Shellharbour Beach.
"The youth movement here must aspire to a martyrdom death. The young must be first at the front line - don't hide at the back. You must be at the front, die as martyrs and all your sins will be forgiven. This is how to achieve forgiveness.
If there are infidels here, then beat them up. Do not tolerate them.
God willing there are none here.
Worms, snakes, maggots - those are animals that crawl. Take a look at Bali ... those infidel tourists. They are naked."
Abu Bashir
All is lost, not just in this world but in the parallel worlds, the worlds where he had been an even greater failure than in this one. His death in Belmore Park had been a long time coming, the final resting place of the city's alcoholics. The stale sweat that had enveloped him for so long; the evening tortures, the experiments in writing that had so abjectly failed, the brief moments of social glory, when he danced till dawn and all was fab-u-lous, there was no one left who remembered those days, not even someone who had caught sight of him in the distance.
His entire generation had passed away; leaving him not just a shag on a rock but a lonely spirit full of infinite sorrow, a figure of ridicule, a seat soaked infidel who had abandoned God. His spirit was broken. His arms flapped in disconnected movements, like broken bat wings, and his weepy eyes bled puss and tears. There just wasn't any way back to a normal life from here, try as he might. There wasn't a way to join the laughter, to connect. He couldn't have been more dislocated, more abandoned, but despite all that he couldn't get rid of the infinite longing. Was it this that made him human?
There were so many other stories; in the high rise apartments, on the streets. He hadn't become this gloom laden by accident. He hadn't just become forlorn at a moment's notice. It was a slow accretion of despair, emphasised by failure, that had eroded every last hope he ever had. That was why they had urged him to pray as the only solution. God would fill his veins and warm his heart, they promised. And he did not believe, was too clever to believe. They are your only salvation, he is our only salvation, he can make you whole, a voice said. And he didn't want to admit he had been wrong all this time, he didn't want to enter the mass delusion that kept everyone else so happy, their perky little faces, their slim bodies in their flash cars.
Once he reached the conclusion that there was no one there, that he had to be contained, that he was a hopeless human being, he built a little tent like arrangement on his own couch in his own living room, and then refused to move. Except for the calls of nature, he just stayed there. He didn't answer the phone. He didn't acknowledge the children. He hopelessly said: this is it, I'm not going anywhere. The world is a dangerous place. I am a dangerous place. There is no way out from this abyss and you know what, I don't care anymore.
This aching loneliness might have been deleted by a partner, a long time back. But those opportunities were gone. He had fluffed the chances that he had, and now the future held nothing but his own echo chamber, his already faded flesh. Dank, rotting, he had gone through the motions, he had pretended to be normal. None of it had worked. The days still rolled by. His infinite heartache still ballooned inside him. The forlorn melancholy that had become his default position would not lift.
Don't ever let me catch you thinking like that again, a voice said. You should be grateful for your life. You can do so many things. A lot of people are a lot worse off than you. He smiled weakly. All around him the youth frolicked. He said: you're welcome, but he didn't mean it. He meant to plumb his own despair because that was all he had known for years; because that was the familiar state. he had become accustomed to living in his monochromatic world, where the most vigorous emotion was melancholy, where the predominant colour was a leaden, occasionally opaque grey.
And it was here, if he had to find a way forward, that he had been sentenced to search. Glimmers of hope were all he could hope for. There would be no end to the isolation; that was not in his destiny. His limited capacity for friendship had been betrayed by death. Old mates gone, long gone. He thought he heard them crying, out in the ether, but no one cared enough to send a message. They had always assumed he would be fine; that he and his jolly nickname were alright, an easy going fellow.
That wasn't the way it was, not by a long shot. His own pit, physical and spiritual, had become so etched that stepping outside the frame had become almost impossible. The natural, cheerful optimism he had been born with bounced off the cone of birth, or was it suffering. He couldn't make his way through, in the mawing soup, in the terrible glue, the muffled echoes that had become his consciousness. Oh Lord, release me, fell into padded grey and disappeared. It wasn't an experiment anymore, it was the way things were. Accretion after accretion, layer after layer, had brought him here. He shrugged a melancholy smile, more of a grimace, and tried to look up. He tried to find some way of getting through another day. There was only one way: to skate around all thought; to distract himself as best he could, to pretend he really was just another human being, with all the normal wants and joys and suffering, to smile and say "no worries", to pretend he didn't really come from a terrible place. "No worries mate, I'll fix it."
THE BIGGER STORY
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/24/2197836.htm?section=australia
The Federal Government has condemned comments Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir made about Western tourists during a sermon in Indonesia.
Australian university student Nathan Franklin video-taped Bashir's sermon to around 300 people while he was in East Java last October.
Bashir can be heard calling Western tourists ''worms, snakes and maggots''. He calls on young Muslims to beat up tourists and urges them to die like martyrs.
He also said infidels such as Western tourists ruin moral values by exposing their skin at the beach.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/24/2197660.htm
A video showing Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir inciting violence against Australian tourists has been made public.
The footage was taken at a sermon given by Bashir to about 300 villagers in East Java in October last year and was filmed by a Darwin-based university researcher.
In the video, Bashir urges those in the village to beat up tourists that disrespect Islamic ways, saying, "If there are infidels here, then beat them up. Do not tolerate them".
Later in the sermon, he likens non-Muslims to crawling "worms, snakes, maggots".
He also says infidels ruin moral values by exposing their skin at the beach.
"Take a look at Bali", he said.
Foreign Minister Stephen Smith says Bashir's comments are not welcome.
"These remarks, these reported remarks from a speech six months ago, contain all the familiar bigotry and they are absolutely condemned," he said.
Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith says the comments are full of the intolerance that has marked many of Bashir's previous speeches.
Shellharbour Beach.
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