Robert William Harewood.

Who knows what the heart hides?

Do we? Can we?

Can we ever truly see what those we love are seeing?

               ..what worlds they walk through?

               ..what fires and demons stalk them?

Can we ever understand the darkness they may be sinking in?

We long to believe that love can be enough 

              .. that our words and songs and laughter can be enough – a light for them to latch on to.

The truth is 

               .. they aren’t – always. Sometimes the darkness is too deep.

We don’t see it

               ..can’t know it.

I’ve lingered only once and briefly in the shallows of that frightening sea, 

..feeling the currents dragging at me, 

..feeling myself being pulled by the ebbing tide.

I was lucky and found a straw to cling to.

Others are not..

               ..Robert was not.

What I can remember of him .. his smile .. his laughter .. his love of life – his motorbike…

It’s years since I saw or heard of or from him – we were close once, but not for long – not for long enough..

              .. but I never dreamed he would be lost like this.

It shatters me in ways I have no language for.

There’s a hole in the world now .. an emptiness .. a once-was ..

.. broken now. A light has gone out.

Broken.

It’s all about me ….

I’m tutoring for a course right now that is both revealing and disturbing; it’s about developing a PLN [Personal Learning Network] and how to use same for learning more about making yourself saleable.

What I am coming to realise is that I am not all that sure I want to be sold.

I have read that a person who thinks that a sex-worker sells their body while a coal-miner does not is allowing their restrictive view of morality to cloud their understanding of the marketing of labour. But is that not true of any employee? Are we not, all of us, ultimately selling ourselves? And if so, what is the difference between selling my body and knowledge of language to teach others and (for example) Aaron Aurora selling his body and knowledge of sexual pleasure to fulfil other peoples’ sexual fantasies? Are we not both exploiting ourselves for financial gain?

At least I know that Aaron Aurora was not undervalued, whereas I am certain that I am. I spent 10 years and $50,000.00 earning myself a PhD in Education only to have my qualifications and years of experience totally disregarded by the employers I have encountered so far. I am starting to understand that many – if not most – employers really only want warm bodies to fill spaces so that they can continue to sell their products, regardless of the fact that, in may cases, those products are worth far less than what the customers actually pay for them. All of us are ultimately retail workers.

Am I wrong to want to move beyond that paradigm? Is it even possible to do so in a market economy? I can tell straight up that Supply-side Capitalism has failed spectacularly to provide any benefit for all but a tiny minority of the Human race; it inevitably defaults to the lowest common denominator of whatever crappy product some wheeler-dealer wants to offload. Look at the people it has elevated; Bezos is nothing more than a glorified shopkeeper who produces nothing whatsoever, but simply moves other people’s products from point A to point B; Murdoch peddles misinformation and uses his power to sway public opinion for no other purpose than to amass enormous wealth for himself and to attack the people he doesn’t like; Zuckerberg is little more than a clever school-boy making money out of people wanting to talk to each other and manipulating what they get to see and hear to his own benefit.

THESE are the people to whom we have given our power.

The situation is so glaringly – so obviously – wrong and stupid that it astonishes me to see the majority of people simply accepting it without question. It’s as if we are all too tired, too busy, or simply too disinterested to bother doing anything about it. I include myself in that assessment, since – even though I am fully aware of the situation – I lack the resources and to a large extent the will to actually take any action.

It’s sad and tragic. I wonder what it will take to get people off their arses and out in the streets (or where-ever is the 21st Century, post-Covid alternative) protesting about this. Will it even make any difference if we do? Any suggestions welcome.

Purpose … and why.

Today I woke up to what I really want to do, and frankly I am surprised it has taken this long. I have struggled for years to figure out exactly what brings me satisfaction in my work; I have been an artist and an academic and for both careers there were times when I felt fully satisfied with what I was doing; but those times eventually ended and resulted in feelings of dissatisfaction – as if I was just going through the motions.

I thought it was me; that I had somehow “lost the spark”. I worked harder and pushed myself and took risks in attempts to reboot my career; to ‘value-add’ myself so that those I thought I needed would find me valuable enough to employ. It always failed and I always thought it was some fault in myself. But I have realised now that – in an actor’s parlance – I was playing to a soggy-Saturday audience; the matinee brigade of self-satisfied people who lean back in their comfortable chairs with their arms folded and wait to be ‘entertained’.

The truth is I was only ever satisfied with my work when it was dedicated to helping others less advantaged than myself – either by supporting them directly or showing their plight to others – not when it was serving to amuse or satisfy those who already had enough, but wanted more: –
… trivial shows and plays to divert the bored and boring, rather than cutting-edge theatre which challenged the mores and perceptions of the audiences who came.
… tired and trite lessons in English for those who could afford them, offering nothing but shallow and meaningless ‘conversational’ skills useful only for shopping trips in tourist destinations, without the deeper cultural understanding needed to really use the language or appreciate the culture from which it arises.

I know now why I have felt so trapped and blocked, and it is not because my knowledge and experience and skills and qualifications are lacking; it is because I have been offering them to those who either cannot or will not appreciate them – those who already have plenty but are still not satisfied. As Cary Grant said in Philadelphia Story: “Not too much, you understand, just more than enough!”

I want my knowledge to help those who need help to gain what I was lucky enough to be born into; a place in the world they can value and where they can be valued. There are so many fine minds that lack the opportunities to do what they could do and perhaps save us all. Often all it takes is one person telling them that they can and helping them learn the skills they need to do so, and I think I can do that. I certainly want to try.

I want to find a place – a life – where I can genuinely be of service to others and help them to reach greater heights than I can achieve. I want to be part of the ladder they climb to their own success, instead of selling my skills to people who believe them to essentially worthless; frivolous people with money and no sense.

I am breaking the mold in which I was cast and in which I chose for so long to remain. The truth is I never sought fame or fortune (though to be honest, a small fortune would help); what I sought was to use my skills to change people’s lives – their ways of perceiving and understanding the world; to give them windows into other ways of thinking and being. As an artist I helped to open those windows. But learning a language does more than open a window into another culture; it opens a doorway.

I want to be someone who helps people open and walk through those doors.

Life in a time of plague.

Lock-down; isolation; social distancing; work-from-home. As one wit said – these days telling someone “get the fuck away from me” is a socially responsible act!

And now the witless wonder in the White House is talking about opening up the US again, even though the cases there are still climbing; apparently his re-election is more important than American lives.

There are valuable lessons to be learned here. If nothing else, this pandemic has shown us how fragile the economies and political systems of the so-called “Developed World” really are; as Robert Reich says – if billion-dollar Multi-national companies cannot go a week without a Government bailout, they are NOT economically strong, and neither are the economies they underpin.

At the moment, I am wondering what I will be doing post-Covid. My skills are hardly ‘essential’ at this point, though teaching may see me through. Who knows; everything is still up in the air, and there is no telling what, if anything, will fall back to Earth and in what condition it will be when it does.

Easter … again

Well … Easter has rolled around again and – as we do every year – we have Christians rabbiting on about how “the evidence supports the reality of the Resurrection“, when it so clearly does exactly the opposite. They never seem to consider the time and place in which the Crucifixion and Resurrection are said to have happened. Some of the events are said to have been:

Large and very vocal crowds gathering to meet Jesus as he entered Jerusalem, so much so that “the whole city was stirred” by them (Luke 19:37-38; Matthew 21: 8-11)

An earthquake during which the screen in the Great Temple collapsed (Matthew 27:51)

Tombs splitting open and the dead walking (Matthew 27:52-520)

Another earthquake (Matthew 28:2)

500 people actually seeing the risen Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:6)

At the time these things are said to have happened, Jerusalem was the centre of political, military, economic, religious, and social life for the region. It was a wealthy and powerful city, with palaces and citadels, schools, a theatre, a hippodrome, bridges, properly constructed water supplies, and an estimated population of 40,000 to 55,000 – which may have been as high as 180,000 during a Festival such as Passover. It was full of scholars, scribes, priests, military and municipal authorities, and the wealthy elite; the cream of Palestinian society.

Yet we are supposed to believe that not one of these educated and erudite people witnessed:

a) the “very large crowd” that welcomed Jesus into the city

b) the first earthquake and collapse of the Temple Screen;

c) the dead wandering around the city;

d) the second earthquake;

.. or that if they did witness it, they didn’t bother to mention it at all in any of their personal or official writings. Moreover not one of the 500 supposed to have seen the risen Christ bothered to record the event either.

What happened? Were they all at lunch?

The idea that so many people simply chose to ignore all these things happening around them, or conversely that some of them did record the events but all those texts have somehow disappeared over the centuries, when evidence of what people ate and drank and the clothes they wore have managed to survive is simply beyond absurd.

The only rational, common sense inference that can come from all of this is that the events simply never happened – not as recorded in the Bible. There may have been a last supper for Jesus and his followers and even a crucifixion. But unless we are to believe that literally tens of thousands of people chose to ignore or deliberately hide the events described for reasons known only to themselves, we can only conclude that the Crucifixion and Resurrection as described in the Gospels are entirely mythological.

I am not bound … ruminations on predictions.

I am not bound by futures yet unwritten; predictions made by faceless people do not and will not confine me to paths I do not choose to tread; decisions by those who have taken or been gifted power restrain my steps only insofar as I allow them to; the dictates of my body cannot be denied, but even they contain me only to the extent that some things are no longer part of my physical being – along with many that have never been so.

My mind is now and always has been free – it is only the recognition of this that has been lacking. The definitions of ourselves that we allow others – and the Other – to impose upon us are illusions; in truth we are confined by no one but ourselves, but it takes wisdom and courage to acknowledge that. Time and age and lived experiences confer neither with inevitability, but they can make them easier to find. We should turn towards our joys and sorrows – not away from them. Those of us with graying hair and sagging skins have earned our wrinkles; we should celebrate them.

Kintsuki – golden joinery. The pottery shatters and is repaired again and again, becoming with each repeat of the process, more beautiful – more meaningful – more capable of teaching healing to those as yet unhealed. Every line of breakage is a story to be told and retold, gaining strength and depth with every iteration. We carry our scars with us and they can be either a burden of sorrow that diminishes or a narrative of survival and triumph that uplifts – ourselves and those around us. The choice – ultimately – is our own.

Our futures are ours to make. There are limits, of course; but then there always have been. Many – perhaps most – are more apparent than real; many are more the result of what we think we cannot or should not or must not do than of any genuinely existent boundaries. In truth, most of them exist only to be challenged. Within the confines of physical possibility lies a near infinity of possible worlds; I – we – should live to seek them out.

Ignition

Betrayal.

I feel betrayed.

I spent six years of my life – and at this end, I don’t have that many years to waste – earning my PhD. I loved it. I loved doing it (most of the time). I loved learning and I loved teaching – and the two always, always work in tandem; you can’t teach without learning, and when you learn you teach at the same time. It’s inevitable.

When I first came to Monash, I was uncertain of myself and of the institution. I had spent four years at La Trobe, and would have stayed there but for the fact that the culture was changing; degenerating thanks to the attitude of the Vice Provost, who seemed to hate anything to do with the Humanities – or rather, he considered them irrelevant.

However, I soon came to see that Monash had a richer and more diverse culture than I had suspected. I found myself being brought into projects, often helping to initiate them, in a wide range of educational fields. I was given opportunities to learn and teach in ways and with people I would never have envisioned working with before, and suggestions were made about future opportunities that were truly exciting. None came to fruition, but there were other compensations; other paths opened up during my studies that implied that I had a solid future there devoted to teaching, learning, and discovering.

I fell in love with it; I believed that, after two decades of wandering in the wilderness, I had finally found a place where I was both valued and productive, and where I could continue to contribute and to learn.

That’s why the eventual betrayal stung and still does sting so very badly.

I was told when I first asked about undertaking a PhD that I would “walk into a job” at the end of it since there were so few PhDs in Education. I never believed that; I realised that I would have to prove myself and work from the bottom up, just as one does in any new profession.

What I didn’t realise – what I never dreamed would happen – is that I would be ejected completely from the University literally on the day my studies finished.

I had devised and run classes, workshops, workshop series, and curricula for various sections of the Faculty of Education. In particular I had been part of the foundational group for the English Connect program that is now running so successfully. I helped to develop the original series of workshops and laboured whenever asked on the upgrades. It was a particular pain to watch one after another of my peers in that program – some that I had trained – elevated to more significant jobs while I was left in the casual role of facilitating workshops; but I thought if nothing else, the experience would do me good in the future and that I might even be offered a more substantial role after my studies were complete.

Needless to say, I was disappointed.

After my studies finished at the end of 2017, I sought to find a way to continue my work at Monash. I applied for any job within my range of skills. None were offered to me; even the role of LSA was denied to me. I couldn’t access the ECR program; sessional work was non-existent, at least in the Faculty of Education; my emails to people I had assumed up until then were my colleagues, along with most of my job applications, went unanswered; even the student employment program proved to be designed primarily for people completing a first degree – post-graduates need not apply. It took a long time to sink in, but eventually I realised that I had been summarily kicked out the back door without so much as a backward glance and that Monash University had simply washed its hands of me.

It broke my heart.

I clung on for a while, hoping against hope that somehow, someone would realise that I had much to contribute and that I could still be of use. But the door stayed firmly and implacably closed. Some tried to help, offering piece-meal work where they could, but it was not enough. Eventually, after struggling to survive on the unemployment benefit and a seemingly endless series of job rejections, I realised that I had been utterly abandoned and would have to effectively hit the reset button. I abandoned any hope of getting a teaching position, re-wrote my CV leaving out most of my qualifications, and landed a job as a part-time clerical worker in a hospital; ironically, the same job I had been doing before I began my studies. Ten years of my life wasted on qualifications that even the University who conferred them on me saw no value in whatsoever!

Not long after I got the hospital job, I applied to teach English in Japan and was accepted almost immediately. It’s not an academic position – not even close. But at least I get to teach, and there might be opportunities here that will forever be denied me in Australia. Japan is a country that genuinely values education.

I’m still connected to several groups at Monash online, but I am going to severe those connections now that I am living and working in Japan. Even if I return, there will be no point in trying to get work there; the only thing I could do would be to enroll in another course and I am too old for that now. No doubt, Monash would be effusive in its welcome, as long as I was bringing money in with me. But I already know the end of that story; eventually, I would be jettisoned again – a useless old man without anything to offer. I know I’m not, but Monash doesn’t seem to realise it.

It’s time to cut the ties. It’s time to burn the bridges.

Smoke

Smoke; others – every ‘Other’ – are like smoke to me now. They drift in and they drift away; they are here and then they are not. Insubstantial; ethereal; twisting and turning in the tides of their lives without seeing that they themselves are the tides; without understanding that with every twist and turn they are forming the tides.

They are so precious, these flickering candles; so fragile and temporal and the same time so beautiful; my breath catches when I see them – when I see their eyes. They have no idea, most of them, how essential they are; how every act, every breath, every thought touches the world around them out to the farthest reaches of the Universe and beyond it.

They serve Gods which say to them “you matter as long as you worship me”, without ever realising that those Gods would not exist without them. They are blind to their own power – their own importance – their own essence – the essence of existence itself; for there is nothing without them – they are no mere cogs in a machine – no ‘mere mortals; mere flesh’; they are themselves the soul and body of the Universe and not just connected to it; intimately one with it. There is nothing they do not touch – nothing that does not touch them. But they cannot see it; their sense of their own smallness – carefully cultivated – blinds them to it.

I understand what Gods are now; I know where they come from, where they abide, and where they go when they die. I know what ghosts are; I know what spirits are; I know why they exist and what they arise from.

I see the whole Universe – everything that was, everything that is, everything that will be – even everything that could be. All of time has opened to me like a flower blooming and it is sad and sweet and tragic and wonderful; all of humanity and everything beyond it is connected – enmeshed – entangled within and through. The stars are not ‘out there’ any more; they are in here; ‘in’ me. And I am ‘in’ them; ‘in’ everything. No barriers.

The veil has dropped; there are no secrets any more.

Goodbye to All That

Dear mother.

I’ve waited for a very long time to write this letter. I’ve been trying to find ways to express my feelings without hurting yours. Sadly, I don’t think that’s possible.

I know what my brother did when he called you up was deeply upsetting to you, and I even understand why. But the most glaringly obvious reason it upset you was because most of what he said was true, even if he didn’t use the right words to express himself; let’s face it, subtlety has never been his strong point.

The fact is … you were not a good mother. Oh I know you did your best – you did what you thought you should do. But most if not all of your mothering of us was done for yourself – not for us.

You wanted a large family, so you made one. You had us to fulfill a long-held need within yourself, but I do not believe that at any stage did you ever really want us for ourselves – you wanted us for you. You kept us well-and-truly tied to your apron strings, and curbed with every form of persuasion available to you even the slightest hint of independence on our part. It has taken me decades to understand what you did to us, and the disastrous effects it has had on our lives.

Why do you think that none of us have ever realised our full potential? Why do you think that all of your children are so glaringly unsuccessful at living? You kept us so tightly restrained – so desperate to attain and keep your approval – that none of us dared to take the risks that all people need to really fulfill their lives. Nothing in our childhoods prepared us for life in the real world – everything was geared solely to you keeping us with you – keeping us from ever developing the courage and the skills to leave you. You did us a terrible dis-service in your desperation to keep us clinging to your skirts – and all because you didn’t want to be alone – as if that would ever happen.

I see in my own children – raised without your desperate need to control every aspect of their lives – what we might have become if you had actually loved us enough to set us free. And the worst thing is that you did all this so gently – so softly. Our prison was built of feather pillows – though it was a prison, none-the-less. You rarely scolded – you never hit – you never yelled – you just killed our spirit with the threat of disappointing you by making you “sad”; the threat of your oh-so-gentle disapproval. Yours was a steel fist thickly swathed in velvet.

And I’m sure you didn’t even really know you were doing it, did you? You probably thought and still think that you were “a good mother”, and that we should be “grateful” for being born. Well – I hate to tell you this, but I don’t remember being asked if I wanted to be born, so why on Earth should I be “grateful”? I am happy that I was born into a family that was comfortably off enough for me to have a reasonable upbringing, and in a country in the First World, with all the advantages that bestows. I am happy that I was born into a healthy body, and that you and Dad were in a position to keep me that way throughout my childhood. There are many aspects of my life that I am grateful for, and some of them include what you and Dad did for me.

But being born is not one of them – that was nothing more than a happy accident. And there are many things that happened after that that I have no reason to be grateful for.

One thing having my own children has taught me is just how much bullshit that attitude of expecting one’s children to be “grateful” for being born is. In fact it’s entirely the other way around – I am grateful to them – grateful for having two such amazing young people in my life and grateful that I had the opportunity to be a father to them. I am grateful every day for that. I do NOT expect them to be grateful to me.

The destructive emotional manipulation to which you subjected us was not the act of a good mother – it was the act of a frightened and desperate woman so mired in her own loneliness that she would do anything to alleviate it. And it even extended to our family friends. I often wondered why so many of them drifted away over time – now I know. They saw you for what you really are, and even though they genuinely loved you, they knew – as I do now – that staying in your sphere of influence was ultimately not for their own good.

You weren’t a terrible mother – you just weren’t good one – not in the way we needed you to be.

I forgave Dad for never being the father I needed him to be in part because I recognised that he was damaged, not only by his upbringing, but by his relationship with you – in marrying you, he simply moved from one intensely controlling woman (his mother) to another. I am very glad that, at least with my own children, that destructive pattern has been broken.

I’m not sure if I can ultimately forgive you for the damage you caused us. Dad couldn’t really help himself, but your manipulation of us was at least partially conscious – you knew what you were doing on some level. I will try to heal all this before you die, as I think it is important to do so. My success in Academia has at least helped in some way, as it is a success that I can attribute solely to my own efforts – you had nothing to do with it.

But to really heal I would have to find a way to actually love you despite the damage you have caused, and I’m not sure I can ever completely do that – mostly because I don’t think you ever fully loved us, despite your protestations to the contrary. Yours was a love that was and remains deeply conditional – I’m not sure that is something I can forgive. Time will tell, I guess.

So that’s it. Don’t think that I will offer gratitude at your funeral, because I do not think you warrant it. Do not think that I will offer words of love and devotion, because in simply expecting them from us – and trying to manipulate them out of us – you gave up your right to receive either. I did not speak at Dad’s funeral because I did not feel I could. I will probably not speak at your funeral because there will be nothing I want to say that others will want to hear.

All I will say for now is ….. goodbye to all that.

CW

 

We

We: a message to the fearful.

 

We – LGBTIQ+ men and women – were here when humanity still lived in caves.

 

We were here when the first human settlements developed in the hills of what is now Ethiopia.

 

Remains of homosexual couples buried as ‘man and wife’ have been found in Neolithic grave sites dating back over 5,000 years.

 

We are known to have existed and been accepted and even honoured in every ancient culture on Earth, including the longest surviving culture; the 60,000+ year-old culture of the Australian Aboriginal peoples.

 

We have outlasted the Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Roman, and Ottoman Empires.

 

We have withstood the European “Dark Ages.”

 

We have outlived the Spanish Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation, and the witch-burnings of Europe, where we were thrown on the fires as “faggots.”

 

We have prevailed over the death camps of the Nazis, the pogroms of Stalin, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields of Cambodia.

 

We have persevered through the discrimination of the 20th century, when we were branded as mentally ill, subjected to electroshock therapy, and chemical castration.

 

We have survived the AIDs pandemic.

 

We will survive your religions’ childish, fear-driven prejudices.

 

Your religions are not part of the natural order. Tens of thousands of others have come, flourished for a few centuries or millennia, and then been utterly forgotten.

 

As will yours.

 

We were here at the very dawn of humanity’s existence and we will still be here long after Christianity, Islam, and every other religion are nothing more than forgotten entries in abandoned history books; long after the names of your prophets and your gods have become overlooked relics of a barbarous age; long after your holy texts have rotted into dust in the derelict remains of your mosques and churches and temples.

 

We were here at the beginning and we are still here, despite your best efforts to destroy us. You will never prevail over us because it is not possible to do so.

 

WE are part of the natural order. WE will endure.