Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

Leon managed to do it. About five years earlier, I had mercilessly attacked the old water-tank lying in a corner of our property. Once a proud receptacle, it now languished, leaking, slightly rusted, in a shallow drainage culvert adjoining our neighbour. It had to go. But we needed to reduce its size, bend it, fold it, to fit in the trailer. After 45 minutes of wielding a much too large sledgehammer, I stopped, beaten, and the tank, now sporting two small indentations on its lateral surface, remained. It looked rustic, my wife and I rationalised.

But last Saturday, Leon did it. We agreed it had to go, because a large cypress hedge adjoining our property line had been removed and burned, opening up our land with Leon’s, and the tank stuck out like, well, you know what. Leon is everyone’s perfect neighbour. Retired, ex-Navy, strong as an ox, a perfectionist, and he has every agricultural and workshop tool ever made, as befitting someone who could survive a disaster in rural Australia. 

Thirty minutes, three angle grinder discs, a crowbar, and a smattering of old Navy terminology later, the tank lay in four large flat pieces. “If you take it to the tip, you won’t be charged, because it’s all metal, it’s recyclable” Leon said. Yes, the tip. Is that word used in other parts of the English-speaking world? The rubbish dump. Well, that’s what it was called when 50 years earlier my father and I regularly took stuff to the Musca Street tip, in the (then) outer Melbourne suburb of North Balwyn. Musca Street now sports million dollar homes, but in 1963 you drove into Musca Street with a trailer full of building, house and vegetable waste, no one cared about the contents, you turned into the tip drive and 2 minutes later there was this 100 yard low barrier overlooking a small valley filled with steaming refuse, swooping seagulls, busy crows, and yes, it stank. It was great. You backed your trailer to the bar and chucked everything in. The flies crawled into your ears and nostrils and down your shirt. Does anyone living in Musca Street now know that Musca domestica is the common house fly? There were one or two bulldozers at various angles, and three or four men at various angles, in the tip, doing stuff to the waste. Later this area between Musca Street and the Yarra River would deliver the Eastern Freeway which straddles the river, and the Musca Street Reserve, where children now play, but don’t get dirty.

But it’s all different now. Tips ain’t tips. They are recycling depots, and the last time I went to the one in Camberwell, in the suburbs, my rubbish was carefully inspected by a pleasant fellow in a safety vest and hard hat, and after taking $30 from me, he directed me to the appropriate lane, where I unloaded my trailer (not garden refuse, not builders’ rubble, not recyclable bits, is there anything left?) on to a conveyor belt. 

So last Sunday I took the collapsed tank to the Hastings tip, about 20 minutes drive away, on the marshy coast of Western Port Bay. Determined to enjoy at least the drive, and unencumbered by a wife who cannot understand that certain music must be played very loud, I plugged the iPod into the radio and started with The Amboy Dukes “Journey To The Center Of The Mind”. Does anyone else in the world listen to The Amboy Dukes, circa 1968, the genre is pre-punk-garage-psychedelic, around for a decade or so from 1965, from Richard Hell, the Velvets, through Sam Gopal, Shadows of Night, the Stooges, culminating in the first foray into punk, the best example of which is Australia’s own Saints with “Erotic Neurotic”, those Ed Kuepper riffs were pure class. Leon was right, no charge, and the dead tank was left in the metal section of the tip, no conveyer belt yet where we live.

On the way home, I remembered that Radiotherapy on 102.7FM was on, where a bunch of young doctors and guests natter about twin studies, health policy, psychosis and so on, serious but fun and often funny. I caught their interview with Melbourne GP Dr Joe Sherman, an amateur actor who had a part in an adaptation of The Tempest currently playing at Theatre Works in St Kilda, and as I drove back home through Hastings, with it’s authentic grungy Aussie streets, boat harbour, pelicans grouped on the beach awaiting scraps, Joe reminded us of Prospero’s speech near the end: “We’re all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep” Yes, I know what Bill Shakespeare was saying, but you know, when  Joe Sherman said “Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve”, all I could think of was the old Musca Street tip.

I will give you three choices; to die forever, to live for a time and return, or to live forever

There are two sorts of people in the world. Those who love Ken Rockwell. Those who hate him. I am in the former group. The reason is simple. I lost my Nikkormat FTN, with its f2.5 105mm lens (gulp), in 1983. My wife, three small children, and I were hiking in a quiet, easy section of the Cathedral Ranges, about 100 kms NE of Melbourne. We stopped for a drink and snack. Two hours later, I reached into my bag to retrieve the camera and yes it was gone. Couldn't go back to retrieve it, with the weather changing and a 4 hour round trip and 3 small kids and if you've been to this part of Australia you know things can go bad if you don't take care. I think it's behind the third rock on the left as you round the bend where we stopped, I have never gone back to look. I reckon the camera would still work.
So, after years of taking shots, scanning negatives for the best one to enlarge, taking the B&W film into our bathroom/darkroom and emerging with a masterpiece, I gave it away.
The early years of digital photography whizzed by in a blur. I still maintain my life membership of the Australian Photographic Society, so for years I read the monthly mag with a mixture of amusement and disdain as digital struggled to compete with the Almighty Film, until, until, two years ago I happened on Ken Rockwell and read his entire blog. Hard to explain, you've got to look at it. He covers photography in an idiosyncratic way, emphasis on Nikon, with titles like "Your Camera Doesn't Matter" and he yabbers on that ISO and pixels don't matter but it's your head and your imagination and no, zoom lenses don't really matter, use your feet, and everything he said made sense. His camera and lens reviews are written in spoken English, if you know what I mean. So I bought the cheapest digital SLR, a Nikon D40. Hey, it was terrific. Now I have moved up to the D7000 and I set it up just like Ken and I do everything he says. There is no BS on his site. No long words. It's all good. Perfect? Nearly. I would like a second opinion on his colour vision as he might, just might, over-saturate the settings, but I love him.
And he comes from La Jolla, California. I visited the Scripps Clinic, Division of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology, when I was a young Fellow in the specialty, and walked the streets of La Jolla in amazement, having flown in a light plane from LA to San Diego along the coast. La Jolla alone would be a photographer's dream.
The original native Americans who lived there, and still do, are the Kumeyaay. Some of their traditional narratives are translated, here is one courtesy of Constance Goddard Du Bois, about the creator who realises that things might not go so well for humans, they could die, so he tells them: "I want to know what you wish to do, and I will give you three choices; to die forever, to live for a time and return, or to live forever." Some of the people said, "We want to die now forever." Others said, "We want to live for a time and return." Others said, "We want to live forever." So they talked and they talked, and they did not know what to do.Then the fly came and said, "Oh, you men, what are you talking so much about? Tell him you want to die forever." So they talked and they talked very much, and they made this choice, to die and to be done with life, and to die forever. This is the reason the fly rubs his hands together. He is begging forgiveness of the people for these words."
I reckon Ken could grab a great macro shot of that fly, just the right exposure to display a faint movement of the fly's hands, with the fly's eye in superb focus, background blurred with terrific bokeh effect...

The Night Of Time Far Surpasseth The Day

Sometimes, when you've got a few spare minutes, and you want to relax, well, you just want to do nothing. I don't mean have a nap. I mean remain conscious but veg out, not taxing mind or body, doing stuff which will not enrich you or the earth, something meaningless,  even useless. You understand, don't you? It happened to me at 2.25 pm yesterday, I suddenly had 35 minutes spare. Pay bills? No. Book the window cleaners? No. Tweet? No, no, no. I wanted to bludge.
So I took my birthday 16/02 and changed it to letters with each number corresponding to a letter of the alphabet in sequence and 0 becoming, er, O. I made a new word AFOB. I googled AFOB. True dinks, I kid you not. Amazingly, the first item that came up was the Archaeological Fieldwork Opportunities Bulletin from the Archaeological Institute of America. Wow. My favourite non-biological science discipline. Archaeology.
My eyes glazed as I immediately thought of Time Team, the most rivetting hour that you can spend in front of TV, and a favourite of mine. I mean the UK version, where this group of unkempt, grungy archaeologists wade through the British mud for three days to prove that Bronze Age man had a rubbish tip under this carpark. I'm sure their clothes were retrieved from an earlier dig. Tony Robinson, the host, runs around like a hobbit on heat exhorting the experts to explain what this different-coloured mud actually means. My favourite team member is Phil Harding, whose dialect is almost as abstruse as his persona. He greets a major find, such as a 3 mm piece of flint, with guffaws that would wake some of the skeletons he digs up.
There is a US version of Time Team. I've seen it. Not as good. It's sanitised, clean clothes, modern equipment, gleaming vehicles. No, the UK version is for me.
I checked the Archaeological Institute of America site thoroughly. Under the History tag, we learn that the first President was Charles Eliot Norton, elected in 1879. At the time he was Professor of History of Art at Harvard, and a true Renaissance Man - author, journalist, and, can you believe, in the early 20th Century he spoke out in favour of euthanasia. And, AND, he translated Dante's Divine Comedy. I only had time in my 35 minutes to read Volume 3 (Paradise), his translation is truly beautiful, you can catch it at Project Gutenberg.
When he was elected President of the Institute, Norton said in his speech: 'The night of time far surpasseth the day, and it is the task of archaeology to light up some of this long night with its torch, which burns ever with a clearer flame with each advancing step into the darkness'. He would be proud of Tony and Phil and the Team.
At home that evening, I recounted this adventure to my wife. I got the distinct impression she was less than impressed, it was something about her frown and the single raised eyebrow. But nevertheless I encourage you all, when you've got that spare few minutes, change your birthday into a word and google it, it's great fun, but don't tell them at home...

It Doesn't Get Any More Exciting Than That

I'm asking you. What is the most exciting thing you've done? Space Walk? Underwater rescue? Mt. Everest? I didn't think so. Maybe you are a little like me. I can recall a long helicopter ride to visit oil rigs. A moderately dangerous high altitude drive. Er, there was a division 3 win in Tattslotto, about 100 bucks. And from there on I'm struggling.
But when Richard Morecroft, host of SBS TV show Letters & Numbers, told the champion "You opened the show with a 9-letter word and it doesn't get any more exciting than that",  I agreed and nodded vigorously. This was right up there with helicopter rides and dangerous roads.
Let me tell you about Letters & Numbers. I love it. It is a show that only people with a double-dominant NN nerd gene watch. When genome analysis does become affordable, like about $25.00, then I will pay for the test and I KNOW that the NN gene will be there. There are two contestants. The loser gets a dictionary. The winner, er, gets a dictionary. (Are you getting the picture?). They are given alternating tasks. One is to make as large a word as possible from nine jumbled letters. (Are you following me?) This segment is adjudicated by David Astle, a cryptic crossword guru who resembles an old hippy. He provides his imprimatur on the proffered words. The other task is to calculate a given total by using six random numbers, using each number once but in any desired arithmetical way. Don't leave the room yet, it gets better. The numbers are judged by Lily Serna, a leggy 20-something-year-old (no mail please) mathematician, who shows us how to get the exact number pretty well every time. She is brilliant.
In summary, I would describe the show as Sudoku meets Wheel of Fortune. It is compulsive viewing, on five nights a week at 6 pm. The next show is tomorrow. I'm already getting excited...

A Dormitory Without An Alarm Clock

His final message: "As to me, I leave tomorrow for an unknown destination". Ambrose Bierce, author, Civil War Hero and journalist, then went to Mexico and disappeared. He was never seen again. It was 1913, and the sprightly 71-year-old chronic asthmatic with an acerbic tongue and pen vanished, as they say, into thin air.
No one has solved this mystery. There are only two possibilities. One, involuntary Oblivion, like his hero Peyton Farquhar in Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'. Or two, voluntary Nirvana on earth, secluding himself in warm climes with a tequila or two, you know the routine, until eternal Nirvana beckons.
Did a man like Bierce, whose motto apparently was "Nothing matters", think about what happens after you, you know, die? I went to his own words for help. The Devil's Dictionary. Surely there are clues there. I looked at his definition of Oblivion: "The state or condition in which the wicked cease from struggling and the dreary are at rest. Fame's eternal dumping ground. Cold storage for high hopes. A place where ambitious authors meet their works without pride and their betters without envy. A dormitory without an alarm clock". Whoa. For Bierce the concept of Oblivion was harsh. Unpleasant and unattractive. Definitely an involuntary act. I certainly don't find his Oblivion a noble end for me.
Well, what about his thoughts on Nirvana:. "In the Buddhist religion, a state of pleasurable annihilation awarded to the wise, particularly to those wise enough to understand it". Now we're talking. Uber-meditation on earth morphing into supreme Nirvana for eternity. Yep. Definitely. That's him. And that's for me too.  Hmm. Let's look at his definition again; "...particularly to those wise enough to understand it". There's nothing much to understand, is there? It's, you know, er, Nirvana...the Void...neither being nor non-being...
Yeh, well, maybe OK for him, but for me, now that I think about it, 'a dormitory without an alarm clock' is starting to look good.

They Are Not Ripe Yet

I used to think 'Sour Grapes' was just a metaphor. Now I'm not so sure. I blame it on an article in a European journal, obscurely titled "XYZ - Nondum Matura Es" The XYZ is irrelevant, you can substitute 'Atomic powered trains" or "ESP as a communication tool", that part makes no difference, it's the inscrutable Latin of "Nondum Matura Es" that I didn't understand. So, well, I looked it up, you know, with Google, Wiki et al, and it turns out it's from one of Aesop's fables, as translated by Phaedrus, a Romanized Macedonian who lived in the time of Jesus of Nazareth. You might know it as the Fox and the Grapes, and this is the translation, thanks to Gutenberg:
'Urged by hunger, a Fox, leaping with all her might, tried to reach a cluster of grapes upon a lofty vine. When she found she could not reach them, she left them, saying: "They are not ripe yet, I don't like to eat them while sour". Those who disparage what they cannot perform, ought to apply this lesson to themselves'.
Ergo 'Sour Grapes', although the "Nondum matura es" refers to 'They are not ripe yet" or not ready for efficient commercial use, such as atomic powered trains and ESP.
But I started to worry about the "Sour Grapes". Yeh, OK, it's a metaphor - to us. But not to the poor fox, she knew these as real grapes, not metaphorical. How can we explain this? OK, some call the whole story an allegory, which is an extended metaphor. but that's not the end of the..er..story. Trust the psychiatrists, they have announced that this tale is a perfect example of cognitive dissonance. Say what? It appears that cognitive dissonance is the act of holding two conflicting or incompatible ideas simultaneously, and in order to reduce the misery of this state of affairs, the hero justifies the stand-off by an excuse. So, I want the grapes, I can't have them, well, they are sour anyway. I FEEL BETTER.
Take your pick, metaphor, allegory, cognitive dissonance - me, I'm with the fox, I reckon the grapes were sour, so there.

I Said I Want A Second Opinion

Boy, are they ugly tomatoes. I was picking a few from our veggie patch, and with a name like Rouge de Marmande, you would expect them to look glorious. Aristocratic, even noble, perfectly formed, symmetrical, evenly coloured. But no, this variety of tomato is real ugly. They vary in shape from elliptical to drum-shaped to ugly. They are called ribbed by the experts, another way of saying they have deep irregular grooves, ingrained with dirt and cobwebs, and ugly. The colour can best be described as variegated, another word for ugly.
So, why do we grow them. They are a cool-climate fruit. We live in an elevated position nearly at the southernmost part of mainland Australia, and the winds blow off the Southern Ocean most of the time. Yep, cool climate. In fact, our weather parameters are the same as Launceston in Tasmania. And the Rouge de Marmande thrive in this climate. They also have a very thick skin. Resistant to insults when I call them ugly, and incidentally resistant to disease. And, you know, they taste terrific. We love them. They may not have the contours of a Grosse Lisse or a Roma, but if you are in a similar climate, get a tub and grow them.
Our first reaction on seeing them was "Grow these funny looking things? You have to be crazy!" But as the late and great Rodney Dangerfield said: "My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said OK, you're ugly too". Nuff said.

The Sun Rises In The Evening

It's paradoxical but one of the main producers of gluten-free products is a country built on pasta. Yep, Italy produces a huge range of excellent gluten-free food; that is, except for the beer. Couldn't drink it. So was I excited when O'Brien's Brewery opened in 2007. They now supply Australia and the world with the best gluten-free beer available (declaration of interest: none), made in Ballarat, a 19th Century gold-rush city about 100 kilometers from Melbourne. I was enjoying an O'Brien's lager yesterday afternoon, and my thoughts turned to boutique beers, a phenomenon of my time on this planet. I can walk up the road from where I work to the Belgian Beer Cafe, I thought; and there are some great Belgian beers. And six of the seven Trappist beers available are made in Belgium. Which sort of made me think of Thomas Merton.
Merton was a Trappist monk, a Cistercian, a mystic, author of a 20th Century classic religious text called The Seven Story Mountain, and an expert on eastern Religions. Not bad for a bloke who became a Roman Catholic at the age of twenty-three! It is said he picked the Cistercian order because they didn't talk much. They follow the Rule of St Benedict, promulgated in the 6th century. The Rule of St Benedict is basically a set of Guidelines for monks. I wonder if he chaired a committee that produced them, wouldn't be surprised.
Thomas Merton is the best exponent and explainer of Zen Buddhism I have read. Perhaps because he understands the language of mysticism, and yet he doesn't say too much, just enough in simple terms. After all, that's Zen. Words are not considered important, they just confuse the (ultimate) picture. Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appetite is a collection of 10 essays. They are readable and uplifting. For example, one chapter is on Kitaro Nishido who formed what would later be called the Kyoto School of philosophy early last century. This has the makings of an impossible subject to understand for most of us, but Merton's interpretation is user-friendly, and very comforting. He writes that Nishida 'seeks to preserve the unity that exists between the consciousness and the outer world reflected in it'. And Merton goes on to make Nishida's philosophy as applicable to Zen as it is to a theistic religion. Quite a feat.
Thomas Merton starts the book with a Zen saying, known to many: 'Ride your horse along the edge of the sword, Hide yourself in the middle of the flames, Blossoms of the fruit tree will bloom in the fire, The sun rises in the evening'. It's meant to confuse, unsettle, and dispose of duality. Thank goodness Merton's book does the opposite - clears the mind, relaxes. Oops, did I write 'the opposite'? A Zen master would have whacked me on the head for that one. Beer, anyone?

Succotash,...Venison, Roast Duck, Roast Goose

The USA gets a bad rap in the rest of the world. Despite Australia's Prime Minister sucking up to the US Congress recently, most Aussies have a well-honed BS meter, and know it was just politics. But I unashamedly love America cause I lived there for two years with my wife and three young children. Although their politics and health care might be problematic, and their ultimate freedom can be described in a Clint Eastwood way as 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly', there is much to love about Americans. They are friendly, funny and tough. That's how I would summarize them. There is a lot to like. And then there's the food.
Now, those who just don't get it tend to knock American food. Outsiders criticize the fast-foods joints and the soda (which pretty-well everyone else in the English-speaking world calls soft drink),  but you gotta live there to understand. Let's take the crab sandwich.
It was 1980, just two months into my life in DC, and the staff said we were going to the best place in DC to get a crab sandwich. A crab what? I couldn't believe it. It was about 5 minutes drive from the Walter Reed, a smoky, dare I say grubby place, full of very loud people sitting on bar stools, and I had the most mouthwatering sandwich, crab, with some sort of sauce, it was superb.
After that we had lots of real American food. Corn, beans, pork, seafood, pies, other foods all cooked in various styles, French, German, Spanish, Native American, Italian. We bought lots of cookbooks, the best we found was 'American Food: The Gastronomic Story' by Evan Jones. The first part tries to answer the question 'What is American Food?' and the author starts at Plymouth 'when Myles Standish and friends shot and roasted over coals an eagle "which was excellent meat hardly to be discerned from mutton'''. He continues through dried sturgeon,, beach plums, eels, stifle, hominy, clambakes, julep (in 1774 it was noted that 'a julep before breakfast was believed to give protection against malaria'), crab loafs, slapjacks, the list goes on. And then the influence of the later great migrations.
He reminds us of the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621: dried beans and whole corn called 'succotash,...venison, roast duck, roast goose (no turkey), clams, eels, wheat and corn bread, leeks, watercress, wild plums, homemade wine'. Yum. I encourage you to experiment next time you visit the USA. Don't be seduced by by volume and efficiency. Go for the real stuff.

The Manipulation Of Significant Symbols

It seemed at best an innocuous Tweet, at worst boring, directing the reader to an link called 'Who Says What to Whom on Twitter'. The only reason I opened it was the sender, Dr Ves Dimov. Now Dr Dimov, who tweets as @Allergy and @DrVes, is an allergist, immunologist, internist and Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. He produces by far the best allergy educational Twitter site in the world, with over 5000 followers. His Blog, 'Clinical Cases and Images: Casesblog', is very good, indeed superb, but I feel the best description would be that it is generous. Generous of his time, and of his knowledge. So when I receive his Tweets, I always open his links. 'Who Says What to Whom on Twitter' was, I knew, going to be disappointing. Dry, statistical stuff that would do nothing for me. Boy, was I wrong.
They say that a book editor can read one page of a submitted novel and make a decision - reject or read on. The introduction did it for me; '...media communications research is encapsulated by what is known as Lasswell's maxim: "Who says What to Whom in What Channel with What Effect"'. Who was Lasswell? Why hadn't I heard of this before? It was so relevant to medical education, indeed any education. I printed the paper and got to work with the pink highlighter. Wu from Cornell and three other authors from Yahoo! Research introduce us to 'mass' communication and 'interpersonal' communication, and then morph us into the microblogging platform of Twitter. They then attempt to answer the question posed in the title of the paper, and their calculations are fascinating. There is a lot to absorb, but in brief they studied five categories: media, celebrities, organizations, bloggers and ordinary. They found that half of the media information passes to the masses via a layer of 'opinion leaders'. They found that 50% of consumed tweets are generated by 20,000 elite users or 0.05% of Tweeters. They found that the longest-lived URLs that are Tweeted are generated by bloggers, and the longest-lived content are music and video. What they didn't, actually couldn't, study, was the Effect of Twitter as a form of communication.
Inherent in their study question was this quote from Lasswell, again, in full, "Who says What to Whom in What Channel with What Effect'. Harold Lasswell, who died in 1978, was a political scientist who studied in the 1920s at the same institution as Dr Dimov, the University of Chicago. He was part of the so-called Chicago School of Sociology. Some of his writings are readily accessible, and I found a stunning treatise he published in the August 1927 edition of The American Political Science review. It's called 'The Theory of Political Propaganda". His final statements are strangely pertinent to our day: "The ever-present function of propaganda in modern life is in large measure attributable to the social disoganization which has been precipitated by the rapid advent of technological changes' (my italics). He goes on: 'Literacy and the physical channels of communication have quickened the connection between those who rule and the ruled'. Dare I breathe the word Libya at this point. But I have left the best to last, Lasswell's definition of propaganda as 'the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols'. Symbols drawn by the pen, by gestures, by the voice. Can we add 'and by Twitter'? Should we extend the analysis of Twitter to determine whether it can ever fit his definition of propaganda? I think so.

Mental Illness Is A Metaphor

When I was a young man, working through a medical course in the 1960s, there were 10,000 psychiatric beds in the State of Victoria. That is, in a population of about 3 million. Now our population has doubled and the number of psychiatric beds has fallen by about 80%. We spent weeks and weeks in the confines of psychiatric hospitals talking to the 'disturbed' and 'mentally ill'. Merely a generation earlier these institutions were called lunatic asylums. The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care was one of the greatest advances in medical care of the modern era, and it was no accident.
There were many triggers for this movement. David Rosenhan published a landmark study in Science in 1973. He broke every rule in the clinical trial handbook of today, but it worked in 1973. The study was called "On being sane in insane places". Eight volunteers pretended to hear voices, and were soon admitted to psychiatric hospitals, whereupon they immediately behaved in a completely sane manner. This is not the forum to describe their inpatient experiences, the report is easily available, but seven were finally discharged with a diagnosis of 'schizophrenia in remission'.
And the previous year, in 1972, Thomas Szasz published one of the great iconoclastic medical books of last century, The Myth of Mental Illness. To give you an idea of his approach, right at the beginning, on page 11, he writes: 'bodily illness stands in the same relation to mental illness as a defective television receiver stands to an objectionable television programme'. Szasz then applied a scalpel to entrenched psychiatry, working his way from Hysteria of the 19th Century through rules and societal acceptance and odd behaviour and game-playing and everything that the psychoanalysts made up. I once attended a meeting in the nineties on somatoform disorders mimicking allergy. I asked the guest psychiatrist about his views on Szasz. He replied: 'Well, Szasz was an essayist'. I think he meant that Szasz was to psychiatry as Nietzsche was to philosophy, both had the ability and desire to write about complex matters in a populist manner. I also thought that it was a backhanded compliment. But I had, and continue to have, a lot of time for Thomas Szasz. He wrote that the incarceration of the mentally ill was a crime against humanity. He felt that most people labelled as mentally ill were dealing with the personal, social and ethical problems of life in a manner that was different to the majority. He reserved restraint only for those who would harm themselves or others.
I remember being especially shaken by his statement that 'mental illness is a metaphor'. He believed that minds can be 'sick' only in the sense that jokes can be 'sick'. His assertion that true mental symptoms arise from physical abnormalities in the brain has, of course, proved correct. And, what's more, neuroscience will sort out those physical abnormalities for us. At the moment, however, we still use the term mental illness, albeit in a non-pejorative way. That's progress, but until we do away with the term completely, and assert, like Szasz, that it is indeed a metaphor, we will still be hamstrung by history.

There Is No Limit To This Moment

I would like to thank Fritjof Capra. Like millions of others since 1975, I own a copy of The Tao Of Physics. I have the 1982 Flamingo paperback edition, pages dog-eared and yellowed, cluttered with scribbles and highlights, re-read often. The subtitle of this book summarizes its attractiveness: 'An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism'. Sounds daunting, but its relaxed, easy-going style is seductive, and by the end of the book you feel that you know it all, or, alternatively, you know nothing, but hey, there's no difference between all or nothing.
After some brief paragraphs on the Eastern religions, Capra then follows with nine brilliant chapters linking those religious or philosophical concepts to modern physics. In 'The Unity of All Things' he quotes Heisenberg: 'Natural Science (ie Physics)...is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves'. 'Beyond the World of Opposites' covers the quantum disparity between rest and movement and observation, and Capra quotes one of those frustratingly disturbing Zen sayings: 'At dusk the cock announces dawn; at midnight, the bright sun'. It's not meant to be understood, but to upset our sensibilities, sort of like quantum physics, you know, the particle is there until you try to measure it. The Void is an integral part of Buddhism, and Capra discusses this under 'Emptiness and Form' and tells us that, in physics, matter and space are inseparable. Every one of those nine short superb chapters is enthralling.
My favourite? 'Space-Time' because none of us understands infinity, which is a real drag. Capra has curved spheres and arrows and vectors, all good, but, you know, his best scientific citation comes from Huinang, a 7th Century Zen master, said to be illiterate, a most important figure of his time. Capra quotes him: 'The absolute tranquillity is the present moment. At this moment there is no limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight'. Yeh, I don't understand it either, but it will have to do, er, for the moment.

Point Your iPad At The Sky

Michael Leunig is an official 'Australian Living Treasure'. He is best known for his minimalist, laconic cartoons, often without captions, which do seem to capture many of our insecurities. Sometimes they don't work. Often they do and we are enthralled. Although opinions vary, I feel one of his best depicts a father and his young son sitting on the floor in front of a TV on which is displayed a beautiful sunset. Both are enjoying this experience, and one gets the sense that it is bringing them closer together. You know, bonding. But in the background is an open window through which we can see the identical sunset, the real one, and it's completely ignored by the two entrenched in front of the TV set.
I was reminded of this cartoon by a friend this week. We were having a few drinks; there are seven of us that have met every couple of weeks for 30 years. This time it was at Steve's place. Steve and his wife live in an authentic sixties highrise with a great view of the Melbourne skyline, and of the sky. I looked out and asked Steve whether he had enjoyed last week's supermoon, what was it, 15% brighter because it was the closest to earth for 18 years? Steve stopped talking, and after a minute or so he made which could only be described as a confession. 'Bless me Father', he started, and said he was in his study one evening last week and he was playing with his iPad, with an App called Star Walk. This allows you to hold the iPad up in the air and view all the stars, constellations, planets, and any other stuff in that part of the sky. He showed it to me. It's very spooky. I have no idea how it works. It does look beautiful. So, Steve looked at the supermoon on his iPad, and, you know, he forget to take the 20 paces from his study to his balcony and look at the real moon with his own eyes. He confessed to me that he only saw it on his iPad. The best view of the sky in Melbourne!
So I went to the iTunes store and looked up Star Walk. It's $5.99 and available in 11 languages. This is the description of the App: "Star Walk enables you to point your iPad at the sky and see what stars, constellations, and satellites you are looking at in realtime" So, we can watch the sunset on TV, the stars on iPad, we can buy all necessities over the internet, all that is left are Apps for digestion, elimination and procreation, and we won't have to leave our room at all.

No Definitely Good News At All

Eric Blair is a gentle name, and it's hard to believe that an Eric Blair was, inter alia, a policeman, a tramp, a wounded soldier, and a (sort-of) revolutionary. This bio might fit a name such as Che Guevara or George Patton, but an Eric Blair? However, Eric had another life, and using the nom-de-plume George Orwell, he wrote two of the most important books of the 20th Century, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. He died of consumption at 46, leaving those novels, and seven others. But his literary output was far greater. As a working journalist and literary critic, he wrote extensively on stuff, and a four volume collection of his work, 1920 through 1950, is published.
I've enjoyed these volumes more than his books; you can read each essay at random, he writes as if he is talking to you, and although politically dated, his many human observations remain true. The best are from the series of articles he wrote for The Tribune. He calls his column "As I Please", a title simultaneously aggressive and self-effacing. There is no doubt that if Orwell were writing now then "As I Please" would be an immensely successful blog. On the 29th November 1946 he looked at the front page of his newspaper and observed that the USSR was querying the numbers of Allied Forces in occupied Europe (Cold War here we come), the civil war in Greece raged, a blood-bath occurred in India, Ghandi was on a hunger strike, and there were more bombs in Jerusalem. Even minor stories, Orwell observes, are, at best, only marginally good news. So he writes "There is no definitely good news at all on the front page" Mr Orwell, where ever you are, let me just inform you that nothing has changed.

If It Were Not For Reality

When Gary Larson retired in 1995, the world became a poorer place. Everyone has their favourite cartoon. Mine is the lookalike Freudian psychiatrist carefully writing in his imposing notebook while a clearly disturbed patient on the couch talks and talks and talks and if you look carefully at the notebook he has written "Just Plain Mad". You know, psychiatrists get a bad rap. You "have to be crazy to become one" or "you get crazy after you become one" but, like a toilet flush, they are essential.
There is one psychiatrist, however, I admire. I have read her book "Neurosis And Human Growth" more than I have read any other book. Karen Horney, who died in 1952 at the age of 67, was an outstanding psychoanalyst. In some people's eyes, that's even more arcane that a plain old psychiatrist, but I love reading them and about them, especially Horney. She was a "Neo-Freudian",  a rather gentle term which actually means that she dramatically split from the pessimistic libido theory of Freud to an optimistic social and cultural theory. Theory of what, you ask? Well, er, stuff. It was all made up, anyway, with no evidence as we know it.
But the result is a classification of Personality, in Life and especially in the Workplace. And this is where Horney's book excels. You will read it and you will understand your friends, family and, especially, your workmates. Wordy, but beautifully written, it's terrific. All about our fight with reality, with our true self, or as one of Horney's patients put it: "If it were not for reality, I would be perfectly all right" I thought I was sane until I read this book. Now I know that everyone is insane. It's reassuring.

And This Image We Call Time

People spend a lot of time thinking about Time. I've just searched Amazon books for 'time management' and there are 17,283 entries. From 'The 4-Hour Work Week' (in your dreams) to 'Getting Things Done'. The seductive titles are bespattered with noble nouns which are all attractive, and all relate to managing Time: Happiness, Discipline, Strength, Survival, Wellbeing, and the subtle Overcoming Dysfunction.
Some people never think about Time. In my experience, these people are usually surfers, or surfies, depending on your culture. You know, blonde, relaxed, erudite in a beat generation sort-of-way, just want to be out there, on a wave. But, hang on, there are tides (Time) and weather (Time) to consider, oh well, there goes my theory.
And there are people who philosophize about Time. What is it? When did it start? When will it end? Everyone's got a theory, but no-one really knows. Although I reckon Plato came close. There it is, in my copy of Timaeus (part of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World, the entire set bought on Ebay for $35 last year, yes, I know you can download it all for free, but the books LOOK so good). He writes: "Wherefore he (here insert she, God, it, creator, or, if Buddhist, leave blank) resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call Time" Couldn't have put it better myself, although Bob thinks zero is better than unity when he sings, "Where black is the color, where none is the number". Which reminds me, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is sort of topical again at this Time.

Pain And Pleasure Do Not Enclose Him

Please do not read The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogel. You will never enjoy a movie again. Well, you'll never enjoy one in the wide-eyed childlike enchantment way that even hardened movie-goers experience. Instead, you will spend the two hours checking each stage of The Story. You see, Vogel's book, published in 1992, but preceded by many years of notes and summaries, is the handbook of the Hollywood scriptwriter. In it he outlines the stages of The Story, common to all fables and myths and legends. The Hero, living in the Ordinary World, is Called To Adventure, which she Refuses, but after Meeting Her Mentor, she Crosses The Threshold, and with the aid of Allies, undergoes The Supreme Ordeal, receives The Reward, and Returns, as Hero, bringing "The Elixir" to the Ordinary World. Get the picture?
Vogel explains at length that he has essentially scriptwritten Joseph Campbell's 1949 opus, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. A multilingual mystic who made a mark on mid-Twentieth Century America, Campbell wrote a beautiful book which more or less deconstructs the popular stories of mankind and in doing so establishes the pro forma by which all such stories are written. His early influences were Nietzsche and Joyce and Mann, and in later years he edited the Eranos Yearbooks, a series of arcane essays on life 'but not as we know it' as interpreted by European mystics and philosophers, also intriguing.
Vogler's Supreme Ordeal stage of the story, the impending death of the Hero, is split in Campbell's original into several parts. One is headed Apotheosis. It's the deification stage, where the Hero is transformed into something more than human. In early fables it was usually into a god. Now it can be anything vaguely super-human; Bruce Willis in a elevator shaft comes to mind. As Campbell writes: "..it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him. He encloses them..." Perhaps this is the pivotal moment for us. We want the Hero to win. The Hero obliges us by shedding a human weakness or three. Nice job, if you can get it. Now, about that movie you're about to see...

I'll Go Your Way Too

You'll probably want to buy the CD. Now, iTunes will download it for you, but before you do that, let me tell you about an article I read a couple of years ago. It was in the Music section of our local newspaper, a blinded study of sorts. A DJ, a sound engineer, and an orchestra conductor were given very expensive earphones, and asked to listen to a number of recordings in various formats. They were CD, Lossless, 256 kbps and 128 kbps. The DJ couldn't separate them, obviously due to occupational hearing loss or concurrent substance abuse or both. The engineer and the conductor delivered the same results - CD the best, 128 the worst, and they could not separate Lossless from 256. So if you want to hear Leonard Cohen Live In London in concert-quality then get the CD. And the DVD.
Not just for Mr. Cohen. For Sharon Robinson and the Webb sisters, blues nightingales. For the best collection of musicians in a long time. And Leonard Cohen, well, I don't pretend even to try and add what is written about the man. You know it all. Especially that there appear to be three phases to his performing life - the literature, the early voice - thin, almost tuneless but enthralling - and the later voice, mellifluous and matched perfectly to his colleagues on stage.
The poetry varies, all interesting, some naughty, to use an old-fashioned word, and occasionally one verse. His Book of Longing was published in 2006, and has all these forms of poetry. The shortest one is the best. It delivers a feint then the punch, and it's about love, all in two lines. It goes "You go your way I'll go your way too" It's just that bit better than the Roman "Ubi tu Gaius..." wedding vow because it suggests togetherness, not just amalgamation. And that's love.

As Though They Had Been Flooded With Light

When Mikhail Bulgakov died in 1940, at the same age and of the same kidney ailment as his father, his works effectively died with him. The Great Soviet Experiment did not encourage wide release of his plays and novels; indeed, it was only in 1966, a generation after its near completion, that his most-loved, most-famous story, The Master and Margarita, introduced herself (books are feminine, aren't they?) to Western readers. Whisper the name of this novel to any quiet crowd and it's London to a Brick that a small but important minority of the group will, if not swoon, remind themselves that they must read it again. Complex, mystical and funny, and allegorical, this is his greatest work.
He gave us other manuscripts. Some deserve a crash-course in Russian history before enjoying. Others are better experienced on stage than read. But Bulgakov, like Chekhov, was also a doctor, well, a short-lived doctor, enjoying medical practice for 2 years before he was consumed by full-time writing. His A Country Doctor's Notebook, written in 1925, has nine vivid descriptions of medical cases in rural Russia, mostly fact but part-fictionalized, and is most rewarding. Indeed, even in this "modern" age of medicine, I would still prescribe this book as required reading for medical students. For its human rather than clinical lessons.
One story in the book, Baptism By Rotation, describes the young doctor deep in the Russian steppe, in the middle of the night, called to a woman in labour with a transverse lie of child, lethal to both mother and baby if not corrected by version of the baby. He had graduated with honours in Obstetrics, but needs the help of an experienced midwife, and a couple of peeks of his textbook, before both patients are saved, just. Afterwards, in the early hours, in his room, sipping his "cooling tea" and flipping through the textbook chapter on "Dangers of Version", he realises "all the previously obscure passages became entirely comprehensible, as though they had been flooded with light". He had learnt it, then done it, then learnt it again, with deeper understanding. I guess that's what experience does: it shines a light on what you've been taught.

A Tail, Like The Other Foxes

By 1859, when Charles Darwin's Origin was published, its author had a continuing history of multiple somatic complaints. He needed long periods of convalescence, and the inevitable debates that followed were shouldered, for the main, by the greatest science educator of the 19th Century, Thomas Huxley. Of prodigious intellect, and with an outstanding debating skill whether at the Royal Society (of which he later became President), or in public halls open to all-comers, Huxley carried the torch for this monkey to man hypothesis.
It is clear, when reading Adrian Desmond's splendid biography of Huxley, that he was driven more by revulsion of the Church's views than by science. His superb knowledge of The Bible and Church History enabled him to debate church leaders effectively.
But he had no personal religious or philosophical label. As he writes in an 1889 essay "most of my colleagues were -ists of one sort or another...atheist, theist, idealist...". He felt, well, put-out. He wanted a belief so that he, too, had "a tail, like the other foxes" So he coined the term "agnostic" for himself.
Now, this is not about agnosticism per se. It is about the astonishing observation that Thomas Huxley, FRS (with Medal), the best-known scientist of Victorian England, "Darwin's Bulldog", grandfather of author Aldous and Nobel Prize winner Andrew, wanted to be like everyone else! Part of the group. With a label of his own. Reassuring, isn't it?

Dreaming Up A Brilliant Labyrinth

If there's one thing Jorge Luis Borges has over Benedict de Spinoza, it's Style. Borges, a beloved son of Latin America and some say the best author never to win a Nobel Prize, nurtures his beguiling short stories until each develops a life of its own. Their content is rich and complex and always character-full, for want of a real word. Walter Truett Anderson said of postmodernism that it "mixed rituals and traditions like greens in a salad" and this is a good description of a Borges story.
Spinoza is unreadable. No, I take that back. Spinoza is unreadable to most of us. But some would say he is more important than Borges. He develops truly original concepts of pantheism and determinism and other isms in the form of The Geometry Textbook. You know, A is to B as C is to D so E...you get the picture.
So what happens when Borges writes a poem about Spinoza. I'll tell what happens - we suddenly get to love Spinoza. Borges writes about Spinoza polishing his lenses with the hyacinth in the confines of the ghetto walls, a quiet Spinoza "free of metaphor and myth". And when he writes that Spinoza sits there "dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth", the picture of Spinoza is complete. In those five words we suddenly see through the convoluted philosophical details, and appreciate the man himself. It's Borges' Style over Spinoza's Substance. The best of both worlds.

Well Then, Give Me Your Pain

I'm not sure that anyone reads Lou Salome, or about Lou Salome, anymore. The peripatetic Russian psychoanalyst and feminist, born in 1861, was linked to famous men of her age, including Ree, Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud and Rilke, inter alia. In fact, there was a menage of sorts with the first two, the Poet and the Philosopher, a deep love affair with Rainer Maria Rilke, and a love-filled albeit (supposedly) celibate marriage of 47 years with Friedrich Andreas. She was profoundly intellectual, smarter than pretty well anyone she met, and wrote profusely, in fact being one of the first to discuss female sexuality. Not a bad curriculum vitae.
She wrote a poem for Nietzsche. It's hard to track down, but you can find it in her own published portrait of Nietzsche, thankfully still in print. Ode to Life starts with an affirmation of her love of life, especially its joys and its riddles and its dangers, but the bottom line, after her cry "If you must destroy me", has to be on a par with Dylan's "Do Not Go Gentle". She dares life to "Throw all you have into the battle. If no more is left of joy, well then, give me your pain".
Its fitting that she wrote this poem for a man who believed Life itself created its own codes and structures and morals, and that Life was there to be celebrated whether happy or sad or dying. But it's tough when you are sad or dying. Does this challenge "Give Me Your Pain" help anyone. I don't know, but it's worth taking the baton offered by her, and running with it.

My Body Of A Sudden Blazed

In his Nobel Lecture delivered on December 15th, 1923, shortly after receiving the Prize for Literature, WB Yeats spoke at length about the Irish Dramatic Movement. The speech is a little like his poetry - brilliant, seductive and mellifluous, although the reader always feels that a PhD in History or Literature or Linguistics would be useful for full appreciation. But, buried in the characters and events and opinions, you can find a mystical spark, just like in many of his poems. He says "you desire beautiful emotion...and care not how fantastic its expression".
His poem that best demonstrates this statement is very short, and has the rather indecipherable title of Vacillation IV. The scene is set. Yeats is fifty, alone in a crowded shop, obviously miserable. The second stanza appears as though shot from a gun: "While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless".
This brief intense happy transformation is good if you can get it. Mystics strive after it, some call it Sartori, or Prayer, or Nirvana, or whatever.  It doesn't have to last long. Yeats even suggests twenty minutes "more or less", but let's not put too fine a point on using time to measure something that is, well, timeless.

A Friend Who Would Understand Me

Anton Chekhov was 38 years old when he wrote "A Case History". He was already an experienced doctor and evocative writer, and some of his best short stories, including this one, effortlessly combined elements of both medicine and human nature. The dismal factory town in "A Case History",  to which a doctor is summoned, has all the depressing features of late 19th century Russia, or indeed of industrial Europe. Within it's walls languishes the neurasthenic daughter of the rich factory owner. She is always sick, tired and depressed.
Just a brief conversation and examination give the doctor the diagnosis - that of no diagnosis at all. Today, after a few tests, she would be labelled as depression or chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia. But Chekhov and his alter ego in the story know the real cause of her illness. She explains it herself in her last few words to the doctor: "I'd like to tell you what I think. It seems that I'm not ill, and I'm worried and terrified for that reason...I'm always having medical treatment and of course I'm thankful and I wouldn't say it's all a waste of time. I don't want to talk to doctors, though, but to someone close to me, a friend who would understand me and could convince me whether I'm right or wrong."
Of course, nothing is resolved, and the doctor moves on, out of the town, to the rest of his life.
Chekhov doesn't try to give us a feel-good story. But we feel better after reading it. Is it Schadenfreude? Maybe. Is it a confessional by proxy? Possibly. It's certainly real, and common, even in a different time and place.