The Best Australian Essays 2015 (36 page)

Why do people get so committed to a belief system?

Most of the things we believe, whether secular or religious, societal or personal, make sense and are universal. Most of us oppose murder and theft. In general, most of us uphold the principle of reciprocity (the do-as-you-would-be-done-by ideal). Where it gets tricky is when we believe crazy things (virgin births, rising from the dead, access to seventy-two virgins per martyr, junk lending never leading to a run on banks). We believe crazy things because once upon a time it was essential to know whether a stranger was with us or against us. If they were against us but we thought they were for us, the dagger in the back was just around the corner. Code words and secret signs don't work. Once they're discovered they can be mimicked. An uncounterfeitable system is required. If you meet someone who agrees that your messiah's mother died a virgin, you can be sure they are on your side. Those who don't won't feign belief, because it's just too ridiculous. (This can backfire – plenty of Jews have died not fighting on the Sabbath.) You can reliably identify someone as being your enemy if they won't testify to your beliefs. And the more ridiculous the beliefs, the better. So if we allow a bit of cultural relativism to sneak in, at least that will protect us against those with vested interests, because in-group/out-group identification is biologically based, and evolution isn't a cultural phenomenon. Horseracing might be ridiculous, but the horseracing fraternity won't know that, and won't even be able to contemplate that, because their beliefs protect, but concurrently conceal, their interest.

It's okay that Delvoye tattooed pigs. The pigs might have suffered a bit, but they are compensated by things like a longer life. Of course, we could have given them the longer life without any imposition on them, and that would have been better, but our universal moral imperatives (the ones that don't lead us to do ridiculous things) enable us to justify appropriately proportioned negative consequences.

Fat men being railroaded.

I talked about this in my book, but I need to rehash it here. If a train is bearing down on, say, five people, but there is a side track with one person on it, the vast majority of people would redirect the train to the side track, thus killing one to save five. However, if they see the train bearing down on the hapless five and the only way to save those people is to push a very fat man off a bridge to derail the train, they will not. Or consider kamikaze warfare. During World War Two, on Okinawa, Japanese kamikaze attacks killed about 5000 Allies for the loss of about 1000. Considering that ‘normal' military engagements have about a one to one kill ratio, the five to one ratio achieved could be considered a triumph (and the Japanese authorities, deluded by their own self-interest, did consider it to be a triumph). But the outcome was achieved with casualties as a consequence of the strategy, not as a side effect, and so kamikaze tactics are widely derided. Just for a moment, contemplate what you think of suicide bombing as a military tactic.

Direct action isn't appropriate, indirect consequence is. That's why bullfighting and cockfighting suffer almost universal opprobrium (except from those in the in-group, who believe the ridiculous to bind the group). It isn't sufficient for an action with negative consequences merely to be entertaining; the negative aspects must be a side effect, not an inevitable consequence, of the entertainment.

Horseracing is about horses running, and racing. Some people, but nevertheless a small percentage of horseracing fans, watch races because they admire the beast. These beasts, like pigs, have been selectively bred and are significantly modified from their wild ancestors. Arguably, unlike the pigs, the consequences of selective breeding thoroughbreds are mixed. In any case, they haven't suffered from the selective selection pressure as much as pigs have. Sometimes, in the pursuit of our entertainment, horses die (as do jockeys, but they, it is argued, understand the risks). This happens about once in 1400 runs. So the horse's life expectancy is reduced from, say, about twenty-five years to about twenty-four years, nine months. A reasonable price to pay for our entertainment? I think so, but then I would. A couple of provisos. Some owners and breeders are quick to top their slow or injured charges. They are economic rationalist scum, and are in-group rationalising a moral outrage. Also, in South Australia and Victoria, there are still hurdle and steeplechasing races. A quick survey of fatality rates suggest that they are about twenty times more dangerous than flat racing. And the extra utility that is provided as a result? Not much. They might be a bit more exciting to bet on, but that is as a direct result (not an indirect consequence) of the chance of the horse falling. So I think hurdle and steeplechase racing should be banned. And this time, I am contradicting my own direct interest, so my opinion has some relevance.

Horseracing is okay, if a bit morally ambiguous. Damage is done, but at a low frequency, and it is a side effect, and not the goal, of the industry.

Slipping from morally ambiguous to morally dubious.

Imagine I had the power that public office allows one to exert. I would exert it. Obama's drones make him an asymmetric warrior, a killer of individuals. And now seekers of public office have to contemplate the notion, in what used to be the best-case scenario, that if they end up the boss, they will be signing death warrants of individuals, and they will know that there will be collateral damage. Will the most moral among us, those who wouldn't gamble even if they could win, seek elected positions knowing their morality could be gravely compromised? Such an appalling choice might not influence me, but I'm not of the best among us.

I'd end up in The Hague, in the cell next to Obama.

So now, is it best to hope that the moral crusaders among us don't seek to run things? That's a more foolish bet than any I've ever taken. But maybe those are the bets you take when you formulate your morality without skin in the game.

And here I am, writing on an average betting day, and by now, near the end of the betting for that day, we will have turned over more than $5 million across five continents. And I note again how difficult it would be for me to manifest rage against an industry that supports all that betting, and the winning that is its likely consequence. So I ask you, Nick, esteemed editor of an esteemed journal, why ask me for an opinion?

The Monthly

The Library of Shadows

Mark Mordue

I have been thinking a lot lately about books that hurt me, about those times in my life when I've been shaken by what I read. How painful and valuable those experiences have been, and also beautiful, which may well be a darker level of appreciation to descend into. How books that mess me up are still probably the most important reading experiences I can have.

This heart of darkness to our literary lives is not much spoken of these days. After all, something ‘negative' isn't just emotionally repelling, or aesthetically and morally questionable – it's bad for marketing.

Of course we also like to think of literature doing us good, improving our minds, even redeeming our souls. But bad books – as in troubling, shadowy, strange and confronting books – can have their place in your life too. Make no mistake about it.

When I think these thoughts an image always comes to me. It is late afternoon and there I am, at the corner of Bourke and Cleveland streets in Sydney's Surry Hills. I am in my mid-thirties and I have just finished Michael Ondaatje's
Coming Through Slaughter
.

The switching on of streetlights and car headlights, the gauzy monoxide air and peak-hour rush is overwhelming. Ondaatje's ‘jazz novel' has left me feeling as if a large plate-glass window has been smashed right in front of me. There is no inside and outside any more. The world is coming in, violent, discordant. This must be what a nervous breakdown is like. And this is how
Coming Through Slaughter
makes me feel: broken to pieces.

The metaphor is a hangover from the novel and a climactic fight scene in which cornet player and sometime barber Buddy Bolden, a prehistoric New Orleans precursor to Louis Arm-strong, begins to go mad.

Bolden precipitates a fight with a customer that sees him pulled through his own barbershop window, out brawling into a stormy street, ‘grey with thick ropes of rain bouncing on the broken glass'. He ends up sitting on a chair that has come through the window with him, a physical and psychic mess, ‘the rain coming into my head'.

But it's not just that this fight scene's furies haven't left me. It's the entire book: its jump-cut prose-poetry and streams of consciousness, its language of riffing and disintegration.

Within a half-hour my senses will right themselves. It will take somewhat longer to end a fragmenting relationship.

Once again a disturbing book has forced me to change direction: I see that to be free I must destroy what I know; but if I destroy it there are no guarantees I will find freedom, let alone happiness.

Yet
Coming Through Slaughter
is inside me now, guiding me as surely as a siren singing. And I am grateful for the trouble it brings.

*

I look at the books on my shelves. For all the artistry and beauty, all the philosophy and poetry, another force takes shape like some plague cloud condensing from their spines.

Coming Through Slaughter
, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's
Crime and Punishment
, Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
, Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
, Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
, Nelson Algren's
Never Come Morning
, Charles Bukowski's
Women
, W.G. Sebald's
The Rings of Saturn
, Cormac McCarthy's
The Road
, Roberto Bolaño's
2666
… on and on, each engaged with its own particular hell, each pulling me in as deep as they can.

One would like to say such books deal in catharsis, but the truth is they plunge us into a shadow land and leave us there to find our own way out again. Years after I read these books, in some cases even decades later, they come alive as if I could still be turning the pages, my fingertips detecting their terrible vitality.

Even the supposedly sweet books, the children's books I grew up with, the ones I really love, suggest something of this dark energy. From then until now my journey has been entirely subjective, of course. But a few glimpses into a biographical reading list may be familiar to many readers, and highlight what I am saying here. In the end, we each have a different library of shadows stored somewhere inside of us.

I could easily have begun with a celebration of the melancholic shafts that so deepened fantasy works such as C.S. Lewis's
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, E.B. White's
Charlotte's Web
and Tove Jansson's
Moominland Midwinter
. Standard primary school texts that serve as initiations into sorrow and death, beautifully framed as they may be. Their correct weight – if that is the measurement we should use for children's stories – favouring magic over loss.

When I was a boy during the 1960s, none brought me further along on that magical journey – yet so strongly back to earth – as Australian author Ivan Southall. In what would come to be defined as young adult novels, Southall dealt with subjects such as a bushfire (
Ash Road
), a plane crash (
To the Wild Sky
) and a fogbound road accident (
Finn's Folly
), adventures where the agency of children, beyond the reach of adults, was his classic theme.

Now recognised as a pioneer of local settings and sensibilities, Southall was excoriated for his unduly heavy subject matter, a predicament that seems a constant for children's writers of any era. For all the grand elemental drama in his work, there was always an intimate core, a sense of children as frightened, mixed-up, isolated survivors in a landscape that was very Australian. It was this physical closeness that made his books so affecting.

‘Real adventure belongs to us,' Southall wrote in his essay collection
A Journey of Discovery: On Writing for Children
. ‘Being ordinary and inept are acceptable qualities, they give meaning to achievement. There must be contrasts within oneself. One must know weakness to know strength. One must be foolish to be wise. One must be scared to be brave. Adventure is simply experience; the mistakes often enough meaning more than the success.'

He knew what he was talking about. Southall was a decorated pilot during World War II. He had also written a non-fiction book for adults called
Softly Tread the Brave
(reissued, re-edited and retitled as
Seventeen Seconds
for teenage readers today), detailing the bravery of bomb defusal experts in England during the Blitz.

Originally subtitled
A Triumph Over Terror, Devilry, and Death by Mine Disposal Officers John Stuart Mould, GC, GM, and Hugh Randal Syme, GC, GM and Bar
, the story focuses on two Australian officers working in London – Mould and Syme – who survived near-suicidal duties. Sure, there was plenty of derring-do, and yes, the heroes of the book made it through alive, but this was rather like Biggles thrust inside
The Hurt Locker
. Officer after officer would be blown apart and killed trying to defuse the bombs before time ran out. I was hooked from an opening description of them as ‘thin men' (thin like me, I felt) who ‘had graves, but no bodies'. I'd continue to learn, chapter after chapter, about death as something sudden, random and answerless.

On the very first page Mould takes an emotion-choked phone call about an explosion that has killed an officer. It ends with angry, grieving words, ‘There ain't no God, I tell ya.' My guess is
Softly Tread the Brave
had been stocked on the basis of Southall's glowing, if gritty, reputation as a local children's author. I doubt my Catholic primary school librarian would have approved of a ten-year-old in thrall to such mortally intense material. But I was ripe for it.

My grandfather had died the year before from cancer, and though both my grandparents had been deeply involved in my upbringing I have only one memory left: him standing smiling in a doorway after a day's work, wearing his railway guard's pants and braces and a singlet.

Actually, there is a second, less pleasant memory. Pa on his deathbed, his skin grey as paper, asking me to kiss him goodbye: I run from the room in tears, and that's it, within seconds he is gone. Now I wonder about my lack of memories, about death as a kind of bomb that blew him out of my life and out of my mind. In reaching back to
Softly Tread the Brave
, my intuition is that despite all the deaths Southall depicted, I took courage in his two military heroes' ability to carry on, and move forward because there was no other move to make. Yes, I loved Southall's children's writing, but I can't guarantee now that
Softly Tread the Brave
is any better than an old war movie. It just affected me, caught me at the right moment. I often feel I owe Southall. That he gave me some kind of urgency.

*

My inclination since then has been to resist overly tidy and positive endings, or any crowd-pleasing concessions to something emotionally ‘up'. If only for a gut feeling it is unbelievable or, worse still, a lie.

In all my reading the only great novel I can recall with a persuasively happy ending is Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird
. No doubt there are other examples, but the whole point of what I am trying to say here is remembering, and therefore being truly marked.

A happy ending, of course, can be the saddest thing of all. Not because it is crudely dishonest or manipulative but because it is permeated by a wish more than a belief. This longing wounds the reader, and perhaps the author too, precisely because it reminds us of the gap between how things tend to be and how persistent our hopes remain.

Some part of
Mockingbird
's appeal resides in that paradoxical aftertaste, though Lee's vision is so true, it reassures us every time we return to Atticus Finch, his daughter Scout, her brother Jem and their friend Dill in ‘Maycomb County', Alabama.

As Lee famously wrote, transforming the southern lawyer Finch into a paragon of fatherhood and racial tolerance, and the child narrator Scout into an equally heroic storyteller along the way – ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … Until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.'

Great books do this every time. Which is why it's not really the nature of endings that concerns me here, though endings do matter, but this larger sense of entering into someone else's consciousness and being changed by that experience.

To Kill a Mockingbird
plays the reader a harmonious tune as love and nobility get the better of prejudice and fear in what we sense is the last great summer of an extraordinary child – and the beginning of an adult writer's life we recognise as that of Lee herself.

The novel is so complete in this way, it is almost a relief Lee never published another book. Until the recent discovery of a manuscript entitled
Go Set a Watchman
. Though written before
To Kill a Mockingbird
, it tells the story of Scout as a mature woman returning to visit her ageing father, Atticus. The looming release of
Go Set a Watchman
is therefore a frightening prospect, primarily for concerns over the quality of the writing and why an ailing Lee never published it before; and, second, for the possibility we may have to witness Scout's adult disenchantment in the wake of her childhood's radiant truths.

Perhaps the most famous conflict between bleak endings and visionary radiance in our recent literature would be McCarthy's concluding passages from
The Road
. Father and son have trudged through a post-apocalyptic landscape of forbidding misery. The book's prayer-like minimalism and intoned pace take us only one way: down.

But when the inevitable comes, McCarthy (unusually, given his bloodthirsty and pessimistic track record as an author) offers us consolation and cryptic, neo-Christian imagery: atavistic memories of trout in a mountain stream and things that ‘hummed with mystery'.

This ending, much argued over for its believability as well as its meaning, seems to suggest we are hard-wired into a primal dreaming that blesses us and unites us with nature. And if nature is all but destroyed, well then our very existence, our blood memory, can be a last stand against that greater destruction. In helping his son survive an apocalypse, the father sustains this sacred accord and thereby hope and beauty may continue. Whether we believe this is a matter of individual faith. I know I wanted to. Deep down I did not.

Such desperately mixed feelings only made me want to love my children better than I ever have, and hold them close indeed. Which may well have been McCarthy's ‘message' to himself, and thereby my painful good fortune during the period in which I read his book. That I should do this while I can; that my children will be the ones who eventually hold me, not with their arms, but with their remembering.

*

J.D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
remains the philosopher's stone for most lost boys' lives. Though some argue it did not transmute lead into gold, as good coming-of-age literature should, but instead polluted the minds of every teenage generation, as it defined – and arguably invented – that state of mind when it was first published in 1951. For the phenomenon of
The Catcher in the Rye
is not simply a matter of continuing sales or critical regard; it's an issue of narrator Holden Caulfield's defining presence as the teenage messiah.

His war on ‘goddamn phoneys', his struggles to resist growing up and all its falsehoods, his puritanical encasement in himself to the point of a nervous breakdown, are well examined. As is the fact the novel has been cited as an inspirational manual by, among others, John Lennon's killer Mark Chapman and Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. Deeply unfortunate associations that only confirm the book's intensity.

I do believe books have an almost occult power in our lives. Never more so than when we are young and open to their influence, even if their meaning is more sophisticated than we can grasp. And I see now that
The Catcher in the Rye
made me want to be a writer. I see now that all the books I have so far mentioned drove me to express myself. All of them spoke to me. All of them had a sound.