Shhh
One of our representatives
Shhh
One of our
I’m having trouble understanding
One of our representatives will be with you
Shhh…shhh
I’m sorry I didn’t understand
Apologise for the long wait
Shhh…shhh…shhhortly
One of our
We have many calls
Representatives will
Sorry for the delay
Be with you
Shortly
Soon
Honest
While you’re waiting…
Ahhh shhhutup.
I’m such a bad blogger. My site lacks decoration and lacks connections. I wait until I have something to say before I put up a post, and I hardly ever have anything to say. The world is ordinary after all, and those whose lives are not ordinary deserve our pity rather than our acclaim.
This seems to suggest that I believe one needs to be extraordinary to have a voice, or to make statements, have opinions, play with ideas. That certainly isn’t the case.
Perhaps it is the concept of context that is significant in my dilemma. We all talk, blather, gossip, chatter… and the noise is just social lubrication. Most of what is exchanged as communication is only meaningful in the right context.
Is Thursday a context?
I’m working on a new poem called ‘Fix me’. That’s not the point of this post, it’s just a reminder to myself really.
What I’m really going to write about is encountering conflict. I know I’ve done that before, in a removed sort of way, with the intention of providing something useful for those engaged with the new VCE English course. I’m marking context essays by the pile in my daytime life now, but I can’t really comment on that. I can start thinking about how I will start my students off next year, and one important aspect of this whole context business is that it’s not entirely an abstract, theoretical thing but something we are all involved in on a daily basis.
Take this morning. I was waiting for the 6.32 Saturday morning tram to East Coburg, as one does, when I felt a light blow, which I realised after a moment’s perplexity was connected to the Hungry Jack’s Fanta cup(and I expect payment for this commercial) next to my foot and the red car speeding away with an open window. I was stickily splashed, and felt assaulted in some small way. I may have mouthed an imprecation. It may have been audible.
Then my tram came, in time the splashes dried, although my jacket probably needs dry-cleaning, and the incident was over.
Except.
It occurs to me that if I make this something useful for 2009, and if I avoid feeling angry, I win. That’s misleading. I felt angry briefly, and had the normal impulses. it occurred to me that breakinbg a headlight or two on that red car might be pleasant – but if I had the opportunity I know I wouldn’t have done it. I wondered briefly about motive behind the assault, but couldn’t be bothered thinking about it for too long. Rather, it occurred to me that in such situations, if you do get angry or upset, the incident lingers with you. If you let it go, the power is yours. You can control your own reactions, and you have not been sucked in to a negative mindset, you have not been reduced to the level of a combatant in a conflict you don’t begin to understand. If you see that as winning, you have accepted it as a contest, and that is equally a trap to be avoided..
There is nothing I can do about the fact that some idiot, apparently not a very thirsty idiot, threw a half full container of drink at me. But there is a lot I can do about the way I feel about it and think about it.
I noticed a long time ago that writing about things that were hurtful was very positive because if you can produce a piece of writing with which you are pleased the hurt is diluted, if not eliminated. We do have a personal power, we always have a personal power.
I hope the idiot got indigestion from his Hungry Jacks, but I don’t care very much, because it wasn’t an important incident. As much as anything, what we might aim to gather from ‘this living’, as the great Dorothy Parker terms it, is a sense of what matters, and often that requires us to rise above our immediate impulses. It might not be easy, but there is a degree of satisfaction waiting for those who can manage the trick.
But that’s all a bit preachy. I’ll try to finish off the poem soon.
Sunday after Saturday. We live by the predictable. Monday – back to work, Thursday afternoon – radio show, 7pm – watch the news. These patterns are useful in at least two ways: they generate a sense of stability, and they offer a safe frisson when they are broken now and again. How can you have the thrill of breaking with routine, after all, if you don’t have a routine?
There are some routines that are better than others, and those I have just described are positive because they reflect choice. If they are broken, by and large it is because I want to break them. I have control of my life. And that is, paradoxically, both true and illusory at the same time. In our efforts as a species to bring our world under control, to ensure predictability or worse, eradicate uncertainty, we mess with forces that can be menacing in the extreme. Nature is not essentially predictable, at least not in the fine day to day detail. If we never want to be uncomfortably hot or cold, if we always want too be in charge, we must defy the way the world wants to work and we ignore the fact that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Hopefully, our lives do not need to be ‘nasty, brutish and short’ as Hobbes suggested, but if we think we can have all we want, immediately, without cost, we are sadly and dangerously deluded.
I am a man on a plain
Hip-deep in grass I can’t eat -
Perfect fodder for the beasts I must
Fear
And steer
Clear of…
Oh, I am cleverer than they are
By far.
I could count their legs five times over
Before any of them could decide which would
drive me into the ground first
And if the chance to debate the principles of non-violence ever arose
They’d be crushed by my logic,
Baffled by my wit,
My control of language.
But I find no consolation in such advantages
Stuck here
In the middle of a plain
Clearly not designed for a creature like me.
Many people have played with the saying that ignorance is bliss. That’s one reason I’m not going to. Another is because I’m more inclined to the view that now there is simply too much information available for the concept to even make much sense, given that it implies the possibility of some sort of meaningful knowledge. In fact, ignorance is a natural and unavoidable state.
More later.
Conflict is often referred to as if it were a self-contained entity – a single thing, existing on its own, something that we might encounter, if you like. There is conflict in the Middle East, in Zimbabwe, within the Liberal party. It might leap out us from the woods, or in the middle of a sporting contest – we could be led to believe.
But such an image is misleading. Conflict does not exist on its own – there must be at least two opposing forces, or impulses, or interests, or desires, or…whatever, conflict is between things. It could be two people or bodies wanting the same thing, or one person wanting two mutually exclusive things, but it does not exist in isolation. Conflict is a term used to describe a situation when not everyone, or perhaps not anyone, can be satisfied.
Given the human condition and human nature, it is perhaps surprising that there is so little conflict, or at least that it is so seldom expressed overtly. I could suggest this is because of a conflict (ironically) between the desire or need to exist socially and the impossibility of infinite, ubiquitous, compatibility between interests and needs.
In truth, we go to great lengths to avoid conflict. Consider the infamous Neville Chamberlain declaration that he had negotiated ‘peace in our time’ with Adolph Hitler. Living in society necessitates compromise, the recognition that the rights of others cannot be dismissed lightly. It is interesting to look at ‘The Secret River’ in this regard. Despite the inequity in the British society that Will and Sal spring from, despite the gross inequity that creates a downtrodden underclass for whom it is a truth a family cannot live on a wage , an underclass that must choose between legal starvation or illegally scraping by, there is no revolution nor any thought of revolution. Rather, those for whom it is a benison that, once caught, they have friends who can pay the hangman to make a clean job of their end, thank the lords that intercede to grant them a suffering that Will at least reflects, could well be ‘worse than death.’ We might wonder, then, when considering this Context, what conditions break down this impulse to co-exist.
In ‘The Secret River’, again, we see that those poor off-casts from society aspire not to the creation of a more just and equitable system, but a replication of that which they were spurned by, with themselves in the positions of power. If their suppression of those they must see as ‘insects’ is violent, perhaps that is because it requires an explosive force to move us beyond civilised behaviour, to do that which is normally unacceptable. How can one reconcile murder with being an upstanding leader of a new world? The propaganda and demonization we see of the enemy in times of war fits this theory. When we actually accept the need for conflict, we move beyond our social impulses. We say what should not be said, we do what should not be done. We step outside the ordinary boundaries of restraint. It should not be surprising that the narrower the boundaries are, the tighter the restrictions, the greater the pressure that can build up – as we see in The Crucible.
When we encounter conflict therefore, we may well be confronting an unpalatable truth about ourselves and humankind. This can be liberating and upsetting simultaneously – not unlike vomiting perhaps!
Encountering Conflict
1. Conflict tests us in some way, by which I mean that it demands something of us. There are some revelations about who we are, and also about what life can be. That can shake you – it is perhaps synonymous with emerging from innocence.
What is the nature of conflict? When we look at conflicts such as wars, whether they are international or civil, full-scale long-term simmering struggles such as those between Palestine and Israel or the unrest in Fiji or Irian Jaya, it is hard to categorise them efficiently. One way might be to draw a distinction between those struggles that erupt between groups, those between individuals, and those within individuals.
Between ideologies, between countries – such clashes still involve people, and the people must have some reason for being involved; perhaps, for example, it is simply because they identify with a group, or because some ideal matters to them, or they feel their personal morality is involved, or they feel they (or those they care about) are threatened, or they have something to gain. There is, therefore, a degree to which all these conflicts come back to the individual.
There might be some interesting elements in this if we take the war dealt with in The Line. If we found it hard to discover or say much about the war, that’s hardly surprising. It’s not a war book in the way that All Quiet at the Western Front and Generals Die in Bed are. Either of those would make an interesting contrast if you’re looking for a leisure read. The Line deals more with the impact on prisoners. There is surprisingly little detail or graphic description of the ‘bashing’, nor the paucity of food. Disease and physical deprivation emerge as big issues. Clearly there is a disregard for the prisoners by most Japanese guards, but the great struggles seem to be internal. It is about how they cope, how they endure. Something to hope for seems important – and so leaders emerge as significant. Personal qualities emerge as important – leaders, those who will sacrifice for others, and who are humble (such as Ray Parkin who thought he was the barnacle on the bottom of the battleship, while others thought he was the battleship) are admired. But they are not unscarred.
The scarring may be something you learn about yourself and have to live with, it may be a compromise of your morality that makes it hard to live with yourself, or it may just be an awareness of the darkness life can offer up – imagine being through the Port Arthur shootings, or the Columbine shootings. How could you be the same, ever? How could you shake the kind of fear that Martin saw in Arch’s eyes when he took him by surprise in the yard? Look Both Ways enters the same territory. Draw on that for ideas if you wish – the world is full of them. Anything that gives you a manageable frame of reference is good.
In passing, the opposite is harmony, which requires everyone to be able to get along. Surely, as an eternal condition this is hard to imagine. Surely, there will be some occasions when we are irritated, jealous, or hurt by someone else’s insensitivity or ignorance or simple unawareness of how we are feeling. There must be times that if we get what we want (or even need) the desires and comforts of others will be compromised. John Donne famously wrote “ no man is an island”, and in the sense he meant, that we are all touched by the fate of others, this is supportable – but in another way we are all foreign countries to each other. Martin Flanagan writes that it is impossible to understand what the prisoners on the line went through if you weren’t there. To a significant extent, we can none of us really get into another’s skin and really know what it is like to be them – and so, if we mix with others for log enough, we will clash. And if we don’t, we’ll probably worry about being loners, even “loner[s] who [like] people”.
How you deal with conflict, then, becomes the big issue, and this can be linked to personal qualities, to past experiences and learned responses.
It is different if you have the power or not. If you are a victim, oppressed, then all you can do is work within yourself – to refuse to be false to yourself. That then is the victory. Does there need to be victories? Can there be draws? If you have the power, the challenge can be even greater, if you are evolved morally. The more morally sophisticated you are, the more complicated things can be. In essence, one way of looking could be to say there is a difference between those conflicts which make you aware of an ugly side of life, that destroy your innocence. The challenge can then be to go on, to find a positive direction to head in – perhaps like a family to protect from what you have seen or been through, or a cause to ensure fewer people suffer as you do – consider Walter Micak, originator of the Lana and Madeline Foundation. There are others that leave you physically or financially or otherwise reduced. Then, the challenge is still to continue – to persist in the face of adversity. There are those that see you contravene your values, that change your sense of self, or your ability to rest comfortably with yourself. There might be the challenge of decency in triumph. There might be the triumph of finding more in yourself than you thought existed. All of these are internal in some way. In the end, the consequences of conflict for individuals contain some element of the personal and must be dealt with on personal levels.
Mugabe v Gandhi
Behind the hut stand cherry trees
Half-picked and pulled around;
Before the hut the children dance -
They leap, they twirl, they bound
In fairy play, toes pointed straight:
Faint puffs of dust seem twice their weight.
Spotlighted in the window’s glow
A singer guides their moves;
His slide guitar embraces them -
He nods and smiles, approves
Of their absorption in the scene:
Not all of life is scant and mean.
(First published in ‘Dragonflies and Edges’, by Seaview Press)
Hypertension and cholesterol
Do-nuts by the dozen,
Roast pork and a plate of crackling
Killed my second cousin.
Dieting and exercise
The leanest of lean cuts,
His sister learned from his mistakes
Until it drove her nuts.
