Stripped Of Ancestral Meaning

*



Mural, Redfern, Sydney.

"Back in my room I couldn't sleep. The feel of Crace's fingers on my neck and on my legs, working their way up my thighs, continued to burn into me. The fear of what he might do next unsettled me and a thousand elaborate, equally disturbing, scenarios ran through my mind. I realised I couldn't continue as I was..."
Andrew Wilson, The Lying Tongue.


Mural, Redfern, Sydney.



The tendrils of absence, he could almost have described it, the connections winking out one by one, the visual and physical vibrancy that had shimmered through him at every turn, which had transformed the most routine of landscapes into profoundly inspiring scenes, all of this was a wreckage. He didn't know why the muffled disconnect had caught up with him so quickly. He felt like he was being unplugged, and not just one wire at a time, whole scale circuits were being deliberately removed.

He didn't know how to take the circumstance that had now become his own. He wasn't sure what had happened. Long ago he could remember friends, family, passionate political groupings. He could remember the fervent illumination of belief. He could feel the necessity of faith. Long ago, decades ago, his fingers picking across the keyboards, he had written about the encroaching sterility of modern life, as if all the modern toys somehow stripped their lives of more ancestral meaning. He was flabbergasted at how rapidly poetic interpretations of sterility had turned simply to senility.

The nights were long, and he felt profoundly disconnected; the sizzling of electrical
wires in the early hours, quiet streets, sleeping houses. He monitored the contemporary debate but none of it connected to anything he had originally thought, or believed. The world will never be the same again, he heard, accompanied by the picture of a group of university students in earnest discussion. The future will bear no relationship to the past. We won't even be able to recognise what is going on.

Friends nodded in agreement; as if just by raising the topic they had been caught up in the grand march of human progress. Why can't I access the core? he asked, as if he was typing the question in to a computer search program. Why can't I see where the centre lies?

Breakfast was normal. Karen was as solicitous as ever. He realised he didn't know where she worked, how she spent her days. She just happened to be there when he needed her, like any traditional animal male, fractious, gliding across the surface, brutally demanding, physical wants.

You're not ready, came one response, followed by another, "there is no core". Once again he calculated precisely the right second to start his car, exactly the right time to pull out into the traffic so that he hit every green light on the way to work. Profoundly disconnected, he had lost any sense of why he kept going through the same routine. He felt impossibly ancient, although he was only in his 50s. These are the years when it all falls apart, a woman in her 60s had told him only a few days ago, when he had been extracting information from her for the data base. Is it happening to you already? she had asked.

He nodded evasively, looking across a chasm of years to an even worse future.

Where did it all go, he had asked her, guessing they would both understand.

The world has changed completely, she said. Everything we feared would happen did happen. We're one of the last who even know there was a different way of thinking.

That can't be true. There must be millions. Millions.
She shook her head. They've died out, or been rewritten. Even now, I bet they can tell we're thinking things we shouldn't.

The next daya they came for him at his desk, took him to the medical centre within an isolated section of the building, prodded, murmured, blacked him out. He came back to consciousness at his desk several hours later, profoundly disorientated. He had rung the woman who had expressed such original views. She did not answer. The number wasn't even connected. Her name no longer showed up on any records.

And thinking about all this, even more frightened of the encroaching blankness than before, he showed up for work, tring to pretend he was functioning as normal, that his head wasn't skiting from one place to the other. The young woman he had spoken to the previous evening, with those large grey eyes, hiding a flush of tears as she lent over the computer terminal, the woman he had determined he would speak to again today, was not at her spot. A different woman was sitting at the terminal, acting as if she had always been there. A profound dislocation, the phrase dodged through his soup of a consciousness, a profound dislocatioin. He couldn't even think, at this point, what it might mean. A deep, far reaching blankness; the heart of darkness, a muffled despair; why was there no voice which gave him a distinct answer; the infinite grey of over lit offices, a shadowless world. There was nowhere to move. He went about his normal functions, waiting for the death knell. He was sure they were about to try and rewrite him, yet again.



Mural, Redfern, Sydney.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/crowd-swells-for-a-shivering-dawn/2008/04/25/1208743249006.html

NINETY-THREE years after bright-eyed young Australians and New Zealanders splashed ashore beneath the pitiless cliffs of the Gallipoli Peninsula and received a wake-up from hell, dawn at Anzac Cove is more populated than ever.

In pursuit of yet another dawn and its myths and memories yesterday, more than 10,000 Australians and Kiwis, accompanied by several hundred Turks - the biggest crowd for years - endured a night so cold the business of breathing became painful.

Those who crowded beneath a three-quarter moon were rewarded with the most sophisticated overnight arrangements yet seen at the Anzac memorial site; a light show transformed the cliffs and the distinctive formation known as the Sphinx into an unearthly work of art, while the Aegean Sea glowed in the dark.

Documentaries on the battles and tribulations that took the lives of 8709 Australians, 2721 New Zealanders and almost 87,000 Turks played on giant video screens, and the families of long-gone soldiers were interviewed on stage by Jennifer Byrne.

As dawn lightened the battlefields above, the Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, said the combatants of 1915 fought a brutal and ugly war that was remembered for the strategic mistakes of its leaders and the human cost of victories and defeats alike.

Whether they wore the uniform of Australia, New Zealand, England, France or the Ottoman Empire, "we stand in awe of their courage, commitment and sacrifices", Mr Fitzgibbon said. "They raised global consciousness of the Australian character and demeanour. Even during the darkest hours they brought larrikinism, irreverence and dry humour to one of the toughest places on earth."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/25/2227658.htm

A 65-year-old man's jaw was broken when he was attacked while walking to an Anzac Day dawn service at Lilydale in Melbourne's south-east this morning.

Ian Carr was planning to attend the service in honour of his father, who served in the RAAF in World War II.

As he walked to the service he was approached by two men in Clarke Street about 5:40am AEST.

They asked him for his mobile phone then struck him in the face.

Mr Carr was taken to the Maroondah Hospital for treatment and will undergo surgery for his broken jaw tonight.

He says he was shocked by the assault.

"[It was] pretty cowardly to do it to someone coming to a service like that, pretty cowardly," he said.

http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2008-04-25-voa1.cfm

Hillary Clinton is still behind Barack Obama in the delegate count after the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday. But her ten-point victory kept her supporters' hopes alive in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Attention is now directed to Indiana and North Carolina, where the next primaries will be held on May sixth. Senator Obama is expected to win North Carolina, but he faces a close race for Indiana voters.

In the race for donations, the Obama campaign had about forty million dollars at the end of March and no debt. The Clinton campaign had about nine million left to spend, and ten million of debt.

But her campaign said it raised more than ten million dollars in the twenty-four hours following her win in Pennsylvania. A spokesman said eighty percent of the donors were first-time givers to the campaign.

During appearances this week, Senator Clinton said more people have voted for her than Barack Obama. She included the votes from Michigan and Florida, giving her a lead of about one hundred thousand votes.

But Democratic Party officials are refusing to recognize the Michigan and Florida votes. Barack Obama was not even on the Michigan ballot. The two states violated party rules when they held their primaries too early. Without Michigan and Florida, Senator Obama leads in the popular vote by about half a million



Mural, Redfern, Sydney.