It's been almost two years since I posted to this blog and, as yet, I perhaps still feel I have little, if any, new compulsion or inspiration to write. However I suddenly realised I was missing a golden opportunity to do either of two worthwhile alternatives ... Post old scribblings of my own and/or post some more (as I did with Walden some time back) by other authors.
So this following piece is something I started back in 2014 but never completed and all these years later I am hesitant to attempt to recover my original thread of thought, so I'm posting it as I found it, unfinished and dangling with perhaps just a suggestion of promise? I hope you enjoy it.
I shall now also look for some extracts from works by other writers ... Perhaps starting with Hermann Hesse ...
1987
The only sounds are the gentle sighing of
the breeze through the nearby casuarinas and the occasional distant call of a
magpie. As I have done on many occasions over the past two years, I am sitting
on Leura’s Olympian Rock, looking directly across the Jamison Valley toward Korowal
(Mt Solitary) and beyond. The sun has passed its zenith in the cloudless blue
vault of an autumn Australian sky, causing a slow increase of shadow which gradually
reveals the contours of the vista stretched out before me. The sheer and
striated sandstone escarpments of Kedumba and Narrow Neck frame the view to
left and right, but from this vantage the view to the south seems almost limitless
– the vastness of such as the Wild Dog Mountains and Lake Burragorang reduced
to little more than foreground detail as the successive ridges and valleys of
the Great Dividing Range challenge my eyes to discern their detail, which
slowly dissolves into the haze of distance. I convince myself that I can
identify the particular silhouette of Mt Gibraltar, ‘The Gib’, in Mittagong
some 75 kilometres distant and home to my elderly parents, but perhaps that is
just a fancy born of a desire to discern something familiar in this wild
expanse?
As the warmth of the sun seeps into my
bones, the solitude and serenity of my situation allows my mind to calm,
de-clutter, wander and, eventually, begin to consider the infinite. What has
brought me to this point in time and space – given me the privilege and freedom
to sit idly here in this apparent paradise with just my thoughts to occupy me? I’m
sufficiently aware to recognize that my quarter century of existence on this
planet has been most notable for my extreme good fortune. The fourth child of
middle-class English parents, my family immigrated to Australia with the
benefit of the ‘Assisted Passage Scheme’ and have resided within proximity of
Sydney ever since. I have always been well clothed and fed and enjoyed a safe
and loving home environment. I received a good education and never suffered
more than the normal run of minor ailments that beset most children. The pangs
of young love combined with my uncertainties about sexuality (at a time when
heterosexuality was essentially the only widely understood and legal option)
provided me with the expected moments of anguish, frustration and self-doubt
but I knew enough to be discreet and was never overtly persecuted for my
orientation. I am bright, capable and enjoy a curious and creative disposition.
And, despite having worked in numerous roles across various fields of endeavor
since leaving school at fifteen, I sit here as a recipient of fortnightly
Social Security Benefit payments that supplement the meager income I derive
from some part-time youth work in the local community.
By most common measures mine truly has
been, unlike Albert Facey’s, a fortunate life. And yet. And yet …
2014
Yet I, like so many others, across all
ages, genders, nationalities, social and economic strata, found myself
questioning: Why? What? How? When? Even who? Though, is that last simply a
manifestation of our species’ over-riding tendency to anthropomorphise
everything? So many faiths and cultures seem compelled to inculcate in their
constituents the notion of human supremacy. The seeming need to find strength
and justification in the frankly alarming suggestion that humanity sits apart
from and higher than the rest of the universe we inhabit, in all its
incomprehensible diversity and complexity. Are we, as is often proposed, driven
mostly by fear of ‘the other’? The other nation. The other race. The other
gender. The other faith. The other culture. The other community. Or is it
actually even simpler than that? Is it just a fear of insignificance? A fear of
being small? Inconsequential.
I think that it might be just that. Do we
ask ‘What is the meaning of life?’ not from a sense of truly seeking
enlightenment so much as from a need to justify our own existence. Are we
actually asking ‘Why am I here?’ Is it little more than an egotistical
assertion that we each must, of necessity, have some higher purpose? And do we
interpret the semantics of ‘higher purpose’ too literally, suggesting that a
higher purpose requires also a position of elevation, of superiority? If so,
then perhaps the reason we feel compelled to ask such questions is the disjunct
we intuit between our culturally acquired sense of authority and entitlement
and our frequent feelings of desire, uncertainty or helplessness.
Sitting in front of that magnificent and
truly vast expanse of earthly wonders back in 1987, the singular notion that
slowly rose in my thoughts to eventual dominance and clarity was the concept of
relative scale, and all that a true comprehension of scale can imply. Bill
Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft, speaks of the importance of seeing
fine levels of ‘granularity’ to gain understanding. He proposes the notion of
exploring ‘orders of magnitude’ to aid clarity and comprehension. These are
mental exercises that evoke in a more practical and helpful fashion the oft
heard taunt to the woebegone ‘Get a little perspective!’
What happens when we do indeed step back
from our subjective immersion in our daily travails? What I discovered, once I
let the irksome minutia of quotidian concerns fall from dominance in my mind,
was a true understanding of exactly how significant I was within the totality
of universal existence.
Not at all.
And for me, that was extremely liberating.
It conferred a new and persistent freedom to my thoughts, actions, being. Why
was that?
Within the context of infinite time and
limitless space we are all of us less than a speck of insignificance. But
that’s perhaps a little extreme? Perhaps such a viewpoint invites accusations
of a nihilist or fatalist position of negation of care or responsibility? And
that surely is not freedom? So let’s explore instead a continuum of personal importance
that stretches between a position of ‘It’s all about me’ to one of total individual
irrelevance. At what scale, what level of magnitude, do we find our level of
greatest comfort? The ‘picture’ of our world within the frame of which we can
feel both sufficiently important to gain self worth, yet sufficiently ‘one
among many’ to feel the freedom to express ourselves without undue constraint, condemnation
or fear? Clearly it will be a different location on the continuum for every one
of us with many external and internal influences – real and imagined; cultural
and socio-economic; religious and familial. The tendency for someone of my
upbringing, within a culture rampantly extolling the righteous virtues of the
supremacy of the individual, would inherently be further toward a position of
personal dominance than for someone reared within an Australian indigenous populace
wherein the philosophy of ‘what’s mine is yours’ has true meaning.
Additionally, there are many who will justifiably feel that the ability to
perceive themselves outside of the pressing concerns of immediate circumstance
are a luxury simply not available within their daily grind of ‘hand to mouth’
survival. They are compelled to place the day to day, minute by minute needs of
their own, or their family’s, food, warmth and shelter first and foremost.
Viewing their life from the next order of magnitude is simply not an option
they feel able to invest even the luxury of aspiration toward.
Note: Incomplete though it is, I feel there may still be some points of interest for the curious reader to consider and just perhaps you might like to compose a conclusion of your own for this piece?
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