That lies just under all we do." Everyday existence is upended by the presence of suffering suddenly amongst us, which throws all we do into a kind of pointless relief. That seems to be the place where we are at.

It doesn't have to be so. We are not as smart as we think we are and people of old were often wiser when it comes to questions like this. It always pays to pay close attention to the past, not to be in its thrall, but to give us a deeper understanding of the present.

If the times seem a little apocryphal for some people then the times may well be right. I can imagine my Christian friends, those with a Book of Revelation bent, pouring over scripture to seek illumination.

The problem with any text purporting to foretell the future is that it is subject to the interpretation of anyone - really - anyone at all. You only have to look at the nonsense written about Nostradamus to see that no one reliable interpretation is possible amongst all the vying options.

Yes, there are 'wars and rumours of wars' (Matt 24:6), pestilences, talk of massive disruption because of climate change and in Australia, a kind of Noachian deluge at present. It is fuel to feed the imagination of those who seek out prophetic truths.

But I'm also sure that many occasions in the past have lent themselves to end-time prophecy and all of them have been wrong. It is not for humans to know such things, even if there is something to it.