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Brisbane Winter
by
Gavin
Gee-Clough
May 2007
The sky is cloudless and radiantly blue.
There is no breeze at all and the sunlight is clear and
palpable; a gentle, loving caress, innocently sensual, that
energises and comforts and infuses a simple joy.
To walk on such a day is an end in
itself. Lazily I make my way to the ferry at Orleigh Park,
the noise of the cars a minor distraction to the shining
world around me. Soon I am sitting on the lawn of the Great
Court talking with my old friend Gerry, a 39 year old
philosophy PhD whose startling fashion sense creates more
life in this place than the rest put together. He sometimes
wears a mirror as a necklace so that others can see
themselves in him.
There are ten or fifteen others here too,
but only Gerry is known to me; he has organised this
friendly get-together for the Philosophy Club. As the cask
white begins to flow so does the conversation, and the
tentativity I was feeling quickly vanishes, replaced by an
eager appreciation, a thirst for the new people I am
beginning to discover. And it is a thirst for myself too
because I am feeling more alive, drinking from the
wellspring, speaking from the heartmind, revealing myself,
unburdening myself, offering myself and receiving freely in
return. This is university now, for it is now that we
are entering original territory. This is the real
stuff, the living stuff: kindred spirits engaged in
the dialectical dance; the mutual catalysis of the
libidinous energies; the wild jazzy joy of the escalating
pursuit, the pursuit of escalation.
Security intervenes. Drinking alcohol is
prohibited on the lawn. We acknowledge then ignore the lone
ranger and he seems to forget about it. As if this were a
tacit carte blanche Gerry and I start charging at an
advertising billboard promoting ‘UQ Careers Day’. The
plastic sign trampolines us back and it’s addictive so we
continue until the sign loses its tension, but it doesn’t
break or fall down. We run out of wine and what’s left of us
go the bar, Gerry and I ending up in a conversation that is
hamstrung by too much alcohol and I give up trying to
explain how mysticism and rationality can live very happily
together within a broader metaphysical framework. Gerry is
an ardent ‘to the death’ rationalist, and I love him for
this loyalty. He lives his philosophy, which is why
he is more free and more alive than most, relatively
unaffected by the stultifying bureaucracy and the mediocrity
it encourages.
I say ‘relatively’ because Gerry is
caught as well; he is free and he is caught and hell if this
is a contradiction then remember that all higher truths are
paradoxical. He is a seeker but he seeks now with the
translucent blinkers of technique and jargon and no little
hubris, and one day these blinkers may scab over completely,
but I don’t think so. Gerry is caught in the no-man’s land
between the old and new worlds and the subtle offerings of
his own unique understanding are the only guides he has out
of there, as is the case for all of us who decide to make
the journey. Gerry knows the transformative power of ideas -
he is a living example of them - and he and I are fused in
this perspective. We came together because we found and spun
on the Situationists, whose ideas provoked an
existential rebellion in France in 1968. That is
philosophy. Stuff that rips your guts out as you recognise
your own needless complicity in the horror of the banal,
when the infinite potential of life lies there right in
front of you waiting, wanting to be exposed,
actualised, lived. If it doesn’t rip your guts out then why
bother? I don’t want a hobby, I want passion. I want life
swollen with urgency, a force of nature, magma bursting
forth, undeniable, elemental, free of its geological prison.
I want free of my geometrical prison, this Euclidean world
of Cartesian alienation and I am free of it, free and
bound, just like Gerry but in my own different way.
It is these moments, these irruptions
of life, that I want to cultivate now. My own freedom
and that of everyone are the same thing, this is why I am
bound. No man is an island; a peninsula, perhaps. But to
retreat to the private reality of the mad, the recluse, the
yogi....no. I want to rip through the veneer of public
reality, and keep ripping ‘til the whole thing is tattered
and good only as a sentimental keepsake, a museum piece.
***
The day of the party and I know that it
will be my last here in this wonderful place. Another share
house lived, loved and done; my mind looking forward now to
the filming of the Pirsig documentary in the US. Confusing
to feel such affection for a place simultaneous with an
impulse to leave, but the moment is all and tonight the
moment will last for a long, long time and that is enough.
I partake of the fungal sacrament and I
play DJ and I dance and my wonderful sister is there dancing
with me. I am fluid and supple and bursting with joyous
energy, love and laughter. There is no ‘me’ now, or rather
there is the real ‘me’ - the simple, still ‘me’ behind the
‘me’ that is a distracting tangle of ideas and memories.
Jesus! - To dance! To just let go and let rip, how can
Heaven be better than this? Who needs Heaven when you have
dance and music and friends that burst your heart and blow
your mind and rupture your guts. The night is still young as
I drift around from pocket to pocket, always drawn back by
the music and I am drinking more water than anything and I
know that things have just started and I am filled with the
wild joy again, a joy that explodes beyond my control as I
see that someone has brought a dog and I see it like it is
God itself and the love dwarfs me and I grab the dog and
dance with it and roll around with it and kiss it and I
know her, some ineffable understanding fills me and I
feel that she can understand me when I say wordlessly, “I
know, I can see you now”. She is purer than us and I
roll around laughing with love. I am soon dancing again and
then find myself in my bedroom doorway. My bedroom is
filled with cross-legged stoners and I am now unable to
finish sentences because everything is too funny.
Uncontainable exuberance slowly gives way
to languid contentment as I drink more beer and smoke a
little and the night gently saunters toward conclusion. My
housemate Lorna and I slow dance to Nina Simone as the sun
comes up, both giggling softly about what a great night it
was. This house which has seen so many beautiful times like
this, I will miss it. How can you not love a place like
this? A place that is charged with the sweet memories of so
many. A house for one and all.
A house, a home... the question of
our times. Is housing not a human right? What is a
human right anyway? We have the right to do as we are told
and that’s about it as far as I can tell. I want to write a
story about home: about ‘home’ the eluder, ‘home’ the cruel
flirt, ‘home’ the ever unattainable, ‘home’ thy name is
Caprice! A Kafka-esque tragi-comedy with a happy ending:
home as an inner destination and an outer manifestation of
this re-connection. The ‘Myth of the Fall’ resolved,
superseded.... the world itself reborn as a living home for
all. But most of the time I just want a home of my own.
Without my parents I wouldn’t have a home
at all, I would be screwed. Okay, more screwed. Yes your
parents clinging love can fuck you up, but I will choose
that trauma over absence or indifference anyday. My relative
freedom is borne of their relative bondage I know it and
they know it and now it is time for me to face up to that.
Shane, their only employee, is gone and they are 60 and
thankfully it is good honest work here at the nursery. But
my life meanders. The work with the plants is enjoyable and
I love the veg garden but I have nothing to do at night, or
more accurately I am too lazy to make something happen. So I
smoke more and I drink more and I betray what I felt when I
got back from the States and god I need a place of my own.
Doesn’t everyone?
When I got back from the States I wanted
to explode into the world. Three weeks of guerrilla
filmmaking and over 2000 miles of driving and so glad to
return from the land of the Giant, until I land and
am treated like a criminal. The airport staff are
interrogative, smileless and there is no “Welcome back”,
there is nothing, and they are nothing - ciphers, automata.
Someone tells me that they are installing electronic
fingerprint scanners and god knows what other anti-terrorist
bullshit. It is all such a stupid waste. Yes, the Giant
is here too and he is behind all this and I am angry but at
least I know this now. I know that he is in me and is in us
all, this phoney, sadistic guardian, and we keep doing this
shit to ourselves because he is still hidden, pulling the
strings. But I can reveal him now and that is all that is
needed to be free of him.
Yes I know him now. No need for
Illuminati, no cabals, no bad guys required. The
Giant is the natural operating logic of stratified
society that once was a necessary survival mechanism but now
is a tyrannical anachronism. It is the whip and it is the
lure: punisher and seducer. It is the life force that binds
us together become twisted, malignant; it is all our
insecurities, vanities and fears, reflected back and
magnified through mass media and education; it is the
super-organism to which we are all expendable; it is the
hive mentality suppressing intellectual independence and we
are workers and drones and we keep pushing and rushing
because if we are let to rest we might just work his little
ruse out and evolve past this adolescent phase. “Economic
growth above all!” - the moronic mantra of the suited
ones, who are unconscious, who are in thrall of the Giant,
serving self but really only serving it.
And the Giant is war because war
divides and war is terrible, fearful and male, and war is
bloody good for the economy. I exploded against the
hypocrisy of rich white Americans blandly protesting against
war as if they weren’t complicit, as if they didn’t owe
their wealth directly to it. America the beautiful indeed,
such grand and inspiring landscapes, but the Giant is
a cancer eating away at the healthy living tissue of the
world: all-consuming consumption. The threat of violence
ubiquitous as those innumerable flags and enormous cars with
their enormous insane fixed grins, baring their grilled
teeth at the world. In short, the unholy trinity of wealth,
blind nationalism and popularity; and what is popularity but
the worship of mediocrity, of kitsch, the only
artistic sin.
Yes the Giant is everywhere now.
We are all complicit in our own suppression, walking
blindly, willingly into servitude. There is only one way
out: Unchain! Release the self from its self-imposed
bondage. Let it fill the world, unite with it, re-enchant
it. One and the same: the mystery is in the flesh and the
rocks and the trees and everything. It is all alive, it is
all you, it is all me and there is nothing to fear but
ourselves, for the Giant lives only in us. He is part
of us, a natural part, grown monstrous and insatiable, ever
isolating, dividing, judging. He is a coward and he is
scared what will happen if we reconnect with each other,
with it all - what need of him then? But his resistance
betrays his desperation. He is dying even now, it
is inevitable, it is the law of nature - what arises must
pass; and what grows quickly, dies quickly.
But what is death?
Death is regeneration.
Death is evolution.
Released, re-integrated into the realm of
the living... and now a new phenomena, a higher version of
the unifying matrix from which the giant arose, for this is
as all things a cyclical process. A helical process.
A return, and a venture into new
territory. The old wisdom rekindled to fire the forges of
creation once more. The result; is it yet knowable? Is it
yet conceivable? Perhaps we get glimpses already.....can we
call it ‘a new culture’?
Every time I am away I miss the trees,
especially the gum trees. Stark sculptural majesty, hardy
strength, shining trunk, dappled branches. Australia is the
gum tree and it is this as much as anything that makes it
feel home to me. And yet a place held me and turned my head.
I felt something in Spain that doesn’t exist here yet -
culture. It is not the Aboriginal culture that is dead here;
they will always have it because it lives in the land and it
lives in them and it is beyond the reach of white ignorance.
No it is we, the new ones, whose culture has been stolen,
and we don’t even realise. We are lost, adrift on a sea
without meaning, for our myths have faded. We have
forgotten what myth is....so we don’t read the signs
anymore. The Aborigine feels no shame; you are
‘pariahed’
out of ignorance my friend. You have more than anyone who
dispossesses you could ever have. Stand tall because you are
men and women still and keep the myth alive for this is
living knowledge. Look upon the self-obsessed
white as you would a child and envy him not, pity him
instead, and maybe one day he will come to you for help.
Most probably associate ‘culture’ with opera, ballet,
literature or theatre but these are artefacts of
culture...the fossil record. Some such
stuff may still hold some mytho-poetic power but it is only
a tease, a taster of something that once was our daily
bread, wine and song... our very belongingness. Now all we
might feel is the poignancy of this loss, this absence... if
we are alive enough and the art is good enough.
Culture originates in the land: that is where it is, that is
where it springs from, that is what it is energised by.
Culture is connection to place and to memory and the memory
is in the place. Brisbane is shrouded still, it has not been
revealed, unveiled. It is a shameful memory that is all the
more shameful for it being shrouded. Expose it: The
massacres, the injustices, the
stupidities, and through facing them atone and reconnect
with the place. With the river that we need to clean,
with the people that we need to value, with the trees that
we need to love. For then a new culture - a hybrid culture,
with hybrid vigour - will grow from the shallow alluvial
soils of West End and New Farm, and from the once red hills
of Red Hill, and from the once rainforested Paddington, and
from the river that is the heart. The oldest culture
anchoring the newest.
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Please
note that the copyright of this paper remains with the
author who need to be contacted directly for permission to
use this material elsewhere.
gavgc@hotmail.com
Another paper of Gavin’s,
“Student life and other
contradictions”, can also be found on this website
here.
