Brawling priests: why piety can cause vice

I've my regular ABC column up today: 'The Ultimate Fighter, priest-style: piety and religious vice'.

Prompted by brawling Holy Land priests, I'm arguing that piety can actually encourage vice, as the means (incantations, clothes, genuflections) are mistaken for the ends (a cultivated psyche).  A sample:

what begins as a quest for reverence becomes dogmatism and vice. The good Christian becomes less like Christ, and more like the priests who judged him: more interested in institutional codes than virtue. "Those who set up piety as their ultimate aim and goal," wrote Goethe, "mostly end up becoming hypocrites." Habits harden, and the psyche is left unimproved.

(Photo: Byztex)

On unconditional love (and happy birthday)

I've a column in the Canberra Times today, 'Navigating the conditions of unconditional love'.

After a Twitter conversation with Karen Pickering and Ben Pobjie, I'm suggesting that so-called 'unconditional love', at least for couples, is a dubious ideal.

What we have, and what we need to cultivate well, is conditional love.  A sample:

conditions are precisely why we love someone: that they have certain qualities, and not others. It is the specifics - of their life and psyche - that make the love what it is. We need, not unconditional love, but judicious, honest, hard-working love - love that creates and appreciates conditions, instead of purporting to dismiss them.

Speaking of lasting love, and its labours: it's Ruth's birthday today. Huzzah!

It began with a cup of tea in bed, followed by gifts and hand-drawn cards from the kids (hopping madly).  Then more gifts from yours truly, and a small poem. (Doggerel: the gift that keeps on giving... laughter.)

After breakfast (which may've included hundreds 'n' thousands on toast), Ruth meandered off to a café with her pen, notebook and new Noodler's Black Swan on Australian Rose ink, while I cleaned and washed up.

Now for a romantic lunch, with only the two of us... and two children still hopping and chattering about Ewoks.

Happy birthday, my love, and thank you for our full catastrophe.

Modern Dilemmas: teenage sex and friends' muddled careers

Today I spoke on Radio National's 'Life Matters', with new host Natasha Mitchell, and author/commentator Nina Funnell.

We were launching a new regular segment, 'Modern Dilemmas', tackling contemporary quandaries (big and small).

Today's dilemmas were teenage sex in the home, and friends with muddled career ambitions. You can listen and leave a comment here.

God, and other friends in high places

I've my regular ABC column up today, 'Friends in high places'.

I'm discussing exceptionalism, particularly of the religious kind: the idea that one's tribe, nation or faith is special, because god cares. Out of all the cosmos, and all its planets, and all our planet's species, and all the humans, we are the favoured.  A sample:

It is not a logical failure, but a failure of virtue. It is this belief that god cares; that there is a sentient creator who is not only benevolent and loyal, but also genuinely concerned with the day-to-day labours and longings of ordinary human beings. Christianity, Judaism and Islam share this view, and it is founded on a vice: the craven unwillingness to face an indifferent cosmos.

Tragic intimacy: the arts of disaster

I've an essay in the new Griffith Review, 'Tragic Intimacy'.

The new Review has a disaster theme, and I'm looking at the arts of disaster: How can disaster be beautiful?  A sample:

We might explain away disaster as a simple narrative device: an artistic trope, like titillating flesh. Certainly, drama is vital for narrative, and disasters do provide drama. Even in sculptures, like Dying Gaul, there is an unspoken story - suffering provides the emotional lure, which pulls us into it. And, as David Hume once noted, simply being in the middle of something - story, craft, scientific investigation - can pique our curiosity. 

But why disaster in particular, rather than romantic passion, existential bafflement, or some other human drama? The technical solution sidesteps the real question: What, in disaster, asks for beauty's visceral magic?

One answer comes from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In his magnum opus Being and Nothingness (1956), he argued that human existence is basically unfinished. Whereas things in the world just are, we are not; our consciousness stands outside itself as time and space, and is always able to be otherwise. With each new moment, we can say ‘no' to the last moment and all that we are. This is Sartre's doctrine of freedom: mankind is continual becoming, liberated from the simple ‘being' of fountain pens, teaspoons and café tables. 

And this is at the root of what he called our ‘unhappy consciousness': we're haunted by this pure being. It's what we are, but we can never recover it, because our consciousness grows against it. In other words, we long to shrug off our freedom and simply be. But this is impossible: this longing is itself part of our free consciousness. There is no way out of liberty. We are always incomplete, unfinished.

For Sartre, art can provide a brief remedy for this. He wrote of the ‘noble suffering' of the statue or tragic mask, which is like a dream of our own pure being. We see in it ourselves - our own restless world. But it is suddenly solid, stable. ‘It is presented to us as a compact, objective whole,' wrote Sartre, ‘it is there in the midst of the world, like this tree or this stone.' This is only a brief reprieve from bittersweet freedom, but it has an extraordinary hold on us. It's a glimpse of perfection, a promise of eternal rest.

In this light, disasters become beautiful in art, not because they deny suffering, but because they make our own suffering palpable, tactile. We can point to Picasso's Guernica (1937) and say: ‘There, that is what I am.' They give us pain, without life's unsettling squirm and sprint.

School holidays and coffee

I've two columns with Fairfax today - one in The Age, another in the Sydney Morning Herald.

In The Age, 'Embracing spontaneity helps make holidays child's play' looks at the ambivalence of parenthood, particularly in the school holidays.

I discuss how play - real play, not just watching from a bench or couch - can be healthy for kids and parents alike. A sample:

Much of adult life is implicit: ideas, impressions, values. When playing, children often ask us to explain ourselves. Fudging regularly fails because of the child's Excalibur of truth: ''But why?'' The colour of the sky, the meaning of irony, the importance of fighting etiquette - putting these into simple, clear language is helpful for my children, and me. 

Play also promotes innovative impulsivity. Lego, for example, is best off-the-plan: taking the basic bricks and making something new. Working with my son and daughter, the constructions change as we work: a palace for Odysseus, planetarium, ninja trap. Likewise for the sandpit, cardboard-and-sticky-tape or woodwork building: a play of artful whims.

Meanwhile, in Herald, 'Caffeine less vital than conviviality of a cuppa' explores the caffeine hit, and asks: Is the chemical stimulation really the chief point? A sample:

Obviously, most Australians do not have health in mind as they sip their ristretto. Caffeine is a stimulant - the silent partner in many workdays. But because it is addictive, its contribution is dubious. Once we are habituated, the miracle cup often does little but get us to ''normal''. What seems like a vital buzz is actually what regular ''up'' folks feel every morning. 

A more likely answer for caffeine's popularity is that it provides respite from boredom or harassment; some change of pace, scene or mood. Like the ''smoko'', the regular coffee break can offer a moment for peace or friendly talk. 

In other words, it is not simply the caffeine that is paramount; instead, coffee provides a focal point for some deeper psychological or social need. Likewise for energy drinks: they are more a ritual of excess and abandon than a necessary lift.

Thanks for the father who failed him

I've a review in today's Australian, 'Caged author Cameron Conaway gives thanks to memory of a father who failed him'.

In Caged, mixed martial artist and poet Cameron Conaway portrays his development from abused, angry kid to confident, Renaissance-man adult.

In no small measure, what helped Conaway forgive his father and forge his own adulthood was violence - of the formalised, disciplined, respectful kind: martial arts.  A sample:

Conaway tells some sordid stories. 

Over the years, he is mocked, beaten and ignored. This drives the youth to be what his father never was for him: physically and intellectually refined. Conaway's Oedipal rage and insecurity are educative pathologies. Conaway quotes Nietzsche, and Caged has Nietzschean undertones: the visceral origins of higher ideals, the replacement of an absent father, the value of pain and the importance of gratitude. Often Conaway takes no credit for his balance. His need for physical exertion was "instinctual", he writes, but it enhanced his studies: knowledge was the effect, not the cause. 

When the author was a teenager, his father was replaced by healthier role models in martial artists such as Ken Shamrock and Bruce Lee. But Conaway recognises what his father gave him: opportunities to become stronger. In a moving passage, he echoes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo by thanking his estranged father. "I do not know what I'd be without the pain you caused, but I know I wouldn't be nearly as happy as I am right now. I'm as confident and strong as I've ever been. I hope that brings you happiness."

Astrology: an odd mix of humility and arrogance

I've my regular ABC column up today, 'Astrology: an odd mix of humility and arrogance'.

I'm exploring why folks gravitate (haw haw) to astrology, and why this is a mistake. A sample:

Astrology fails as science and existential commitment. It cannot predict or control the physical world – except perhaps providing an income for astrologers. It cannot encourage liberty of consciousness, since it gives responsibility for character to distant cosmic bodies: I am Leo, forever fixed by the stars. Meow. This is classic bad faith.

(Photo: French engraving of an Egyptian depiction of the sky and divinities, courtesy of the US Library of Congress)

My Month of Reading @ Writers Victoria

Next month I'm teaching 'Year of the Essay' at Writers Victoria, starting on February 19th.

It's a series of day-long courses on the essay form, covering the nature of the essay, its chief genres, and the art of pitching and publishing.

There's an 'Early Bird' discount if you get in... um... early.

To coincide with this, I've a short piece in January-February's The Victorian Writer, 'Month of Reading'.

It looks at a few of my reading pleasures for the past month: Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, Emily Dickinson's Poems, Alfred Habegger's All My Wars are Laid Away in Books: A Life of Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney's Human Chain, Will Self's 'Diary' in the London Review of Books and W. Somerset Maugham's 'The Art of Fiction'.

Here's what I had to say about Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad:

Atwood is brave. Not because she has dared to retell the myth of Odysseus – all myths are retelling. She is brave because she makes Penelope an ambivalent, ambiguous psyche – makes her real, in other words. Atwood’s prose is adaptable: from conversational storytelling, to choral chants, to scholarly declamation. What marks this novel is her combination of exquisitely expressed sympathy and lightly worn scholarship. She has researched Odysseus, Penelope and their genealogy; she has read over the Odyssey, Iliad and Graves’ mythic smorgasbord. She takes this putty, and thumbs it with feeling: for skeptical, canny Penelope; for her braggart, restless husband; for the ill-fated serving girls Odysseus strings up. These girls are Atwood’s chorus: “twelve accusations, toes skimming the ground, hands tied behind our backs, tongues sticking out, eyes bulging, songs choked in our throats.”

There are no banshees in Mexico

I finally have a copy of El Lado B de la Distracción, the Spanish translation of Distraction. Three years since Distraction's debut, it's nice to see it young again.

It is also a curious pleasure to read myself in another language - well, 'myself', interpreted by the translator Iván Viñas Arrambide. And 'read' deserves scare quotes too.

I don't speak Spanish, but it's fascinating to see what doesn't translate. 'Banshee', for example, has no equivalent - it remains untranslated, and explained with a footnote. ("Las banshees son espíritus femeninos que según la tradición irlandesa al aparecerse anuncian con sus gemidos la muerte cercana de algún pariente.") Likewise for 'Doctor Who', 'grassroots' and 'hipster'.

Writing books is an alienating job sometimes: from one's family, but also from one's own words.  In the process of writing, editing, laying out, illustrating and publicising a book, it becomes collaborative - the intimacy between oneself and words is lost. And, as in all writing, sometimes one looks back on one's own prose: Did I write that?

But translation adds another dimension: I recognise my own sentences but they are no longer mine.  It's less like authorship, and more like posing for a portrait: I'm certainly there, but painted by another hand. Odd.

As a work of design, Distracción is striking. The cover picture is cute, and the teal, orange and white work very well together (to my surprise). The cover photo is a nice touch.

Inside, the font is a generous size (for those with less-than-perfect eyesight), and each chapter begins with a white quill on grey, then a little ink bottle above the text. Again: cute.

May it grow old in Mexico.