Redfern Now: Indigenous

Accountability, Hopeful Realism,

and Intervention

by Tess Altman and Anita Patel

 

 

Blackfella’s Yarn

“We’re all very, very proud of being blackfellas to be able to tell our yarns and have black producers, black writers, black directors and black cast telling our stories. Deadly. It’s a lot of pride in the process…” (Redfern Now actor Leah Purcell)

Landmark ABC TV series Redfern Now turned heads. It’s about Indigenous Australians telling their yarns: spinning out stories filled with joy, fury, love, compassion, despair, tenderness, courage and hope. The theme of cultural accountability pervades the series, bookended by episodes which palpably challenge the outlook of the average viewer. In the first episode Family Grace (Leah Purcell) is caught in a struggle between her comfortable middle class home and the terrible reality of her mentally unstable sister Lilly’s life. Our stress levels rise as Grace responds to her young nephew’s plea: ‘Aunty, Mum’s goin’ off again’, just as her own family is about to leave on an expensive holiday. Grace has no choice but to stay and care for her sister’s children because she is bound to her cultural belief that family is more important than individual needs and desires. The success of the series is that these moral questions are always resolved. Lilly’s children are taken into Grace’s family who are forced to confront their selfish, individualistic attitude to life. The episode ends in a joyous redemptive scene with everyone taking off camping: ‘Tyler, Maddy [Lilly’s kids]…your mum said “Let’s go camping!”’

The final episode Pretty Boy Blue focuses on Aaron Davis (Wayne Blair, also one of the series directors), the police officer. He’s the only character who recurs in the series, an obvious yet controversial selection for this central role. The choice is obvious because the police officer embodies the central theme of Indigenous accountability. He also bridges the gap for the viewer because he pivots between two cultures and belief systems and can understand both worlds. However a police officer is a normalised, traditionally ‘white’ figure. The choice to place narrative and moral authority in a police officer is hence controversial because the police institution has incarcerated many Indigenous peoples and has lately become a tool of Intervention in remote Indigenous communities.

Pretty Boy Blue draws us into a moral dilemma about the death of Lenny (Luke Carroll). Despite the horror of Lenny’s death in custody there is a strong inclination to empathise with ‘good cop’ Aaron Davis who ignores Lenny’s calls of pain. After all Lenny behaves appallingly and pushes Aaron’s buttons by swearing and slurring his daughter’s virtue.  We understand the viewpoint of Constable Hobbs (Stephen Curry) who sees Aaron as a mate (not as a blackfella) and advises him not to worry about Lenny. Aaron’s intense guilt and personal struggle are again shaped by his cultural background. His agonising interaction with Aunty Mona (Lenny’s mother) confronts and confounds the mainstream viewer. Aunty Mona furiously cries: ‘You lied to protect yourself!’ Aaron’s response is profoundly distressing and we cannot help but feel great pity for this morally sound man caught between deep-set cultural values of kinship and community and his position in the police institution.

These are tales about the human condition, not patronised or romanticised through an outsider’s lens but told from the truthful perspective of blackfellas themselves. It is this truth–often brutally honest but always hopeful­–that is so engaging and enthralling. We are drawn into situations, relationships and lives that are not dissimilar from our own. The power of Redfern Now is that these situations confront us as a viewer and invite us to question our own attitudes, convictions and morality as Australians. Through presenting cultural accountability as the norm, Redfern Now poses the question: is the ‘normal’, individualised, mainstream Australian way of life the only, or indeed, the best way?

 

Blazing a Trail Politically and Creatively

Redfern Now is the result of a combined push from the Heads of ABC’s Indigenous Unit (Sally Riley) and Screen Australia’s Indigenous Branch (Erica Glynn). Both expressed ‘a deep desire to ensure that urban Indigeneity, contemporary Indigeneity, was represented’ in the mainstream so that people could understand Indigenous people and culture in a new way. The series presents a fresh, dynamic urban Indigeneity, one that belies the urban Indigenous stereotype in Australian mainstream media (‘loss of culture’ through succumbing to the Western ills of drinking, gambling, prostitution, incarceration and gang warfare). Although it does touch on these bracketed issues, it is in a way that does not patronise, demonise or disempower urban Indigenous peoples. Hence Redfern Now is blazing a trail politically by creating a space in the media for Indigenous peoples to define and depict their own stories and issues.

As Marcia Langton pointed out in her Boyer lectures, Redfern Now also provides a fresh perspective on urban Indigeneity by acknowledging the emergence of an Aboriginal suburban middle class who are still intimately connected to their (poorer) families on ‘the Block’. Hence Redfern Now blurs traditional class distinctions and illustrates the interconnectedness of classes through kinship whilst unseating the typical association of urban Indigeneity with poverty. This is all part of the show’s effort to destabilise negative stereotyping.

Redfern Now provides an uncompromising gaze on urban Indigenous communities through the lens of Indigenous accountability and self-determination. But it also softens this gaze through normalising its Indigenous characters as ‘ordinary people’. As Producer Darren Dale says, the show is about ‘seemingly ordinary people put into extraordinary situations’. Coral (Tessa Rose) in Episode 2 is one of these ordinary people. She’s an Indigenous grandmother who despises the Indigenous teenagers in Redfern. When her granddaughter, Julie, comes to stay Coral is terrified that she will form a relationship with one of these youths. Tessa Rose brings a brilliant level of humour to this role and this is enhanced by her vernacular, the language of the ordinary people of Redfern. We find ourselves laughing out loud at her hilarious cutting comments and marvellous comic timing: ‘It’s you. What do you want, you little deadshit? You can steal a car inside 30 seconds but you can’t give an answer’.

These ordinary people are tested by extraordinary situations such as in Episode 4. Here we witness the stubborn refusal of Luke (Aaron McGrath) to stand up for the national anthem in an elite private school and the politically savvy action of his father Eddie (Marley Sharp) who uses the media to protest the expulsion of his son.  While we have to suspend disbelief at the actions of the Principal, Director Rachel Perkins succeeds in delivering a glorious story of the empowered underdog.

The creative construction of the series is innovative. A complete change of cast in each episode (except for the police officer) encourages the viewer to find familiarity not in identifying with specific characters, but rather with overarching themes and a strong sense of place: Redfern. Redfern’s suburbia, cityscapes and landscapes layer together over the series to present a cohesive aesthetic and sense of belonging through Indigenous eyes. Redfern is, in fact, another character in this series. We connect with it from the opening credits where hands, faces, tears, bubbles, grungy terraces, skyscrapers, the Indigenous flag, a gleam of sunlight and leafless branches weave together to the haunting lyrics:

Reach out and touch me. Take my hand. Walk me home. Reach out for my love. Understand that you’ll never be alone.

Indeed we never are alone for Redfern wraps its iconic presence around us, reaching out and touching us throughout every episode in this series.

The New Wave of Indigenous Cinema

While studying in the Netherlands, I (Tess) attended a lecture by media anthropologist Faye Ginsburg entitled ‘Australia’s Indigenous New Wave: Future Imaginaries in Recent Aboriginal Feature Films’. Ginsburg led the audience through Indigenous cinema in the 1980s and 90s (a time where films such as Radiance were deliberately affirmative and provocative as a corrective to dominant negative portrayals of Aboriginal people) to arrive at the present new wave or fourth wave.

This fourth wave is deemed to stand for a fourth world, a fourth cinema outside the confines of first world value judgements, neoliberal discourses, and commercialisation, instead focusing on rights, relationality, and cultural citizenship. Indigenous filmmakers no longer bear the burden of representation to outsiders. Instead, they focus on the issues important to Aboriginal people themselves by using cinematographic techniques that draw on an ethnographic sensibility, portraying lived experiences underpinned by implicit (yet not didactic) social critiques of Indigenous issues.

As Ginsburg puts it, the fourth wave focus is on creating a contemporary Indigenous accountability: Indigenous people making cinema for themselves, about their own issues, and trying to grapple with how to address those issues. This genre is exemplified by films such as Samson and Delilah (2009), Here I Am (2011) and Toomelah (2011) which use in-depth, raw realism to address Indigenous issues such as drug abuse, child neglect, the collapse of kinship relations and incarceration through a strong emphasis on Indigenous self-accountability and self-determination: Aborigines fixing it for themselves in their own culturally-specific ways.

Redfern Now fits into this fourth wave, particularly as it is written, directed, acted and produced by Aboriginal people. The series presents an unapologetic account of urban Indigeneity that doesn’t shy away from Indigenous issues but instead attempts to illustrate their complexity from the perspectives of Aboriginal people. The heterogeneity and diversity within the Aboriginal community is highlighted, as are the ways in which internal resolutions can be achieved.

However in some ways Redfern Now both distorts and extends the fourth wave. It distorts it because it aims to make the genre accessible to mainstream Australians, seeking to help them understand Indigenous people and to unseat their stereotypes. In this way,  it echoes the earlier techniques of 1990s films which attempted to represent Aboriginal people to non-Indigenous audiences. Yet this representational element does not detract at all from the overarching themes, and engaging a broader audience does not mean that the series is pandering to that audience; it is doing almost the opposite by challenging them.

Redfern Now extends the fourth wave because the kind of realism and self-determination the series employs is a hopeful, even utopic, realism, with characters that encounter struggle but always manage to find solutions and resolution. Fourth wave films such as Samson and Delilah also did this but there was a dark, dystopic feel and the resolution was more tenuous. Redfern Now offers more surety and certainty and each episode concludes with a delightfully unexpected but much-needed happy ending. This is Redfern realism with a tantalising aroma of utopian hope.

 

Discourses and Imaginaries of New Wave and Intervention

Ginsburg’s lecture was strangely depoliticised in the context of current Australian Indigenous policy. Although the issues in the films she explored are highly relevant to Australia’s current political climate, Ginsburg did not dwell on this and instead sought to explore the fourth wave from a more media-based perspective. Australia’s current Indigenous political context remained in the background whilst the politics of representation and postcolonial cultural politics were discussed more broadly.

As an Australian in the audience I (Tess) felt obliged to ask a political question: did this new wave represent some kind of counter-narrative to the Australian Government’s Intervention discourse? She replied that could well be the case, and briefly mentioned self-determination and Cape York Indigenous lawyer and advocate Noel Pearson’s notion of ‘the right to take responsibility’ as an example of that counter-narrative.

This is where it all gets a bit murky. Because the neoliberal discourses of the Intervention (helping communities help themselves) sit quite comfortably alongside the neoliberal rhetoric of ‘taking personal responsibility’ espoused by Pearson. Both of these stances argue for the individualisation of Indigenous peoples, their inclusion in a mainstream economy, and a move away from cultural or kinship forms of economy and conflict resolution.

Let’s take a step back and outline what the Northern Territory Emergency Response Intervention, the boldest Indigenous Affairs policy in decades, actually entails. On the back of the Wild and Anderson ‘Little Children are Sacred’ report, in 2007 the Howard Government intervened in 73 ‘prescribed communities’ in the NT with the aid of an increased police and bureaucratic on-the-ground presence. The aim was to ‘stabilise, normalise and exit’ these communities. The initial premise was related to child abuse but the Intervention grew to include welfare measures, education, and law and order. Under the Rudd and Gillard governments it has transformed into ‘Closing the Gap’ while retaining the same underlying features, which have been enshrined until 2022 under the new Stronger Futures legislation. Essentially these measures are punitive, involving increased surveillance of these Indigenous communities in all areas of their lives in the name of their safety and wellbeing.

Even though urban and remote Indigeneity are hugely different things, with the rise of unifying forms of Indigenous cinema and TV the question remains: do such new wave films and TV series’ which emphasise contemporary Indigenous accountability provide a counter-narrative to the kinds of ideas promoted by the Intervention, or do they implicitly legitimise those ideas? Is ‘Indigenous accountability’ an Indigenous idea, or is it one Indigenous people have internalised through hearing over and over from external bureaucrats and commentators that they must ‘get off welfare and take responsibility for themselves’? The ‘middle class’ presentation of urban Indigeneity identified by Langton in Redfern Now may also be viewed as part of this broader ‘normalisation’ process, making Aboriginal people more like the average viewer, more like ‘us’.

Redfern Now ‘normalises’ Indigenous people, hence echoing the language of Intervention. Even though the discourse of normalisation is similar, there are some significant differences in intention. Notions of accountability in the fourth wave mean cultural and relational accountability, not externally-imposed accountability. Notions of normalisation mean that an Indigenous person should be treated like any other Australian citizen and that Indigenous drama be judged by the standards of any other drama—as Redfern Now actor Leah Purcell states, ‘I want Redfern Now to be viewed as a good drama, and that happens to be sprinkled with black pepper as I call it … a blackfella perspective’­—not that Indigenous people should reject their cultural practices in favour of being just like everyone else.

Government Intervention in remote Indigenous Australia and the contemporary now of urban Indigeneity portrayed in Redfern Now seem polar opposites. Yet that is precisely what makes their juxtaposition so interesting and potentially illuminating. The point of drawing parallels between political Intervention and Indigenous film is not to detract at all from the importance, originality, timeliness and power of Redfern Now and the films mentioned. It’s rather to draw attention to the fact that these depictions in all their diversity are what create the social and political imaginary of Indigeneity in the Australian consciousness. We must be careful and aware of how themes such as ‘accountability’ and ‘normalisation’ circulate and are put to use in government and public (including media) arenas, and be sure to define what they mean, how they are used, and how this usage changes in particular contexts.

It is therefore important to question the imaginaries created through these powerful discourses of Intervention and of fourth wave cinema. Yet this questioning does not change the fact that the rise of new contemporary Indigenous representations and contributions in the mainstream media are broadening the conversation, engaging diverse sets of publics, and unseating long-held stereotypes. And that is the kind of Intervention Australian society surely needs.

 

 

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References

ABC Online. 2012. ‘Indigenous Voice Resonates Loud in Redfern Now’. Available at <http://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/video/default.htm?srcNews=http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-27/indigenous-voice-resonates-loud-in-redfern-now/4336998/mediarss.xml?site=news&title=Indigenous%20voice%20resonates%20loud%20in%20Redfern%20Now&autostart=true> accessed 4/1/2013.

ABC Web Extras. ‘The Making of Redfern Now’. 2012.

Available at <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/redfernnow/webextras/> accessed 3/1/2013.

Altman, J. and Russell, S. 2012. ‘Too Much Dreaming: Evaluations of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Intervention 2007–2012’. Evidence Base 3: 1-24.

Altman, J and Hinkson, M (Eds.) 2007. Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise and Exit. Melbourne: Arena Publications.

Langton, M. 15 December 2012. ‘Opinion: New Generation Ripe With Promise’. Sydney Morning Herald. Available at <http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/new-generation-ripe-with-promise-20121214-2besr.html <accessed 3/1/2013>.

 

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Tess Altman recently graduated with a Masters in Anthropology and Development cum laude in the Netherlands. The past five years have been a whirlwind of living in Auckland, Melbourne, Leiden and Rotterdam working as an International Student Advisor, conducting and publishing research about volunteering, social welfare, democracy and diplomacy in Europe and New Zealand, and foraying into the non-profit sector working for the Red Cross. In 2013 she is getting back to her roots, re-engaging with Australian political and Indigenous issues, tutoring and lecturing at the University of Canberra and conducting research for Volunteering ACT on volunteering and youth disengagement.

 

Anita Patel is a teacher of English and Indonesian in Canberra where she has lived since 1982.  She enjoys browsing in bookshops, reading in cafes, going to the cinema, watching television and jotting in notebooks. She has had work published in the Canberra Times, in Summer Conversations (Pandanus Books, ANU) and in journals including Block 9, Burley, Babel and Professional Educator.  Her children’s poems have been published in the NSW School Magazine and in an anthology Pardon My Garden edited by Sally Farrell Odgers and published by Harper Collins. She won the ACT Writers Centre Poetry Prize in 2004 for her poem Women’s Talk.

Anatomy of the Monster

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by Dolan Morgan

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with illustrations by Tom Oristaglio, Roxy Drew, Jessica Mack, Adam Scott Mazer and Dolan Morgan

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Our ship arrived at dusk. Spanish moss cast warm shadows along the moorings. Straight away, we met with government officials, quaint reactionaries usually found festering in Town Hall. As the doctor’s assistant I took notes while the mayor detailed all we’d missed.

“Here, rumors are common, rarely trusted,” he said, nibbling at his cheek. “And so initially the monster hadn’t seemed so threatening. But then came stories of its swift approach, inhuman abilities, moral apathy: towns leveled, organs eaten, children raped, bodies heaped, societies erased, etcetera, etcetera.”

The doctor and I shared a glance: this wouldn’t be the routine leeches/tinctures affair we’d expected.

Before the monster’s actual arrival, the mayor remembered, townspeople dripped with anticipation. None could certify its existence, but all wondered how the government planned to safeguard against the idea of it. The mayor said he was “loath to spend funds on fibs pedaled by vagabonds, ne’er-do-wells and tramps.” Only after a drumming in the polls did he pivot away from a platform of practicality, sighing with the knowledge that legislating from absurdity would be even easier than the usual constraints.

“Selectmen,” the mayor said, “deliberated to no end.” By scrutinizing the town’s layout and commissioning expert advice, they proposed defenses ranging from catapults to militias to packs of wild dogs. But rumors and gossip always undermined their delicately calculated security. “A moat? The monster loves swimming. Fire? In some parts, it is fire. Arrows? They adorn its skin the same way a hunter wears a bear-tooth necklace – tauntingly.” The monster, in its ambiguity, adapted to every attempt to fortify the town. But, after a night of heavy drinking and in a rare moment of clarity, the mayor proposed that to battle an abstraction, they didn’t need specificity at all – no, they needed gross generalization.

By this stage my notes were becoming increasingly complicated.

“We needed something all-encompassing,” he said. “A blankness upon which all permutations of the monster could hold.” After months of adjusting knobs, detachments, turrets and oils to fit the exact idea of the monster, the selectmen settled on the simplest and most uninspiring of defenses: a wall.

We had seen it as we approached the harbor, surrounding the town in a long gray arc. It took over a year to build.

“Imagine us atop its steep embankment,” the mayor said, and affected a far-off stare. “We were all there on the day of reckoning. An entire town standing, wondering if all we toiled for could buffer the unparalleled force finally bursting from the forest”—he jumped from his brown leather chair to animate his story—“in undulating waves stretching nearly a mile across, obscure, vein-riddled body parts sloshed toward us the way racehorses alternately overtake one another out of starting gates – stutters of flesh converging in mixtures of unbroken velocity and sudden crests.” He wiggled from one foot to another, swinging about the office, hair and jowls swaying like flags. The doctor looked on, stern and unencumbered while I struggled to record not only the mayor’s words but also his movements.

The mayor grabbed a lamp to further demonstrate the scene, waving and shaking it. “Parts falling forward like tentacles thrown down in loud slaps upon calm water. It snaking from trees, renting branches and overwhelming shrubbery in storms of dirt, mud and leaves. Louder and louder, its calls ascending toward crescendos that never come”—the mayor let out a series of shrieks not unlike a cawing crow, and the doctor nodded along in polite understanding—“one scream after another raising the ante again and again, like an unhinged and riotous cattle auction that’s less about livestock than some underlying anger, bidders staring each other down amid rising stakes and uncertain intent.”

“I stood frozen,” the mayor said, locking himself into place, “in a special type of terror. We had prepared for anything, but the monster wasn’t just anything anymore, and, in the face of its being so precisely itself and nothing else, how could our wall—a mere generalization—still hold it at bay?”

The mayor struggled to catch his breath, exhausted, and melted into the patterned office wallpaper. As he blathered on, I looked down at my notes, distracted – inky scribbles and odd shapes crowded the pages like stains on a fat baby’s bib.  Obviously, their wall had worked, but solely because of a peculiar fact: there was no monster, only a bunch of people working some kind of mobile clearance sale, nomadic mini-mall or roving corporate flea market. In fact, we had seen it—or them, really—at the foot of the wall, while touring the grounds en route to the mayor: “How are you today?” they’d exclaimed with too much expression. “Do you need any help with anything?” they’d yelped with a glee betraying profound sadness. They were all hawking something: contracts, memos and brochures flitted around like bees. I was more than a little confused when someone first pointed to that group of people and called it the monster. I almost blurted “Where?” but instead kept jotting in my notebook about the charming masonry and arch-work that gilded the quaint homes and buildings, loose shapes sketched amongst names and quotations.

 

While our investigative team snatched some much needed rest, the doctor and I went over the notes, piecing together the mayor’s story by lamplight. Taking a bite from his large slice of cake, the doctor picked up where we’d left off: “The mayor, peering over the edge of the wall, still not grasping what was actually down there, probably declared, We did it! We stopped the beast! and the delusional townspeople no doubt erupted in screams again – this time not out of fear but joy.” He took an enormous bite of cake, and continued through his chews, “After the initial euphoria of survival wore off, however, they lost direction. They hadn’t anticipated the space beyond victory or defeat. Nervous, they wondered: what now?”

In subsequent interviews, the baker explained that the silence and uncertainty broke when the fishmonger shook, “We have to kill it!” Others agreed. Instantly, a team assembled itself to usher the monster into oblivion. Armed with a rifle, three swords, one hammer and a large rock, heroes climbed down the wall into the vicinity of the newly calm beast. It looked as if the thing might go out peacefully, but then in a flurry of movement, sensing the presence of the townfolk, it reared back into full motion, writhing and flapping about. Brave and daring, with a surge of energy, and with images of their families and friends in mind, the group of men descended upon the monster in a glorious attack, shooting knobby mounds of unnamed flesh studded with blenders and accessories; eviscerating a tit-like appendage adorned in brightly colored travel magazines; and crushing the bulbous node atop a flank, somehow smiling at them and waving to unknown purpose.

Of course, our inspection of the crime scene told a different story, revealing the mangled remains of one paid spokesperson, one Tupperware salesman, and one acne-scarred clerk, each still holding various clearance items. The villagers had no idea. Even more unsettling, it appeared as if blood and bone fragments did not deter the “beast” – no, so far as our forensics could tell, the people constituting the monster had come jostling forward in knots and mobs through the carnage, intent on selling this or that to the would-be warriors. Trembling at the memory, the baker explained, they had just barely managed to clamber back up the wall and pull their flimsy rope back over the ledge before being overtaken by its enormous claws or—as the Doctor suggested, needling his shrimp plate—clause. “Right,” the baker nodded, confused.

Conventional methods could not kill the beast. That it must therefore be killed by unconventional means was obvious to everyone, the welder told us, but what methods of killing an unimaginable (only imaginable?) monster were conventional? Chopping off its head? Bleeding out major arteries? Gouging eyes, removing skin? Any of these might have passed an unconventional executions test for humans, but for a fantastical beast? Who knew? And besides, who could even say what part was foot or skin or artery? And if they couldn’t pinpoint body parts, how could they sever them in unseemly ways? A decision: they must understand the anatomy of the monster before establishing coherent plans of attack, conventional or otherwise. They’d almost lost good family men in their first attempt and could not risk repeating the same mistake.

That’s when, via smoke signals, the doctor was called. His job? To label the beast.

Now, with the doctor standing triumphantly along the ramparts, the mayor thanked and deferred to the much-needed authority. By reputation he knew the doctor’s methods were exact: products of elite and mysterious training. Remorse lingered under the mayor’s smile, though, because the doctor, as is customary, bills his time by the half hour – and he is always on the clock. And though the doctor moved with an intensity that looked casual, he took as much care with each observation as he did when inspecting grand meals. He rarely touched a piece of meat without invoking a series of equations and figures. I wondered how he planned to broach the subject of the village’s delusion or confusion, but in the flurry of events, I didn’t ask. The doctor had a way of assuring that he knows what he is doing, and that you know it too, even though what he actually does is unfathomable and unknowable.

He didn’t shy from producing results though. Leaning over the parapet with two fingers of whiskey in one hand and a cup of garlic spinach in the other, he proclaimed, “On this day, let it be known that the veil has been lifted, the monster unsheathed, if only partially.”

And with a gesture rife with pomp and ceremony, he announced the liver.

Beneath him, the liver squirmed around with their hands in the air, each figure enacting some promotional dance or jig.

The doctor displayed no intention of disabusing anyone’s misconceptions about the monster, and in fact gave these misconceptions names and identities, each drawn from a nomenclature based on solid but complicated reasoning. Here amongst the unseen barbecue grill hawkers was a lung, over here with the unknown frozen meat deliverers was the suspensory ligament of the duodenum, and over there amongst the overlooked pharmaceuticals and beauty aides were scattered some subclavian veins. On and on the doctor paraded himself, waving his hand like a wand, magically proclaiming so many people and their jobs to be organs and ancillary parts. I asked the doctor whether or not we actually planned to help these people, because they seemed to be suffering from wide-spread delusion, and to me it felt like maybe we were feeding into it? He smiled and asked if I had failed to tell him all these years that I was, in fact, also a doctor. Then he continued on his way without hearing the answer, of which there wasn’t one.

 

That night I found a plate of beef Wellington on my pillow, accompanied by a note which read, “Rest easy, we are helping. That we might also make a little money along the way? It cannot hurt.”

The mayor ordered the townspeople to return to business as usual: “Yes, an enormous monster may be just beyond the stones of that wall, and yes, it appears to be lusting for blood, and yes, we know nothing about it and are only barely being rational in believing that the wall can hold the thing indefinitely, and yes, it does dwarf the lives we lead with its omnipresent reminder of death, but please return to your daily routines as if nothing has changed because, if you think about it, besides all that, nothing has.”  And so shops reopened, bakeries fired up ovens, people started making purchases.

By the time the doctor’s procedures had hit full stride, however, the entire town was in the throes of something like a communal mid-life crisis. The doctor denied noticing it, but through a secret network of mirrors and echo-capturing funnels installed by our court of investigative assistants, I observed the slack jaw of the woodcutter pausing over half broken logs, apathetic soap swirls painted upon the barkeep’s mugs, the wilting frame of the postmaster, slowly slumping into the soil. In interviews, villagers begrudged themselves: there’s more to it than all this. Their revelations were trite, but the townspeople, in a wave of self reflection, were equally aware of this stupidity, and cried that recognizing the futility of malaise was not the first step toward something greater – but instead the last lock barring them from it. Though each villager’s misery was different, one chorusing question was common to everyone: What did the monster think of them? They swore us to secrecy, looking from side to side and sweating, unaware that everyone else in town shared the same secret: all were making private contact with the beast.

I tracked their trysts through reflections and echoes. Small irrigation and sewage ducts speckled the wall’s base in regular intervals, and one by one the people began slipping into these tunnels for a closer look at the monster, seeing whatever it was they thought they saw. Watching the beast, the townsfolk resembled giddy children rolling in summer grass. In fact, it was a teenage boy, Eric, who first heard a voice, who first communicated with what should have been an as-of-yet-undiscovered organ of an enormous non-existent monster.

“Hi,” it said to him in the voice of a young woman. “Have you given any thought to a life insurance policy? And are you protected in the event of a fire or flood in your home?”

Through a corridor of over a hundred and thirty mirrors, I just barely saw the boy jump and stammer, “Wha— who is that? Where are you?” Mortified, flailing at walls and steel bars and grates, trying to ward off anyone who might discover his inviolable rendezvous, he scrambled out of the water tunnel back to bed, breathing heavy, full of shame. He’d been caught doing the unthinkable, unaware that almost everyone in town also had a special time when no one would notice their absence. Just as much, he was unaware that it was the beast itself that had spoken to him, though of course, again, the beast did not even exist, so it wasn’t that at all. He was wrong about knowing and not knowing it. I made a point of following his movements – repeatedly, he’d sneak away, hear the voice of a woman offering “fiscal and monetary shields in event of unforeseen disasters” and run, terrified, back home, too ashamed to notice everyone else’s crippling shame. He spent days narrowing eyes at everyone he encountered, measuring the possibility that they might be the person who had discovered his secret. Yet, he never heard that distinct voice in town, a voice that he admitted was beautiful and alluring. Even I felt so, and I’d only heard it ricocheted along hundreds of walls. Eric couldn’t get it out of his head. Eventually he gathered the courage to stick around and respond honestly.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said into the darkness, “but I like it. Who are you? Where are you?”

“I’m talking about a simple investment in your peace of mind,” she said, suddenly timid too. “And I’m right here.” Eric couldn’t see from inside the dark tunnel, but the boy kept talking, determined not to run home, drawn in by the comforting cadence of her words.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked, half afraid she might ask the same of him.

Her voice continued to lose luster, but replied, “Just hoping to help you feel comfortable knowing your assets are well protected – so you sleep easy.” The boy was enamored – as if he’d always wanted someone to feel this way about him, to care for his well-being, to want him to sleep easy – though he might have imagined it a bit differently before now.

“I feel the same about you,” he said, in a way that sounded not so much like he really meant it but maybe more like he believed he eventually could. Their conversation continued

through the night in much the same vein, a mutually misunderstood but comforting volley. They were still at it when the sun began to rise. In the pink and orange light of dawn, she said to him, “You deserve comfort and security and I can give you that,” but Eric started to really wonder – where is she? In all this new light, certainly he should be able to see her now. Yet, to him, there was only the beast.

And when he finally discovered that she was actually, according to the doctor, a set of toes, he was at first furious and later even a little disgusted – he abhorred feet – but in the end he accepted and even embraced it, the power of their connection overwhelming his prejudices. He told her, boldly, that he loved her. The sudden shift in emotions, the hairpin turn that the relationship had taken, caused a snap in the toe, or perhaps a final stitch, visible, to me at least, as a quiet tic in her left eye. She’d been broken or fixed and started right in: “I have no idea what I’m saying or doing. Really, it just kind of comes out. I don’t think I’m a toe but maybe I am. I don’t know how I got here. I don’t even know my name or what insurance is, or if it’s one word or three, but only that I have to sell it to someone, somewhere – anyone, anywhere. What does insurance even look like? I couldn’t tell you, but I have to make someone buy it. Why? I don’t know, but I don’t want to find out what will happen to me if I stop trying. There’s something bigger going on in here, I can feel it. People whisper to each other. Rumors spread. We don’t know what’s true. I can’t trust anyone. I don’t remember if I had family or even who I was before I woke up here, chasing a deadline. I’m scared out of my mind. There’s some kind of force, a feeling in here, a combination of people and ideas. You can catch glimpses of it out of the corner of your eye when people gather together in huddles – talking, planning, thinking. That’s just it, too – it’s got no physical form, it’s an idea that I can’t even grasp, it’s too big, the type of idea that only ideas themselves could understand, and not individually but collectively, a group of ideas coming together and thinking about an idea, and the idea they are thinking of is looking for something that only an idea’s idea could desire. What could an idea want? If it’s insurance, then I could help, but beyond that? It’s not my job to think about this. Still, I do and I’m scared. But, Eric, somehow, really, you make me feel safer, though I can’t imagine why. You make me feel like there’s something beyond this idea, beyond the paper and beyond the insurance, but what? The way you talk, it’s like you’re standing and looking at me from a point of view I never could have imagined. Like you’re standing outside the world and peeking in. You seem to understand me even less than I do – but the more you don’t know about me, the closer I feel to you and the nicer I feel because the farther I can get from where and who I think I am, the better. I don’t care if I’m a toe. I’m your toe. Or, at least, I’d like to be. So just, please, for the love of everything we know to be true, sign these goddamn papers and set me free.” In a rush of intimacy and misunderstood affection, Eric signed all the documents and ran excitedly through the pipes with papers spilling into walls, white sheets falling like dander or spores. I had to laugh when he called out into the night, “I am insured!”

I immediately briefed the doctor, but he insisted that Eric’s was an isolated incident. It was not isolated, however – budding relationships between the beast’s body parts and the townspeople were reaching secret pinnacles all over town, deals made with unknown currencies. The doctor conceded to me this point but then chided my verbosity and countered that isolation was a broader concept than I realized. “The voices of the beast are not only not toes,” the doctor told me, “and not only not lungs and not feet and not necks,” (I was having trouble getting all this into my notes) “but they are also not penises and not vaginae, advertising and business being a complex but complete sexual act unto itself, as you know, like a slit starfish . . . and as such, being separated even from itself, it’s quite isolated.”

 

I found these remarks curious, to say the least, but the doctor assured me they were mostly in jest, and even that he’d ponder my concerns further, as a favor. I was surprised then that the doctor, upon completing his detailed labeling of the creature, held a meeting in the town square to announce that, according to my notes and graphs and maps, the beast could not be completely understood – at least, not within the limits he’d previously been working, because, “Apparently, and perhaps unfortunately, the town itself appears to be contained in the beast’s body. That is, the town is part of it, or actually a series of many parts, and – I’m only giving you facts as they become clear to me here – beyond medical explanation, it appears to be pregnant. With itself.”

That this was an absurd and utterly incorrect reading of my notes hardly mattered at all. “Obviously, we dispensed with the truth a long time ago,” the doctor said to me while dubbing the town water mill a tonsil, the first designation in a new campaign of labeling and naming different parts of the village itself, citizens included.

Understandably, tensions rose. Previously, the monster was (somehow) visible to the townspeople, but now the doctor labeled things they hadn’t expected to be monster at all – and so everything became suspect. Tables? Chairs? Cabinets? Gardens? Anything at all could be – and probably was – a part of it. No one wanted to be the horrible beast they all feared, and who knew when the doctor would knock on your door and file you away as an artery or knuckle? Perhaps he’d say your home was a useless gland? Or, God forbid, a patch of unseemly hair? Obviously, there was a type of pride in being a pivotal portion of the central nervous system or large muscle, and the town clerk, a major artery, did more than a little gloating in front of the innkeeper, an extraneous gonad, after the doctor swept through their neighborhood in a flurry of names.

Eric saw these developments as an opportunity – sneaking the toe through the wall and into town was no problem now that everyone was just another monster part. To demonstrate devotion (to each other? to the idea of insurance?) they made a habit of going door to door, hand in hand, selling something they didn’t understand to people they didn’t know – just because it felt nice.

Though Eric and the toe enjoyed a boom in sales, an underlying competition was slowly being nurtured. People resented each other and their labels. Plus, they were all already delusional, so it all kind of dawned on me at once that things were getting starkly out of hand. How had it gone this far? The doctor was roving about the town in his robes, followed by a retinue of cooks and attendants and women. He was like an overstuffed Gestapo, instilling fear and trust at random, sowing uncertainty and ill will like robust crops. Having exhausted, down to the smallest trinket, new things to name, the doctor ignored rising pressures and moved on to where the womb might be located. He suggested that “most likely it lurks underground somewhere. I’ve seen blueprints of the tunnels beneath the streets – we must investigate down there. This may help us derive limits of the monster’s body – and our own, as the case may be. Besides, I suspect our limits and our womb are one-and-the-same, seeing as we are pregnant with ourselves.”

We? Our? The doctor was suddenly including himself in all this nonsense? I was taken aback, but he assured me that, “given the circumstances, I think people find it comforting that I am a nipple, one more part just like them. And you,” he said, “you are a nostril, one of ten.” I tried to remind him that, in fact, I wasn’t, but he insisted that, regardless of whether or not I was or wasn’t, in some way I was. “Think about it,” he said, before handing a crude map to the mayor, who then contracted a team of townspeople to dig beneath buildings.

Three groups left from different parts of town, moving in different directions according to the doctor’s calculations. One group later emerged, muddied and sopping wet, from the harbor; another trekked in from the foot of a mountain, citing lack of proper tools to continue; and the third never returned, lost in the tunnels they had dug that burrowed on and on into the darkness. Each claimed that they couldn’t find any wombs or limits, but that they’d seen “other things.” Like what? They wouldn’t say.

Unsettled, I again tried conveying my concerns to the doctor, but my notes were jumbled and I always stumble with improvisation. Mostly I just pointed to doodles and loose phrases scattered about pages piled in my chamber, a room that had become increasingly harder to navigate, while the doctor looked at me like I didn’t understand how much money we were making. I understood more than he realized, and the fact that the townspeople were getting poorer and poorer did nothing to assuage my fears that something terrible might happen. The mayor and most government officials had been labeled warts and other blemishes, some only temporary calluses and blisters, and everything had been turned on its head (now a local, near-sighted school master). Alliances formed amongst various body parts. More powerful organs and lesser subsystems armed themselves against one another. Fingernails and wrinkles banded together with ear lobes and calcium deposits in attempt to make demands of the spinal cord and hippocampus; the brain hemispheres, along with major systems, plotted out means to keep lesser neighbors under foot (a downtrodden cobbler). Small skirmishes erupted in the night.

To boot, the baker (or adrenal gland) and a woman (hangnail) selling lifetime supplies of stainless steel kitchenware, had consummated their love by entwining business ventures. In an alliance meeting in the northern pub, the baker proposed, as a method to overcome opposition, a series of wild business ventures that would “redirect the flow” of something left unstated, a sort of commercial-union or ménage-à-trois/factory-farm to package and distribute a feeling, a kind of tangible emotion they could hold – but which would manifest as some vague change in the town and their lives. It was very clear to him, which was well and good, except that the people he loved had become not only the products he sold but the people he bought them from and also his body parts and the landscape around him, all amidst what was slowly becoming a full on war in the town.

In a final plea to the doctor, I did my best to outline the havoc we inflicted on these people, but he just looked at me with genuine eyes and half a smile slung low across his face, whispering, “Oh, you really are the heart of this operation aren’t you? Up in that chamber of yours?” He sighed, “Maybe someday you will be a doctor,” then patted me on the shoulder and looked me in the eye. “Don’t worry. The cure is working. In fact, believe it or not, the townspeople are in remission! It’s a miracle. I plan to make a report of it all tomorrow.”

Then the doctor killed the monster.

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I watched it all from my mirror chamber. Instead of a formal progress report, he stormed into an alliance meeting the following day and announced as he entered that he’d found the womb. “It’s love,” he said. The crowd turned in silence, giving him full attention. “The womb! It’s love!” The doctor, for perhaps the first time, was nervous, “And, and, the uh, child...is us! Like I said. But more than that, too. It’s friendship, and family. I mean, baker, look at you! You’re happy! You have purpose. And Eric, the boy? And his beautiful toe friend? Aren’t they an inspiration? A lot of good has come of this, really.”

Something was wrong. This wasn’t the announcement I’d expected at all. Running through my notebooks, I ran fingers along trails of numbers, added dividends and tabs.

He continued. “You thought it was going to eat you! Or kill or rape you! Isn’t that a laugh? Hindsight, right? Oh,” and he forced a shallow snort of glee, fake and nerve-ridden, “to think it would have turned out as nicely as it did. A new camaraderie is forming, I can feel it.”

I blended data from town records and far-strung ledgers.

“The womb is producing great offspring amongst us, truly,” he said. “I see a bountiful future, a new beginning. And if the womb is a myth, which it is, does that matter? Aren’t myths in so many ways truth? Didn’t you say something to that effect, Reverend, uh, what was your name again?”

“Excuse me?” the reverend asked. “I thought I was the unibrow now.”

The numbers came together: the town was bankrupt. It was over.

The baker stood up, squinting: “What are you trying to say here, doctor?” The crowd leaned forward in unison.

Regaining composure – as if all along it had been the holding back and anticipation that galled him, not the coming clean – the doctor smiled, snapped his fingers, pointed at the baker and said with a wink, “Heh, there is no monster.” After a pause, he bolted out the door, yelling, “Light the fires!” Through mirrors, I caught flashes of him cutting across town while his retinue poured barrels of oil and pitch from rooftops, igniting streets in huge pillars of flame.

Smoke clogged alleyways and rushed over houses. Mirrors cracked in the heat and the roar of burning wood flew up through funnels, amplified to constant surges of static. In scattered reflections I saw the mayor screaming for water, for dirt, for help, and people running around like they’d just opened their eyes for the first time, at once angry and fearful. I caught just a flash of the doctor hopping down into the ground, no doubt heading off to sprint beneath the scorching streets through the womb tunnels. He scrambled up through a hole and emerged at the harbor, where I was waiting. He looked at me and shrugged, “Fine. Let’s go.” Spanish moss and shadows blowing after us, the doctor grabbed a satchel-full of sailing accoutrement, descended back into the tunnels, deeper and deeper around innumerable corners, finally reaching a grand underground current. We boarded a small sailing vessel, already stocked to the jib with gold, silver and premeditation, and set ourselves off into the flow. “What about the rest of our crew?” I asked.

“Screw ‘em,” the doctor said, staring up to the rocks, the other side of which people were too busy drawing pales of water to come chasing. Only the doctor’s former employees, who had no stock in the land we left behind, would be standing on banks waving fists in anger. Neither of us mentioned the symmetry of our arrival and departure, bookended in smoke. “Those people had a disease.” the doctor said. “We had a responsibility to stop its spread.” There was a new somberness in his voice.

We popped into the sunshine after a while, and then rode fast with the wind and current for over a week. The doctor spent much of the journey at the prow, gazing ahead, never looking back, scanning waters and nearby shorelines – what for, I couldn’t tell. He sought something, definitely, and when he found it made it very clear. “I found it,” he said, pulling our boat into a cave. Within, we anchored near a dry patch of rock to set up camp. The doctor needed no tent or blanket, merely unloaded all his riches and practically sat atop, falling asleep in a great sigh of relief and release, as if dropping down dead, his life completed.

We spent some peaceful, carefree time in the cave – the doctor had brought along playing cards – but soon surviving villagers sought justice. The ocean didn’t deter them. No doubt they searched every sea cranny, harbor and bay between the village and our encampment. Warriors arrived, usually one at a time, sword in hand, suited in armor, looking for the doctor’s head, ready to claim honor and victory. They sometimes came with sample cases or clipboards or contracts, or catalogs and brochures, but they never arrived without swords and anger. The doctor and I were both frail due to scant fishing in the cave, so we couldn’t easily fight off noble knights or gladiators or door to door salesmen, but the doctor had this fantastic cannon, all steel and gears and black iron, and, “because of the risk of infection,” he would just blow these warriors away in a huge ball of fire. In the darkness of the cave, it was really something. True fireworks, splattering shadows across the rock face. As soon as the warriors came through the narrow mouth of the rock, arms raised and declaring this or that, they were the easiest of targets. There’d be nothing left but blackened flesh and singed metal and the doctor’s ecstatic hooting.

I’d often swim out into the shallows to see if I could locate cannon balls for reuse. I’d linger, wading and treading water, enjoying the breeze. The water was warm, calm. Once, distracted by the wind and the sun and my toes in the velvet sand, I didn’t see, from the safety of the waves, a sales rep approaching the cave, whistling and swinging his battle axe, and so I never made the customary bird-call warning. The sound of a commotion and scuffle echoing off the wet rocks roused me and heralded the loud clap of the cannon – and then silence.

Not a single hoot, ecstatic or otherwise.

I returned to the cave carrying a cooled cannon ball, and found first the many burned pages of a collectible catalog, the mutilated body of the salesman, and finally the doctor himself. He asked, mumbling, whether or not I wanted a sandwich, despite having no means to make one, then shifted atop his gold, wiggling his hand around and drooling. Blood started pooling in large black puddles. An arrow rested squarely in his neck. He looked like a soggy, brown banana.

I went outside and jumped back in the water.

Floating with the tide, I looked at the cave, smoke ominously rising from its maw, the doctor coiled dead atop his treasure, bones burned beneath our feet, smoldering ruins of a broken town at our backs. Fire, gold, terror, caves – the scaly-skinned arrogance, the slithering use of education, fork-tongued rhetoric, lumbering greed – a dragon? How could I have missed it? He was the thing that had slunk into town to destroy it, not those sales reps. And for what? In any event, it’s dead, I thought, but after a minute the whole dragon conceit felt a little stupid, and I just grabbed a gold sack and got the hell out of there. Was there honor and glory in this? Maybe a little, but not much. I sailed to a distant city, then another and another, every one the same. Open waters felt just as cavernous as womb tunnels, all options laid out in front of me like transparent knots of corners and bends. Eventually I simply stopped where I was, some small town here or there, sold the boat, traded in gold for currency, and started a small business selling used musical instruments. I made decent money. Enough to eat out a few nights a week, to lounge with books in the park, or catch some entertainment on weekends with friends. I even started a little family, and could afford to enroll my son at a respectable private school. We owned some land in the country. Recently, too, I ran into Eric, the young boy, and the insurance-selling toe, outside a small market. They were older, obviously, and married. They looked happy. I was nervous at first, but we smiled at each other somehow. She was pregnant. Their clothes were cheap but cared for.

There was only a little wind in the air, but it felt right. My hand lingered too long on her round belly, so much so that Eric had to touch my elbow to get my attention. I tried to look into her eyes, and then his, but I had no idea what anyone was feeling. We stood there smiling at each other outside the market like that for a very long time. I didn’t want to leave. The market stretched out around us like the sea. How long could we keep smiling? There is no monster, of course, I thought, but I want to be a part of it.

It started to snow. ”Do either of you play music?” I asked.

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Dolan Morgan lives and writes in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. You can find his work in The Believer, Armchair/Shotgun, Field and TRNSFR, among others. His work mythologising airplane hijackings has been featured in the documentary project, Fortnight Journal. More at www.dolanmorgan.com.

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Tom Oristaglio lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he writes poetry and molests photocopy machines in his spare time. His poems have appeared in Armchair/Shotgun, Rabbit Catastrophe, Fourteen Hills, and Anatomy & Etymology. Peel your eyes.

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Roxy Drew paints and draws and writes in Brooklyn, New York. She studied English literature at Brown University, science journalism at Boston University, and art through a correspondence course offered by the Institute of Trial and Error (go Fightin’ Self-Taught Eagles!) She has a webcomic for you to read at hangedmancafe.com.

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Jessica Mack makes pictures in Brooklyn, NY.

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Adam Scott Mazer is a Brooklyn-based writer, actor, illustrator, and warrior.  Highlights of his life so far include facing down Genghis Khan’s army with only a lighter and a can of Binaca, sailing across the Pacific on a raft made of human bones, and decoding the ancient witch-runes of Baba Yaga.  In his free time, he runs a theater company, AntiMatter Collective (antimattercollective.org), which has produced two of his original plays about his experiences in the Old West and the Far Future, respectively.  He also enjoys basket-weaving.

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This story appeared in issue 14 of the The Lifted Brow. To purchase this issue, or any others, or to even subscribe and get the next six issues delivered, click here.

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Forays into my New Age Rage

by Jenny Valentish

 

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Wait. Did John Butler just 12-step me?

I’m locked in a Tarago, newly sober, with the John Butler Trio. They are heading to a gig in Newcastle and I am leeching along, dictaphone in hand. I’m concentrating fiercely. Beneath all the talk of uranium mines and the importance of cracking the States, I can hear an undercurrent of something big – a hidden message of some sorts.

Butler is talking about the importance of being fully present, about putting out his intention and handing over his will. He talks of grabbing the reins of his life and riding it like a wild, bucking bronco.

My ears prick up. I’d recently started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and I recognise these patterns of speech. Up till this point I’d been about as spiritual as a sock; suddenly I’m the empty vessel into which strange new vocabulary pours – usually in the form of a rhyme or acronym. That’s what happens when you quit drinking. One month you’re just a limbic lobe on a wobbly brainstem, the next you’re epiphanying righteously all over the place and talking in tongues. Now Butler seems to be strongly hinting he is one of us.*

Veering wildly off the interview script, I start lobbing in some unusual questions. “Do you have a few drinks before you go on stage?” I ask, thrusting the dictaphone between the front seats, where he reclines with his feet on the dash. “What about after?”

Butler frowns, perhaps presuming I have run out of Wiki ammo and am about to ask him his favourite colour. “I might just have a few beers,” he shrugs, and stares back out at the freeway.

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‘Alcohol’ in Latin is ‘spiritus’

What I had failed to realise was that while the foundations of 12-step programs are built upon Jungian theory and cognitive restructuring, in the past few decades the community has acquired plenty of nouveau spirituality. Thanks to the popularity of books like The Secret, The Power of Now and guru-anointer Oprah, the language of enlightenment is infiltrating everything. Alcoholics Anonymous has been particularly ripe for pop-spiritual assimilation. As Jung himself wrote to AA founding father Bill Wilson right at its genesis, “‘Alcohol’ in Latin is ‘spiritus’ and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as for the most depraving poison.” Small wonder a sudden switch to abstinence would leave one grasping for meaning in their life. Some kind of epiphany from your chosen Higher Power is often top of each member’s to do list.

Butler’s own appreciation of Buddhism and his interest in neurolinguistic programming and self-improvement programs ticks many boxes of modern spirituality, just as AA does, hence I saw a pattern. But up until this point in my life I would never even have realised I’d just taken a trip in the Tarago of true enlightenment.

(* I should say here, I checked Butler’s rider when he was on stage and he’s not “one of us”.)

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New age rage

I stopped going to AA meetings when I was told I was spiritually sick and unlikely to improve. It’s possible I took this statement as a direct challenge when I immediately started up the blog New Age Guinea Pig.

Over the following year, I’d road-test dowsing, pranic healing, ThetaHealing ™, a Scientology e-meter, reiki, kinesiology, a gong bath, 5Rhythms dancing, singing about angels, psychometry, acupuncture, lucid dreaming, tai chi, tantra, EMDR, EFT, NLP, a laughter club, a woman’s healing group and the talks of several gurus. It was super fun and super expensive, as most of these treatments inexplicably are. It probably replaced the pursuit of drinking and tapped into something lying dormant within me.

As a kid, I was a sucker for religious paraphernalia. My parents were atheists, but my father was partial to divine architecture (the bricks and mortar kind) and thus we’d visit many a house of the Lord so that he could cine-film the eaves. As he whirred away, I’d make a beeline for the booklets bearing photos of crepuscular rays, or I’d shimmer a silent language at the statues. I felt like I channelled the spirit of God and would demonstrate this through the medium of “internal yawns” at the dinner table, to no one’s delight (try yawning without opening your mouth. Feels all shimmery). Skipping off to church alone on Sundays made me feel pious, but I found none of my anxious questions were answered. The worries that I couldn’t tell my mum and dad, for which I’d sought comfort from a celestial third party, were exacerbated.

At puberty I coldly cut off my spirituality and worshipped at the altar of alcohol. I couldn’t keep setting myself up for disappointment, I’d decided, and from thenceforth the slightest sniff of soul healing and salvation left me bubbling with new age rage. Show me the flyer of a “spiritual doctor of psychology”, “fourth-generation metaphysician” or “angel healer” (moonlighting as a middle-aged woman in dreamcatcher earrings) and my fists clenched. But shouldn’t you baulk at someone who waftily claims to cure cancer via “Transcendence Healing, an individual process assessing powerful Universal energies in order to facilitate your healing at a soul level”? I think so.

As a journalist writing for women’s magazines and the health supplements of newspapers, my brushes with treatments like reiki and kinesiology left me feeling thoroughly manipulated – and not by cleansing violet light. Psychics, meanwhile, would beadily eye my slovenly dress code and inky arms and deduce I was a raging pisshead. Ha! Three years too late, vague-looking lady.

Despite this, I was convinced there was something spiritual out there for me, to connect with my soul (“You don’t have a soul!” a sceptic friend snapped). Where to start? The town built on magical ley lines, of course: Byron Bay.

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Byron Bay: it’s a bit Eat Pray Love

On my first day in Byron, I swam with big silver fish in clear ocean waters and then booked in for a massage so relaxing that I started to hallucinate. Part of the package was a session with a healer, Mark. Mark had a very empathetic face, useful in a job like his.

“I keep spacking out and losing my temper,” I told him. I’d realised immediately on this grande spiritual mission that I was the sort of person who’d have to tell a ‘soothsayer’ the truth rather than try and catch them out with a lie. Besides, you’d never learn something about yourself with a lie. “The rage is always there, just under the surface.”

Mark responded with a number of kind maxims. “Everything you’ve ever done, no matter what you think of it, has served a purpose,” was one of them, coming dangerously to my much detested, “Everything happens for a reason.”

I lay down on a table as he made plucking motions with his hands in the air over my body. “I can see all sorts of protective layers you’ve put over your heart,” he said, still plucking. “Some of them are tissue thin, some of them have heavy padlocks.” Pluck pluck. I drifted off, feeling like I was floating in the foetal position, breathing easily in golden fluid and bubbles. I’d had healing done a few times and felt nothing but intense irritation, but when Mark did it I bounced like I was floating on a lilo in the sun, a virgin pina colada in one hand. There was a subtle sense of being pulled upward, but more noticeable were the ripples pulsing down my body from my head, finally streaming out of my feet. It made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, there are real deal healers out there.

“Be careful crossing the road,” Mark said as he waved me off.

Riding on the breeze as I made my way down Byron’s main street, there came the distant rumble of bongos. But instead of the familiar knot of repulsion in my gut, I felt expanded, relaxed. I found myself imagining the satisfaction the bongo botherers were getting out of interlocking their rhythms and looping into infinity, like psychedelic fractals.

“Thank god,” said a passerby when infinity petered out; but at this they started up again, making me titter.

I set off to follow the sound.

Richard was not from anywhere in particular, but a citizen of planet earth. To be fair he didn’t utter this himself, but I deduced it from his rough, brown legs, straggly goatee and faraway stare. He perched on a rock, looked out to sea and requested a rolling paper. I shifted over to sit next to him and threw sticks for his sandy dog, which was wearing a bandana. The sun was setting epically over Mount Warning. Richard requested some tobacco.

“Get here earlier tomorrow,” he said. “You need to absorb some vitamin D from the sun and decalcify your pineal gland. That’s your third eye. It calcifies as you get older.” I pictured it scabbed and scaly as a cuttlefish bone behind my chickenpox scar.

Richard gave me a lentil pie he’d salvaged from a dumpster behind the bakery and cracked one open himself.

I thought about what to say other than, “And what do you do?”

“This is all just a figment of our imagination,” he offered before I could come up with anything. He swept his hand out at the shimmering horizon. “What we see here, we have created. Think about taking acid or mushrooms, and how differently you see things then.

“We’re all made up of energy,” he continued. “Like golden light. Sometimes when we meet someone with the wrong energy we’re like lightsabers, you know? Shwwwwung, shwwwwung. But we’re all just drops in the ocean. How do I know? I’ve read enough books and had enough conversations to be sure.”

It helped that Richard was good looking, in the same way that market researchers recruit hot young students to wield clipboards and bounce into your path. Sometimes you’ll weaken and listen. Richard talked some more about the meaning of life, and then drifted off. “Maybe your reason for coming to Byron Bay was for us to have this conversation,” he said in parting.

With this entire positive experience as my anchor, I started making regular trips to Byron Bay whenever times were tough, and I always made an appointment with Mark. Mark was placid as a panda bear; as warm as a roaring hearth. He was the sort of person with whom you can make prolonged and meaningful eye contact without wanting to stab out the jelly in yourvitreous with your car keys. This time around, he diagnosed an energy block in my abdomen.

“That’s funny,” I piped up. “I’ve always had a huge phobia about being touched around there.”

Mark suddenly saw arrows. “I’m being shown arrows,” he said. “You were shot in a past life by a jealous lover.” He gave a warm chuckle as I pictured my punctured ovaries. Another successful healing session later, I left: a big ball of loved-up expanded consciousness, floating off down the street to the sea.

The idea of past lives would never be one that I’d accept, but even so I let this occasion through to the keeper. I started making recommendations of Mark to all and sundry.

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Experiment: ThetaHealing™

Whenever in Byron I was keen to explore the stranger end of the spirituality spectrum, like ThetaHealing™. In a backstreet, I found a little babushka of a woman who offered to re-strand my DNA in the method of guru Vianna Stibal. Stibal claims ThetaHealing™ can rewire someone genetically and cure cancer. A practitioner works with guardian angels to balance seratonin and noradrenaline levels in the brain, and pull heavy metals and radiation out of your cells.

“We believe by changing your brain wave cycle to include the ‘Theta’ state, you can actually watch the Creator Of All That Is create instantaneous physical and emotional healing,” goes one such claim. To the uninitiated this will simply look like someone waving their hands over your body. The Byron Bay practitioner assured me she’d cured herself of radiation poisoning after exposure at Chernobyl.

Technically speaking, ThetaHealing™ is exactly like energy healing, as both involve combing the fingers through the air above the body, but ThetaHealing™ is $60 more expensive. And I’m ashamed to say that after an ultra-personal line of questioning as I lay prone on a table, I wept a bit.

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Experiment: Nectar of pure beingness

Despite feeling sheepish, I walked out of the treatment room completely buoyed and super peaceful. I tried to project my energy as I hovered past the surf-wear shops, and gave other people’s energy a sly rub.

That evening, I decided to go to a talk by Gangaji – an Oprah-approved guru from California. Just as Eckhart Tolle does a nice line in pop Buddhism, one critic complained of Gangaji and her partner Eli (who had a Jimmy Swaggart-style fall from grace, FYI): “What they are teaching is a super-watered down version of what Ramana Maharsi lived, which was at least a little close to the Advaita teachings, which originated with Sankaracara about 1300 years ago.” Tonight though, people were dropping the word “satsang”, which meant we were about to be in the company of a true “spiritual leader”.
As we waited for Gangaji to take the stage, I felt like I was in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All around me came the guttural sound of deep breathing (some of which was a tape loop), and scoping the room I realised the vast majority of the audience were off on some other plane already. Fifteen minutes later, Gangaji materialised on stage, and wordlessly led us through a further quarter hour of meditation.

She’d nailed the beatific stare, but Gangaji’s approach to speeches was ‘minimalist’. Slowly – ever so slowly – she pondered the concept of being “here”, “just here”. “Whether it is you, I, he or she that is here is immaterial,” she beamed. “We are … here. You are … that.”

I suppose there are only so many ways you can relay the message of “stop trying to fill the void with attachments and just exist in the moment” before you have to rely on nodding and long pauses to fill the gaps.

Looking around the room at people nodding back sagely, there came to me the deafening thought: “I don’t like the idea of being shared consciousness with any of this lot.” But that, of course, was my ego mind talking.

A procession of women from the audience took to the stage and fell into some kind of trance. “I don’t need to say anything any more,” one observed after failing to say anything in the first place – and she was met with great approval. She’d tapped into what Gangaji called “nectar of pure beingness”. The woman did some startled head wobbles, blinking and looking around like she’d just been born.

Later, the snarky lady giving me a lift back into town declared: “I hate that woman,” her unspiritual outburst triggering my insufferably pious gland. “She was definitely faking it,” she continued. “What do you think? There’s no way. And what was that dress all about?”

I dunno. I didn’t dislike the woman on the stage, or Gangaji, but I’d have to agree with this lady about the tendency of some new agers to fake enlightenment with a sense of desperation. If you don’t epiphany publicly, are you a failure?

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The five cornerstones of nouveau spirituality

I spent a lot of time in bookshops like the one in Byron Bay, in which I heard two psychics behind the register debating how to break it to someone that they are dying, and it was within these shelves and in the pages of new age papers like Living Now and Nova that I came to identify five cornerstones of nouveau spirituality. You may disagree.

1: Eastern spirituality ($)

Buzzwords: Awareness; your authentic self; shared consciousness.
Gurus: Eckhart Tolle; Deepak Choprah.

My experience: See ’Nectar of pure beingness’.

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2: Self improvement ($$$$$)

Organisations: Landmark; Pathway; Mind Dynamics.
Tools: The Law of Attraction; Neurolinguistic Programming; Emotional Freedom Technique.
Gurus: James A Ray; Jack Canfield; Anthony Robbins.
My experience: Frequently the ambition of disciples is financial gain, as was the stated aim of almost everyone in the EFT workshop I attended. You tap at your body’s acupressure points as you intone instructions to your subconscious. We were all slapping away at ourselves as a participant was asked to relive a traumatic occasion. I hope it wasn’t a sexual trauma as I suspected, because it sounded like a porno flick in that room. Our instructor referenced The Secret frequently. “Trying to rationalise something like EFT,” he scolded, uses “rational lies”.

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3: Pseudoscience ($$$)

Buzzwords: Quantum; dianetics; theta; succussion; water memory, frequencies.

My experience: Most notably, reading the Guardian column and book – Bad Science – by Dr Ben Goldacre. Goldacre is the Lord Flashheart of sceptical journalism, lancing the boil of pseudoscience and fashioning meaningless hyperbole into a frilly bonnet. He relishes taking homeopaths to task – something that’s not so tough now that Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council has declared homeopathy unethical. That and the high profile case of Western Australian woman Penny Dingle’s death from bowel cancer in the hands of a science-hating homeopath, who in turn was consulting a clairvoyant.

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4: New age conspiracy (0)

Buzzwords: The Mayans; reptilians; Alpha Draconis; George Bush; Indigo Children; WAKE UP!

Gurus: David Icke – the former England football goalie who has maintained for 21 years that many world leaders and celebrities are shapeshifting lizards (his son Gareth is a recording artist who writes indie songs about the same); Nexus – the international conspiracy and ‘health breakthrough’magazine that’s based in Queensland; Jim Corr (from Irish band The Corrs. If you play a Corrs record backwards you’re going to hear all sorts of weird shit).

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5: Prophesy and healing ($$)

Buzzwords: Angels; energy; clairvoyants; spirit guides; psychics; psychometry; mediums; telekinesis; totem animals; past life regression; astrology; palmistry; crystal healing; violet light.

My experience: My history teacher at school once told the class that the superstitions practised by people dying of the plague in the Middle Ages – like cuddling hens and rubbing human faeces on buboes – may seem ridiculous now, and they probably did then, too, but when you’re desperate you’ll try anything. It can’t hurt! But that’s why I highly recommend that you 1) Have a think about the 1968, as-yet-unclaimed offer of $100 (now $1m) by magician and sceptic James Randi to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities under laboratory conditions, and 2) Check out a mentalist’s live show, which will show you every ‘mind reading’ trick in the book. Because putting your faith in something intangible doesn’t hurt, no, but it will set you back $100 that could be better spent on a great slab of vintage cheese or something.I’ll even share with you my own sham psychic training that I arranged through Meetup.com, that hive of weird hook-ups…

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Experiment: Psychometry

The evening was all a-bluster as I trundled over the West Gate Bridge and pointed the quackmobile towards Geelong. It came as a surprise that there was a psychometry group out in this part of the world. While the Mornington Peninsula is a hotbed of psychic activity and angel guides, the Bellarine Peninsula is usually less concerned with esoteric wisdom.

En route to this Monday night gathering, at which we were to give psychic readings for other members, my cohort Esther and I rehearsed our scripts, utilising the cold-reading tips set out in Professor Richard Wiseman’s book, Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There. He’s an expert in the predictability of the human brain and how we can be duped.

I practised my double-headed platitudes, designed to hook the recipient with one end or the other: “You’re a person with great depths who enjoys pondering the big stuff alone, yet people seek out your company,” I postulated.

“You’re not one to gossip, but people value your advice,” Esther countered.

For today’s mission, we would need some kind of personal trinket, which would be put anonymously into an envelope and picked by someone else, who would do a reading based on it. Esther had a rummage in her handbag for something I could use.

“But it’s got to belong to me,” I pointed out.

She looked at me sharply. “You say that as though makes a difference.”

Oh yeah.

Nevertheless, once we got to the venue, I couldn’t help noticing Esther had a superstitious riffle through the empty envelopes on offer until she found one with her favourite number printed on it. Sap!

Terry also noticed. He was the leader of this group, and also – according to my googling skills – a local performer in the vein of Tom Jones. I saw him lurking under the pretence of handing us nametags as I stuffed an earring into my envelope.

There were 12 of us – all women, including Terry’s wife – sat in a tight circle in a barely lit Masonic hall. We weren’t allowed to cross our legs as Marg led us through a guided mediation, presumably so that the ‘christlight’ in us could seep out unhindered.

After the meditation we were all asked to share what we saw. Everyone, bar us two interlopers, admitted to having had a conversation with their spirit guides. Terry had also conversed with a dolphin “that seemed to know me” and seen all sorts of spectacular wizardry that Ronnie James Dio would have baulked at.

Next it was the bit we’d been waiting for – the psychometry. Terry picked my envelope, and waxed lyrical about a totem animal, an eagle. Very flattering. Nicely done.

I opened my envelope to find some kind of necklace with a ‘T’ on it. I passed it from one hand to the other, tangling the chain between my fingers.

“I get the feeling this person has been waiting very patiently for their time to come,” I said. “They’ve watched others have their moment in the sun, but they really feel it should be their time now. And it will be.”

“That was 60 to 70 per cent right; so that’s really good,” complimented Terry when I was done. He spent the rest of the meeting trying to unsnarl his necklace.

“I’m getting bananas,” Esther shouted when it was her go. “I don’t know why, but I can smell them really strongly … and I can feel a pain in my head, here.”

Carmen reclaimed her ring. “I quite like bananas,” she admitted politely. “And I get headaches sometimes.”

I noticed that there was a script of sorts being stuck to here. Almost everyone complained of a burning sensation emanating from their object, and “I can tell this person has great wisdom” was bandied about a lot. My overwhelming feeling, though, was that I was in a room full of curtain twitchers.

We finished off by healing Annie, who – I deduced – has a serious illness. We stood in a circle around her and held hands as she wept. Terry warned her about a couple of dubious men in her life who meant her harm, touched her head and gave it a little push, faith healer-style. Cured!

As we bid our farewells, two of the women told me I had a remarkable gift, steadfastly ignoring Esther. “I actually did see a banana!” she yelped indignantly as we jumped in the car, never to return.

I really hope Annie seeks proper medical attention.

And now, a short intermission and admission.

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I like David Icke

“I can tell you how the World Trade Centre came down. I served in the Special Armed Forces, the Secret Service, I know all the world bankers. I know the cure to breast cancer. I could become a very wealthy man.”

The rant came thick and fast, low and sexual, delivered with a prowling gait. It was surprisingly succinct and coherent, with a bitter little twist.

No, it wasn’t David Icke, it was a bloke on the 86 tram. Pacing up and down with straggly hair falling around his face like Jesus. Or Frank from Shameless. Once he jumped off, everybody breathed a sigh of relief – so presumably they weren’t on their way to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre like me.

On this day in November 2011, Icke would talk for nine hours on his The Lion Sleeps No More tour, brought out by a company called Positive Path. You know David Icke – the Pommy goalkeeper-turned-Green-Party-pollie-turned-New-Age-conspiracy-theorist. The one with the lizards. The giant, blood-sucking lizards that are running our governments, our media and our minds. Their number include George Bush, the Queen and Willie Nelson. Yes? Now?

I was expecting something slick and unnerving like Tom Cruise in Magnolia. Instead we got a pot-bellied, slightly peeved, nutty professor – albeit one with crazy eyes. Icke’s self-deprecating humour (in the sense that he’s decided to laugh at himself before you get a chance to) covered all his humiliations: his cruel dressing down on British talk show Wogan (YouTube it), his “turquoise period” (during which he moved his clairvoyant mistress into the family home, called himself the “son of the godhead” and would only wear turquoise in an effort to attract Universal positivity), his dabblings with psychoactive plants (could he be seeing the same giant lizards Hunter S Thompson saw?), and Richard Dawkins’ persistent poking fun at him. In fact, his motto is “Still crazy after all these years”. You can even get the T-shirt.

As the story goes, Icke lost his mind back in 1990, when a psychic told him he’d say things that would change the world as we knew it. He found himself called to Peru, where he had an awakening atop a mountain, so powerful that he found himself drilled into the ground in a Christ-like pose, with the elements rushing in to baptise him. Ever since, he’s been refining and refining his theory: that the human race is neck-deep in a triple conspiracy to keep us dumb, while giant reptilians from the star system Alpha Draconis manipulate our reality.

As allegories for modern society, some scholars point out, Icke’s theories are brilliant. But, the same scholars concede, he’s probably not talking allegories.

Or is he?

Or is he?

The first third of today’s proceedings, anyway, fucked us gently.

In a seamless flow of rhetoric, Icke pulled apart religion, the monarchy, the CIA, mindless television, the Lord Mayor’s reaction to Occupy in Melbourne and blind adhesion to a rat race existence, overseen by sinister, shadowy overlords. Icke had logical explanations for UFOs, astrology, palmistry, crystal therapy, chakras, numerology and all the New Agery I’m highly dubious about, but explained so fast I had no time to keep filtering back through his claims and cross-referencing. Still, learning physics at school also required a massive suspension of disbelief that I don’t even remember having to hoist. The ‘big bang theory’. Really? Icke laughs in the face of it.

“Don’t trust your thoughts; you are not your thoughts,” Icke was saying; shouting, actually. But whereas that’s a mantra of modern-day psychologists and mindfulness practitioners, Icke means our thoughts are literally being inserted into our heads – by “Them”.

As a slow drip feed of information, it all seemed perfectly reasonable, whereas if he’d leapt from “While you’re watching Deal Or No Deal things are happening without your consent” to “We are all holograms projected from the edge of space” in one fell swoop, well, I’d have laughed.

So this is how mind control – the very type he warns us of – works: careful attrition of what you think you’re sure of. No wonder some extra-conspiratorial conspiracy theorists reckon Icke’s a double agent, a right-wing rube.

Three hours in, we broke for lunch and despite my intrigue I kept on walking. I felt like I was betraying Icke – and I’ll never know for sure who THEY were – but I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t have made the apostles sit through a story that long, and having to listen to the converted yell “Yes!” and clap with a self-righteous fervour was threatening to explode my head, Scanners-style.

And while Icke may approve of that dramatic scenario, I don’t think he’d want me for one of his lions.

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Eckhart Tolle vs David Icke

Despite having aligned herself in the past with gurus who have since been variously accused of manslaughter, child torture and fraud, Oprah Winfrey has never been pictured cuddling David Icke. Eckhart Tolle, on the other hand, she’s all over like a rash.

Yet I have compared the ‘awakening’ moment of Tolle (as described in The Power of Now) to that of Icke (as described at every opportunity), and really, it’s the same, minus the mountain accoutrements. Check this out:

“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two?” If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”
I was so stunned by this strange realisation that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing”, as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It was as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that. — Tolle’s version of his awakening, aged 29.

There were magnets pulling my feet to the ground… and then my arms go out at 45 degrees, for the best part of an hour. This energy coming through me. My body started to shake with it and I had two very powerful thought-forms pass through my head.

The first one said: “They’ll be talking about this 100 years from now.” The other one was: “It will be over when you feel the rain.”This energy just kept coming through me. And I kept going in and out of, if you like, awareness, consciousness, like driving a car and you go: Crikey. Where did the last two miles go?

I watched this storm come out of the mountains… I’m seeing faces in the clouds. And then it’s a wall of rain. I’m watching it coming towards me. By this time I’m hanging on, you know, with this energy coming through me. Eventually it hits me – torrential rain – and everything stopped. That’s when I staggered forward and my shoulders were agony and all the rest of it. — Icke’s version of his awakening, aged 39.

Whoever you think wins that awakening contest, I’ve got to hand it to Oprah: she has managed to transcend my own innate fear and revulsion of new age men and made them her army. I do apologise for my frankness, but frankly, they give me the creeps. And so I decided to prod that feeling with a stick for the blog.

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Experiment: 5Rhythms

5Rhythms originated in the 1970s and uses tenets of shamanistic, ecstatic, mystical and eastern philosophy – although to the uninitiated it looks like flailing around to music. On this day there were around 150 of us in a convent hall.

A DJ span languorous ambient music, causing one woman to roll around on the floor, showing her undies. Other people waved their arms around like trees in the wind. We’d be doing this – to varying BPMs – for the next few hours.

Ten minutes in, I was still grimacing at ground level. At some point I knew I’d have to get off the floor, upon which I was trailing the odd limb, and get jiggy with it. The BPMs were rising, and in response, people ran around the room like aeroplanes or bucked their hips wildly, as though re-enacting the voodoo sequences in Live and Let Die.

I got up and got stuck in, and after some initial dying inside, I found I was completely forgetting myself – and pulling awesome shamanistic dance moves, hitherto unseen. I snuck a peak at my scepto friend Esther. One minute she was interpretative prancing through the air with her frock sailing behind her, the next she was raving to an internal munted-mix, happy as Larry.

An hour went by. I love this, I thought. I was secretly dying for someone to gasp of my chops: “You mean to say you’ve had no formal training?” However, I couldn’t quite lose the “Get fucked, seriously” attitude whenever someone came whirling like a dervish into my personal space.

One shirtless man with an unruly beard and orange fisherman’s pants curled up in the foetal position on the floor. Another man drifted over to him in a non-threatening manner and slowly reached out a hand to touch his shoulder. They remained in this chilling tableau for many minutes.

The BPM rose a notch. There was clapping. Some people tumbled on each other like acrobats. They embraced. Women tucked their dresses into their knickers and rolled their eyeballs around their sockets. One woman curled into a ball and a man wrapped himself around her like a limpet. Another couple touched each other’s fingers and stared into each other’s eyes, kissing.

“Feeeeeeeel it,” a disembodied voice shrieked over tribal drums. We’re feeling it, we’re feeling it; if only in the form of flashbacks. In fact, as my learned friend noted later, this seemed to be an old ravers’ home, for those who had long since blown a gasket.

My interest started to wane 90 minutes in and I went to gaze out of the window. The mix faltered between tracks and I could hear everyone groaning, like we were in some soft porn flick.

As we sat in a massive circle afterwards in various states of undress, I drew one knee towards me to stop it touching the skin of the new age man next to me.This is fair enough though, as a friend had told me that a mate of hers goes along to these shindigs purely to pick up new age chicks who are helpless to resist a shirtless man in a leather necklace, dancing to the divine force.
The facilitator told us about a mid-week class called Relating on the Dance Floor, in which – reading between the lines – we would learn to touch each other and dance at the same time.

“You should do that,” tormented Esther in a whisper.
But I would go one better.

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Experiment: tantric sex

The next logical step, having shared groans with new agers, was tantric sex. The reason I’d been determined to try this is because it sounds so excruciating. I mean, tantra’s all about spirituality, eye contact and effort, isn’t it? I doubt Sting saw his virginity as an indignity to be got rid of fast, or treats wanking like an aggressive formality.

The only morsels my Melbourne investigations unearthed were a thinly veiled prostitution service, in which Tatiana offered to touch me all over while we were both naked for a mere $250, and a website for Tantric Dave, who lies stretched out on the homepage with one thigh positioned over his ‘wand of light’.

Then I found a less salacious lady in Sydney.

Beatriz was Brazilian, and therefore well placed to laugh at the sexual repression of the English, which I am. She greeted me in leisurewear, but then produced a couple of skimpy kaftans. A room of her apartment was decked out new age-style, with candles, incense, cushions, didgeridoos chorbling away from hidden speakers and the heat up stiflingly high. Let me just open my kaftan a notch…

We started off with some pelvic floor exercises to get the blood flowing to the nethers and to learn how to, you know, sort of massage a man from the inside.

Breathing deeply through our mouths, we clenched away, and Beatriz suggested I move my hand up my body to help me visualise pulsing the good feeling right up to my heart. It was no use, though – try as I might, I couldn’t extend the warmth beyond the physiological vicinity of my reproductive organs. I felt like I was swinging a hammer at a test-your-strength machine and not pushing past ‘puny’. Meanwhile, Beatriz was clearly dinging the bell.

Next, we sat opposite each other on cushions and took turns musing on “what touches my heart”, while staring into each other’s eyes. Beatriz talked about sexuality and how Gen Z girls are expected to recreate porn scenarios while so liquored up they can’t feel anything anyway. Tantra’s a method of being aware of your body and its every nuance. But anyway, on to the masturbation.

Sitting side by side, we slid our right hands down onto our sexual chakras, with our left hands over our hearts, where I found mine was opportunistically having a sly tweak of my nipple. Beatriz started rocking in a figure of eight, arching her back in and out of the yoga cat pose. “It’s okay to moan,” she gasped. We were supposed to be visualising a golden sphere of light, but thanks to years of an oppressive male regime, I was only able to picture a massive cock.

Then it was time for the strokes. Leaping up impishly, Beatriz pulled a phallus out of a drawer and lay down on the floor, holding it above her groin. She demonstrated a variety of tantric ways to stroke it – ways other than furiously choking it, I mean – and gave me a go as well. I can now pop a cork and firestick someone with no worries at all.

That was it for our session and I walked out feeling really peaceful. There’s definitely something to be said for taking the time to acknowledge and nurture the sensations you’re feeling. Although, problematically, the idea of a bloke being into tantra makes my ovaries deflate.

And talking of that region…

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The big problem of the alien implant in my groin

While I was certainly feeling the benefits of some new age practices, things came crashing to a halt when I went to Byron Bay to see Mark again.

I was a sceptic, sure, but Mark was my healer. He was my wild card; the aberration of science that I’d described as being the real deal in the same way that racists will have their one black mate who’s “all right”.

Mark had become the knife-edge on which my scepticism swayed. I’d told so many fellow naysayers: “but there’s this one guy…” I’d accredited him with dispensing of my circular thoughts, a broken heart and my smoking habit. Or at least, I’d thought of it as a dual effort between us – one with immediate results I couldn’t have achieved on my own.

As I’ve said before, past lives are about as high on my ‘Maybe Believe This’ list as Indigo Children – a new generation of supernaturally gifted kids with psychic powers and Steiner School educations – but in the name of consistency, I decided to return to this subject with Mark on my next visit. I.e., would he stick to the arrows-in-ovaries story?

“Last time I came here you said we should investigate an energy block,” I said.

Mark gazed at my energy for a bit. “I often baulk at saying things like this, because most people don’t react well,” he said, at which point my hips tightened a few notches. “But it’s an implant.”

“An implant?”

“Yes. I’m seeing reptilian ETs – Zeta Reticulans. They used to rule the Earth and would quite frequently study humans by using implants, but these days we thankfully attract more benevolent beings of a higher frequency. The Zetas put an implant in you at birth to study your reproductive system. I can probably get it out.”

I decided to roll with this. It was deliciously close to David Icke’s theories after all.

“I’m not going to use the spirit guides in this operation, I’m going to use the friendly ETs,” Mark said, as I removed my shoes. I climbed aboard the table for 40 minutes. I usually love this bit, but I wasn’t feeling it as much this time, due to the inconvenient truth of Mark talking about aliens. There was a small possibility Mark had seen my blog and my enjoyment of Icke and was having a marvellous joke at my expense, but I reckoned not. I mourned the Mark gone by; the one who told me not to intellectualise spirituality, the one who said he had no interest in studying things like chakras and what have you.

I tried though. It could be true, was my mantra, up there on the table. You don’t know for sure; you only know your version of reality. Your critical mind could have created you a very limited universe.

I saw my individual cells, golden, spinning, shimmering and spitting like Coke bubbles. I felt myself opened up flat as a pancake on the table – although Mark later told me the operation was multidimensional.

“I’ve never seen one as big as this before,” he said when he was done, talking down at me as I lay on the table with my arms behind my head. “It was like the Tardis. There was a whole universe inside.”

“Really?” I said, unable to not be impressed.

He nodded.

“A universe in my pelvic bowl,” I marvelled, and we chortled.

“But of course, there’s a whole universe inside every cell,” Mark pointed out.

I nodded.

“The Zeta aliens actually came in at the beginning,” Mark said. “It got a bit nasty, but they were asked to leave. Could you feel the implant being removed from your brain? There were strands leading all the way up your spine, meshed into every cell, and up into your brain. It was a very tricky procedure.”

Mark didn’t seem too rattled after facilitating major surgery on the biggest alien implant he’d ever seen. He explained that I’d attracted bad sexual experiences to myself because of the implant. “Your critical mind will explain this away over the next few days,” he continued, “but you know it was special. There was a lot of love in the room. Don’t forget this experience you’ve had.”

“So,” I offered hopefully, as I swung my legs off the table. “Do you perhaps see this as a visualisation technique to hypnotise me into freeing myself from some emotional blockage?”

There came a pause.

“Or are you describing things in real terms?”

“In real terms,” he said. His eyes shone softly, as though he were just giving me a lovely recipe for parsnip soup.

Bugger.

As I walked out I conceded that Mark had pushed me past my limit of making allowances and moving the goal posts. And so, with reluctance, I wrote up my findings on the blog.

- But Mark will see this and he’s a lovely guy.

- He WON’T see this – he’s not psychic!

- No, but just in case he is?

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In conclusion

In conclusion, in conclusion… I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m quite good at lying on a table and turning it on. Getting the chi flowing. Tapping in. Could it be I already found the greatest love of all, inside of me? Possibly. I read that ‘epistemology’ is the study of how we know what we know, while ‘epistemological modesty’ is the knowledge of how little we know: so I will declare myself epistemologically modest.

I know what appealed to me about this whole project: it was a desire for total understanding without having to actually get to know someone. Whether that understanding be from a little babushka in a Byron Bay backstreet or a middle-aged woman on disability benefits in a church hall down in Geelong, I didn’t really care. Know me.

In the end I got bored of waiting to be astounded, but I would like to close with the thoughts of Prince Charles.

The Prince of Wales is a patron of the Temenos Academy (“For education in the light of the spirit”) and has written a book on metaphysics and sacred geometry, and is generally a good egg. True enough, some of his ideas would make Dan Brown blush, but his dismissal in the British press over his esoteric beliefs is one of blanket disdain. At a Sacred Web conference broadcast on YouTube, he sighed and quoted TS Eliot: “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

In other words, don’t be such a bloody know-it-all.

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Jenny Valentish is editor of Time Out Melbourne by trade and human guinea pig by nature. She enjoys dunking herself into ‘interesting’ situations with ‘colourful’ people and writing up the results. http://newageguineapig.com/

 

 

 

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Kathryn Renowden is a Melbourne based illustrator and an artist with a passion for printmaking. She enjoys creating work in a diverse range of media, from watercolour, acrylic and ink, to digital painting and collage. http://kathrynrenowden.blogspot.com.au/

 

 

 

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If you would like to buy a copy of the Brow issue that contains Jenny’s essay and Kathryn’s art (issue 15), go here. Or you can even subscribe, and get all the good writing and all the good art delivered to you, every two months.

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Why is a Raven

Like a Writing Desk?

by Aden Rolfe

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Picture a room containing two things: a piece of wire, and a plastic tube with a small bucket of food at the bottom. The objective is to retrieve the food, but the tube can’t be upended, and it’s too narrow for you to reach down. So how do you get it?

If you said, Bend the wire into a hook to lift the bucket, you’d be right. Simple enough? Not quite. It mightn’t seem overly complex, but this answer demonstrates a high level of intelligence. To make a tool without instruction necessitates an understanding of cause and effect, along with the capacity to imagine the solution rather than stumble on it by persistence or chance. The ability to do this is something that’s long been used to separate us from all other animals — including our closest relatives, chimpanzees — except that, in 2002, a crow solved this very riddle.

So what does that say about humanity?

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Betty is a New Caledonian crow, Corvus moneduloides, residing at Oxford University with her test partner, Abel. In the wild, she would have fashioned a number of tools out of twigs and pandanus palm leaves to spear and hook insects that live inside plant cavities and crevices. Such behaviour makes Corvus moneduloides “almost unique amongst all animal species”, according to Jackie Chappell and Alex Kacelnik, of the university’s Behavioural Ecology Research Group. It positions New Caledonian Crows as ideal candidates for experiments and studies of complex cognition in animals.

In 2002, together with Alex Weir, Chappell and Kacelnik were running just such an experiment, investigating whether Betty and Abel could select the right tool to retrieve some food. It was the bucket setup described above, with the choice between a hooked piece of wire and a straight one. The experiment changed course, however, when Abel absconded with the hook and Betty made a new one from the straight piece of wire. Surprised and excited, the researchers recalibrated the test, and observed Betty repeat the behaviour in nine of ten trials, experimenting with different techniques to create the hook (standing on it, bending it around the tube, wedging it in a crevice). So while Betty didn’t invent the hook out of thin air (she’d seen the tool she needed to replicate; she would have made tools for similar purposes in the wild) her behaviour suggests she had an appreciation of the underlying forces of the hook — that is, how it’s useful, not just that it is useful — and provides us with one of most compelling examples of corvid intelligence on record.

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A corvid is any bird in the Corvidae family (cast your mind back to high-school biology: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species). Corvidae includes crows and ravens, which make up about 40 species of the Corvus genus, five of which reside in Australia. People often say “crow” when they mean “raven”, and vice versa, but the two aren’t interchangeable, as bird lovers insist. But then again, they kind of are.

Ravens are typically larger and more solitary than crows, but other than this, the differences are minimal. The Australian (or, more properly, the Torresian) crow, Corvus orru, is almost indistinguishable from the Australian raven, Corvus coronoides. What’s more, “Corvus” comes from the Latin for “raven”, while “coronoides”, derived from the Greek, simply means “crow-shaped”. The two birds differ not so much in size or diet, or their eyes (Australian crows and ravens are the only ones to have white irises, but they both display this feature), but in their distribution, their calls, and the white feathers at the base of the crow’s neck. So when someone tells you adamantly that there aren’t crows in New South Wales or ravens in Queensland, they’re right, but they also deserve a punch in the teeth. Even side by side, you can’t really tell them apart. Crows are crows are ravens are ravens, and anyone telling you otherwise is a jerk.

So when I say “crow”, I also mean raven. And when the Mad Hatter asks, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”, he might as well have asked it about a crow.

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When someone says “animal intelligence”, by contrast, I don’t think of either crows or ravens. I think of gorillas using sign language, the dolphin in seaQuest DSV and Lassie rescuing people from trouble at the old mill. The words that immediately come to mind about crows are altogether more negative: “knowing”, “calculating”, “malicious”. As Poe says of his eponymous raven, “his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming”. Despite this dark reputation, however, it’s interesting that these depictions still point to the idea that there’s more going on inside a crow’s head than what we are privy to. Which is turning out to be true.

There are numerous measures of animal intelligence, and specifically that of birds, some more obvious than others. We might take into account an animal’s brain-to-body ratio, its capacity for memory, how sophisticated its communication is, whether it can count and whether or not it uses tools.

Tool use by animals is relatively rare, despite increasing evidence for it across a range of land and sea-bound beasts. In a paper published in Animal Cognition, Chappell and Kacelnik note that “only 26 of an estimated 8,600 species of birds have ever been shown to use any kind of tool”. Other notable tool users are octopodi, which carry coconut halves to make impromptu shelters and, possibly, coconut disguises; bears that, somewhat alarmingly, use rocks to scratch themselves; and a variety of primates, present company included. Tool use offers insight into a species’ cognitive capacity, but because it’s been defined in different ways (is a tool an object used as an extension of the body, or does it need to be directly manipulated to qualify?) it’s more useful, as it were, to look at different kinds of tool use to create distinctions.

At its simplest, tool use means, unsurprisingly, using a tool. It’s about picking an object up, getting things done. It’s more advanced than using your bare paws, but it doesn’t mean you understand the tool’s function, and candidates quickly begin to drop out when you advance to the next level: selecting a tool.

Tool selection requires an animal to understand why a tool works, or at least that the hooked stick is better for getting the food than the shorter one. Prior to Betty and Abel, there were only two recorded instances of tool selectivity in non-primates: black-breasted buzzards that dropped stones on hen’s eggs and Egyptian vultures that, as if unable to come up with a different use, dropped stones on ostrich eggs. In both examples, the predators exhibited a preference for stones best suited for the job. To qualify as a selector, animals need to choose the appropriate tool more often than would be expected by chance. It’s better still if they do so through insight rather than trial-and-error.

Insight and trial-and-error can be thought of as the two main approaches to problem-solving. Both are valuable and necessary for intelligent beings to get through the day, but where one method seeks to comprehend the problem in order to arrive at a solution, the other is content simply to locatethe solution. An insightful buzzard, for example, might choose a rock that is heavy enough for the task without being unnecessarily cumbersome, while a vulture using trial-and-error will test each rock’s effectiveness on the eggs until it gets what it needs. This is the difference between learning a rule (hooks get buckets; straight pieces of wire don’t) and learning by rote (this particular piece of wire works in this situation). The rule learner can build on their knowledge to solve increasingly complex problems; the rote learner needs to figure things out whenever they’re confronted with a new set of rocks.

In his book, Mind of the Raven, biologist, writer and long-distance runner Bernd Heinrich details an experiment he conducted with hand-raised ravens in which they displayed both insight, and the ability to flexibly apply their knowledge to new situations. In a setup that had no analogue for the birds either in nature or their prior experience, Heinrich hung a piece of meat from a perch by a string. The only way to successfully retrieve the meat was for a raven to pull the string up, place a foot on the pulled-up length, and repeat until lunch was within reach. Some ravens reached this solution on the first attempt — that is, not by trial-and-error — and none of the ravens selected the incorrect strings (which held control stones) or attempted to fly away with the meat still attached to the perch.

This is what Weir and his colleagues were testing for in their hook and bucket experiment: whether the crows would arrive at the right solution to an unfamiliar, artificial problem through selecting the right tool, and whether they would use insight or trial-and-error in their decision-making. When Abel absconded with the hook, Betty went one better and just made her own.

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Tool-making was once thought to be unique to primates, so it’s no small thing when it manifests in other species. Along with language, it’s generally regarded as the main driver of our rapid evolution and cognitive advancement, ushering us from the apes in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the closing credits of The Flintstones. Tool manufacture demonstrates the ability to think in abstract terms, a grasp of object permanence and the use of causal reasoning. And apart from the great apes, it’s only ever been recorded in elephants, woodpecker finches and our friends the New Caledonian Crows. There’s a caveat to be mentioned here, though: instinct.

Because New Caledonian Crows make and use a variety of tools in the wild, Betty’s behaviour might be considered partly instinctive, or at least based on prior experience. This makes her achievement less impressive than if she’d made the hook merely of her own intelligence. Instinct encompasses all of an animal’s hardwired behaviours and how it can apply skills in different situations: just because a spider spins a web doesn’t mean it can design a patio extension. Prior experience, meanwhile, is the ability to generalise experience to solve new and unfamiliar problems. Like trial-and-error, it’s at once an indicator and qualifier of higher intelligence, demonstrating flexibility in the application of knowledge, but is less advanced than solving a problem with no reference point or previous exposure. It’s more to do with an animal’s capacity for learning than pure cognitive ability. When testing Betty and Abel in another tool-selection experiment, for example, Chappell and Kacelnik deliberately limited the number of trials in order to focus on their ability to “solve new problems” rather than “improve in solving the task by practice and reinforcement”.

Instinct is, as you can imagine, a not inconsiderable grey area, rife with speculation and qualification. All animals feed themselves instinctively, and many of the actions they carry out are an extension of this primal urge. So where do you draw the line? Chappell and Kacelnik note that it’s unclear the extent to which crows’ abilities in this area are “a specialisation for tool using or an expression of unusual cognitive ability.” In other words, do New Caledonian Crows make tools because they innately know how to do so, or is this ability more complex, informed by their capacity to teach and learn new behaviours, and indicative of higher intelligence?

Professor Gavin Hunt, of the University of Auckland, is firmly in the camp of the latter. In a journal article in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2003, he and Russell Gray claim that the tools Corvus moneduloides makes in the wild include variations and innovations that are passed on between individuals and across generations. The website of Hunt’s research group in the university’s School of Psychology makes the bold claim that “New Caledonian crows are the most accomplished tool manufacturers in the animal kingdom.” Kacelnik backs this statement up, quoted in a National Geographic article as saying, “There is no similar [non-human] example of cumulative transmission of a skill… such as the making of pandanus leaf tools by New Caledonian crows.”

When it comes to what crows and ravens are capable of teaching to and learning from each other, and what they can be taught, there are numerous examples, including a crow vending machine built by Josh Klein. A technologist and systems thinking advocate, Klein describes, in a 2008 TED Talk, the staged process he used to train the crows to use his machine. Eventually, the birds were foraging coins from the surrounding area and inserting them into the machine to receive some nuts. Despite being unable to suggest imaginative applications for his technology (the best Klein comes up with in the lecture is training crows to pick up rubbish after sports games) this project remains a great demonstration of how quickly crows can adapt to new technologies and provides compelling evidence for complex cognition.

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In an article published in Science magazine in 2004, Nathan Emery and Nicola  Clayton propose that complex cognition “depends on a ‘tool kit’ consisting of causal reasoning, flexibility, imagination, and prospection.” Like tool use, complex cognition was previously thought to be the sole realm of the great apes, developed to solve environmental and social problems that we encountered over time. Emery and Clayton suggest that crows’ tool use provides a strong case for complex cognition, despite the different brain structures between corvids and primates.

Causal reasoning is the understanding of the relationship between cause and effect. In the context of crows, causal reasoning is comprehending how a tool works, and is tied to insight rather than trial-and-error. Betty’s innovative tool manufacture “suggests some appreciation of mechanical causation”, and while Klein’s crows can’t understand exactly how the vending machine works, they can be thought to appreciate the mechanics of the transaction (money = nuts). At a more advanced level, causal reasoning is also to do with recognising other beings as having their own desires, beliefs and motivations. Reports remain “controversial” in this area, according to Emery and Clayton, but both corvids and apes “appear to demonstrate a similar propensity for representing animate beings as causal agents.”

When it comes to flexibility, Emery and Clayton state that “The ability to act on information flexibly is one of the cornerstones of intelligent behavior”. It’s about applying prior experience to solve new problems, generalising learned rules in unfamiliar situations, and separating rule learners from rote learners. Chappell and Kacelnik include tool selectivity in this category, and note that this kind of flexibility is considered a “hallmark of complex cognitive adaptations for tool use.”

Imagination, then, refers to the “process by which scenarios and situations that are not currently available to perception are perceived in the mind’s eye” (again, I’m quoting Emery and Clayton). Like causal reasoning, it’s tied to insight, and it’s been suggested that object permanence — the ability to picture an object that’s absent — “may be a precursor of imagination”. This is about experience projection: perceiving the solution to a problem and executing it, as Heinrich’s ravens did with the string puzzle, rather than testing out the parameters of a situation and learning through trial-and-error.

Lastly, prospection covers the ability to “imagine possible future events”. It’s about stepping outside the current moment and your instincts and engaging in planning. Here’s where the current examples of tool selection and manufacture become less indicative, and researchers point instead to instances of complex caching as better indicators of future thinking. Elsewhere, Hunt claims that “shaping tools to a rule system”, as Corvus monedulodies does with pandanus leaves, “is generally assumed to require foresight, planning and … ‘mental templates’’’. He also goes a step further, suggesting that this behaviour “might point to symbolic thought and the use of language as well”. Which is a pretty big call.

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Studies of complex cognition and animal intelligence are important because they contribute to our comprehension of our own mental processes and help us better understand our own evolution, as well as the conditions that give rise to higher intelligence. They also make us rethink what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. We share up to 95% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and generally think of the remaining 5% as what defines humanity. But when other animals display a propensity for the behaviours and cognitive abilities that fall in this gap, we have to reconsider our definition. They might not be capable of language and symbolic thought, or religion and madness, but corvids exhibit compelling evidence of their capacity for both culture and complex cognition. Proportionally they have similarly sized brains to chimpanzees, even though the brain structure is notably different. According to Emery and Clayton, this “has important implications for understanding the evolution of intelligence, given that it can evolve in the absence of a prefrontal cortex”.

New Caledonian crows not only have a propensity for tool use previously undocumented in non-primates, they’ve surpassed them in some areas. Abel performs better than capuchin monkeys in certain tool selection tests, and Betty is capable of refining her tools at a much more advanced level than any ape. Hunt and Gray once wrote that “only humans are generally considered to have the cognitive sophistication required for cumulative technological evolution”. Not anymore. While chimps are capable of insight in solving certain problems, their tool-making mainly involves trial-and-error, meaning that innovations at the population level can’t exist. Corvus moneduloides, however, is the first non-human animal to demonstrate this feat, enhancing their tools and passing the improvements on to each other. As Weir and Kacelnik write in another Animal Cognition article, their “observed behaviour is consistent with a partial understanding of physical tasks at a level that exceeds that previously attained by any other non-human subject”. (With article titles like ‘Lateralized suckling in domestic horses’ and ‘Contextual Pavlovian conditioning in the crab’, Animal Cognition is your go-to journal if any of this stuff floats your boat.)

These studies can also help us predict the kind of adaptations that will occur — either in us or in animals — in the future, including the possibility of intelligent life arising, or having already arisen, elsewhere. And while evolution on Earth takes place over hundreds of thousands of years, essayist and pop-rock culture critic John Jeremiah Sullivan notes in his humorous (and only somewhat embellished) article, ‘Violence of the Lambs’, that a warmer planet means faster evolution. More pressing and more immediate, he points out, are the effects of human impacts on the environment, namely that a distressed planet is likely to yield “stress-related behavior modification, so-called ‘phenotypic plasticity’” in our animal friends. As major ecological shifts take place, what new innovations will crows come up with in their tool-making?

University of Washington academics John Marzluff and Tony Angell suggest a less alarmist future, more akin to a “synergy between human culture and the environment – a coevolution of human and other species’ cultures”. In their 2005 paper in the Journal of Ecological Anthropology, they propose that “when humans interact with other social species … simple feedbacks from a culturally evolving ‘environment’ can stimulate rapid cultural evolution in humans”. They term this process “cultural coevolution”. And while their vision is of a shared future, markedly less apocalyptic than Sullivan’s, the effects of cultural coevolution aren’t necessarily positive, for us or crows.

In a later study, Marzluff had his research team wear a particular type of mask for tagging and handling crows, a process the crows invariably dislike. He then had other researchers walk around with the same mask on, to see how the crows would react. It turned out that whenever the crows saw the mask, they would caw and harass the wearer, even though the researcher had never bagged or tagged a crow. Marzluff was intrigued to note that this behaviour was exhibited even by birds that hadn’t been handled by the researchers. The crows not only recognised and remembered the mask, but they told all their friends about him too.

It’s also somewhat interesting that we can’t return the favour. We’re not very good at telling crows apart, even in the case of different species, as noted about Torresian crows and Australian ravens. National Public Radio’s golden tonsils of science journalism, Robert Krulwich, labels this phenomenon “the crow paradox”. He suggests that there’s no evolutionary reason for us to be able to identify individual crows, whereas crows have a number of reasons to tell us apart, not least to avoid bag-and-taggers.

The human race has a long history of scapegoating corvids, and not just in stories. In the fifteenth century, both James I and James II of Scotland ordered the killing of rooks, and England passed the Vermin Act in 1532, encouraging the slaughter of (among other things) crows, rooks and choughs. In all of these instances it was believed that the damage corvids did to agriculture rendered them a pest (consider exhibit A, the scarecrow); also, that they carried disease. It’s a sentiment that isn’t just relegated to the past either. Crow hunting is still a regular occurrence in the US, where it’s generally legal to shoot them if they’re seen to be causing a nuisance or health hazard. Accordingly, crows have learned to tell people who shoot them from people who don’t. Seems reasonable enough, really.

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Historically, we’ve never needed to tell crows and ravens apart, but do these evolutionary advantages give us reason enough? Corvids exist in vast quantities, alongside human settlements, with few natural predators and the ability to adapt to new food sources (including, believe it or not, cane toads). There’s a famous documentary sequence where David Attenborough observes some crows in Tokyo in possession of walnuts that they’re unable to crack with their beaks. The crows solve their problem by dropping the nuts onto the road at an intersection. They let the passing cars do the grunt work while they stand patiently on the curb, waiting for the lights to change and the traffic to stop before hopping out and retrieving their lunch.

This kind of environmental adaptation and ingenuity suggests to me an innate survivalism, possibly beyond that of humans. Faced with uncrackable nuts in Shinjuku or a piece of ox heart at the bottom a tube in Oxford, how long would it take me to arrive at a solution without help? It’s not hard to imagine crows outliving us, thriving in a post-apocalyptic landscape, possibly of their own making.

Tongue-in-cheek or otherwise, John Jeremiah Sullivan posits that we have very real reasons to fear an animal uprising. “As we intrude on, clear-cut, burn, pollute, occupy, cause to become too hot or too dry, or otherwise render unsuitable to wildlife a larger and larger percentage of the planet, what will be involved in terms of the inevitable increased human exposure to remnant populations of truly wild fauna?” he asks. “What sort of changes, adaptations, and responses might we look for in the animals themselves as the pressures of this global-biological endgame begin to make themselves felt at the level of the individual organism?” Sullivan goes on to cite instance after instance of animal-on-animal and animal-on-human violence, cataloguing, in case you were still unclear, “changes in the nature and lethality of animal aggression”. And crows? In an admirable turn, he resists the temptation to mention Hitchcock’s The Birds (I have no such dignity), as he notes that “when measured in actual numbers, birds may be the single most active species in terms of manifesting whatever lies underneath this shift”.

Bernd Heinrich, the corvid enthusiast who conducted the meat-string experiment, recounts an anecdote that offers competing interpretations: two possible relationships we might have with crows going forward. It’s about a woman in Colorado, chopping and stacking wood while a raven flutters about and caws incessantly. Heinrich describes the woman’s annoyance at the bird, exhibiting behaviour she’d never noticed before. Just before it’s too late, however, she spots a cougar ready to pounce on her. The woman’s explanation, repeated in press at the time, was that the raven was trying to alert her to the danger of the cougar, and ultimately save her life. Heinrich’s preferred interpretation, however, is that the raven wasn’t flapping and calling for the woman’s benefit, but to let the cougar know where it could find an easy meal. Sullivan may be right after all. What dangers do animals capable of social organisation present to us, either as a species or, as in this cougar-raven coalition, through interspecies cooperation?

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Again, we might look to Marzluff and Angell, the Washington academics and committed nature-advocates, for more optimistic possibilities. In looking at corvid intelligence and its implications for cultural coevolution, they call for “a more thorough understanding of how human culture is stimulated by the sight, sound, and even culture of nature”. They even suggest that cultural coevolution – the changes that occur in people by living with and alongside animals – is “an ‘ethological service’ that nature provides people”.

An ethological service is certainly something I like, or at least I like the sound of it, however unconvincing it may be as an argument for increased ecological conservation. More than this, though, and more than the advances in evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, and regardless of the impending animal apocalypse, I find examples of corvid intelligence compelling in and of themselves. That’s what initially drew me to the subject: that Betty made a hook unprompted, untaught, with unfamiliar materials in an artificial environment; that crows can be taught to use a vending machine; that Japanese crows use cars to crack nuts; that Midwest ravens use mountain lions to kill married women. And despite the intervening exploration, with the implications for complex cognition, problem-solving, instinct and evolution, that’s what remains with me – that it just blows my mind. Crows and ravens are intelligent, emotional, intriguing birds, and are closer to us psychologically than we give them credit. But in terms of what’s going on inside their heads, we may just never figure that out.

After the Mad Hatter asks why a raven is like a writing desk, he promptly admits that he hasn’t the slightest idea. Later commentators asked if it was because Poe wrote on both. Or because they both stand on sticks, perhaps? They both come with inky quills? The real answer is that the author, Lewis Carroll, never intended it to have a solution, that the question simply draw attention to its own absurdity, but he did include the following preface to later editions: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!” In most printings, however, “nevar” is erroneously corrected to “never”, and the pun is nevermore.

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Aden Rolfe is a writer and editor with a slight obsession with crows. He’s had radioplays broadcast on ABC Radio National and poetry published in Best Australian Poems 2011. He was recently featured in Overland’s Emerging Poets Series. http://www.adenrolfe.com/

 

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Sab Meynert is an illustrator living and working out of Toronto, Canada. Her work stretches between illustration, fine art, and writing. When not exhibiting at zine fairs with her micropress, Blacktooth, Sab is surrounded by comics, cats, and cheese. She is lactose intolerant. http://sabo-art.tumblr.com/

 

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If you would like to buy a copy of the Brow issue that contains Aden’s essay and Sab’s art (issue 15), go here. Or you can even subscribe, and get all the good writing and all the good art delivered to you, every two months.

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The Arrangement

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by Laura Jean McKay

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One:      Be honest.

Two:      Always use protection, even if you don’t want to.

Three:    Don’t do it in our bed.

Four:      Tell the person you’re about to sleep with about us.

Five:      We both have power of veto. Alex can’t sleep with Kate or Stace; Laura can’t sleep with Ned or any of Alex’s brothers.

Six:        No cruising when we’re out together.

Seven:    Our own sex life is paramount.

Eight:      No comparisons.

Nine:      Artistic freedom.

Ten:       No angst.

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When they’d all gone, I lay in bed and watched the city lights flicker around the rim of bush like low bearingstars. Alex lay next to me with his chest bare against the cold and his open face to the ceiling. He was drunk. So was I.

‘What’s in your heart?’ he asked.

I shrugged, evasive. ‘What’s in yours?’

The housewarming party soaked through me – tonight an old friend had laughed with a new one, Alex and I had poured tea then Pimms then vodka from giant teapots, I had sung ‘happy new bush life to you’ and kissed Alex’s lips.

‘I’d like to sleep with other people,’ he said matter-of-factly, and then, softly, ‘I’ve been heading toward an affair.’ The trees outside rushed in a sudden wind and a beer bottle tipped with a hollow clunk on the verandah.

‘Why?’ I said finally. My stomach stabbed. He rolled his gentle eyes towards me.

‘When was the last time you enjoyed sex?’ he asked.

I didn’t respond.

He reached to pull me close and I felt his lips through his beard on my neck. I shifted my pelvis from his and he sighed and fell back. Later, I could hear him scratching with insomnia, so I fumbled a consolatory hand to his penis. ‘Maybe we could try it. With others,’ I said.

He rolled on top of me and the length and weight of him pressed me into the mattress. My breasts ached. His beard hair and head hair and chest hair made a curly cushion between our skins. I wrapped my legs around his frame and focused on the endlessness of his back. He smelled like booze and bicycles.

‘This okay?’ Alex asked, and I nodded, wishing that he would throw me against a wall instead, pound me to oblivion.

I will cum, I will cum, I will cum. I repeated the slow rhythm in my head. When he did and I didn’t I frowned myself to sleep.

In the night I dreamed that Alex killed a man.

‘I had to kill him,’ he said in the dream. He stooped to gather the man’s decapitated head to put in the freezer, but then changed his mind and climbed in himself and lay curled there, like a baby.

‘Sometimes you don’t come back from being frozen,’ I warned, but he was resolute. He closed his eyes – he had already started to fall in to a coma – and I whispered fiercely: ‘I loved you more than any man.’ Then I closed the freezer door.

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When I woke I saw the familiar chaos of my clothes spilling from the cupboards, felt Alex’s breath on my back, and I smiled. My drunken dreams of affairs and murder. I edged backwards and Alex engulfed me.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked in my ear.

‘A bit hung-over. You?’

‘Good. You feel okay about … what we talked about? Our arrangement?’ he asked. I wriggled to stare at him. Those blue eyes that waitresses stopped to remark on. The Arrangement.

‘We’re breaking up …’

‘No, no, we’re just doing an experiment.’

‘What if we hurt each other?’

‘We’ll be honest,’ he said, touching a tear that escaped my eye. ‘We’ll tell whoever it is about us. We’re the most important thing here.’

‘What if you sleep with some girl I don’t like? Or Kate! We should be able to veto …’ My stomach still stabbed.

‘We’ll make rules,’ he said. I nodded slowly.

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We sat inside watching gunfire on the telly, talking about how strong and brave we were – a super couple. Words of contentment flinging themselves at the TV screen. Alex’s face was bright. His beard had picked up wood smoke from the neighbourhood fireplaces and, after his walk through the cold evening, he came home smelling like fire. He sang like woodwind. I sat up in bed and told him how beautiful his voice was. He blushed and chuckled and lay down beside me

‘You’re my muse!’ he cried generously.

‘You’ve barely written a song since we got together!’ I said and convulsed with laughter. I remembered his music about other girls. Waitresses, mostly.

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I escaped to the city I’d just moved away from and sought out Dee to tell her about The Arrangement. Dee had one with her boyfriend.

‘Oh you’ll be completely overwhelmed,’ she advised, as we perched on her bed and I jiggled with confusion on a quilt the replica of my Nana’s. Something was wrong in my gut.

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘you’ll fuck someone else and everything in you will be awakened and you’ll be obsessed for, like eight months. Then you’ll just get over it and write.’ I looked into her dark, sardonic eyes and over her body that had ‘been there’.

‘I’d feel like I was having an affair,’ I said.

‘You are. It’s just one that you’re allowed to have.’ She grinned. She wants to sleep with Alex, I thought.

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Dee had a party that night and I moved close on the dance floor to Max from uni.

‘You know, everyone thinks we’ve got a thing,’ I said. He stared at me uncomprehendingly. Four: Tell the person you’re about to sleep with about us. ‘I’ve got an open thing with Alex now. We’re calling it “The Arrangement”.’ I laughed and waited, swaying. He said nothing, just put his hand on my shoulder and pointed me around the room to take in all the people I could now have.

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The next day turned hot, and burned on into the night. Alex picked me up from the train. We swam in our naked, available bodies in a holidaying neighbour’s pool. I duck dived and raced Alex underwater. The bottom of the pool was invisible, only present when you scraped a nipple or a finger against the grain. From under the water the world was an off-green, the sky and trees appearing as nightmarish grey blobs, the clouds iridescent. I swam close to Alex and wrapped my legs around his huge frame. His cold dick floated between us. He crawled out and hurled himself down the waterslide, giving a short giggle each time before the huge splash, his chest and beard heavy with water. I felt full in my stomach and let it sink me to the bottom, then fought my way to the top with my last scrap of breath.

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We hauled junk from the city, junk from the street, junk from the bins to the bush and didn’t stop until the place was like our city house again. I couldn’t go to the toilet in the dark without tripping over and Alex couldn’t exercise on the lounge room floor – stretching his giant’s body from one end to the other – without bolts/nails/things stabbing him in the back. We went over The Arrangement, perfecting the rules, until my resolve cracked and I lay naked on the bed crying hopelessly. Alex watched me.

‘I feel like I’m the only grownup in this relationship,’ he said. I bawled until we were both exhausted and he kissed my wet face.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, ‘and I love you. I love you. I love you.’ Three times, like a spell.  He fell asleep snoring and I stumbled to the couch. Some animal — a possum? Bat? Rat? — charged up and down the carpet and then took refuge beneath me. I leapt and returned to Alex, running, and he opened up his sleep-hot arms and mumbled that he would always protect me, then snored powerfully, protectively, into my ear like a little kid, like a lover, like a father, all at once.

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My period didn’t come and I woke before the sun to sit in the swarms of bugs, killing them occasionally. A rat pressed itself against the glass and stared in at me on its way from one roof to another. Nausea drained from my mouth to my legs until they ached with illness I vomited up my lunch and vomited up my dinner. I pissed into a cup and dipped the stick and sat on the edge of the bath watching the blue lines appear. Positive. But I was well in the mornings. It was only late in the day, after all the food had filled and refilled my belly, that I vomited again and again and again.

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I had dinner with Dee in the city. The oil glistened on my roti bread and the curry looked like spew. ‘I feel like there’s a universe inside me,’ I said.

Later at a bar, clutching an untouched beer, I turned to her. ‘Doesn’t my body look amazing?’

‘It looks the same as always,’ she said. ‘You’re just pregnant.’

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It took a train ride, two breakfasts and a greasy lunch, four ibuprofen and one paracetamol, two midday naps, two showers, several cups of tea and some diarrhea before I felt I could talk to Alex. Inside me matter was pulling together, becoming nuclear in my gut. Hydrogen nuclei fusing to helium nuclei. This must be how scientists feel, I thought, when they look out at space and realise that life is possible. We’re not alone.

Alex and I sat at either side of the stained wooden table, our fingers tracing the ring marks from every cup of tea we’d ever plunked down. Alex had brought paper and pens, and he held my hand tightly. We can do anything together, said his face.

‘You’ll have to be my brains,’ I warned him. ‘My body just wants to give birth.’ Our hormones lashed out and clung to each other. The father of my child. The mother … Alex’s body said: protect, protect, protect. Mine said: love, love, love. We said: is it financially viable, artistically sound, creatively suicidal? We talked, reasoned, made lists.

‘We can hardly look after ourselves!’ we said. The rat and all its children scuttled in the walls. The sexy rules of The Arrangement were replaced before they’d started.

One:     Our fridge is broken.

Two:     The house is filthy.

Three:   The rats keep eating the bread.

Four:     Our clothes are also being eaten by something else. What.Moths?

Five:     We’re getting an abortion

Six:       Flies circle overhead.

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When I told Mum she sobbed with her face in her hands before asking finally in a voice much, much younger than I was: ‘Is that even legal?’ Outside, three pigeons sat with their fleshy breasts hanging out over the suburban fence. Alex and I spent a solemn night in my parents’ clean house amid the suburban sounds: dishwasher sounds, computer sounds, organic fair trade peppermint tea sounds. We woke to a stupidly sunny day.

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We drove to the city.

‘I don’t think that babies have souls until they’re born,’ said Alex, navigating our car through traffic like we were a ship avoiding rocks. I stared out the window with my fingers splayed on my flat gut. This is a baby that likes salt and mornings, I thought, this is a boy.

When it was done the baby was gone. Put in a bucket and then where? The clinic doesn’t tell you. Not us. Not the woman who arrived alone, complaining that it was her third this year. Not the girl who woke from the anesthetic at the same time as me and stared right at me for a moment with widening eyes before they filled with tears and she cried out for her mum through the tongue guard.

How does one dispose of an aborted fetus? So effective. Instant. A universe ending.

I woke up and was completely alone with my empty body. I sat with chattering teeth in the post-op waiting room listening to the anti-abortionists chanting outside. I remembered that, before I had the operation, Alex saw the ultrasound the doctor was trying to keep hidden from me.

‘Oh, it’s tiny,’ he’d whispered longingly, ‘like a cartoon.’

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Alex turned 31 and I forgot to get him a present. We were always out of toilet paper. The remains of our baby leaked from me. Outside it was still and grey. I mucked out the fridge with rubber gloves, retching at the grey slime that slopped into buckets. Alex put poison out for the rats and they all disappeared, except for one that wandered psychotically into the lounge room — half its face mutated by sores — and tried to charge at Alex before creeping away to die behind the couch. I fiddled with the endless buttons of Alex’s tall man’s shirt and unzipped his pants. He smiled down at me sympathetically and I let my hands fall away.

‘I’m afraid to have sex with you,’ he admitted.

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I had a dream that Alex and I were part of a Chinese prison camp that was also a theme park. There were log games and bright rooms, and we had to navigate them. If you were served oysters on a bed of rice and greens, it meant they were going to kill you next. Alex and I got lost in the house of mirrors and missed dinner.

‘Could we have something to eat?’ we asked a girl wearing a theme park t-shirt.

‘Have I offered you oysters yet?’ she replied.

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I retreated to the city and lost myself in another party. Troy slow danced with me in the kitchen and bit my neck. I pulled away from him, ran upstairs, and stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. My eyes were wide and enlivened – like ecstasy eye, like sex eyes. Back downstairs he was dancing alone in the darkened living room, splay legged, his tiny body writhing around like some junkie rock star.

‘I liked dancing with you,’ I yelled over the music.

‘Yeah, that was sexy,’ he said. We biked back along a street Alex and I had lived on. Memories of shopping and movies and wobbling home from the pub shimmered on the nature strips.

‘Are you a serial monogamist?’ Troy asked and, because I didn’t know what that was, I laughed knowingly.

‘I just broke up with someone too,’ he added.

‘Alex and I haven’t broken up,’ I insisted.

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Naked in Troy’s room, I couldn’t feel his tongue or his touch, but only the bones of his thin hips tapping against mine. The smoke on his breath. His eyes that didn’t love me. Eight: No comparisons.

‘I’ve wanted to fuck you for the longest time,’ he said when I straddled him awkwardly.

‘How long?’ I wanted to know, but he didn’t answer. I wondered if he’d been watching me whilst I’d seen only Alex. I wanted to tell him that he was beautiful. But it was easier to screw and laugh.

His bed was a homemade mezzanine jammed up against the ceiling. I kneeled over him and held his cock in my hands. ‘If I was a plaster-caster, I’d make art of this,’ I said. I tried at first to open the condom packet by attacking it with my teeth. It wouldn’t unroll. He calmly removed it from my hands and smoothed it on. I was dry. I forced him inside me. He slammed his hips up and slammed my head against the roof. He laughed. I laughed. He rolled me off him and I was lost in his bed until he grabbed at my legs and positioned me kneeling. I was dry. He was inside me and gave a stinging slap to my arse with his palm. I laughed. I pushed back. He bit my back and thrust and thrust and came and I didn’t. He pulled out of me. I rolled over and looked.

‘Where’s the condom?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry I’m clean. I just got tests back …’ he yawned, ‘last weekend.’ He reached for the lamp and we were in darkness. I felt him collapse on top of me and erupt, immediately, into snoring.

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In the morning: water and a few kisses. His body curled around mine like a leaf – that perfect face, that perfect cock, those perfect teeth. I touched the tattoos that banded his arms and stretched in orange spirals down his back. When he went to the toilet I took a quick inventory of the bedside table that was hammered to the edge of the bed: water glasses, books on film, photocopies of something that looked suspiciously like a spiritual journey. The missing condom was there, fetal, beside the pillow. A neat row of a dozen sunglasses watched me from the floor.

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‘I feel like someone has beaten me up,’ I giggled to Dee on the phone. Inside the clinic, people with genuine ailments coughed and frowned in the waiting room. I perched uncomfortably on the plastic chair discovering new bruises every way I sat. I thought about starting a band.

The doctor didn’t have time to know why I wanted the morning after pill. ‘We couldn’t find the condom,’ I said. He raised his eyebrows. ‘He says he’s clean but maybe I should have some tests?’ I smelled like beer. I smelled like Troy. The nurse leaned close and took blood from my arm. My phone rang again and again. It was Alex.

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He left the mountain and came down to the city to see me.

‘I’d like to start The Arrangement,’ I announced over Thai noodles.

‘I’ve been thinking about that too. I guess we just need to convince other people to have sex with us,’ he laughed.

‘I mean … I have … started The Arrangement.’  His eyes widened then he smiled and sat back in his chair with relief. ‘I’m so happy,’ he said and laughed. ‘But I knew just by looking at you.’ I felt my face and grinned.

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We were having sex on the floor of the lounge room. Giggling, our dinner cooking on the stove and the bush house clean and warm. I straddled Alex and he smiled into my eyes. His gaze drifted over my bare shoulder and stopped.

‘What’s that?’ he asked. I covered the fresh bite mark, purpling in the light.

‘I … had sex again,’ I told him.

‘When?’

‘Last night. When I was back in the city. I went out—’

‘With who?’

‘That same guy.’ I lifted my hips and he slipped out of me. He stared at the bite. Twice, that meant. Twice with Troy. The look on his face ripped my heart out and threw it on the floor.

‘But this is the first time we’ve had sex in weeks,’ he mumbled, confused. Seven: Our own sex life is paramount.

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In bed, Alex whispered into the dark: ‘No matter what happens, we will always be friends.’ But later he talked in his sleep with such an aching, violent longing that I woke and couldn’t believe it was him: ‘I want you so much. So much. You don’t realise how sexy I think you are. You are so fucking, fucking beautiful.’ And I wished that he was awake when he fought for me like that.

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Laura Jean McKay writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays. Her stories have been published in Australia and Asia and in 2011 she won the Alan Marshal Short Story award. Her short story collection Holiday in Cambodia will be published by Black Inc in July 2013. www.laurajeanmckay.com 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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If you would like to buy a copy of the issue that Laura’s memoir piece is in (issue 15), go here. Or you can even subscribe, and get all the good writing and all the good art delivered to you, every two months.

 

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