lost-at-sea

 

By Warwick McFadyen

I picked six daffodils from the garden this week. They bloomed earlier than usual, which makes their appearance all the more welcome in this midwinter. Their colour is that of the sun. The wind had knocked them around; they were bedraggled and slumped towards the wet earth. To save them I had to cut them free from their roots. Now they stand erect and sunshiney in a vase on the kitchen table. It’s not quite seeing a heaven in a wild flower when I look upon them, but it is a natural, innocent insentient thing from which to draw quiet joy and warmth.

Yes, they will die. But their passing is in nature’s order of things. The cycle of life turns, the seasons, they change.

People, though they die, too, are not so grounded.

There’s winter in the bare-limbed trees and there’s winter in the bones. The chill light has seeped into the marrow. It’s hard to keep warm among these days of bad news on the doorstep, rushing into the inbox; the news is breaking, it’s breaking the heart and the bough. It’s breaking on the fatal shore. It can carry you far out to sea, beyond land, beyond sight of hope.

To what then do you cling? Where do you look for the centre of things – the core that will hold, despite everything. Despite everything human.

Where do the 84 dead of Nice look? Death is nothingness. There is cause and effect writ in blood and steel and then, laughingly, there is effect without cause.

Life is precious to us because we can count the days, and yet here’s the greatest cruellest cosmic joke, life doesn’t believe it to be so. Life doesn’t believe anything. People do, and that’s their tragedy, and their greatness, their pillar of aspirations and dreams, despite everything. Despite everything human.

What did the truck-wielding mass murderer Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel see as he zigged here and then zagged there, on the Promenade des Anglais on the night of Bastille Day? No one will know. For he is now nothingness as well. It’s an equation of death merciless and cold and unfair.

There are dark spaces on the promenade where the flowers have been left to mark the spot where each person, man, woman and child was mown down. To what do people cling as they approach them, as they stand next to a life that is not there and here?

They could cling to the belief that the dead were now in heaven. With their god, they would be blissful eternally, whatever shape they were in. They could believe that to bring them succour. It’s a pass-out from the theatre of misery and despair and incomprehension. It’s the defence against hatred, the ramparts of consolation.

They could cling to the fact that the murderer was dead, too. Thus, he can kill no more. This is, truly, the solace of altruism. It is the end of a small world within one world.

They could believe that whatever the deed, in the end, love would conquer all; that love would win because in love, receiving love, giving love was the ideal state of being. This is the long view. No one lives that long. From Nice to Munich to Paris to Florida to Manhattan to Norway to Port Arthur; from one madman’s war against the world to many madmen’s wars against the world, terror lives not among the extraordinary but among the ordinary. It is the child of hatred.

The great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature 10 years ago, wrote of hatred that “it gives birth itself to the reasons that give it life’’.

See how efficient it still is,

How it keeps itself in shape –

our century’s hatred.

How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.

How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

You could cling to that. But know that poetry changes nothing.

These past weeks have seen commemorations for the centenary of the Battle of Fromelles. The attack was the first large engagement by Australian troops on the Western Front. From the Australian War Memorial account: “When the troops of the 5th Australian and 61st British Divisions attacked at 6 pm on 19 July 1916, they suffered heavily at the hands of German machine-gunners. Small parts of the German trenches were captured by the 8th and 14th Australian Brigades, but, devoid of flanking support and subjected to fierce counter-attacks, they were forced to withdraw. By 8am on 20 July 1916, the battle was over. The 5th Australian Division suffered 5533 casualties, rendering it incapable of offensive action for many months.”

Futility bloomed in half a day. There were so many days like that in the First World War. Fromelles is only about 100 kilometres from the woods of Mametz, where poet Siegfried Sassoon earned a Military Cross for bravery under fire. He later threw it away and publicly denounced his government’s war aims. A generation of young men were sent to their deaths or, if they survived, isolated in a prison of trauma and self-imposed silence.

What chance do the vulnerable have against the powerful? And the powerful do not have to be individuals; it can be a system, a chain of seemingly ordinary links that together shackle and torture a human being. It can be a collective attitude that comes from one voice – “I’ll pulverise the little fucker’’ ­– and is condoned, laughed with, accepted as the norm, as the way things are done round here.

And we as a nation can say:

It’s not me.

It’s not you.

It’s not us.

Australians all let us rejoice.

It’s not me.

It’s not you.

It’s not us.

For we are young and free.

It is an aberration. The bad acts are just the bad apples in the orchard. Perhaps that is true. No, it is true. Otherwise the vista is too terrible to contemplate. Otherwise, the cruelty we impose on others as a government, the pain we inflict on the powerless, the disdain we throw at the less fortunate, the hopelessness we say is a refugee’s future, is really, truly, us.

Then, to what do we cling?

A vase of flowers on a kitchen table, a love among family and friends, a concord of brotherhood. All these are in their closeness and, in their yearning, the heart of things, our mooring.

Warwick McFadyen is an Australian freelance writer and editor

 

 

By Warwick McFadyen

Friedrich Nietzsche once observed that “if you look long enough into the abyss, the abyss will look back into you’’.

This year the abyss came to town. Everything has fallen over the edge. And having settled into this chasm life goes on as if its nature and meaning has not changed. We hardly blink at the altered light of events or the hollowed out gaps where decency and fairness and conscience used to line the political and social world. Labels have become meaning and meaning has become labelled. The pursuit of power and the cementing of ideology thrive within this and, with each day, the abyss grows larger within us. One cannot climb out of it; one can only puncture it. It is both emptiness and empire.

Elections bring it into sharp relief. Then you can see its shape and it makes you want to weep. Welcome to the campaign, Australia, America.

They are campaigns of very different style and substance. Ours is somnambulism at 20 paces, America’s is street fighting.

In Australia, it’s hard to know who is dozing off more: the players or the public. Both Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten exude the vigour of a vanilla slice.

It is apposite, however, that one of the memorable images (an easy choice in a small field) has been that of the blackhole. It may have been mentioned in the context of budget figures, but one can apply it in wider context. These weeks have been one blackhole, one from which no light emerged. And turning physics on its head, just as the arguing did, there will be blackholes within blackholes. The level of debate and leadership also means that physics has been turned on its head in another way, for there has been no sudden explosion of a star to create the blackhole. It has happened gradually and insidiously.

It is the rising of mediocrity, an almost unnoticeable buildup of what is deemed the usual sort of thing, the normal way of travelling, and then one day we open our eyes and see? Blackness. We’re in the hole. Over the abyss. In trouble. And why? Because we do not know what we stand for. No one can argue that we’re compassionate when we consign people to indefinite detention for the ‘crime’ of boarding a boat that they hope will take them to a new life. Asylum? There’s more than one meaning to that word, mate.

As there is to fascism. It’s a word being thrown around left, right and centre, both here and in America. It’s heard on the streets of Coburg, and wherever and whenever Donald Trump speaks. George Orwell, back in 1944, (a year before the death of Benito Mussolini, leader of the Italy’s National Fascist Party) wrote that using the word fascism “is almost entirely meaningless’’.

“In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

“Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.”

Trump has been mentioned many times in relation to fascism. In an interview with Isaac Chotiner in Slate, Robert Paxton, professor emeritus at Columbia University said: “The use of ethnic stereotypes and exploitation of fear of foreigners is directly out of a fascist’s recipe book. ‘Making the country great again’ sounds exactly like the fascist movements. Concern about national decline, that was one of the most prominent emotional states evoked in fascist discourse, and Trump is using that full-blast, quite illegitimately, because the country isn’t in serious decline, but he’s able to persuade them that it is.

“An aggressive foreign policy to arrest the supposed decline. That’s another one. Then, there’s a second level, which is a level of style and technique. He even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out, and also the bluster, the skill at sensing the mood of the crowd, the skilful use of media.”

Trump has blown all his Republican rivals out of the water. Barring a seismic shift at the party convention, he will be running for the White House against Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. If he wins the White House that will be the abyss personified. Trump is no leader of all people of his nation. He is a divide and conquer type of creature. His bluster is the screech of a will to power.

And having evoked the ghost of Nietzsche, I offer this quote. It could have been written for Trump, for this moment, on the edge:

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

German writer Elias Canetti, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote that to exercise power was to threaten death.

Of course, it’s hard, even absurd, to pass a hard-working local candidate at the shopping mall and think the preceding. “Christ I’m not voting for you. If you win, I’m dead.” Or perhaps so.

Follow the leader is a children’s game. We follow the one ahead of us, we mimic his or her actions. If we don’t, we’re out of the game. But life is not a game, is it? And shouldn’t he or she who leads a nation be the best of the best? Should they not have qualities to inspire and improve the lot of fellow countrymen and women. Or else, what is the point? That nothingness you can hear, that’s the silence of the abyss.

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