Yesterday was Tom's first day of high school. Now halfway through his compulsory school life, it is up to him to make the best of his chances. Of course, I will be there to help and support, though ultimately, parents have less sway than might be imagined. I tend to be of the soft power school, encouraging where I can, intervening where there is little other choice, though reluctantly even then. But I can't sit the tests or develop the skills required, only cheer (quietly) on the sidelines. I have quibbles with what is taught (more critical thinking and philosophy, please) and whether the regimes of testing that have been increasingly present in recent times achieve their purpose or just stymie genuine, independent thinking. I wish Tom well and hope that he finds his niche.

Also yesterday, Ann and I took a short walk from the Scenic Railway to Katoomba Falls, a round trip of perhaps 2kms. We stopped often at lookouts and in the midst of cool grotto's, for the temperature soared mid-morning. The dry rainforest was gorgeous, Ann being often in awe of the size of the trees. She maintains that most big trees in Thailand have been chopped down. At Juliet's Balcony, we paused again. Romeo was behind the lens, on this occasion.

Ann and I first (physically) met in Hyde Park, adjacent the Archibald Fountain nearly three years ago. It's a spot popular with tourists, city workers seeking respite and those who want a safe and obvious place to meet. Ann was a little late and I sat somewhat nervously awaiting her, since our only form of communication up until that point had been by email, SMS or telephone. Face to face is the real deal and its full import cannot be underestimated. That day we strolled through The Botanical Gardens and The Domain, later having dinner in The Rocks. The definite article was much in use.

Last weekend, before he headed out to La Perouse, we spent some time again in Hyde Park. We reflected on how much has passed since that consequential day in 2015, what with marriage, visas and plans for the future. There is no way of telling exactly how things might work out in any given human situation, particularly where there is a myriad of variables. Relationships present the critical challenge: get out of yourself and your view of the world and selfish habits and embrace another, knowing that without accepting a significant measure of change, the thing will fall flat.

I think that Ann and I are on the way to doing just that. It is, after all, a lifetime project with no guarantees and only the daily record of exchange and interaction to go by. But I would rather it this way than not at all.

viewing this tree
with its ten thousand stories,
things just fall apart

I should have mentioned, though I'm sure you're glad that I didn't, that whilst on the way to meet my wife in the city (see previous post), I was listening to that most excellent podcast, Philosophize This! The host, in talking about Schopenhauer(the subject of the broadcast) did a little necessary revision on an aspect of Kant's philosophical position of reality, to-wit, that there is a rough map of reality that we all have as a result of the interaction of our senses and mind with our environment, and that there is reality itself, the actual world of phenomena. The latter can never be fully perceived or understood. We are left, alas, with the rough guide.

Which got me thinking about an elderly tree I was standing before in Hyde Park, shortly after. My perception of the tree, limited by my knowledge of it and my human eyesight, was really quite meager. I am inadequate in this respect, though remain in awe, regardless. Still, this map that I have inside my head, seeming so real, is tatty, torn and blurred. Fit to purpose, sure, but fragile upon deeper reflection.

On Sunday last I went into the city to meet Ann after she had finished work, something I like to do regularly. I know that it's hard for her and probably very dull to sit for nearly three and a half hours on a train in transit, so meeting up gives us more time to talk and further, companionship on the way home.

She finished uncharacteristically early (fewer checkouts) and so suggested a bus trip to La Perouse. I don't think that La Perouse ranks at the top of my favourite spots but I am happy to do anything with my wife, so off we went, wending our way past massive roadworks for the light rail, past my alma mater at Kensington, past the maximum security prison at Long Bay, before finally being deposited at the hot and windy headland that is, La Perouse.

I had not been here for many years, not since my father drove the family to visit the nearby memorial garden. At that time, Aboriginal men would demonstrate boomerang throwing in the parkland. Nowadays, it is packed with families heading for the secluded beaches, or tourists idling on the rocks or walking the rickety bridge to Bare Island Fort. We trod the path between these two, clambering over seaside boulders, getting shoes full of sand and observing the aquatic antics of the barely clad.

It was fun. I was a tourist in my own town. My wife is a genius.

The New Year's Sumo tournament began Sunday in Tokyo. Sadly this basho is without Yokozuna Harumafuji, who was forced into retirement by a scandal late last year. We may never know the complete truth behind Harumafuji's assault on a fellow Mongolian wrestler Takanoiwa, sumo being a strangely impenetrable sport when it comes to internal matters. It is clear though that Harumafuji was standing up for the honour of champion Hakuho, and things got a little out of control. As he put it at a press conference in November, "I had heard that he(Takanoiwa) was lacking in manners and civility and thought it was my duty as a senior wrestler to correct and teach him. But I went too far." The rikishi had all been drinking so it is little wonder things got out of hand, but misconduct is seriously frowned upon in sumo. So this very talented, exciting wrestler had to go. I will miss his lightning swiftness and unerring technique.

Harumafuji, left. A man for all seasons.

I have been working my way through Philip Plait's Death From The Skies, a book about the many ways the Universe is able to kill us. There are some that you will be familiar with, such as the threat from asteroids or comets smashing into the Earth. If the dinosaurs were still with us today, they would have something to say on that matter. It doesn't take a particularly large space rock to wipe out most life on the planet.

But the Universe is not out to kill us really, because there is no sentient entity known as the Universe, nor is there any evidence that any planet, galaxy, star, black hole or collection thereof has any awareness of anything. It happens that on FB I read (often enough) memes expressing the contrary. It is assumed that there is some kind of cosmic consciousness, denoted as The Universe, that has a special power to intervene in human affairs. If you believe hard enough, things will be delivered to you, the contrary also being true. It seems like so much harmless nonsense, more like wishful thinking, but there is a dangerous flipside. If you believe that all will be well just by imagining it will be, then you are stripped of the agency to act. It might induce a calmness of spirit for a time, perhaps even acceptance, but magical thinking (which is what this is) is essentially fatalistic. It is believing in something that isn't so and cannot lead to positive outcomes in your life. Worse still, it sets the believer up for disappointment and the development of a victim mindset.

Better to be committed to purposeful action, and acceptance of those things we cannot change, than wait for the cosmos to bring home the bacon.

birds bend darkly
and trees grip tight their roots-
southerly buster

Something odd happens in the time between Christmas and the end of January. A great sleepiness descends upon the nation; the business of the past year and the coming year is forgotten, routines fall into abeyance, there is a general lassitude of speech and spirit, time itself seems drowsy and apt to falter. A huge boredom is apparent.

That is not to say that you can't be busy if you choose to be - sampling the delights of summer festivals, off on a foreign adventure or simply seeking diversion wherever it might be had. For most of us though, it is a time (thank you, Mr. Larkin, once again) unrecommended by event. The other day at Lawson Pool I overheard a group of boys talking about Test Cricket and their conversation continued unabated even as they showered and changed and left the pool. Truthfully, it wasn't very interesting, quite pedestrian in fact. But thinking it over, it occurred to me that really this was something to be celebrated.

The engagement in a conversation was real, not forced and it required a certain level of expertise to participate. To keep a dialogue running, largely without digression, is also an underpraised skill. Finally, the conversation was not about the joys of jihad, the greatness of one religion over another, sexist observations, drugs, or anything beyond the simple pleasure of talking about cricket.

So for this reason, I nominate the love of sport as the greatest faith to emerge on the earth. In Australia at least, it turns bloodshed and extremism into a rich blend of boredom, which is just fine by me.

St Don genuflects before the faithful.

Last night was a so-called super moon, meaning, I think, that the moon was both full and at a closer distance to the earth. It's true that the moon is about 50,000kms nearer than average, but is it still much farther away than it was 4 billion years ago. You see, the moon has been very slowly moving away from us since that time, currently at about 6cms a year. It isn't much in an average human lifetime (perhaps 5 metres) but over eons it adds up. In a billion years or so, there is a real chance that we will lose our longtime companion. Humans will unlikely be around on earth, but an alien observer would note a change to the size of tides and possibly even the tilt and rotation-time of the earth, over time. It seems entirely possible that had it not been for the moon, life on earth may not have started or taken hold.

Last night I took my phone around the corner and snapped a (very poor) shot of the rising moon, which had a haze of cloud around it. The other light is not an alien ship, but a humble streetlight.

The trajectory of technology over the past two centuries has been upward, with a radical steepening of the curve over the last 30 years. Much as I find this period of capitalism rife with contradiction and inequality, it is nevertheless a reliable driver of technological change. When I was a kid the only computer I had heard of was something at IBM that took up a warehouse in space, the only telephones were in booths by the roadside or attached to a wall at home, a TV was smallish and black and white and portable sound systems were not very portable at all.

I remember how excited I was when I got my first portable cassette player, though it was second-hand and had poor sound quality. Next was a cheap plastic Sanyo 3 piece record player, which at least had the virtue of being new, though it lacked separate bass and treble controllers. The sound was tinny but the joy of playing albums in my own room was overwhelming. Thereafter I sought better and better (budget) systems, usually compromise 3 in 1 units but nevertheless adequate. For anyone born more recently than me, the notion of being tied to music at home must sound quaint, but that was the situation if you didn't have a car with a radio. Nobody really cared of course because we didn't know any better. Then Sony came along with the Walkman. You can trace a line of rapid development from that device to the present time.

It is hard to say how liberating this experience is, for though I love listening to podcasts as I walk or to music on the train, I'm not convinced that the extraordinary convenience offered matches the loss of the struggle or the benefits of passive listening. Because there were fewer sound systems in any one house (typically one), people heard each others music choices. One might argue over how the wide the range might be in any given family, but in mine, there was a mother who listened to Latin jazz, Sinatra and Bing Crosby, an older brother who played The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Leon Russell, a younger brother who loved Deep Purple and me, whose early choices were distantly MOR. There was also a lot of well-known orchestral music playing (that might have been my mum again), so we were not too cloistered.

I don't feel the least bit nostalgic about this period because the technology was unreliable and prone to damage. Records scratched up easily and stylus needed replacing every hundred hours or so, prompting a dash to the hi-fi department of Grace Brothers to search for a compatible needle. Let's not even talk about the flakiness of cassette tapes! Sure the artwork of LP covers could be interesting and we have lost the tactile experience of sliding a record from its sleeve, gently smoothing off the dust, then gingerly lowering the arm onto the spinning disc, hoping for perfect contact.

Exhibit A



Exhibit B



Exhibit C (with repair kit)

the witching hour-
sleep cracked by cannonades,
waking cockatoos scream

New Year's celebrations go back a long way, though they did not originally fall on December 31. The vernal equinox in mid-March once served this purpose, but the Romans made the change to January at some stage. It has bounced around a little, the Medieval Church disliking its pagan origins, preferring to mark the calendar with religiously based events. It seems that in the West, the celebration at December 31 is a rather recent development and its most modern iteration (countdowns, drunkenness, fireworks etc) is very recent. I can recall as a young boy there being a fireworks display on the harbour. I also remember the banging of pots and pans as the midnight hour struck.

But truthfully, I don't really get the whole thing. I am not sure if I fully understand the tedium of sitting on a rug for hours, surrounded by strangers, a tilting bottle of champagne growing more tepid by the minute. There is a buildup of sorts, a movement towards a moment in time, not unlike any other moment, much looking at watches and smartphones, a period of more waiting, then the hurried chant to midnight. Fireworks (yes, big and beautiful), then nothing. A drifting way, without meaning.

Then the resolutions, made so that they can be broken the instant the last syllable has passed from the lips. It's not intentional, just a consequence of the habit. There's nothing wrong, of course, with resolving to do better and be better and I encourage it, through goal setting, every day of the year. For those reading this, make this evening's resolutions doable. Make them specific and measurable and realistic. I hope that you achieve them and thereby break the hoodoo of the unfulfilled resolution.

Stay yet, my friends, a moment stay—
Stay till the good old year,
So long companion of our way,
Shakes hands, and leaves us here.
Oh stay, oh stay,
One little hour, and then away.

William Cullen Bryant

There is a lot of unearned inflated self-regard about and it appears to be getting worse. Pandering to this epidemic of me and me and me again is a cafe in England that is now offering a selfieccino (surely a horrible word in any dialect of English). An image of the customer is uploaded to the cafe where a clever machine prints said image onto the froth of a cappuccino.

It is not for me to offer a moral argument on this ghastly development but it is impossible not to look scornfully at the concept. After all, coffee at a cafe is a social activity. It is conducive to a lively conversation about all manner of things, from the mundane to the mystical, but now I fear that in addition to people staring at their hands for inspiration, they will also peer longingly at themselves, as rendered on the surface of their beverage. Sure, I understand that it can all be had in good fun and that the phenomena may pass like so many other fads. On the other hand, it might just be the beginning.

Caravaggio would have additional subject matter if he was painting today.

Today I cooked my first Thai meal, Larb Na. The dish is one of Ann's favourites and the recipe came out of Cooking With Poo, a book I bought recently. Poo has a cooking school in the slum district of Bangkok.

For more than 5 years the school has been running in Klong Toey for tourists as well as local residents. Poo represents a remarkable model of success and positivity in an often difficult and complex landscape of poverty and hardship and has trained up a team of fellow residents.

So this was a book well worth buying as it is now well worth using. Ann was so proud of me and kept saying "David, you can cook Thai food!" as if I had opened a magic cave filled with gold and silver. Truth is, if you get organized, it's not that hard.

People often make jokes about the title, but this is a great book and well recommended.

Good poetry captures the essence of human experience. Unlike prose, it distills it through an economy of language and a particular attention to word choice and structure, allowing the moment, or the experience, to resonate within the reader. Because our life experiences are often different, two separate readers might have divergent views on the impact of the same poem. Others will bring with them a knowledge of decoding the poem, skills that are taught at school and soon forgotten. I suspect that this is one reason why poets are no longer esteemed as once they were and that the general public is rarely bothered to read verse of any sort.

I confess that poets themselves must take some of the blame, for the shrinking of their profession and its confinement to academic circles has meant that a particularly abstruse form of poem has become common. I remember reading a few poems by an acclaimed young Australian poet and being bamboozled. The obscurity of the language made the poems dry and largely inaccessible to anyone except, presumably, a closed circle of fellow poets. Sure, poems should be challenging sometimes but they need to be readable. They need to communicate.

I have mentioned the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu before. An official in the Chinese bureaucracy at a time of considerable upheaval in the land, Tu Fu became a chronicler of the times. He reacted with genuine emotion to the threats of war and rebellion that he encountered. The following one, translated by Ken Rexroth, strikes a far more Daoist note. The hermitage may be real, or perhaps serves as a metaphor for the poet's desire to escape the folly of the world.

WRITTEN ON THE WALL AT CHANG’S HERMITAGE

It is spring in the Mountains.
I come along seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echoes
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you
An empty boat, floating, adrift.

When I first became familiar with existential thinking as an undergraduate, it was a revelation to me. Thinking about what life meant and how we made meaning in our lives was already something I thought a lot about. Studying the Romantic poets in senior high school opened me up to a broader conversation about existence and whether there was something beyond the material. I confess that part of me has been fascinated with religious thought since an early age, while another part of me scoffed at all this as I learned about science and the rational world. It is a dichotomy that has never been bridged.

The idea that we are born with no a priori purpose is strangely liberating. When I first dug into the pages of Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd, read the plays of Ionesco, Beckett and Albi, and attended the wonderful lectures of Dr. Jean Wilhelm in World Drama 1, some bright thing hove into view. It has stayed with me since, informing at least some of the work I did as a drama teacher and remaining a touchstone to this day. In terms of the arts, absurdism (which is one possible conclusion of existentialism) has the potential to unsettle a baked-in worldview and challenge long-held beliefs. There is nothing wrong with testing these waters, for stoking doubt surely gives us conditions for further growth if we are open to it.

Truth is, I keep running into stuff that harks back to my earlier epiphany. I haven't lost that first sense of wonder that there were real people thinking great things beyond my middle-class existence, things that went way beyond mundane concerns and the wretched mediocrity of television. What that says about me I don't know except that I feel compelled by a curiosity that I cannot explain.

Tom is almost finished 6th Grade and tomorrow will complete primary school. There have been a number of social events recently and I have often found myself sitting in the main quad waiting for something to start or end. Last night was his farewell and this afternoon is his graduation.

I don't always find someone to talk to on these occasions but yesterday, as I stared at a news site on my phone, a man I didn't know sat down next to me. Our brief encounter went thusly.

Him: You must have something interesting there.
Me: Yes, I'm looking at the returns from Alabama.

(Silence)

Me: Oh, er, the special Senate election results.

(Silence)

Him: That's in the US?
Me: Yes.

(Silence)

This probably reflects poorly on me, though I'm wondering just what sort of geek this gentleman thought he had sat down next to. I hasten to add that I rarely look at my phone in public but was drawn by the rolling coverage and the potential closeness of the contest. Politics is a funny thing, ne?

Tom's formal went really well and was unencumbered by obscure American electoral statistics.

local cemetery

summer-heated stone,
warily an old couple tread,
stoop to read a name

Back in August, I posted about being able to buy Dekavita C in one of the Daiso stores in George Street, Sydney. It was one of those things that conjured vivid memories of living in Japan, especially those steaming summer days when I chose to walk into the centre of Sanda with 100 yen jangling in my pocket. Not long after, Daiso ran out of the magical drink and it has not been seen since. By way of compensation perhaps, bottles of Oranamin C appeared in the refrigerator of the same Daiso store, producing a similar effect in me. I did not drink as much of this concoction at the time, but sometimes it was the only alternative to Dekavita in the vending machine, should that be unavailable.They have a similar taste.

Sure enough, upon visiting the same Daiso a week ago, the Oranamin C was gone, it's price tag removed! It seems that Daiso is subject to the whims of supply, whims that may have nothing to do with market forces, nor my entreaties to puzzled staff. Oh well!

I have been looking at some of the grimmer offerings that thoughtful FB friends have posted. I don't mean the bland pretending-to-be-meaningful memes that are the bread and butter of so many posts, but those with a strong social or political message. Sometimes they can be quite jolting, but it is always better to be shaken up than anesthetized. Uncomfortable to view they may be but the chance to address social ills or injustices is a noble pursuit, even where it is confined merely to words. Actions can follow if enough people feel the same way.

Many of these kinds of posts address the alleged skewed interface between technology and people. Some focus on the way we are seduced by the lure of gadgetry. Everyone reading this post will have noticed that the public space has been invaded by portable technology, and principally the smart phone. I have such a phone and it serves a utilitarian purpose - to communicate, to inform, to entertain. But I recognise that having a smart phone is in itself a threat to my autonomy unless I am aware of its distracting influence, its unshakeable omnipresence.

Theodor Adorno addressed some of these issues when he wrote about the "culture industry" seventy years ago. He noted that capitalism had co-opted culture (as with much else), creating a commodity out of it. Culture was thereafter for profit alone, with art being subsumed within the various modes of production. Perhaps worse was how this new product became the go-to escape for bored and alienated workers, who could seek some relief from stultification through the radio, the cinema, records, and later TV. Today the full panoply of mediated diversion is available and the list grows, with more promised. I don't agree with all of Adorno's positions, but think there is much to be gained from applying such an analysis.

We should never, however, underestimate the human capacity to think through the implications of phenomena. It is arrogant to think otherwise.