Twenty years ago this month I first went Japan. The occasion was the anniversary of the Sanda City and Blue Mountains Sister City relationship. Somehow, the choir I was a member of, Crowd Around, was selected to represent the Blue Mountains at a special concert. We were a non-audition SATB community choir so I guess that this was a considerable honour. Since I was the choir President (a title with no real power), I was hopeful (though in jest, to be truthful), that I would be presented to the Emperor. Alas, no.

But this was a wonderful week away in which our home-stay families spoilt us rotten and we got a small taste of Sanda and environs, including a lightning tour of Kyoto. I didn't know it at the time but this trip was the start of an enduring relationship with Japan, including a three year stint teaching English at Yes School in Sanda. So I owe much to Janet Swain (our choir director) for grabbing the opportunity when it came. I am also grateful for the chance offered by Stephanie Swoll, an American living in Sanda and whose school it was that we worked at. If not for Stephanie, there would have been no job to go to.

The evening concert took place in the outdoor amphitheatre of Fukada Park in Flowertown (also an evacuation site) and we performed half a dozen songs. Also on the same program were a Korean choir and a local symphony orchestra. The evening was very warm and I remember looking up into the audience and seeing hand-held fans swinging in the semi-darkness.

Below is a shot taken just before our performance on that hot August night. The glass building in the background is the Museum of Nature and Human Activities, adjacent the performance space. The photo is pre-digital and has deteriorated over time.

Do you have a preferred time to be alive in human history? Are you happy with the present, with its mod-cons, medical science, instant connectivity and high standard of living, or would you trade these undoubted benefits for a different era? Would you be happy to sheer off half your life expectancy for the chance to live in Georgian or Victorian times in England, a place where, if luck blessed you, you might end up at balls, driven by horse and phaeton through dim cobbled streets, certain of your nation's place in the sun.

As a younger man I often pined (that really is the right word) for the chance to hang out with the Romantics, somewhere at the beginning of the 19th century. Unlike now, one might write with a great lucid verbosity and compose verse with a flourish of high sounding language. Today this would be pretentious but then, you were assured of a reading public, holidays in the Lakes District and Italy, and female admirers. Poetry could be a profession if you were good enough, though I suspect my verse would fall short and I would "fade far away into the forest dim", contracting pneumonia and expiring promptly.

Today I was listening to a podcast on the Venerable Bede, the English cleric, scholar and intellectual of the 8th century. Bede's time, about which he wrote, was difficult. Plague consumed most all of the monks at his monastery at Wearmouth, except he and one or two others. The Viking invasions were yet to come, but for most people, life was threadbare and contingent. Only 2% of the population were literate and death was a constant handmaiden. Yet, the certainty with which people believed in God, where they had come from and where they were going, made the present more bearable. Their lives were meaningful in ways we cannot understand.

You know by now that this is one of my themes (surely, idee fixe - ed.) and that modern living has done a remarkably good job of stripping the meaningful from the life bit. People search in all kinds of ways to get meaning, but it is not found in extreme sports, composing buckets lists, taking drugs, pumping iron or becoming a celebrity. There are thousands of ways modern people seek meaning and for the most part, it alludes them. I am not chastising, moreover, I find it sad that we have thrown out those ways of being which better suit our condition, in favour of the gross distortion of contrived happiness that is consumer capitalism.

I have no answers, but like Larkin, tend to stop by at old churches. I am less sure than he that "the ghostly silt" has dispersed, but it seems true enough that we need to recapture something of that certainty, that lost wonder.

strapping winds
bending the timber backward
pitching birds nowhere

I have had an abiding interest in Chinese history for a while now. I have just finished yet another podcast survey course from ancient times to modern (From Yao To Mao by The Great Courses) and would love to start the same one again. There is a simple reason for wanting to repeat or reread courses, programs or books in Chinese history. It is very long and broad and deep, going back thousands of years with a clear line to the present, most unlike anywhere else. It is demanding and unwieldy and therefore difficult to remember.

I guess China scholars tend to focus on one period, or a part of a period, becoming experts in that field. To go much beyond is to invite confusion. Imagine going to an international car show where every manufacturer and every model of vehicle is displayed. You have one day at the show and you will probably be tempted to make your way through the many pavilions and exhibitions, occasionally lingering at a favourite car or car maker, but pushing on relentlessly, collecting brochures, overhearing sales patter, sitting behind wheels and watching fragments of video presentations. You arrive at the exit come days-end exhausted, perhaps exhilarated, but somewhat overwhelmed by information.

There is an adage which goes, "the more you know, the less you realise you know," a saying that smart people know to be true. It is certainly true of Chinese history. I will keep plugging on, arriving at a place one day far from now that I will know to be only the starting point.

How about this for a timeline! The first date on the top left below the Xia reads 2,000 BC.

Hiroshima Day Commemoration 2018 has just passed but its powerful memory lives on. I went to Hiroshima 16 years ago on a short vacation from teaching duties at Yes School in Sanda. I was hunting through some old letters we sent back to Australia in 2002 and publish an extract below. I think it sums up my complicated feelings about this awful event. Lest We Forget.


April 2002

"Nobody can enter this city without the knowledge, buried sometimes deeply in the psyche, that this is a special place. I entered Hiroshima with something of that feeling that I had when I first came into Dachau. Passing through Dresden I had the same sensation. How can I explain it?

We had no bookings for Hiroshima and I was a little worried. This was a city of over a million and we had a few listings for accommodation in our travel guide, but no detailed map. Nadia tried the first couple of hotels on our keitai but they were booked solid. The youth hostel was full. It was getting dark and the traffic was heavy. Finally, we secured lodging in a minshuku, very close to Peace Park. A little expensive, but very central.

In our meanderings, we had crossed several rivers and seen the cherry trees in full bloom. We were overjoyed – the city looked beautiful with large boughs weeping white petals into the rivers. On another wide boulevarde, trams ran up and down. Hiroshima felt European on first glimpse.

After settling in (our room had a tatami floor and roll up beds!), we set out for a brief evening foray into Hiroshima. We passed through adjacent Peace Park, which is the central symbol and rememberance for the catastrophic atomic bombing which took place on August 6th, 1945. This single incident informs both the past and present mindset of residents here – there is no avoiding the singularity of it.

I remember in school debates (about the merits or otherwise of dropping the bomb), that the central argument advanced by the affirmative ( a line also propagated by the Allies in WW2, then and since) was that it saved millions of lives. A necessary evil to stop a greater evil. This argument is shot to pieces by more recent scholarship that demonstrates that Japan was very close to surrender anyway and that the real reasons for dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had more to do with American fears of the Soviet Union than the defeat of Japan. A demonstration of US power for its new post-war foe.

It is impossible not to empathise with the people of Hiroshima, whose personal circumstances changed forever at 8.15am on that clear morning, over fifty years ago. I wonder whether the Americans gave thought to the 20,000 Koreans who had been forced into service and who perished in a flash. Or the ten of thousands of women and children who dived into the river to drown, so painful were their burns. I doubt it.

I could go on, but no. We walked through the park to the cenotaph, past the peace flame(that will not be extinguished until all nukes are gone from the earth), towards the monument to children who perished in the conflagration. This is really a tribute to Sadako Sasaki, the brave girl who died from leukemenia a decade after the war ended. Many of you will be familiar with her story; her abiding belief that if she folded a thousand paper cranes, she would be healed. Fifty of those cranes are in the adjacent museum – tiny, delicate, colourful. Ten years ago I walked to the Tower of London to see the crown jewels and wondered what the fuss was about; today I would go on my knees to Hiroshima to see these jewels of the heart.

Sadako fell short of folding the thousand cranes before she died, but ever since, children from around the world (though especially in Japan) have been folding them and laying them at this monument.

Very close by the monument, though across the river, is the remains of the Industrial Progress Hall, the gaunt shell and skeletal dome a mute reminder of the fatal blast. I can't even begin to describe the impact of Hiroshima on the traveller; I can only say, come and see for yourself. I'm starting to think that it might be the single most important place on the planet."

I had my first solo mission of guiding on HMAS Onslow last Sunday. Onslow is a decommissioned Oberon class submarine now stationed at the National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour. As for me, the last few months have been a training period of sorts, largely consisting of being buddied-up with an experienced guide. I have also been studying some of the Museum's manuals, which present a kind of dry introduction to each ship (or boat). They tend to lack the kinds of storied experience that comes with having served in the RAN.

So imagine my surprise and joy at being on first station (the gangway to the Oberon) when a former submarine commander presented himself as a mere member of the viewing public. I stepped aside and let him amswer questions and essentially conduct an impromptu tour of the boat, a boat which he had actually served on. One doesn't get much luckier, I was later told by a fellow guide.

So now I have a few stories and a more hands-on idea of how to go about making the Oberon come to life for those who have never served on a submarine. Most people tend to wander through the boat without much of an idea, so maybe I can help to make a difference. Stories about human endeavour will always be of interest and sometimes, they can inspire people to make changes in their lives for the better.

HMAS Oberon

plum blossom
lone stranger on a bare tree
August surprise

I regularly check NHK's Haiku Masters for new works. There are so many good haiku coming into being all the time, in addition to the millions that have already been written. It is easy to get lost in the works of the old Japanese masters and forget how this tradition of verse writing has only grown stronger and perhaps richer. Not being Japanese is no longer such a disadvantage, though understanding much of the native oevre requires some investigation into pre-modern Japanese thinking - lifestyles, social relations, religion and so forth. There are more a-ha moments when one has an inkling of the deeper structures at work.

Today I publish one of the runners-up in the photo haiku section. The photo is only a starting point for the thought that becomes the haiku, rather than merely a description, as will be apparent from this little gem.



I case you can't read the script, the poem goes:

the old train station-
only from the swallow nest
departures and arrivals


Capota Daniela Lacramioara

leafless dawn
sky spread like a dirty sheet
and no damn moon

The scheduled lunar eclipse took place earlier today (since we have no way of preventing it!) but the vision from Hazelbrook was very poor. In fact, a cloud cover completely obscured our nearest neighbour, so I went back to bed. A lot of hot air is expended by the media whenever a lunar eclipse comes around with precious little said about the cosmos at any other time. Except, perhaps, for the race to Mars. And even that is just rummaging in the back yard.

Speaking of which, Mars made a surprise appearance in the meme community recently, with one such offering claiming that the (full) Moon and Mars would appear as the same size in the night sky, since Mars was at its closest approach to the Earth. It is hard to know whether this is a serious assertion or just an attempt at humour, though the image was earnestly distributed by folks on Facebook, as if genuine. So even if it's creation was deliberately mischievous, some people believed it.

When I was about 15 I was given a cheap little refracting telescope which I used to lash to a wooden beam that was sunk into the ground in our backyard. From atop this point I gazed at the shaking heavens (the stability of the system was seriously tested by even a slight breeze) but even so I could make my way about the heavens, picking out this planet or that star or even small fuzzy patches that I knew to be nebula. Sometimes I would gaze at the Red Planet, which presented, even at 40 times magnification, as a small red blurry dot in my lens. Even at that age, I knew that there was no chance that this planet would ever appear in the sky, the same size as the Moon, as if only a couple of million kilometres away. I suppose that it might be possible in extreme circumstances, such as where a Black Hole had entered the Solar System and was throwing the furniture around. In that case, the Martian proximity would be the least of our worries.

Never mind, the same minds who gave us the massive Mars probably had a hand in the Nibiru mystery, in which a large planet was supposed to have entered the Solar System unnoticed and had secreted itself behind the Sun.

I am now settled, more or less, into the two volunteer jobs that I began about three months ago. I do still have the training wheels on to some extent because at both organisations, most of the volunteers have been there for a long time. It is a little intimidating to go on air (as I do at 2RPH) with two other workers who have been doing program readings for about 15 years each. They bring a great wealth of experience and a calmness that is both instructive and frightening. Will I measure up, my mind asks, over and over.

Likewise at the Maritime Museum, where I regularly meet folks who have been giving up their time since the inception of the museum, I feel like the greenest of recruits. On the replica of HMB Endeavour, I can identify with the long-departed boys who came on board the long voyages with Cook, ostensibly to learn the ropes and get a career from the bottom up. My co-workers on this ship not only know the patter, but they know the patter about the patter.

Meanwhile, I mix up details about the various ships complements and struggle to recall the kinds of stories that bring the experience of being on a ship (or a boat, the case of the Onslow) to life. I guess that I will get better as time passes.

Then there are the times when I am chatting to a visitor, trying to sound mildly authoritative, only to find out in the course of things that they have actually served on the ship during its active life in the RAN!! Shrinking to a small size, I slink back off to the Endeavour, knowing that there is no chance of such an occurence on that ship.

Looking aft on HMB Endeavour.



Sydney CBD from adjacent X Turret on HMAS Vampire.

In late Georgian and early Victorian England, there were over 200 capital offences. Glancing through a list of these there are some obvious inclusions, such as murder, treason amd armed robbery. Others are less obvious and some are downright odd. Under the "Bloody Code" which operated from the late 17th to the early 19th Century, a huge number of offences were added to the penal code, many of which carried the death sentence. Forgery or passing off forgeries ("Uttering") meant death. Burglary, sheep or cattle theft, highway robbery - death. Returning from (convict) transportation, sodomy, rape - death.

Some of the more exotic (and inexplicable) offences for which one might be hung included being in the company of gypsies for more than a month, stealing from a shipwreck, writing a threatening letter, pick-pocketting, damaging Westminster Bridge or being out at night with a blackened face. So one could really be done over for anything and those copping most of it were of course, poor. The rich and the well-to-do in Parliament wrote the laws and since they owned all the property, most of these laws were directed at property crimes.

To make matters worse, hangings were generally public and ordinary folks could gather for ringside seats outside gaols like Newgate to watch the spectacle. The latter held these events at 8am on a Monday morning and people would often arrive the night before to get the best spots. Nearby houses could make a killing renting out rooms to gentlemen. A kind of carnival atmosphere prevailed with entertainments, food stalls and souvenir sellers. It might seem a complete reversal of our conception of Victorian society as straight-laced, law-abiding and reform minded, but the whole underclass of poor, so vividly written about by Dickens and others, conjured a kind of hysteria which swept through the middle and upper classes, making anything fair game.

This period is really only a little while ago in the human scheme of things. In the West, we don't generally execute anymore and much is understood about the nature of criminality and the circumstances that drive people into it. But I don't know if we are that far away from the the kinds of moral panic that lead down the path to severe and unreasonable judgements and all that that entails.

Who would be caught at night with a blackened face on Westminster Bridge with a hammer in their hand?

Resurrection Man was the name given to a grave robber in the 19th Century. The demand for corpses for dissection at medical schools was such that the supply from executions alone was insufficient and needed to be supplemented by the gruesome removal of bodies recently laid to rest. Of course, this practice was illegal and conducted by men in the dead of night, the bodies being then sold on to the medical schools. The Government (in Britain) tended to turn a blind eye to the practice since the corpses were needed for medical training and research. Horrified relatives often sat a vigil at the graveside or enclosed their loved ones in a steel cage built into the plot. But the Resurrection Men were resourceful and could often empty a tomb without leaving a trace of their handiwork.

I am not fascinated by the macabre but only raise the subject because I have been reading Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. Jerry Cruncher, a messenger and general dogsbody for Tellsons Bank, acts as a Resurrection Man on the side. In one gripping scene, his son secretly follows him part of the way on one of his midnight adventures.

But Cruncher is only a small player in a wonderful book. Dickens can be a little long-winded and somewhat too ornate at times, but otherwise is a fantastic writer, with the imagination and scope of a Shakespeare. Little wonder that he was so popular during his lifetime. The plot is tortuous, the reveals sometimes shocking, the coincidences many, and the ending, extraordinary.

Who would want to meet Madame Defarge on a dark night?



John McLenan's illustration for Harper's Weekly, July 1859, entitled, Mr Cruncher's Friends.

I have no notion of where the Trump Presidency will ultimately lead the United States and the wider world, but its chaotic nature is very troublesome. Like many others, I have said before that Trump seemed unfit for the office before he won in 2016 and would maintain now that this has been blindingly obvious since. He is a very odd person and unlike anyone who has occupied the White House previously.

I bear the man no ill-will and I truly hope he can make a difference for the good. His temperamental unsuitability will make that difficult. His tangential relationship to the truth (something likely learnt in his years as a property developer) means it is hard to take anything he says at face value or to know whether a statement in the morning will be contradicted in the afternoon. A case in point is his follow-up remarks which came in the wake of his meeting with President Putin in Helsinki. People in power seem often to misspeak and so too did Trump. A would becomes a wouldn't. Memories are short and the media will doubtless move on to the next controversy.



Incidentally, Nietzsche meant the phrase God is Dead in a figurative sense to express the idea that the Enlightenment had killed off the possibility of a belief in any god having ever existed. He wasn't proclaiming it as a fact, rather, pointing to the difficulty of being a believer in the modern era.

The purposes of science are not theological. They do not seek to extract meaning from natural phenomena, rather, to explain them. Religion seeks to answer all the "why" questions. Religions create meaning by attempting to answer all these profound, largely metaphysical questions and in doing so, offer believers meaningful pathways to follow. Scientists are not really interested in what kind of life you are leading (moral questions), nor whether there is a meaning to life. Religion and science are different systems with different purposes. Their methods of working are entirely different. They are, in a sense, mutually exclusive.

So it is always unsettling for me when the two systems clash. Most violently in the last two centuries, the clash over the evolution of species, including humans, has continued down to this day. When I was a young Christian I had no problems with Evolution. How God created the Earth seemed largely irrelevant to my faith. Science was clearly a manifestation of God's creative purposes in Mankind, so science was perfectly welcome to figure it all out. The Christian Church had been terribly wrong in the past when it had taken on science, particularly the pioneers such as Copernicus and Gallileo. Such a project today seems equally misguided. There is no battle to be fought. God as Creator is perfectly compatible with evolution.

I do not advocate for the kind of bullish arrogance of Richard Dawkins and his ilk, no matter how brilliant they are. People of faith who are skeptical, despite whatever overwhelming evidence to the contrary that may be presented to them, should be treated respectfully. Only a reasonable discussion, in which their faith is acknowledged, can lead towards a mutual understanding. If only to agree to disagree.

I listen to a lot of podcasts while I walk the streets of Hazelbrook. The content is fairly consistent though I eventually tire of too much of any one genre. Before the last US Presidential Election, I devoured copious quantities of political commentary. Following that extraordinary event, I needed a long break from that subject and dove back into The Great Courses Series. I have bought a dozen or so over the last couple of years and dip in when I can. Today I returned to a course on Victorian Britain.

Which brings me now to Charles Dickens and John Millais. Millais was a Pre-Raphaelite artist in the the mid-19th Century and on one occasion early in his career displayed a work entitled, Christ in the House of His Parents, at the Royal Academy in London. One might have thought that this is not a painterly subject likely to create a furor. It is worth noting that the Pre-Raphaelites wanted to return to a style of the Italian 14th Century, with historical subjects and an abiding faithfulness to nature being foremost. Paintings often contained abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions. So what, you might ask? The Holy Family is the Holy Family!

This is not what Charles Dickens apparently saw when he attended the Royal Academy. Here is a portion of what he wrote about, Christ in the House of His Parents.

"You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the foreground of that carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest ginshop in England."

Here is a reproduction of the painting.



A little harsh, you might say? Is Dickens looking at the same painting as we are? Or is he reacting to the ordinariness of this portrayal of Jesus and his parents, Joseph and Mary? Anyone who has seen works on the same subject from earlier periods will no doubt recognise the prosaic quality of the figures in this painting. No halos! No fabulous robes nor especially handsome faces! They could be anybody, really.

But not to worry. The famous art critic, John Ruskin, rode to the rescue and the Pre-Raphaelites, for all their pretentiousness, came into vogue in a big way.

slowly and slowly
from the belly of the cave-
a dozen bicycles await

It is no secret that 12 boys and their coach were trapped in a cave in Chiang Rai in Thailand's north. In fact, you would have to have been trapped in a cave yourself to have missed the blanket media coverage. Through the combined efforts of many nations but the co-ordination of Thailand's civic and military authorities, the Wild Boars are free, though now convalescing in Prachanukroh Hospital. Their rescue, under dangerous circumstances, is being celebrated as I write.

Good news stories are rare amongst all the hell-in-a-handbasket stuff we are usually subjected to. But they are welcome and demonstrate, once again, the capacity of humans to rise above partisanship, cultural difference or nationality to do something outstanding, worthwhile, yes, even noble. This is the spirit and attitude we need to survive and thrive as a species, and I pray that it will be a spark to all people.

The cartoonist Sisidea created a fine cartoon which sums up the essence of the great collaborative enterprise that has freed the Wild Boars, which I reproduce below.



I want to mention also the heroic effort of the only person to lose their life, Sgt. Major Sanam Gunam. A former Thai Navy Seal, he volunteered to dive through the dangerous cave waters, "to bring the boys back home." In sacrificing his life for others, he has become the hero of Tham Luang Cave. Rest in Peace, good man.

The old V-Set inter-urban trains that have been plying the Blue Mountains line have been in operation for over 30 years. They are great trains - comfortable, quiet and generally reliable. Ann thinks they are long overdue for replacement (Thai's love new things) but I suspect that any replacement will be a step backwards, if you deduct the gimmicky things like phone charging stations. Still, we have a couple of years before the new Korean-built replacements arrive.

Today I found an old photo of Hazelbrook Station posted on a social media site. Putting things in perspective, it harks back to a different era, when steam was king and folks dressed up if they went outdoors. The photo is grainy but gives an idea of the times. The water tank is now gone and the lay of the Great Western Highway, much changed.

stuttering wind-
outside, shadow-shapes convulse
as if darkly aflame

Most days I go for a walk somewhere. I have a few well-trodden ways that I complete almost automatically, without giving a huge amount of thought to where my steps may lead. The culprit may be my podcast-listening habit, where I become lost in the narrative.

Today I took another familiar walk down past the local Steiner School and into the Blue Mountains National Park. There are a number of firetrails and locked gates and ordinarily I will stop at one or another and turn back. Today I digressed, taking a less-trodden path past the remains of the Transit of Venus walk and on towards Edith Falls. I stopped by a rusty old gate that sat on the cusp of a long descent.

Most times my mind is chattering or thinking or processing some detail or other but today it stopped, even if for just a moment. I took out my ear buds and was astonished by the sound of the wind rushing through the trees, the bright framing of a cloud as the sun ducked behind it, the sense of movement and stillness and movement pulsing around me. And this feeling swept through me, holding me as if a captive for minutes, keeping me by that gate. I realise that my observing self had briefly taken charge. I was completely attentive to the moment.

It is really something close to a religious experience. Coming from the natural world, we are connected in deep ways that modern living tends to disconnect. That disconnection, amongst other things, is surely a cause for the deep seated anxieties, depression and mental instabilities that plague our age. The same disconnection compells people to seek escape or authenticity in drugs, consumption and destructive lifestyles.

I was much attached to the Romantic poets as a youth and today Wordworth came to mind. Specifically, The Preludes. It is easy to live life vicariously, as I tend to do, but more deep and compelling, when seeking the experience, first hand.

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought!
That giv'st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! not in vain,
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of Childhood didst Thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human Soul,
Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man,
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

and

Ye Presences of Nature, in the sky
And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!
And Souls of lonely places! can I think
A vulgar hope was yours when Ye employ'd
Such ministry, when Ye through many a year
Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
Impress'd upon all forms the characters
Of danger or desire, and thus did make
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph, and delight, and hope, and fear,
Work like a sea?

Internet forums and comment pages are sometimes dangerous places to go. They are certainly frustrating locations if an intelligent conversation is sought after. Everyone knows about the problem of trolls, those malign folk who set out to deliberately provoke outrage. You don't need to be smart to be a troll, though a little cunning might help you to find the best spot to get the biggest bang, as it were. There is nothing honourable in trolling, even if there is something to be gained from setting a cat amongst pigeons. Moreover, most trollish comments tend towards a kind of cruelty or meanness of spirit that conjurs the idea of a self-loathing poster, occupying an ever-diminishing psychological space. It is hard to fathom that kind of nastiness.

Then there are the tranches of posts in which posters have failed to read properly an article or a previous post, constructing so many straw men as they go. Corrections go unheeded or are followed by abuse, nonsequiters or plain nuttiness. Maybe none of this matters in the long run, though these posts could theoretically last for centuries. Imagine a distant civilisation which had recovered primary source fragments from our time and those in our own past. They have a copy of The Analects of Confucious, Plato's Republic, Augustine's The City Of God, Dante's The Divine Comedy and Darwin's The Evolution of The Species. They also possess a huge pile of random pages of contemporary internet forum sites/social media and such-like commentary. They might quite reasonably conclude that a terrible regression had occurred, perhaps a natural disaster, plague or war that had sapped humans of their vitality and a significant chunk of their IQ.

The democratization that the internet had promised has probably come to pass. Any person with a smart phone or computer can create content for themselves and express their opinion however they like, whether or not they have anything worthwhile to say. There are no real standards and very little moderation. It is a wild west zone where everyone is a publisher and truth setter. That could be a good thing in the history of ideas and human development, a thriving digital democracy. It could also be an endless race to the bottom.

Somewhat off topic, but I like its cleverness:

Haiku Masters is an NHK Japan program that allows viewers to write in with original haiku that satisfy certain criteria. For example, one can compose a haiku which takes a particular photo as a starting point. There are a lot of talented haiku poets about and I am often impressed by their imagination and dexterity, much as I am underwhelmed by my own lack thereof.

The following is a recent winner in the photo haiku category by Corinne Timmer of The Netherlands. How impressive to write in a second language with such assurance and broad knowledge of the idiom!

If liberal democracy is in a kind of crisis, and this is very debatable, then it's demise has been foretold many times in the past. One of the differences today is that we have a unique intesection of conditions that make democracy more difficult. Like any human system, democratic institutions need repair and maintenance. Anyone who has watched Question Time in the Australian Parliament can see how frameworks for debate can be abused, largely for the scoring of those odious and infantile political points.

While a certain virtue in our leaders is not the only ingredient for a healthy polity, it is nevertheless a yardstick for measuring the health of that class. Confucious noted on many occasions that the demeanour of leaders, their moral compass and virtue, was a fundamental element of a stable political and social system. Surely it helps if those in positions of power seem honest and emboldened by a desire for the good of the commonwealth, and that this is seen to be the case in both word and deed. There is always a case for top-down exemplars - even autocrats can appreciate the utility of being above corruption.

Populism will grow if people become sufficiently disillusioned or even disgusted with their elected representatives and leaders. I am not a Confucian but can appreciate another of his ideas, that ritual is important and needs to be paid attention to. In the modern case, I would say that decorum and mutual respect between political adversaries is of the essence. You can disagree without being bombastic and you can debate by presenting issues clearly and without the need for ad hominems.

nowhere to hide
birds flit from twig to branch-
wintering tree

the ocean's in the trees today
wind-howl through bird and bush and sky
eye-blinding madly

Australia is about to commence its fourth football World Cup campaign in a row. This is something which could not have been countenanced thirty years ago, in the so called wilderness years. The single inaugural appearance in West Germany in 1974 (itself, a remarkable feat) might have been the last given the long run of misses, including a famous one against Iran in 1997.

But here we are again, with a new coach and a team of determined, workmanlike players. It is probably unfair to make comparisons with the team of 2006 though people will do so. There is a dearth of individual stars playing with big clubs, but there is a solid mix of youth and experience. We can only hope than Van Marwyk has the developed a team organisation and game plan sufficient to take the challenge up to the French, Danes and Peruvians.

It is a huge ask but still within the realm of possibility. Otherwise, who could dream the big dreams?

A flashback to the historic Socceroo team of 1974:

We live in strange and interesting times. Seeing Trump and Kim yesterday - shaking hands, smiling and backslapping - is not something that anyone would have expected even 12 months ago. I had always hoped for dialogue between the rogue regime and the US, in spite of the clear evidence that North Korea has consistently failed to keep its promises in the past.

But since the alternative would likely be war, and potentially nuclear war, then even a Chamberlain peace-in-our-time moment would suffice in the interim, whilst some other solution is cobbled together. Trump is the oddest of democratic leaders I can imagine, though they seem to be proliferating. Western Democracies are in need of renewal if populists are to be kept at bay.

The Chinese have a proverb, "Better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a human in a chaotic (warring) period." Hegel put the same idea less lyrically when he noted that, "World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are empty pages in her."

Unfortunately we do not live in those empty pages so we must, perforce, envy the dog. I wish it were otherwise.

Listening to one of the Munk Debates on the topic of political correctness today, I was reminded of what a complex and fraught area this is for someone who wants to be even-handed and reasonable. It is hard to be against something whose apparent aims are generous, kind and good, whose objectives are to right past wrongs and create a more just and equitable society. People who believe in good causes are generally nice folks who want the best for others, especially those who have been historically oppressed.

The problem seems to occur when governments and institutions (and even business) take up these issues and try to create policies that will reform, or ameliorate the problems raised. With these policies often comes a raft of language impositions and omissions, new ways of speaking about a problem or matter and ways of not speaking about it. These don't have to be enforced by fiat - they might be recommendations or suggestions, but that is beside the point. Their enforcement happens without the need for policing.

One of the debaters in the Munk debate was Stephen Fry. Apart from his sheer erudition and wit, Fry puts his finger upon the central problem of political correctness, as it applies to language. It is the group that enforces the rule. One does not want to say something that might be seen as being outside the way the group thinks about and issue, for fear of being outed or labelled as racist, or misogynistic, or something similarly odious. The only option is silence or compliant language.

I know this to be true because I have been in such company and bitten my tongue when a more courageous approach would have been to say plainly what I think. My somewhat left-field sense of humour has often got me into trouble for not dissimilar reasons, for there is something about the conformity and passivity of group think that lights that little contrarian flame in me.

The debate can be found here. It features also the controversial Dr Jordan Peterson, whose views you may may find compelling, or irritating.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNjYSns0op0

or you can google it.

The self-help industry is big and getting bigger, with any old Jill having the potential to be a guru. I can't remember that many books of this ilke being available when I was a kid, if one discounts all the tabloid cook books and their funky seventies recipes. The Readers Digest had articles now and then along the lines of the self-help formula and Dale Carnegie's famous tome, How To Win Friends and Influence People, was likely in its 30th edition. The latter is credited with ushering in the whole industry, a precursor to all that followed.

Looking online or in a bricks and mortar shop today, it is astonishing just how many volumes are grouped under the self-help title. Many of them seem fixated on numbers - The Seven Secrets of Successful Bicycling, Twelve Rules for Lying Straight In Bed, The Nine Lives of the Cat and What It Means For You, and so forth. Numbers do seem to have a kind of magical property. There were 12 Apostles, you may remember, and a flood that lasted 40 days and 40 nights, Four Noble Truths, Ten Commandments, a Noble Eightfold Way and so on. This is not even scratching the surface. With self-help books, numbers are a guide to how much you might have to remember - somewhere between 7 and 12 seems optimal. Let's face it, if you only have one or two ways to achieve a certain overarching goal, then you may not have the material for a whole book. So maybe just a pamphlet!

It has been said that there is a self-help book in all of us. All you have to do is successfully achieve some sort of large project, then work out the winning formula a posteriori. There is the book. It kind of writes itself, with each chapter ticking off one of the ways you did it. If you're short on material just add personal anecdotes and testimonies, diagrams and cartoons. Most of these books have lots of waffling filler anyway so don't be afraid to digress, pop down rabbit holes or insert famous or wise quotations. The latter don't even need to be on topic, but will add an air of authority to your work. Then all you have to do is sit back and wait for it to hit the remainder bin.

Speaking of which, I was looking over the discount table in Dymocks George Street a week or two ago. There were a lot of very fine books heavily discounted, and not a few of the self-help genre too. Most of these were titles that were begging to be forgotten - Ten Paths To A Successful Dinner Party, Twelve Tips For Online Dating, The Seven Days Of Abs. There you go, those numbers 7, 10 and 12 recurring! I suspect the Abs man ran out of things things to write, for number 7 was to repeat the first six steps. His number 1 was a thank-you-for-buying the book chapter. So really there were only five steps but five is a very unlikely sell. Somehow he had to get to seven.

I am not going to write one of these books, nor any book, in all probability. This blog is as close to self-help as I want to get. In any event, there are simply too many entries to win over readers, if six hundred and something is anything to go by. And my advice is free, anyway.

I have had a fight with anxiety for most of my life. It manifests itself almost daily and can have a corrosive effect on my capacity, if I let it. From time to time I become a kind of captive to my anxiety, its dark invisibility, yet omnipresence, a debilitating factor. Most people don't understand this condition, only those who have experienced it in its most nightmarish form.

Anxiety is a well-designed feature for an earlier time when humans faced existential threats day and night. Would there be enough food in the morning to stave off hunger pangs? If I venture further will I be attacked by a wild animal? Anxiety prepared you for fighting or fleeing. Today, we don't have such threats - there is surplus food and all the wild things are in retreat - so our anxiety has nowhere useful to go. It emerges in the body as a series of often frightening symptoms, and the mind, if not well-trained and advised, is likely to be an unwitting ally. A cycle is perpetuated and if not healed early on, can destroy a life.

So it is that I have to return, time and time again, to the book that saved my life thirty years ago. I have to relearn all the lessons that I had already learned, but which the persistence of memory, overwhelms. The fearful nature of the anxiety state is such that it leaves a seemingly indelible scar on the mind, one which can be almost instantaneously retrieved. It is much harder to recall the lessons learnt and pathways taken, so sometimes the memory recreates the past in the present. I think that there is no cure for this but there are certainly ways to manage anxiety and to deal with serious recurrences. It's a case of, well, here I go again!

The book, you ask? I have often talked about it. Self-Help For Your Nerves by Dr Claire Weekes. From my point of view, it is the most important book ever written, since it kept me on the planet for a few more decades. If you are an anxiety sufferer, then this is a book worth reading, again and again and again.

dry leaves dancing-
fallen fellows flip and skate,
last waltz of autumn

About two months ago I began looking for new volunteer jobs. I wanted positions that would offer a personal challenge as well as being socially useful. I find my semi-retirement to be somewhat boring, a first-world problem I know, but one which requires a solution. Golf, lawn bowls or card games are not that solution. So I have been searching volunteer sites and from the hundreds of jobs that I looked at, two popped out at me.

At the present I am in the beginning phase, getting to know the ropes, being mentored and discovering how I might harness those talents that I have to best effect. I applied for a research job with a radio station that offers a reading service to those people who cannot access printed material, such as newspapers, magazines and so forth. I have also successfully auditioned for a reader position at the same place which I think is an exciting prospect.

My other volunteer position is with a maritime museum in Darling Harbour, ostensibly as a guide on board their floating display. There is a steep learning curve as the details about each vessel need to be studied. I will also need to develop my own patter, which should not be too difficult.

Lately also I have been reading Karl Marx. No I am not a Marxist but, since Marx is still relevant in many academic circles (he seems to be a lens for viewing social structures and conditions), I wanted to become more familiar with his theory. Not being an economist either, I find a lot of material hard-going and dry, but push on, I do.

One aspect that I find compelling is Marx's take on alienation. He argued that the modern worker, set as he or she is in a workplace in which he is merely a wage earner, divorced by the intrinsic processes of his work from the product he is making, becomes alienated from his job. It becomes mere drudgery, eight or more hours a day.

I was lucky enough to have a job as a teacher that engaged me intellectually and socially. Moreover, it had a noble purpose. But so many jobs lack that kind of motivating raison d'etre and are essentially just a pay packet. I am thinking especially of white collar jobs - people stuck in offices and cubicles, selling products or entering data or maybe doing very little at all. And blue collar ones where people clean up after others. And what for, I wonder? To make the money to pay the bills and consume products? To visit the shopping cathedrals and come face to face with the alienated, bored workers on the other side of the counter?

there are still leaves
at the foot of the old urinal
from autumn last

I have been revisiting some of my old postmodern haunts lately. This was motivated by one Dr Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist who, amongst other things, has been highly critical of the manner in which (he supposes) postmodern ideas have permeated tertiary institutions. This infiltration has lead to a wholesale sacking of the Western tradition and it's replacement with systems of discourse which radical questions all truths, traditions, narratives and authorities.

In some sense this is correct. The verities thrown up by The Enlightenment and which worked their way through into modernity, assumptions upon which so many disciplines were built, have been under an assault in the last 30 years. The Bachelor of Arts that I did in the late 1970's was a rigorous and classical one (though no Greek or Latin), in which novels, plays, poems and the like could be studied in their own right, experts could be trusted and one could proceed as if there were truths or knowledge that could be counted on. When I look back on the Bachelor of Communications that my ex did in the late 1990's, and which I confess I had a hand in completing for her, one can see an entirely different philosophy at work. A whole new layer of jargon had been added to explain a radical scepticism towards knowledge and knowing. Courses reflected this new relativism and scepticism. I really enjoyed myself but I thanked my lucky stars that I had that earlier BA (and an MA) under my belt. Without them, I would have been lost at sea as far as rational, critical thinking was concerned.

Which brings me to Jean Baudrillard. I was re-reading a summary of some of his most important ideas. On a simplified level Baudrillard argued that representation (by which he meant all manner of media, advertising, TV, radio, internet, newspapers, magazines, cameras, packaging and so forth) had so saturated reality that experience can only occur at one remove from it. We experience the world through a filter of preconceptions and expectations fabricated in advance by a world swamped with images. He wrote this before the advent of the smart phone, social media and augmented reality, all of which only feed into his thesis. While walking through the city yesterday, I was thinking about Baudrillard and how, despite the hyperbole in some of his writing, he was probably correct on some level. No matter where I looked, people were absorbed by brands, advertising or were staring into their phones. Their activities were likely already socialised by previous experience, perhaps many times over. What is original or authentic in such a world?

So Dr Peterson, I urge you not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are elements of the postmodern project that are interesting, challenging and valid. PoMo is a many-headed beast and not every head needs a-chopping.

through glass panes-
high in the gritty May sky,
a dog-nosed cloud

I spend quite a lot of time wandering the streets of the CBD in Sydney. I have my preferred patterns, places that I like to sit, buy coffee, reflect upon the metropolis. In as much as cities are lively, with decades and sometimes centuries of livings etched upon a collective memory, they are tiring. Strolling along a busy thoroughfare often involves a kind of urban gymnastics, with all manner of obstacles presented. People are sometimes engrossed in telephony (you know what I mean!) or sprawled four-abreast across the pavement, like the swells who walk up the avenue in the old song. There are couriers doing deliveries, baby strollers the size of small SUV's, homeless folks begging in all manner of postures and those annoying spruikers with ipads who are trying to sign you up to this or that charity. I am always happy to part with loose change but not sign up to a monthly plan!

Wynyard Station has been undergoing a facelift in recent months, a long-overdue improvement for such a busy entry and exit point to the CBD. Gone are the old wooden grooved elevators and rabbit-warren passages. Elements of the former have been incorporated into a smart hanging art installation, as if the old runners leapt from their tracks and clung to the ceiling in desperation. There is a clever audio-visual wall with thoughtful and quirky presentations, not unlike those seen in an art gallery. On occasions I have descended and reascended the adjacent elevators just to watch the projections again. You know that I have a certain fixation with finding meaning and this is no different, except for the location. Art in busy public spaces is intriguing and here is a spot where fast-moving commuters have no choice but to pass by art. How many think about it?

There is an interesting billboard-photograph that sits above the new elevators, paying homage, to the old set that now grace the ceiling. It forms the basis of a haiku from two posts ago. There is something about old photographs, of people and place and time, that is arresting, that demands further thought.

finding a lookout,
a thousand cares evaporate
in endless green and blue

escalators and old billboards....

descending the stair,
a woman stares back blankly,
seventy years ago

yellow moon
yellow moon half-slung, west,
cerulean sky

I have been reading the poems of Li Qingzhao, a female poet who wrote in the 12th Century in the late Song dynasty. Li was adept at the Ci-Poem, which was originally a kind of melody tuned to folk music, but which later developed into a new form of written verse. Lines were of different lengths and the poems have a fixed number of (Chinese) characters conforming to strict meter and rhyme schemes.

She wrote many of these poems though only about 70 survive and she is renowned in China for her mastery of the form. Li's life was informed by a few shattering events which coloured her perspective. In 1127 the Northern Song fell to a Jin invasion and her family fled south. Two years later, her beloved husband died of typhoid fever. It is fair to say that she never really got over these losses, as the superb poem that follows only too amply shows.

Spring Ends.

The wind has subsided,
Faded all the flowers:
In the muddy earth
A lingering fragrance of petals.
Dusk falls. I'm in no mood to comb my hair.
Things remain, but all is lost
Now he's no more.
Tears choke my words.

I hear "Twin Brooks'" is still sweet
With the breath of spring.
How I'd, too, love to go for a row,
On a light skiff.
I only fear at "Twin Brooks" my grasshopper of a boat
Wouldn't be able to bear
Such a load of grief.

(Twin Brooks was a well-known beauty spot and resort at that time.)

Freedom is both a blessing and a curse. In the West, we enjoy freedoms that our ancestors could neither have imagined nor conceived of. Not knowing that you can have something, nor that it's realisation is even possible, is not painful. What you never had cannot be a loss. How can you miss what never was?

At the far edge of freedom, a place where we now seem to reside, is a location of seemingly endless (consumer) choice, of ever-expanding rights, a withering of custom and tradition, a challenge to any and all censorship and the normalisation of the private become public. There is much to be commended in a lot of this change, for who would want a return to the conditions of 50 years ago, where half the population was repressed, where a novel like Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned, where authority rarely was challenged. Native Australians could not vote in an election until 1967.

Like all revolutions, this freedom project has probably gone well beyond what was wise. Democracies are not always adept at handling change and once freedoms are conceded, it is hard to reel them back in. Amongst the major errors of our time are the proliferation of pornography in the public space (principally the internet but elsewhere too), the untrammelled freedom of "the market" in people's lives (choice, choice and more choice) and a pronounced decline in public standards of dress, behaviour and speech. I know it's not a trendy thing to say, but punctuating every sentence with expletives is not a freedom of speech issue. In this rush to unshackle the perceived injustices or impertinences of the past, personal responsibility has taken a shellacking. It only takes a small minority to transgress for social relations to begin unwinding.

Before I am accused of fuddy-duddyism or the like, it is not my approaching dotage that persuades me of this view, for I have always felt thus, but a need to be in the debate, if only as a footnote. Freedom of speech this is, of the kind that tries to persuade, and is open to persuasion. It is not hectoring nor obscene nor entirely sure of itself. But it is speech that is worth having and encouraging, no matter what the point of view.

One of the champions....

My workaholic wife has Tuesday's off so we planned to have lunch at one of our favourite little cafe's, Hana, in Leura. This little Mountain's gem served Japanese izakaya-style food, good, down-to-earth meals that did not cost a lot. Ann loved the tempura udon, a bowl of fresh seafood and vegetables deep fried in that light Japanese batter, neatly arranged on top of a bed of rice. I rarely eat large amounts at a sitting so a plate of gyoza and a bowl of miso soup were more than adequate, and delicious to boot.

Where am I going with this? Upon checking the opening hours this morning I found, to my genuine surprise and sadness, that Hana was permanently closed. The chef has retired after decades in the game. We wish him well and want to say a heartfelt thank you for the great food and simple ambience.

Arigatou gozaimashita.

Nothing lasts forever.

Those who may occasionally dip into this blog (zero!-ed.) will know that I have been quite involved in helping my wife with her partner visa application. It is a long process and the onus is on the applicant to provide sufficient reason in writing, together with copious documentation. The purpose is to show that the relationship is genuine and ongoing. There are immigration agents who, for a sizeable fee, will guide you through the process. We did not use an agent. For the purposes of our visa application, I was the agent. It is genuinely exhausting.

But the good news is that Ann has been granted an 820 visa, a subclass that confers provisional residential status pending the final outcome in 12 months or so. Ann wants to bring her daughter Athitaya(JJ) from Thailand, something which will delay her own permanent settlement by some months. Of course, I have been helping my wife again in completing the initial visa application on behalf of her daughter.The rest is up to the folks in Bangkok.

I guess the point that I want to make is that, despite the unpleasant rhetoric coming out of Canberra, a fair process is being followed by public servants. Sure, its hard to do and there are multiple hoops to jump, but it seems, even to my sceptical way of thinking, reasonable and equitable. Alas, if only the same fair go could be applied to refugees, we could all hold our heads a little higher. The problem is purely political and therein lies the solution.

sunset calls again-
clouds like primped pillows
in a golden mansion

English is a rich language full of nuance. It is also vast and a little eccentric. My dear wife often complains to me about the number of synonyms, which she finds frustrating. Of course, I find this trove of potential words wonderful. The language brims with choice.

By way of example, take the windscreen on a car. The other day on the way home, Ann told me that the mirror was dirty. I was clear that she meant the windscreen. "You mean there's a different word for this," she said, indicating the windscreen, "and this?" she continued, pointing to the rear-view mirror.

I told her that one was a windscreen, a window in the front of the car, and the other was a mirror. One was reflective, the other designed to be seen through. In Thailand, she reported back, there is only one word for mirror and window and windscreen. Difference is indicated by context. Well good to get that learnt, I thought. But where is the room for a Shakespeare in that system? I kept the last sentence to myself, fearing violent retribution.

English may offer more latitude for expression than Thai but it still throws up the most annoying usage. Consider the sentence, "It is what it is." I don't know who first coined this gem (perhaps the same wordsmith who first wrote, "Life's a bitch and then you die.") but it deserves an early burial. Ostensibly a poor cousin of "That's life" or "Such is life", it suffers from having none of the latter's mildly melancholic overtones. Ned Kelly might be forgiven for being so brief, as he did have a noose around his neck at the time.

"It is what it is" is a lazy copout for people who don't want to think about a more complex response. It forbids further analysis and shuts down inquiry. English is such a rich language and a mind is a powerful and marvelous tool. Please engage the former with the latter.

Ann and I have been attending to numerous matters Buddhist over the past few days. I am sometimes not sure exactly what her plans entail nor why, but I am happy to go along and make a little merit. For a Westerner, the arcane ways of Thai Buddhism provide a fairly endless source of fascination and not a little amusement at times. I don't mean any disrespect for my mirth comes mostly at my own expense, my clumsiness and ignorance of practices being sufficient cause.

Thai Buddhism has a towering theology and cosmology that I will likely never really comprehend on anything more than a superficial level. Still, I enjoy the liturgy and chanting, the ceremonies and coming together of community. I especially like the communal meal afterwards, towards which all the congregants contribute. The West may be falling into a more parlous state because we have allowed ritual to fall into abeyance, where once it occupied an important part of daily life.

On Saturday we went to our favourite Thai town shop, Two doors, which appears, sadly, to be closing. Two Doors was hosting a visiting monk from Thailand, a man who has come to raise funds for the orphaned children of parents who have died of HIV. He was a power of a presence, exuding grace and calm in spite of the difficult work he must do. Ann had her picture taken with him as part of the offertory. The other shot is the shrine area of Wat Buddharangsee, shortly before the service.

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)