It's been so much warmer this time of year than I remember.
Not much news. My camera is broken.
I became very ill from another dental infection.
My dentist was away. My writing diminished.
I had an extraction last week.
I still feel awful. Less pain. Longer days.
Still studying Acupuncture and Herbs. I miss the Writer's Group a lot.
I miss being mobile.
I'm grateful for the Asperger's network.
I tried to see my sympathetic doctor about it recently.
It was one day when he's been called away from work.
It's a bit difficult being doctor phobic.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Michael Jackson & Dreams
Time Magazine Cover, March 1984
Someone’s passing can bring out the worst in those gathered round, but when the person is famed and fabulous then a situation develops whereby the best is worshipped while the worst may turn to obsession.
It still feels unreal that Michael Jackson no longer walks, sings and dances upon this earth and the promised concerts exist only in shadows caught by the camera. It’s taken me awhile to begin to write of the mixed feelings, the mixed emotions relating to an artist so startlingly gifted, of an individual so essentially troubled…
Still in considerable shock from the news of his passing, I recently checked, as part of my weekly routine, an Asperger’s Syndrome site. Predictably, it was flooded by messages from distressed fans.
Someone had written that surely Michael Jackson, a talented individual who’d battled misunderstandings and extreme projections most of his life is also an Aspergian. Then followed a tide of agreement. We’d recognised him as one of our own, one uniquely gifted in his own special arena but not terrifically good at many other things and out of depth in a society whose basic presumptions may be malicious.
A large factor in my experience of Asperger’s Syndrome is the grief and alienation I felt as a child, a process leading me to the study of education, psychology and philosophies later on. As I remember, as a-social as I was in the early days of schooling, I was still able to talk my way into the homes of happier people to observe the ways they interacted with their children.
(We didn’t have television then, so unlike Michael, I didn’t learn about human relationships from situation comedies, but rather from what I loathed in feral Australian country towns.)
My childhood feelings regarding the well-being of children as the essential basis of the well-being of society was such that I was sure I would have a career as an educator. Failing that, I would find fame either as an Artist or an Author.
Now that I understand Asperger’s, I also understand why I never survived or coped very well with the politics of school or even the situations of literary or artistic in-groups or even ordinary office environments.
I could work one to one and I had some success with the administration of creative projects, it’s true, but such projects frequently involved folks even more dysfunctional than myself and most of the projects eventually came to grief….
All the same, even in terms of a considerable amount of voluntary and part time work, I continue to study. The development of learning and cognition is still an inspiring topic and research into the cultural variations regarding these theories is as absorbing as ever. For more than three decades, I’ve also studied dreams and various theories and researches relating to dreams.
Obviously, our earliest consciousness is the dream state and I feel that it’s a part of the power of artists to operate in the world of those dream symbols able to communicate far more deeply that the lofty mostly unreachable stratosphere of Pure Reason!
Back in the nineties I had a couple of dreams I thought might be prophetic.
(I must say here that my prophetic dreams are usually pretty banal. In my own experience, dreams which are realised immediately, such as a dream of a person who I’ve not seen or thought of for a very long time, who’s then encountered unexpectedly the next day is an interesting phenomenon but usually one of no enormous import or significance.)
In my experience, prescient dreams which occur well in advance of an event, those which would probably not be remembered if they were not recorded, represent profound affect and impact.
Entangled in a long term relationship disaster, I was astonished when I re-read my dream books, to discover that I not only had dreamed the circumstances of the future meeting of that partner in sorrow, but his name also occurred in that dream… ten years before that particular disaster commenced.
OK, it’s a reasonably common name, but….
Around that time, I also dreamed that I was desperately searching for my sister who was nowhere to be found. To re-read that dream in a state of grief shortly after her death twelve years later was a shock to say the least. (These days I dream that I forgot she hadn’t died at all and she’ll appear sometimes to offer the pithy advice so much a part of her personality in life. She then always departs before I’m ready to see her go.)
Such dreams occur as if they are a part of strange moving paintings, as if sometimes they are somehow two-dimensional. At other times it’s as if they belong in different universes where inanimate objects may become animated, where animals talk and things change shape and caricature may be the rule.
They are more like crazed cartoons than the everyday world of the waking really.
They are more like crazed cartoons than the everyday world of the waking really.
Every so often my dreams have travelled to the larger world, the world of famous people. Shortly after the marriage of Charles and Diana for example, and long before the media hinted that there was any hint of marital difficulty, I dreamed that the Royal Marriage was unravelling. In this dream the couple were desperate, they couldn’t change a baby’s nappy and there was shit everywhere. In such ways dreams aren’t usually naturalistic. If anything, they’re a looking glass world possibly able to reflect and prophesy certain events symbolically. Sometimes.
Jung believed that The Child in terms of dreaming is an Archetype of The Self, the person or process that has integrated both the shadowy fearful side and their conscious side of an individual. Therefore, after the royal sons were born, I never supposed that there was any neglect about nappy changing, but that there were shadows in the environment which might possibly cause things to get somewhat stinky.
And thus it would be so in the real world.
After writing dreams for so long, it seems to me that they are something of a mish-mash of impression, (a digestive system for the mind or the psyche perhaps).
A component of wishful thinking may also be involved; at other times a caricature may present itself, for example, when in the wake world, the dreamer is behaving foolishly. (This has happened to me and you'll have to believe it because it would be too much of a side-track to particularize here.)
I also believe in the reality of the occasional archetypical dream where profoundly terrifying spiritual insights may be presented. Sometimes a dream simply makes such an impact that one feels that it MUST mean SOMETHING.
OK, it’s also true that in physiological terms, dreams are a part of our ongoing participation in life and in learning. No matter how isolated a person may be, their conscious life is an amalgam of impression and information about their place in the rest of life and in sleep, the impressions are sorted and more or less organized.
In my experience it’s rare that a dream will offer the kinds of dreams that Alison Du Bois apparently experiences in the television show Medium.
Only once did such dream come to me as if it was a prophecy and it was so vivid that when I eventually watched Medium I was reminded again of the dream.
Two dramatic events appeared that night regarding two very famous people and since then, whenever I saw or heard about those characters who were the subject of that particular dream, I’ve wondered if the dream events would turn out to be prophetic.
(For a time, as a devoted and rational student of the irrational, I was tempted to consult with the Rationalist Society to compete for the prize they put up for anyone who can prove the irrational… an irrational procedure in itself since all one has to do to prove the irrational is to look at the tabloid press!!!)
The first part of the dream involved the assassination of a very popular public figure who, as far as I know, remains safe and well. I hope that he continues that way for a very long time. The second part of the dream caused me a lot of grief in my sleeping world and yet with this dream there was also somehow no surprise.
I dreamed that Michael Jackson committed suicide.
There seemed to be something fearfully logical in such a dream when Michael had already embarked on that disfiguring plastic surgery so surprising for such a naturally charismatically beautiful young man.
I always found his immense talent absolutely mesmerising and while I couldn’t count myself as one of the many millions of Number One Fans, I always followed stories about him and noted and enjoyed his new music and was as awed as everyone by his astounding performances.
My first insight into the troubled reality of his origins had come with a sketch he drew of himself as a child.
I’m surprised this drawing hasn’t re-emerged recently as the media trawls through all its opinions and discussions of the man’s life and death. In those days I'd tried to save it for a scrap-book but then became so overwhelmed by all the material I collected I couldn’t organize even a fraction of it for the said Scrap Book project. (How much easier it is to keep scrap-book information and pictures with a computer these days!)
I’m surprised this drawing hasn’t re-emerged recently as the media trawls through all its opinions and discussions of the man’s life and death. In those days I'd tried to save it for a scrap-book but then became so overwhelmed by all the material I collected I couldn’t organize even a fraction of it for the said Scrap Book project. (How much easier it is to keep scrap-book information and pictures with a computer these days!)
The sketch showed a small and frightened child huddled in a corner with such an expression of sorrow and isolation on his face! It was not only moving, it was in itself a brilliant self-portrait, and one showing a powerful awareness of the artist’s own childish physical presence…. but the posture of the child, the facial expression and the body language wrung my heart!
Joe Jackson may have decided that the most rational thing to do in young Michael’s case was to toughen him up, to force him to learn to deal with the slings and arrows associated with celebrity and to provide a harsh crucible for that amazing talent to emerge.
Joe Jackson may have succeeded in everything he tried to do as his son became beloved the world over as ‘The King Of Pop’, but those actions didn’t help the self esteem of a talented sensitive child.
So Michael’s brothers teased him about his wide nose.
The first nose job was therefore understandable, but the child in him sought a more idealised beauty. The suggestion that he tried to look like Diana Ross is a little bizarre since Diana Ross is a beautiful black woman and the nose the poor boy chose for himself was very Euro. The report that Michael went for the surgery because he wanted to look as little like his father as possible makes some sense, but the eventual nose, the chin and the shape of the face he paid so much to create was closely similar to that of one of his beloved friends, Brooke Shields.
Brooke had stunned New York with her beauty around the time that Michael was first running around New York, performing as the clown in The Wiz.
Of his first meeting with Michael in February 1977, Andy Warhol recorded,
“Went home and did some work, then at 11.00, Catherine… [Guinness]… and I went over to interview Michael Jackson of the Jackson 5. He’s very tall now, but he has a really high voice. He had a big guy with him, maybe a body guard, and the girl from The Wiz. The whole situation was funny because Catherine and I didn’t know anything about Michael Jackson, really, and he didn’t know anything about me – he thought I was a poet or something like that. So he was asking questions that nobody who knew me would ask – like if I was married, if I had any kids, if my mother was alive.... I told him, “She’s in a home.”……
We tried to get Michael to dance and at first he wouldn’t but then he and the girl from The Wiz got up and did one dance….”
(Andy Warhol of course is the artist who later painted the portrait of Michael for Time shown above.)
It shows a development of the shy kid who only knew about reality through television soap operas. It's a portrait of a person who was by then arresting, fascinating and awesomely talented. I’d be curious to read the actual interview conducted by the person Michael assumed to belong to the kind of soap opera family he never really succeeded in finding.
It shows a development of the shy kid who only knew about reality through television soap operas. It's a portrait of a person who was by then arresting, fascinating and awesomely talented. I’d be curious to read the actual interview conducted by the person Michael assumed to belong to the kind of soap opera family he never really succeeded in finding.
The debonair Fred Astaire later commented that he thought that Michael’s dancing was aggressive. I suppose Michael did channel an aggressive persona in Bad, but to me and to his millions of fans it seemed that his dancing was simply magnetically sexy.
After all, the era of smooth expensive cheek to cheek elegance wasn’t exactly cutting edge movement by the time that Michael’s Jackson’s video clips rocketed to the top of the charts.
Michael’s elegance and gravity defying talent was to me like a living dream, and an enrichment of people’s psychological life.
And eventually, for all his amazing success, for the new spin he brought to music, dance and super stardom, he was insomniac. And like Elvis, his ancestral Father in Law as it were, he refused il-legal drugs.
(Unlike Elvis, Michael didn’t go so far as to apply to The President for a Sheriff’s badge in order to arrest illegal drug users, but like Elvis, he entered a similar twilight world of prescription medications.)
It’s clear from the constant rehashing of the accusations of hanky panky and the subsequent ordeal causing him to leave his Neverland behind that Michael probably never recovered even a basic psychological equilibrium after the traumas of the examination and of the trial.
The truth is that many children today, thanks to the processes of Media and Culture aren’t innocent and the evidence showed that it was a set up. The kid simply guessed Michael's private bodily characteristics and the whole thing was as bad a nightmare as the old dramas of his own childhood according to those closest to the man.
So Michael was wise after that to pay primary attention to his own children.
Seeing his kids with Michael's family at the funeral and hearing daughter Paris speak of her father, my daughter commented,
“That man was NOT an abuser!"
I agreed. In fact, I never believed that he was because although he was naïve in terms of certain behaviours, his impulse felt as mine had been, to honour children and their safe lives to the best of one's ability and to treat them with respect and kindness.
So once Michael was into his years of fathering, I'd already begun to think that my dream of his suicide was like a movie about something unlikely and impossible. No one who loves their children wants anything else but to be there for them as long as possible.
So it seemed and it still seems unbelievable that he died.
He’s joined others who I think of who mixed too many prescription drugs when they were going through too much and thus took too much from too many doctors…I’m thinking of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Heath Ledger, Elvis Presley, my own grievously vanished sister….
Death by the kinds of drugs taken by Michael or any of the drugs these other individuals took obviously don't amount to conscious suicide. Surely all these people and the many more who’ve died from wrong prescriptions or from being over prescribed had much to live for.
I conclude that the suicide element of my dream reflects a fact in my psyche which is that ever since I was personally prescribed drugs which almost finished me off, after my sister died with an a quantity of drugs in her system which had me very worried, after many such things I’ve seen and experienced, I’m very scared.
I’ve experienced outright aggression from Doctors when I’ve refused some of the drugs my sister took in such good faith. One Doctor in particular released highly dangerous confidential information rather than believe my stories of life long physical weakness, damage from sport injuries and operations gone wrong and the accidents of bad dentistry.
When I eventually told her I’d developed a phobia about Doctors, she hit the roof.
I’m not saying that some of the psychological medications don’t have their place. I certainly wouldn’t advise that certain medications be dropped without expert support.
I guess I’m simply trying to say that in terms of some of the things I’ve seen and experienced, something about some of those medicinal orientations just FEELS like suicide to me.
I pray for the safety and the well being of Michael Jackson's kids.
They had and have a beautiful father.
Michael and Brooke, Brooke and Michael.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Abroad
So one moment Summer is approaching the stuck phase, the dog days, and then suddenly there are wild and serious blazes in places I remembered as exquisite glistening rainforest; sometimes even at the same time as sweet steady rain fell here in Sydney. Saying thus I'm still not caught up with all the weeds that the rain has nourished.
All computing in that time was checking for updates about the weather and the fires, contacting friends, donating, discussing donations, checking the stories in the newspapers.
A few days previous to those mighty flare ups, I'd dreamed of a huge living burning Kali figure who wasn't near me but who was big enough for all to see. She seemed unable to be stopped and everyone who saw her began to throw water at her in containers made from newspaper.
It wasn't that effectual but we had to try something.
Not long before that and then again for a few too many days afterwards, Sydney had binding unshifting heat with those essential doldrums which meant that coolest times were at The Pub.
News of friends and fire stories are slowly filtering through the last couple of storm cooled days.
I was ill from an inner ear infection during the duresses, then the computer required attention.
I thought of blogging continually, took to scrawling ideas in my notebook, the one which was supposed to be about the band. There are some good pieces I think but how to think up a link after a break?
With vertigo from the ear infection and a haze of confusion, it seemed necessary a few weeks ago to begin to sort books.
Three shelves only have I now sorted. Towers are emerging up and down the hall. There are new books and new categories. During the homeless time I wrote more than I read. In reading more than writing these days, I find I'm dreaming short stories and wake up from a different movie each morning with transforming screen plays busily humming away in the background just out of hearing.
The young Neil Simon, after being taken to his first movie in the Thirties, awoke the next morning to tell his mother he could also watch movies in his sleep. I like his book Re-Writes very much in the same kind of way as I like to read about New York and Broadway.
Several years and a few other lifetimes ago, before domestic hurricanes blew things about, my books where basically usually where I knew they'd be. Admittedly, locations travelled through varying fans and small towers as the processes of research and study progressed. I was very distressed when this and all the basic literary memories were hurled about.
It led to just about everything I could think of breaking down.
I'm renting a nice place here and I can't help noticing that it's sometimes looked at with jealous eyes by some of those who are suffering from Sydney's Rental Crisis.
Angelic protection would be appreciated in present times because I sure don't want to move until I've got some work and mobility issues sorted (and some of those old time messes). I don't want to move until one or more of my own already written books have been picked up.
The best thing about this place, apart from a certain gracious beauty, is reuniting with my things out of storage.
I'd been worried during the homeless years because there was evidence the storage places were being pilfered. In the small and dreary cheap cells I inhabited in those times I basically managed to keep close to me several favourite research texts, tomes I hoped would balance inspiration and dread in the writer in me as well as a selection of cook, herb, gardening books and so on. I also had a pile of old journals and notebooks including dream books.
I didn't much appreciate the strange file dropped on me at great cost by Federal Education and the sharks who moved among the remains of the old CES!
Even during the homeless era, my library was enlarged by friend Mike Noonan who lent and gave and borrowed, my daughter of course, some fabulous library sales, the occasional cheap book shop and the Please Help Yourself boxes which appear on the street when folks change their abodes.
Today, resting after overdoing things yesterday and lately, I read Karen Stolz's book, The World Of Pies. Most satisfying though purists would be surprised by the Texan dietary input. Recipes are included.
I've read a fair bit during the time offline (not much else to do in the doldrums of interrupted dentals and even less on TV mostly!)
I was loaned the latest Terry Pratchett, more memoirs and some great music books.
Music wise, it seems as if we can now put together many more details of the never ending saga of Rock Icon back-stage gossip thanks to writers such as Tony Bramwell and Ian McLagan. Some of these people, Marianne Faithful and dear old Mac, you are surprised they remember anything at all!
Books take me to places I'm interested in. Isobelle Allende recently took me through San Francisco and a lot of Chile. These's also a lot of LA in the music books, which was also an interesting place in the first chunk of the Twentieth Century (as recalled by David Niven).
Elizabeth Taylor's biography was surprising. Broad Aboard.
It's an escapist world maybe, but it's work, it's history it feeds the writing and if one can't get about, at least there are other ways of travelling.
After launching this post with atmospheres, updates and various writerly subjects, I must include the News To Hand, which is that there's been an atmosphere of some Disquiet at Number Twenty as Flat Two lies vacant before the ravening hordes!
My three sorted shelves which I just photographed, I hope will initiate some functionalism but I still feel a bit inadequate.
Jeremy and Brendan, happily bookish, moved yesterday to a place where they can fit more books and music.
Neighbour Ron moved a coupla weeks ago and two girls have moved in to his place.
I shall ring the agent. I need someone quiet and considerate. I have to do my work here, see my clients, get the tutoring happening again and a few more publications etc, some entertainment...
( I just scored a client interested in publicity ideas recently!!)
There's a part time job I'm after, a bridge I hope. There's more serious dentals down the track and my appointments are already stretched, I believe because I'm a Medicare type.
Ah, Phooey about some of it.
I have to sort photographs and get my new scanner working. Both and All.
All computing in that time was checking for updates about the weather and the fires, contacting friends, donating, discussing donations, checking the stories in the newspapers.
A few days previous to those mighty flare ups, I'd dreamed of a huge living burning Kali figure who wasn't near me but who was big enough for all to see. She seemed unable to be stopped and everyone who saw her began to throw water at her in containers made from newspaper.
It wasn't that effectual but we had to try something.
Not long before that and then again for a few too many days afterwards, Sydney had binding unshifting heat with those essential doldrums which meant that coolest times were at The Pub.
News of friends and fire stories are slowly filtering through the last couple of storm cooled days.
I was ill from an inner ear infection during the duresses, then the computer required attention.
I thought of blogging continually, took to scrawling ideas in my notebook, the one which was supposed to be about the band. There are some good pieces I think but how to think up a link after a break?
With vertigo from the ear infection and a haze of confusion, it seemed necessary a few weeks ago to begin to sort books.
Three shelves only have I now sorted. Towers are emerging up and down the hall. There are new books and new categories. During the homeless time I wrote more than I read. In reading more than writing these days, I find I'm dreaming short stories and wake up from a different movie each morning with transforming screen plays busily humming away in the background just out of hearing.
The young Neil Simon, after being taken to his first movie in the Thirties, awoke the next morning to tell his mother he could also watch movies in his sleep. I like his book Re-Writes very much in the same kind of way as I like to read about New York and Broadway.
Several years and a few other lifetimes ago, before domestic hurricanes blew things about, my books where basically usually where I knew they'd be. Admittedly, locations travelled through varying fans and small towers as the processes of research and study progressed. I was very distressed when this and all the basic literary memories were hurled about.
It led to just about everything I could think of breaking down.
I'm renting a nice place here and I can't help noticing that it's sometimes looked at with jealous eyes by some of those who are suffering from Sydney's Rental Crisis.
Angelic protection would be appreciated in present times because I sure don't want to move until I've got some work and mobility issues sorted (and some of those old time messes). I don't want to move until one or more of my own already written books have been picked up.
The best thing about this place, apart from a certain gracious beauty, is reuniting with my things out of storage.
I'd been worried during the homeless years because there was evidence the storage places were being pilfered. In the small and dreary cheap cells I inhabited in those times I basically managed to keep close to me several favourite research texts, tomes I hoped would balance inspiration and dread in the writer in me as well as a selection of cook, herb, gardening books and so on. I also had a pile of old journals and notebooks including dream books.
I didn't much appreciate the strange file dropped on me at great cost by Federal Education and the sharks who moved among the remains of the old CES!
Even during the homeless era, my library was enlarged by friend Mike Noonan who lent and gave and borrowed, my daughter of course, some fabulous library sales, the occasional cheap book shop and the Please Help Yourself boxes which appear on the street when folks change their abodes.
Today, resting after overdoing things yesterday and lately, I read Karen Stolz's book, The World Of Pies. Most satisfying though purists would be surprised by the Texan dietary input. Recipes are included.
I've read a fair bit during the time offline (not much else to do in the doldrums of interrupted dentals and even less on TV mostly!)
I was loaned the latest Terry Pratchett, more memoirs and some great music books.
Music wise, it seems as if we can now put together many more details of the never ending saga of Rock Icon back-stage gossip thanks to writers such as Tony Bramwell and Ian McLagan. Some of these people, Marianne Faithful and dear old Mac, you are surprised they remember anything at all!
Books take me to places I'm interested in. Isobelle Allende recently took me through San Francisco and a lot of Chile. These's also a lot of LA in the music books, which was also an interesting place in the first chunk of the Twentieth Century (as recalled by David Niven).
Elizabeth Taylor's biography was surprising. Broad Aboard.
It's an escapist world maybe, but it's work, it's history it feeds the writing and if one can't get about, at least there are other ways of travelling.
After launching this post with atmospheres, updates and various writerly subjects, I must include the News To Hand, which is that there's been an atmosphere of some Disquiet at Number Twenty as Flat Two lies vacant before the ravening hordes!
My three sorted shelves which I just photographed, I hope will initiate some functionalism but I still feel a bit inadequate.
Jeremy and Brendan, happily bookish, moved yesterday to a place where they can fit more books and music.
Neighbour Ron moved a coupla weeks ago and two girls have moved in to his place.
I shall ring the agent. I need someone quiet and considerate. I have to do my work here, see my clients, get the tutoring happening again and a few more publications etc, some entertainment...
( I just scored a client interested in publicity ideas recently!!)
There's a part time job I'm after, a bridge I hope. There's more serious dentals down the track and my appointments are already stretched, I believe because I'm a Medicare type.
Ah, Phooey about some of it.
I have to sort photographs and get my new scanner working. Both and All.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Depressions
I'm counting my depressions here and let me be lateral about the term depression.
One minute I was the adored child of a charming father.
Next thing he's gone, disappeared with a new lady friend and my Mother's family, bearing in mind that I resembled my father too closely, see to it that all my baby back teeth are extracted. How to create life long problems in one fell swoop!!!! Yeh, that's all in my memoir & I'm trying here to simply pick out a few relevencies.
I've spoken of abusive situations in this blog, but if one's immune system is compromised that early, what is one to do?
I think that one problem I inherited was from being a gifted child, a child who grew into a person who didn't altogether lose faith in the self. And yes, I had possibly too much feeling for certain troubled types. And yes, i copped bullies by the drove and learned to hate and loathe bullies. Not so long ago I think I finally began to stand up to some of them, but the worst of them of course compromised my livelihood and I guess I have to follow this thread to simply get beyond unwanted and unexpected poverty.
I do my coping as best I can even yet even with the Asperger's I believe I inherited from my Dad.
Haven't quite got over that horrid dental crisis, even yet!
Age four I was back then. The hugeness of those nightmares I can't forget even if more recently, my ex emphasised to me again and again, 'You Must forget. You shouldn't remember harm, how else can you get on with your life?'
Well he forgot pretty easily because I think that like my Dad he had a lot of abuse in his life and I think that there is a kind of abuse worse even than I experienced which causes a difficulty in distinguishing truth from alibi.
'As if, babe!' I remember because I don't want to repeat certain hateful patterns. I take care to remember.
It may have taken awhile to get some perspective on primitive alienations such as come from bad dentistry and an accumulation of relating to some who are intrinsically seriously damaged, but I haven't forgotten that I started out with love. I was born of parents who at that time loved each other passionately and I was a welcome child because no babies had been born on my father's side of the family for fifteen years or more. All this is a lot more than some people start out with!
I've been reading a lot recently, Psychology, novels, stories and bio's about musicians, great books, I'll list them soon. I'll have to do a summary of all these Christmas and post Christmas books some time.
A recent favourite is Neil Simon's Re-Writes. This is Neil the playwright and he is a person who hit some trouble simply because of his success. I find Re-Writes to be an appropriate title as I go through my attempted books, my essays and my journals from a space where I'm now very, very stuck.
I do the odd scribble in the notebooks, I read eagerly, but I haven't posted for awhile.
Neil Simon has began as a gag writer, wrote Phil Silver's sitcom which I remember as being very funny. Neil Simon had an amazing run of Broadway smash hit comedies and still he got depressed at times. I liked his book a lot, even if I'd never presume to have those kinds of success. I love his insights into the dilemma of the obsessive writer.
Writer's Block. Any writer may come across that factor. He suggested that Writer's Block is at it's worst not because a wordsmith has run out of ideas but because they have too many ideas. There's a flood, a raging flood and the everyday words can't be caught. Yep, that is so.
O. I'm not miserable. Much of the time I'm happy, but there's a lot of insecurity from having hung around people who treated me like I'm worthless because the odd thing is that ever since I found a cure for depression, I never felt worthless at all. On the other hand, how can I turn the crap around into functionality which gets beyond the disempowering cliche's of folks I once held in high regard?
Somehow, there's been a pattern where I've had that thing projected upon me.
These depressions had huge financial impacts.
Yeh, I needed to learn to trust less, but there are some people I admire very much and it was a programme by Stephen Fry about Bi-Polar Disorder which got me forcing a few words out tonight.
Ah, therapy has it's boring side, but it's best to stay on the side of healing I reckon.
Even if my chosen form of healing is a left field heresy which attracts various persecutions.
(I definately have more to say about all this!)
I'm a bit limited lately because it's been horridly hot. I had horrid dreams last week of a towering flaming Kali and more recently there have been bushfires endangering some folks I still care about.
I keep returning to my dreams.
I'm exhausted and my dentals are getting dangerous.
I decided to get back to my blog and do some writing tonight because i saw Stephen Fry's programme.
I know serious depression because I experienced it in my teens and early twenties before I discovered strong Acupuncture.
I really don't know if the treatment works for everyone or not but I'm pretty annoyed that our money wasting past government spent about $30,000 to drag me through a case to 'make an example of myself with regard to alternative medicine.'
If you didn't know before, I would regard this recent techno crap as 'Alternative' in view of many millenia of study of the Chinese Philosophies and if there are some horrid people who are cruel with regard to animal organs, they are definately not mainstream as are some of thse who are hideously cruel with human organs and human situations.
I first tried Acupuncture in the seventies and later I had a lot more trouble with abusive doctors and wrong medications than those delicately balanced Acupuncture treatments which had me dancing and singing and carrying on after a sweet anciently researched point got me charged up and happy.
(What right have you to be happy?, I think those arseholes said. You are disabled, you should feel inferior!)
I guess I could have done it quietly if it hadn't been for the horror dentals and the depressive inflictions of society but hey, I'm not completely the retiring type!
O yes, one can find a cure for certain depressions, but then there are dick heads who insist on projecting their other depressions upon one!
I have more to say about all this.
One minute I was the adored child of a charming father.
Next thing he's gone, disappeared with a new lady friend and my Mother's family, bearing in mind that I resembled my father too closely, see to it that all my baby back teeth are extracted. How to create life long problems in one fell swoop!!!! Yeh, that's all in my memoir & I'm trying here to simply pick out a few relevencies.
I've spoken of abusive situations in this blog, but if one's immune system is compromised that early, what is one to do?
I think that one problem I inherited was from being a gifted child, a child who grew into a person who didn't altogether lose faith in the self. And yes, I had possibly too much feeling for certain troubled types. And yes, i copped bullies by the drove and learned to hate and loathe bullies. Not so long ago I think I finally began to stand up to some of them, but the worst of them of course compromised my livelihood and I guess I have to follow this thread to simply get beyond unwanted and unexpected poverty.
I do my coping as best I can even yet even with the Asperger's I believe I inherited from my Dad.
Haven't quite got over that horrid dental crisis, even yet!
Age four I was back then. The hugeness of those nightmares I can't forget even if more recently, my ex emphasised to me again and again, 'You Must forget. You shouldn't remember harm, how else can you get on with your life?'
Well he forgot pretty easily because I think that like my Dad he had a lot of abuse in his life and I think that there is a kind of abuse worse even than I experienced which causes a difficulty in distinguishing truth from alibi.
'As if, babe!' I remember because I don't want to repeat certain hateful patterns. I take care to remember.
It may have taken awhile to get some perspective on primitive alienations such as come from bad dentistry and an accumulation of relating to some who are intrinsically seriously damaged, but I haven't forgotten that I started out with love. I was born of parents who at that time loved each other passionately and I was a welcome child because no babies had been born on my father's side of the family for fifteen years or more. All this is a lot more than some people start out with!
I've been reading a lot recently, Psychology, novels, stories and bio's about musicians, great books, I'll list them soon. I'll have to do a summary of all these Christmas and post Christmas books some time.
A recent favourite is Neil Simon's Re-Writes. This is Neil the playwright and he is a person who hit some trouble simply because of his success. I find Re-Writes to be an appropriate title as I go through my attempted books, my essays and my journals from a space where I'm now very, very stuck.
I do the odd scribble in the notebooks, I read eagerly, but I haven't posted for awhile.
Neil Simon has began as a gag writer, wrote Phil Silver's sitcom which I remember as being very funny. Neil Simon had an amazing run of Broadway smash hit comedies and still he got depressed at times. I liked his book a lot, even if I'd never presume to have those kinds of success. I love his insights into the dilemma of the obsessive writer.
Writer's Block. Any writer may come across that factor. He suggested that Writer's Block is at it's worst not because a wordsmith has run out of ideas but because they have too many ideas. There's a flood, a raging flood and the everyday words can't be caught. Yep, that is so.
O. I'm not miserable. Much of the time I'm happy, but there's a lot of insecurity from having hung around people who treated me like I'm worthless because the odd thing is that ever since I found a cure for depression, I never felt worthless at all. On the other hand, how can I turn the crap around into functionality which gets beyond the disempowering cliche's of folks I once held in high regard?
Somehow, there's been a pattern where I've had that thing projected upon me.
These depressions had huge financial impacts.
Yeh, I needed to learn to trust less, but there are some people I admire very much and it was a programme by Stephen Fry about Bi-Polar Disorder which got me forcing a few words out tonight.
Ah, therapy has it's boring side, but it's best to stay on the side of healing I reckon.
Even if my chosen form of healing is a left field heresy which attracts various persecutions.
(I definately have more to say about all this!)
I'm a bit limited lately because it's been horridly hot. I had horrid dreams last week of a towering flaming Kali and more recently there have been bushfires endangering some folks I still care about.
I keep returning to my dreams.
I'm exhausted and my dentals are getting dangerous.
I decided to get back to my blog and do some writing tonight because i saw Stephen Fry's programme.
I know serious depression because I experienced it in my teens and early twenties before I discovered strong Acupuncture.
I really don't know if the treatment works for everyone or not but I'm pretty annoyed that our money wasting past government spent about $30,000 to drag me through a case to 'make an example of myself with regard to alternative medicine.'
If you didn't know before, I would regard this recent techno crap as 'Alternative' in view of many millenia of study of the Chinese Philosophies and if there are some horrid people who are cruel with regard to animal organs, they are definately not mainstream as are some of thse who are hideously cruel with human organs and human situations.
I first tried Acupuncture in the seventies and later I had a lot more trouble with abusive doctors and wrong medications than those delicately balanced Acupuncture treatments which had me dancing and singing and carrying on after a sweet anciently researched point got me charged up and happy.
(What right have you to be happy?, I think those arseholes said. You are disabled, you should feel inferior!)
I guess I could have done it quietly if it hadn't been for the horror dentals and the depressive inflictions of society but hey, I'm not completely the retiring type!
O yes, one can find a cure for certain depressions, but then there are dick heads who insist on projecting their other depressions upon one!
I have more to say about all this.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Happy New Year!
Sociabilities May Be Alarming
However, it was a jolly Christmas and I hope everyone else had a good Christmas or at least an OK one.
This year I emailed several Christmas cards.
For local friends I got some bright cards with a tree very cheap from the Indian Everything Shop in Surrey Hills. I was on the lookout for things to add to the collections of angels, gods, goddesses, heros and feng shui animals. (My place isn't as crowded as the collections suggest because it's a large place with ledges and picture rails.)
A good statue of a well known hero caught my eye. It was out of my budget, but having read about such flights of humanic vision in many ways since childhood, I decided to peek inside the neat little card that was titled Greek Hero ($89). Somehow someone must have got a little mixed up. It was a small and excellently crafted statue of Moses, MichaelAngelo's Moses.
My lost sister would have loved it. She collected statues.
These cards (10 for $2.85) only said Merry Christmas inside them so when I got ready to give them out, I copied one of my poems for the text. It is a poem I wrote ages ago when I lived in the box over the road, and things got mixed up in storage and I ripped the poem out of the notebook to read to someone, (one doesn't have much forethought in moving times, in illness times) and the rest of it is still hopefully the box it was in when I borrowed those pages back then whichever box that was:
And let my own words now sing song,
make music roll forth all day long.
May my words embrace the soul,
do this to make an old world whole.
May singing bless, may good words ring,
may poetry cause our hearts to sing,
be in our bones and in our blood,
make goodness come in righteous flood.
The poem came from a dream.
Slowly I thread through the phases of those older times when my possessions became debris. I need filing folders. There may be some somewhere but I can't find them. Easier to work with folders on the computer, easier to find things here, even though I can get my titles mixed up if I'm not careful.
Recently I've noticed that when I emerge from the screen or page or move around the weeds, that there have been several days of such divine warm sparkle after a bracing Southerly Buster that I can't imagine being unable to dip my body in water or feast my eyes on the loveliness of the sea.
(Mind you the storms frequently leap in response to a stinking weary fuming hot day when all you want to do is go to the pub).
There have also been many lovely balmy days, not so many returns to iciness as there was a few weeks ago. On a warm fresh day I recall the days of childhood and young adultry when we were always tuned to the beach.
When himself and myself lived at Bondi, we were just up the cliff from the ocean which was then a part of our every moment. I began a series of poems because there was inspiration afoot.
Poetry is amends for the future. On a crystalline day following a stormy night, I found myself yearning for a taste of the ocean on a perfect ocean day, so I hunted for the Bondi poem which illustrated the storms which stomp regularly around Sydney's summer and Christmas Season suburb by suburb and sometimes in one place out of the blue.
Although I found many poems from the Bondi Seasons Suite had been transcribed onto the computer from a variety of note books and an edit of some of the collection last year when I was going for competitions, the precise long ago Summer Storm which was ringing its words at me wasn't there.
To breathe the breath of the ocean after a storm is a good thing.
Change.
A veil of rain
thrown over the sea
from this morning’s storms
is lifted by the sun
as the surface of the ocean
gleams in light.
The Ocean From Mark’s Park.
The green waves flow,
the horizon a moist mist blue.
The flats are struggling down the cliff, climbing over
to catch the view, the glimpse of blue.
Torn by the weather,
The sea opens its heart
And mist rises
Above the surface of the water.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Those Stranger Times
The recent poem about the experience of Domestic Violence is now in print.
It's a declamation of woe and protest and astonishment. Maybe it’s a part of a larger script.
How does one write poetry about such painful events?
It's not pity that I'm chasing here, nor is it despair because I always was curious about experiences and learning to choose survival.
I am writing about these matters because I require and desire Justice in this once much more FAIR land of Australia!!!
I write here and in my poetry of things which should have been private and the subject of therapy, counselling and maybe support, but the story was picked over with an inordinate amount of clumsy stupidity and a barrel load of that sort of rubbish began an avalanche which later would involve a concerted bullying by many Government Departments, even when I was homeless and especially after I finally found paid work which was taken away from me...
I'm not a hater, but I hate such processes.
The Editor of the Magazine who published my poem said most people didn't write or talk about the subject of violence in the home or in offices such as those of Bureaucrats because there were and are still petrified with fear.
Oh yes, I had my time of terror also and I didn't think I scared that easy.
I hesitate to call Himself The Perpetrator, Him who I frequently loved so much before his greed and selfishness over money matters drove us apart.
I still have compassion for Himself because he saw violence happening next to him when he was but a Baby and I know now that that toxic sort of thing can twist perceptions. Forever.
At least I was an adult when it happened to me. I'd moved a long way away from him the first time he confiscated the first money I earned since I lost that last job and even more so after he first ridiculed me in public.
We shared the same dwelling because we started out so fond of each other and initially and for a long time afterwards we were interested in each other's work.
I thought if I stayed as far away as possible, if we mostly slept apart, we left a clear path and made clear plans, then all would be well in the end.
I know now that he told sob stories with a bent brain to that wretched Medical Clinic we'd both attended and also I know now that he's had a pattern of turning against those folks he gets close to who end up loving him.
How could he not when someone close did whatever it is lies hidden behind the warpings that are eventually intrinsic to violent attitudes.
Well, DH Lawrence did just that thing of writing a poem about Domestic Violence and that poem told me for the first time in my teens that those kinds of things could happen. The Ash Tree, his Mother thrown outside, locked outside one cold night and finding pollen from a lily on her face.
DH Lawrence was an adult by the time he wrote that poem and the events were long past by then although apparently dinner parties at the Lawrence's could be difficult much later once the plates began to fly.
I was an adult when Domestic Violence happened to me, and even so, although I continued to keep a journal when things were at their worst, I hadn’t known how to talk about it all, or even yet comprehend it. Sometimes there was a blunt description, at other times I repeated and tried to focus on my belief that things would heal.
When I got thrown out, it was in the heat of Christmas when Himself at the time of year when the family had been called to account, felt like a failure and blamed me.... on my face and on my reputation there was nothing but his self hatred which was thrown at me to deadly effect. It made me consider certain mysteries of misunderstanding within my own family because I was diagnosed as Autistic when young and a lot of things went way above my head.
Most frustrating with Himself was that the whole business then was something I couldn’t wrap my mind around. No such thing had ever happened to me in any how excepting maybe for literature or the very occasional intimation.
There was this Doctor. She was angry with me because I refused antidepressants and hormones and she was also angry because I denied that I was depressed.
(To be sad, worried or even despairing isn't the same thing as depression and when things were getting dangerous I thought it best to keep my wits about me.)
I told this former Doctor that in the past, I'd experienced pretty bad dentistry (which still affects my health and probably my immune system). I told her that sometimes when I get very stressed, I lose my appetite and sometimes also my temper when under duress. I told her Acupuncture had helped me with my appetite problems for many years and that those treatments probably stopped me from being depressed. Soon afterwards, admittedly with her initial help, I began to regularly see an Acupuncturist in that Clinic and it helped me keep going although it also hid the symptoms of the Worst Abscess.
(Oh I have that X-Ray still. That thumb print sized hollow in the bone of my face. Everyone should know that I was not only probably an angry part of that first serious incident but that I was then not well enough for the ordeals to come less than a year after the bone was scraped!)
In those years, the only expectation for treatments from the ex Doctor was certificates when I couldn't meet obligations because of colds or flu.
And...oh yes, she did once treat me for earwax which is when when the arguments about depression began, excepting for that one serious incident further down the track.
At first I'd said to her, OK, I am depressed.
Then I said No, my dear sister is dying, I can't find work, my relationship is bad, I hate being broke. I am not depressed, I am miserable and I have bloody good reason, OK?
Looking back, above all, when an event approaching real violence occurs, I believe that confidentiality must be assumed. If a person in shortened circumstances finds it hard to escape such a situation then they should NOT be endangered.
The incident of the bruising push concerned the time, the one time back then when his tantrums got physical. Thankfully, he'd spent much of the year touring, and that one time, he came home in a filthy mood and pushed me against a bookcase after smashing up my study.
Those smashups I had hated but they weren't too frequent thankfully.
My Acupuncturist would say if I appeared in the surgery trembling and stressed,
'Oh he's being Artistic Again, is he?'
You see my Acupuncturist had become a dear friend, she GAVE me books about the subject to study and I never once mentioned to her, my closest friend back then, what was going on at home!
Better to laugh I thought at first, until that one time when it hit my person.
It was in case it got worse I went to that dire Doctor.
And I showed her those bruises in case the whole thing got worse.
What got worse of course that she told a hostile Lawyer about it as the only comment on my health matters, thinking no doubt as many people do that if a person cops violence it's a slur on their character and their own stupid fault.
(Hardly one's fault if one has no comprehension of the same!!!)
So there I am, as I wrote a few posts ago, just as I thought I'd be off Benefits, with a part time job and the worst of the Dentistry done and I get dragged through that Tribunal crap and the 'victim of violence' crap was my only allowable defense!
It's a Solicitor by then, a Solicitor who was even dumber than myself about violence and they wouldn't talk about these Acupuncture treatments which I'd been receiving ever since I'd read about ex-President Nixon's Doctor being CURED of peritonitus, (techniques studied for millennia and applicaple to Martial arts and much much more!)
(The Martial Arts aspect would save my life much later when Himself tried to kill me after taking Valium and Vodka after reading That Fatally Lying Tribunal Finding. Sure I got that eye blackened and my nose was poring blood, but I knocked him off balance and since he'd already smashed the place up, he fell on the smashed things and got bruised and later told folks I'd attacked HIM!)
(Next day my friend says, 'My God, what happened to You?' I says, 'You should see the other guy!' Was meant as a joke, but I trembled for months and had to drop a lot of work things which is another story, how much that all cost me.)
They shouldn't call Acupuncture a 'New Age Thing' should they? From my studies, it looks like something like seven millennia has gone into that field f research.
'Modern' Medicine after all is only a few hundred years old.
So this doctor said that despite the fact that I'd told her of the scary dentals and the appetite and the stress problems, that I had no health problems, but that the Lawyer should know that I'd once been to see her and I was bruised and in some distress.
(Isn't there somewhere in the Doctor's Code about Confidentiality?)
(Isn't there something in a Lawyer's code about Confidentiality and Endangerment?)
As to 'violence', me and my sisters had been frequently belted as kids of the Fifties, and smacked very hard on the back of the legs or the buttocks.
(Later, when my gal friends danced to Madonna’s old spanking song and swatted their own posteriors, I found it horrifying.)
I’d hated the smacks, the beltings and so on and I‘d a tendency to go rigid and glare at my mother when it was happening. That didn’t help because it infuriated her. The last time some idiot swatted my posterior in so called fun, I belted him round the head with the newspaper I was carrying which is maybe the second most violent thing I ever did in my life.
I knew that a folded Newspaper wasn’t going to hurt but I had to show my utter outrage. How people can enjoy that sort of thing is beyond my comprehension!
I didn't want to go through with those stupid cases at all and the Welfare Rights people said I had to.
They didn't even tell me it would different Tribunal the second time. They didn't say I'd be in an actual Court Room all day facing a Rigid Army Type Bitch who'd apparently concluded ahead of time that I was a liar. She even slandered my Mother!!!!
For the record, my Muma had a tough time in her life, was a teacher famous for her work and she tried alcohol a few times and didn't like it. That that finding called my Ex a bruiser, myself a liar and my mother an Alcoholic...well you know how stupid people get caught in cliches.. I am not going to forgive this crap you know, and I think I can guess who began the crap and I'll need a Lawyer by then...
And it has to be said here that it was our wonderful Federal Education Department under those face pulling sneering Liberals who wasted $30,000 of tax payer's money to put me through that 'Case' simply so I now understand, to prevent me from becoming the Tax Payer I had been before I went to the horror Dentist in the first place.
Rather than being the hard eyed level headed Defender of Injustice we see on the television sets, my so-called Solicitor fluttered apoplectically and apologetically all over the place.
She'd been to all those Preliminary Hearings without briefing me and without even knowing anything about me, except that she seemingly agreed that I should be punished for liking Acupuncture.
It must be said here that ambition and especially achievement CAN be considered as a crime in Australia. We can be slavish about our trivialised Cultural 'heros', but if an ordinary person, Heaven Help us, if a 'Dole Bludger', shows Ambition, even the ambition to get beyond Benefits, why then they are 'Up Themselves!!!!
In point of fact I hadn't wanted to be 'On The Dole' at all and only coped by doing immense amounts of Voluntary Work, some of which includes a much larger number of Essays than I ever presented at Conferences. I believed that at least while I worked, having been involved with Media, I was still 'out there'.
I could have meetings and coffee with former colleagues, talk about my projects, keep my CV updated etc etc.
The Dental Situation which had caused an instant health fall out before I had to attend a cheaper dentist as I was minus income, wasn't the only thing that had prevented me finding paid work in the Nineties. It was also a Tragic Truth that all my old Work Places had been absorbed and reorganised and positions were lost and people my age were being made redundant everywhere.
It was depressing applying for jobs but I kept doing so until the abscess hit the bone of my face and incurred a whalloping health crisis. OK, I hate the Dental Hospital & had been going to a cheap Dentist who didn't X-Ray. There wasn't much money after the part time voice work dried up.
During that particular crisis, the level of general physical pain was acute. I couldn't then (and can't now), walk very far. Maybe thats partly because I overdid it during the months when I tried to stay off the Dole. Walking from Bondi to Kings Cross and back for the job interview certainly roused those old sports injuries and the bad operation on the foot had me grounded for a week following.
I knew that any blessed part time job would be fine, but it was apparent even back then that I'd be better off working from home and maybe doing some part time things outside home.
The old time Employment Agency, the CES agreed. I attended every meeting with them and they only ever sent me after one job.
Eventually, I had to drop my Private Medical Benefits and I bought a Fax Machine, and after cashing in my Superannuation, I bought a Computer, my first Macintosh, now with most of the leads lost in the eventual process of homelessness.
With the Fax, the Phone and the Computer however, I organised quite a few Shows for Himself and spent a lot of time with Arts Lawyers hammering out the rights for all the people who gave us their time. Seventeen people contributed to our Music Project about The Last Of The Irish Bards.
As well as the Music work, there were several publications and one Seminar to the Graduate Literature Class at Sydney University.
There were a couple of Recording Deals too. I enjoyed negotiations although when stresses of Himself's awful work built up, I was hampered by the awfulness and tensions of the home situations. (And by the fact that some people became greedy about the project and began to harass me by telephone!)
The important thing I discovered was that like Writers, Musicians have to do a lot of Voluntary Work, and Work is the important thing. Maybe a person may find themselves without a job, but they should never stop working, whether it's study, Caring for other people or Voluntary Projects such as Bush Regeneration, even House Work such as can be managed despite various official and unofficial SmashUps, Work Is The Important Thing.
My study of Cultures continued and I was fascinated to discover Feng Shui, the Ancient Study of Time and Space which involves rituals in regard to the damaged areas of One's life. It's no Good Luck Charm. Luck is like the Life Force, it's called Chi and it can help even in the worst times because when one becomes helpless, there are still rituals and ways of making sense. I'd already investigated Taoism back in the Seventies not long before I discovered Acupuncture and I was fascinated to discover the similarities in the essential rules.
Well, Himself after the disaster which followed that second Tribunal case was apt to say that he'd 'supported' me all along.
Well, I've still got the bags and bags of receipts from all I paid from those times and I would dispute that claim from an exhausted and overly defensive mind. In fact his work expected him to go on the Dole for half the year when not working, which he hated so much that my Dole became our sole income when he was at home composing because I thought that by those means I was saving that much grief.
In all that time his former Boss ridiculed him for laziness. He certainly wasn't lazy. During the off periods when there was no paid work he rehearsed and composed at least ten hours a day. Those phases were good. I could get on with my writing and study.
I admired his work very much, but the Laziness accusations bit deep and eventually to my amazement, he accused ME of 'Laziness' and would say so even when I'd worked myself to the point of exhaustion.
At the AAT Hearing, during which none of these realities were ever raised, when I mentioned that it would be more productive to be at home improving my essay on Australian Rivers for the first International Conference I'd been asked to participate in, the 'Lawyer' jumped up and explained the statement away by saying I have a 'Personality Disorder'.
In fact I have Asperger's Syndrome.
I was speaking of my Seventh Conference Paper, still not yet read and the deadline for submission had been absorbed over the days waiting for the promised calls from the Lawyer who claimed to be conducting the preliminary business of The Case.
So eventually they found me guilty of maliciously missing three Appointments one time back in 1997 when my paper work had been hurled about and after the CES had written to tell me that I'd have no obligations that month.
Well Himself had cracked up, hadn't he and it was very bad. Did I say I have a tendency to forget dates and times when stressed? I do.
If my paper work is chucked about, how would I know about appointments? They were very obviously out to get me, and if that very fact is a breach of Tribunal Law, noone noticed.
Acupuncture, Depression, I mean, what was going on there?
Yes I did crack up myself eventually. It's awful to be homeless. Awful and I hope I inocculate myself against repeating such a pattern by these means.
You see, the real violence occurred after himself read the exaggerated lying Findings from the Tribunal and concluded that I'd exaggerated. I hadn't.
What had gone on was that my only allowable Defence was the one instance the Doctor leaked and they used my Work History to ridicule me as if I was a liar.
O Boy. Thus the poem.
Someone should explain to the Tribunal that Domestic Violence isn't simply the Lot of those they see as Losers!
Funny about this economic downturn. The recent American and Australian Governments spent an awful lot of money persecuting individuals solely for the purpose of whipping up paranoias.
They say I'd have to get to the High Court for justice. Qe?
It's a declamation of woe and protest and astonishment. Maybe it’s a part of a larger script.
How does one write poetry about such painful events?
It's not pity that I'm chasing here, nor is it despair because I always was curious about experiences and learning to choose survival.
I am writing about these matters because I require and desire Justice in this once much more FAIR land of Australia!!!
I write here and in my poetry of things which should have been private and the subject of therapy, counselling and maybe support, but the story was picked over with an inordinate amount of clumsy stupidity and a barrel load of that sort of rubbish began an avalanche which later would involve a concerted bullying by many Government Departments, even when I was homeless and especially after I finally found paid work which was taken away from me...
I'm not a hater, but I hate such processes.
The Editor of the Magazine who published my poem said most people didn't write or talk about the subject of violence in the home or in offices such as those of Bureaucrats because there were and are still petrified with fear.
Oh yes, I had my time of terror also and I didn't think I scared that easy.
I hesitate to call Himself The Perpetrator, Him who I frequently loved so much before his greed and selfishness over money matters drove us apart.
I still have compassion for Himself because he saw violence happening next to him when he was but a Baby and I know now that that toxic sort of thing can twist perceptions. Forever.
At least I was an adult when it happened to me. I'd moved a long way away from him the first time he confiscated the first money I earned since I lost that last job and even more so after he first ridiculed me in public.
We shared the same dwelling because we started out so fond of each other and initially and for a long time afterwards we were interested in each other's work.
I thought if I stayed as far away as possible, if we mostly slept apart, we left a clear path and made clear plans, then all would be well in the end.
I know now that he told sob stories with a bent brain to that wretched Medical Clinic we'd both attended and also I know now that he's had a pattern of turning against those folks he gets close to who end up loving him.
How could he not when someone close did whatever it is lies hidden behind the warpings that are eventually intrinsic to violent attitudes.
Well, DH Lawrence did just that thing of writing a poem about Domestic Violence and that poem told me for the first time in my teens that those kinds of things could happen. The Ash Tree, his Mother thrown outside, locked outside one cold night and finding pollen from a lily on her face.
DH Lawrence was an adult by the time he wrote that poem and the events were long past by then although apparently dinner parties at the Lawrence's could be difficult much later once the plates began to fly.
I was an adult when Domestic Violence happened to me, and even so, although I continued to keep a journal when things were at their worst, I hadn’t known how to talk about it all, or even yet comprehend it. Sometimes there was a blunt description, at other times I repeated and tried to focus on my belief that things would heal.
When I got thrown out, it was in the heat of Christmas when Himself at the time of year when the family had been called to account, felt like a failure and blamed me.... on my face and on my reputation there was nothing but his self hatred which was thrown at me to deadly effect. It made me consider certain mysteries of misunderstanding within my own family because I was diagnosed as Autistic when young and a lot of things went way above my head.
Most frustrating with Himself was that the whole business then was something I couldn’t wrap my mind around. No such thing had ever happened to me in any how excepting maybe for literature or the very occasional intimation.
There was this Doctor. She was angry with me because I refused antidepressants and hormones and she was also angry because I denied that I was depressed.
(To be sad, worried or even despairing isn't the same thing as depression and when things were getting dangerous I thought it best to keep my wits about me.)
I told this former Doctor that in the past, I'd experienced pretty bad dentistry (which still affects my health and probably my immune system). I told her that sometimes when I get very stressed, I lose my appetite and sometimes also my temper when under duress. I told her Acupuncture had helped me with my appetite problems for many years and that those treatments probably stopped me from being depressed. Soon afterwards, admittedly with her initial help, I began to regularly see an Acupuncturist in that Clinic and it helped me keep going although it also hid the symptoms of the Worst Abscess.
(Oh I have that X-Ray still. That thumb print sized hollow in the bone of my face. Everyone should know that I was not only probably an angry part of that first serious incident but that I was then not well enough for the ordeals to come less than a year after the bone was scraped!)
In those years, the only expectation for treatments from the ex Doctor was certificates when I couldn't meet obligations because of colds or flu.
And...oh yes, she did once treat me for earwax which is when when the arguments about depression began, excepting for that one serious incident further down the track.
At first I'd said to her, OK, I am depressed.
Then I said No, my dear sister is dying, I can't find work, my relationship is bad, I hate being broke. I am not depressed, I am miserable and I have bloody good reason, OK?
Looking back, above all, when an event approaching real violence occurs, I believe that confidentiality must be assumed. If a person in shortened circumstances finds it hard to escape such a situation then they should NOT be endangered.
The incident of the bruising push concerned the time, the one time back then when his tantrums got physical. Thankfully, he'd spent much of the year touring, and that one time, he came home in a filthy mood and pushed me against a bookcase after smashing up my study.
Those smashups I had hated but they weren't too frequent thankfully.
My Acupuncturist would say if I appeared in the surgery trembling and stressed,
'Oh he's being Artistic Again, is he?'
You see my Acupuncturist had become a dear friend, she GAVE me books about the subject to study and I never once mentioned to her, my closest friend back then, what was going on at home!
Better to laugh I thought at first, until that one time when it hit my person.
It was in case it got worse I went to that dire Doctor.
And I showed her those bruises in case the whole thing got worse.
What got worse of course that she told a hostile Lawyer about it as the only comment on my health matters, thinking no doubt as many people do that if a person cops violence it's a slur on their character and their own stupid fault.
(Hardly one's fault if one has no comprehension of the same!!!)
So there I am, as I wrote a few posts ago, just as I thought I'd be off Benefits, with a part time job and the worst of the Dentistry done and I get dragged through that Tribunal crap and the 'victim of violence' crap was my only allowable defense!
It's a Solicitor by then, a Solicitor who was even dumber than myself about violence and they wouldn't talk about these Acupuncture treatments which I'd been receiving ever since I'd read about ex-President Nixon's Doctor being CURED of peritonitus, (techniques studied for millennia and applicaple to Martial arts and much much more!)
(The Martial Arts aspect would save my life much later when Himself tried to kill me after taking Valium and Vodka after reading That Fatally Lying Tribunal Finding. Sure I got that eye blackened and my nose was poring blood, but I knocked him off balance and since he'd already smashed the place up, he fell on the smashed things and got bruised and later told folks I'd attacked HIM!)
(Next day my friend says, 'My God, what happened to You?' I says, 'You should see the other guy!' Was meant as a joke, but I trembled for months and had to drop a lot of work things which is another story, how much that all cost me.)
They shouldn't call Acupuncture a 'New Age Thing' should they? From my studies, it looks like something like seven millennia has gone into that field f research.
'Modern' Medicine after all is only a few hundred years old.
So this doctor said that despite the fact that I'd told her of the scary dentals and the appetite and the stress problems, that I had no health problems, but that the Lawyer should know that I'd once been to see her and I was bruised and in some distress.
(Isn't there somewhere in the Doctor's Code about Confidentiality?)
(Isn't there something in a Lawyer's code about Confidentiality and Endangerment?)
As to 'violence', me and my sisters had been frequently belted as kids of the Fifties, and smacked very hard on the back of the legs or the buttocks.
(Later, when my gal friends danced to Madonna’s old spanking song and swatted their own posteriors, I found it horrifying.)
I’d hated the smacks, the beltings and so on and I‘d a tendency to go rigid and glare at my mother when it was happening. That didn’t help because it infuriated her. The last time some idiot swatted my posterior in so called fun, I belted him round the head with the newspaper I was carrying which is maybe the second most violent thing I ever did in my life.
I knew that a folded Newspaper wasn’t going to hurt but I had to show my utter outrage. How people can enjoy that sort of thing is beyond my comprehension!
I didn't want to go through with those stupid cases at all and the Welfare Rights people said I had to.
They didn't even tell me it would different Tribunal the second time. They didn't say I'd be in an actual Court Room all day facing a Rigid Army Type Bitch who'd apparently concluded ahead of time that I was a liar. She even slandered my Mother!!!!
For the record, my Muma had a tough time in her life, was a teacher famous for her work and she tried alcohol a few times and didn't like it. That that finding called my Ex a bruiser, myself a liar and my mother an Alcoholic...well you know how stupid people get caught in cliches.. I am not going to forgive this crap you know, and I think I can guess who began the crap and I'll need a Lawyer by then...
And it has to be said here that it was our wonderful Federal Education Department under those face pulling sneering Liberals who wasted $30,000 of tax payer's money to put me through that 'Case' simply so I now understand, to prevent me from becoming the Tax Payer I had been before I went to the horror Dentist in the first place.
Rather than being the hard eyed level headed Defender of Injustice we see on the television sets, my so-called Solicitor fluttered apoplectically and apologetically all over the place.
She'd been to all those Preliminary Hearings without briefing me and without even knowing anything about me, except that she seemingly agreed that I should be punished for liking Acupuncture.
It must be said here that ambition and especially achievement CAN be considered as a crime in Australia. We can be slavish about our trivialised Cultural 'heros', but if an ordinary person, Heaven Help us, if a 'Dole Bludger', shows Ambition, even the ambition to get beyond Benefits, why then they are 'Up Themselves!!!!
In point of fact I hadn't wanted to be 'On The Dole' at all and only coped by doing immense amounts of Voluntary Work, some of which includes a much larger number of Essays than I ever presented at Conferences. I believed that at least while I worked, having been involved with Media, I was still 'out there'.
I could have meetings and coffee with former colleagues, talk about my projects, keep my CV updated etc etc.
The Dental Situation which had caused an instant health fall out before I had to attend a cheaper dentist as I was minus income, wasn't the only thing that had prevented me finding paid work in the Nineties. It was also a Tragic Truth that all my old Work Places had been absorbed and reorganised and positions were lost and people my age were being made redundant everywhere.
It was depressing applying for jobs but I kept doing so until the abscess hit the bone of my face and incurred a whalloping health crisis. OK, I hate the Dental Hospital & had been going to a cheap Dentist who didn't X-Ray. There wasn't much money after the part time voice work dried up.
During that particular crisis, the level of general physical pain was acute. I couldn't then (and can't now), walk very far. Maybe thats partly because I overdid it during the months when I tried to stay off the Dole. Walking from Bondi to Kings Cross and back for the job interview certainly roused those old sports injuries and the bad operation on the foot had me grounded for a week following.
I knew that any blessed part time job would be fine, but it was apparent even back then that I'd be better off working from home and maybe doing some part time things outside home.
The old time Employment Agency, the CES agreed. I attended every meeting with them and they only ever sent me after one job.
Eventually, I had to drop my Private Medical Benefits and I bought a Fax Machine, and after cashing in my Superannuation, I bought a Computer, my first Macintosh, now with most of the leads lost in the eventual process of homelessness.
With the Fax, the Phone and the Computer however, I organised quite a few Shows for Himself and spent a lot of time with Arts Lawyers hammering out the rights for all the people who gave us their time. Seventeen people contributed to our Music Project about The Last Of The Irish Bards.
As well as the Music work, there were several publications and one Seminar to the Graduate Literature Class at Sydney University.
There were a couple of Recording Deals too. I enjoyed negotiations although when stresses of Himself's awful work built up, I was hampered by the awfulness and tensions of the home situations. (And by the fact that some people became greedy about the project and began to harass me by telephone!)
The important thing I discovered was that like Writers, Musicians have to do a lot of Voluntary Work, and Work is the important thing. Maybe a person may find themselves without a job, but they should never stop working, whether it's study, Caring for other people or Voluntary Projects such as Bush Regeneration, even House Work such as can be managed despite various official and unofficial SmashUps, Work Is The Important Thing.
My study of Cultures continued and I was fascinated to discover Feng Shui, the Ancient Study of Time and Space which involves rituals in regard to the damaged areas of One's life. It's no Good Luck Charm. Luck is like the Life Force, it's called Chi and it can help even in the worst times because when one becomes helpless, there are still rituals and ways of making sense. I'd already investigated Taoism back in the Seventies not long before I discovered Acupuncture and I was fascinated to discover the similarities in the essential rules.
Well, Himself after the disaster which followed that second Tribunal case was apt to say that he'd 'supported' me all along.
Well, I've still got the bags and bags of receipts from all I paid from those times and I would dispute that claim from an exhausted and overly defensive mind. In fact his work expected him to go on the Dole for half the year when not working, which he hated so much that my Dole became our sole income when he was at home composing because I thought that by those means I was saving that much grief.
In all that time his former Boss ridiculed him for laziness. He certainly wasn't lazy. During the off periods when there was no paid work he rehearsed and composed at least ten hours a day. Those phases were good. I could get on with my writing and study.
I admired his work very much, but the Laziness accusations bit deep and eventually to my amazement, he accused ME of 'Laziness' and would say so even when I'd worked myself to the point of exhaustion.
At the AAT Hearing, during which none of these realities were ever raised, when I mentioned that it would be more productive to be at home improving my essay on Australian Rivers for the first International Conference I'd been asked to participate in, the 'Lawyer' jumped up and explained the statement away by saying I have a 'Personality Disorder'.
In fact I have Asperger's Syndrome.
I was speaking of my Seventh Conference Paper, still not yet read and the deadline for submission had been absorbed over the days waiting for the promised calls from the Lawyer who claimed to be conducting the preliminary business of The Case.
So eventually they found me guilty of maliciously missing three Appointments one time back in 1997 when my paper work had been hurled about and after the CES had written to tell me that I'd have no obligations that month.
Well Himself had cracked up, hadn't he and it was very bad. Did I say I have a tendency to forget dates and times when stressed? I do.
If my paper work is chucked about, how would I know about appointments? They were very obviously out to get me, and if that very fact is a breach of Tribunal Law, noone noticed.
Acupuncture, Depression, I mean, what was going on there?
Yes I did crack up myself eventually. It's awful to be homeless. Awful and I hope I inocculate myself against repeating such a pattern by these means.
You see, the real violence occurred after himself read the exaggerated lying Findings from the Tribunal and concluded that I'd exaggerated. I hadn't.
What had gone on was that my only allowable Defence was the one instance the Doctor leaked and they used my Work History to ridicule me as if I was a liar.
O Boy. Thus the poem.
Someone should explain to the Tribunal that Domestic Violence isn't simply the Lot of those they see as Losers!
Funny about this economic downturn. The recent American and Australian Governments spent an awful lot of money persecuting individuals solely for the purpose of whipping up paranoias.
They say I'd have to get to the High Court for justice. Qe?
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Getting There
Rain falling and I'm remembering.
Two people I seemed to be as a child.
First born for a couple of decades in Old Jindabyne before the dam, I postured and pranced expecting admiration and laughter.
Then Daddy left us behind.
It's in the memoir, all that.
Muma and me, there we were remembering the old times and no-one spoke of them.
The world grew silent, no-one ever saw me and I thought to myself, am I here, is this a pretence?
Thus was the first breakdown and the first horror dentist.
There's a lot already written, a few books.
One time I believed in music per se.
If a person believes in music, perhaps they shouldn't get to know musicians.
I don't know Bob Dylan although he advises me with regard to my writing in my dreams.
(Dream On!)
A poem published while worlds fall apart.
I have got the hang of the things gone wrong in my life.
I've been writing in my note book.
There is another horrid abscessed tooth. Awful.
I ain't whinging about it all.
I never knew about the Asperger's or the effects of bad dentistry and so on until recently.
I got me facts together with the 'Education' shit I went thru in this country.
It's in the note books.
Tryin to get a couple of my essays published overseas.
Noone here in Oz seems to be interested in the process of accumulating and investigating the processes of belief and knowledge.
Especially those I once believed to be open minded and honourable people.
I guess the next post should deal with illusions as I look out from my imaginary Beach House over a quiet pale sea!
Two people I seemed to be as a child.
First born for a couple of decades in Old Jindabyne before the dam, I postured and pranced expecting admiration and laughter.
Then Daddy left us behind.
It's in the memoir, all that.
Muma and me, there we were remembering the old times and no-one spoke of them.
The world grew silent, no-one ever saw me and I thought to myself, am I here, is this a pretence?
Thus was the first breakdown and the first horror dentist.
There's a lot already written, a few books.
One time I believed in music per se.
If a person believes in music, perhaps they shouldn't get to know musicians.
I don't know Bob Dylan although he advises me with regard to my writing in my dreams.
(Dream On!)
A poem published while worlds fall apart.
I have got the hang of the things gone wrong in my life.
I've been writing in my note book.
There is another horrid abscessed tooth. Awful.
I ain't whinging about it all.
I never knew about the Asperger's or the effects of bad dentistry and so on until recently.
I got me facts together with the 'Education' shit I went thru in this country.
It's in the note books.
Tryin to get a couple of my essays published overseas.
Noone here in Oz seems to be interested in the process of accumulating and investigating the processes of belief and knowledge.
Especially those I once believed to be open minded and honourable people.
I guess the next post should deal with illusions as I look out from my imaginary Beach House over a quiet pale sea!
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