Piscina Podium - On Being Left

On Being Left

An invitation to ongoing discussion as an addendum to the formal symposium paper presented at the 2004 UTS ‘Researching Work and Learning’ conference

Since writing the paper published in these conference proceedings, which argues against the conservative campaign to disappear the historical working class identity, there has been some quite marked developments in this arena, in particular with the recent passing of the Howard government’s Industrial Relations Legislation. Whilst the groundswell of public reaction has been relatively muted to date, the main reaction coming in a renewed energy from the labour unions, there is an underlying unease in the public mood; for many, it is accompanied by an as yet chthonic recognition that they may still be working class after all. With its control of the Senate, the ideological arrogance this government’s leaders and the compliant nature of Labour have brought Right wing ideology into the spotlight.

This necessarily calls into the question also the place and character of its natural opposition, the Left. Since for some time now, along with working class identity, Right wing public commentators have been attempting to disappear the ideological Left along with the working class identity, I thought that it was timely to explore just what it means to be Left. This short essay is a skeleton of a larger work that I am embarked upon, based upon ideas developed during the research conducted for my thesis on the history radical education. I offer it as an addendum to my published contribution for this seminar and invite criticism and contributions to this project.

Old foes and the enemy within

The dialectic between the ideological Left and Right is an ancient battleground of power and defiance, assertiveness and resistance. However, these characteristics do not necessarily belong in discrete political or class camps, since we can refer to the progressive assertiveness of the historical radical Whigs and other Liberals versus the slavish monarchism and obdurate resistance to progressive change of a sector of Labour politics and traditional working class conservatism. Indeed, there are also numerous historical examples of creative merging of ruling and lower class interests, in the diversion of potential opposition, for instance, that ubiquitous Roman euphemism of ‘bread and circuses,’ unparalleled in its cynical awareness. Nineteenth century conservative government warnings of imminent social breakdown whipped Church and King mobs into ferocious attacks on the writers, publishers and distributors of radical literature, such as Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man. In our own times, John Howard beguiles that same population with his empathy for ‘the battlers’ rhetoric, then appeals to their worst instincts, influencing their voting behaviour whenever it seems they might stray. Howard’s Tampa speech was a wonder of moral turpitude, drawing upon that ancient cultural meme, the fear of invasion those of British, Celtic, Anglo Saxon and Viking stock inherit from ancestors who were both the invaded and the invaders. Then in 2004, at the extended peak of a property boom, there was the jab to the precarious hip pocket nerve with unwarranted implications that interest rates might rise if Labor were to gain fiscal control. This is masterful, Machiavellian power stuff, with which the Left’s tradition of moral action and an obligation to critical consciousness can never hope to compete.

In recent times, a concerted attack by the Right has been launched upon the Left wing intelligentsia, a barrage of snide remarks in public commentary, sniffy asides about ‘latte sipping, bleeding hearts’ whom are politically correct to the point of ideological stupidity. However, the most insidious attempt argues that all its battles have been finally lost or won, that in this pragmatically egalitarian society there is longer any need of such antiquated sensibilities and idealism and the Left simply has no reason to exist. Of course, this has similarity with another of their arguments - that the working class no longer exists - lately come under pressure, largely due to their own actions. This is a popular strategy of the Right, reinforced by a transparent, but nonetheless extraordinarily effective, blatant denial of the bleeding obvious. Therefore, it behooves the Left well to constantly remind the public that much of the social goods we have enjoyed over the past four decades were not delivered by benevolent conservatives, employers and politicians but wrested, one by one, largely through the efforts of the Left.

It seems that, by and large, the Right’s strategy works, because people have a tendency to be persuaded by assumed authority and utter conviction delivered by someone with the veneer of an expert, even if it conflicts with experience. This is reminiscent of those remarkable 1970s Milgram psychology experiments demonstrating that people would continue to deliver increasingly dangerous electric shocks to someone they thought the subject of an experiment on the command of a man in a lab coat holding a clipboard; the symbols of scientific authority in an era when the power of scientific expertise was accepted uncritically. Cloaked in the iconography of conservatism with its rhetoric of stability and order, the Right traditionally lays claim to the authority of professional expertise with the calm assurance of the ‘born to rule.’ They can lie unashamedly, conduct the business of the nation in inhumane and abominable ways, and people still believe and trust them because they look and talk ‘right’. I am reminded of a cartoon strip in a 1970s Mad magazine: A group of mothers cluster around a smart looking young dude in a suit, their raffish teenagers playing in the background school, they say, “You look so successful. I wish my Johnny were more like you. Tell us, what have you been doing since you left school?” To which the dude replies, “ I sell drugs to your kids.”

We know, from both historical and more recent examples, that progressive, Left-leaning liberals lurk within the Liberal Party ranks and Right wing ideologues dominate the Labor Party leadership. Neither is there a direct correlation between the Right and conservatism, as we have witnessed the rise of a radical Right that is equally as rabid as any old Stalinist in attitude. It is a matter of the dominance of an ideological paradigm. For two decades now we have seen the rise of Right wing ideology, in both of the main political camps and their influence on the wider social values. Over time, when the products of the rule of the Right are subject to examination there are invariably indications of a shift of public goods into private hands concomitant with an increase of social dysfunction, a swelling of the ranks of the disenfranchised matched by an increase in the prison population. For an example of Right wing Labor, we can evidence the long regime of the NSW labor government, the massive increase in demand on charities concomitant with the building of four new prisons.

We have witnessed the marginalisation of Left wing politicians in both Liberal and Labor parties, most of whom moulder on the backbenches. We see the workplace fraught with the pressures of fragmentation through casualisation, the stress of perennial contracts and ever increasing demands for greater productivity by less and less people. We, as professional adult educators, participate in this process through our compliance in that ubiquitous misnomer of ‘workplace training’ and the development of professional accreditation courses in every known human activity. The original adage of ‘lifelong learning,’ which once inspired us with the concept of ‘freedom to learn’ has morphed into ‘you must learn this.’ Our research in community education frequently feeds the rendering of previously grassroots community activity into professionalised services, their normal human-to-human conduct transformed into consumer products. I am currently witnessing my local swim club’s elders, many of whom have successfully taught children to swim for five or six decades for free, now invaded by the professionalised body of Swim Australia, which demands that they all obtain accreditation and charge for what was previously a free community service. One wonderful elder who swims laps every day, maintains the clubhouse and teaches kids with calm humour and authority despite his mild Parkinsons has been told he can no longer teach at all. I tried to foment resistance amongst them to no avail; they have been frightened into compliance by threats of litigation but, as one old community stalwart said, “The heart’s gone out of it for me.” So, where can a Left-leaning person move, anywhere within current bureaucratic or political systems, or the institutions it administers?

What is Left then?

At a time like this, I feel it is terribly important for people of progressive, left-leaning persuasion to not become disheartened, to not give into that ever-present danger of mind-numbing despair. I fight, sometimes in a moment-to-moment battle, to retain my universal, unconditional love of humanity by reminding myself of the daily courage and generosity by countless thousands of local heroes everywhere. I recall the works of those writers who have used their talents to articulate the inchoate needs of their societies, to inspire dreams of a better world and incite action towards it. I keep the mantra going that things have been much, much worse and what those heroes won in the past we may have to fight for again, but we can never lose it all. And we will win, again, because what we want is good and true. So, what do I think being Left is all about? I am an unashamed romantic and a utopian and here begin the discussion that I hope other voices may contribute:

Being Left is:

· It is an article of faith for me that, given the right kind of nurturing by their community, all human beings can have the capacity to fulfill whatever their physical and intellectual potential may offer. Karl Marx elucidated this concept with his maxim of the ‘hunter in the morning and poet at night.’ I see this as a society that inculcates the integration of each member’s natural need to undertake provision for the necessities of daily life with the creative impulse. The writer I think evoked this best is William Morris, with his artisan’s utopia in News from Nowhere.

· It is the understanding that nothing beyond the daily necessities of community, food and shelter, are givens in human life, that we make our world according to the scope of our imaginations, and we can create for ourselves, just as easily, a good and kind world as one that is callous and cruel. As Zygmunt Bauman articulated: ‘Utopia relativises the present, without which we could not envision an alternative future.’

· It is recognizing that the ‘dog-eat-dog, winners-and-losers’ paradigm of social order that some would impose only encourages the worst aspects of human nature and benefits those who have greater capacities for greed and unscrupulousness.

· It is recognizing that we all have different capacities, we are all products of the human gene pool, have gained our individual talents and capacities in that lottery and therefore the fortunate owe some service those less so. It acknowledges that each of us has something of value to offer their community and allots, again as Marx enunciated, ‘from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs.’

· It is believing that a truly human society is able to nurture all its members, to recognize that we are flawed creature, one and all, to be just and fair and, most importantly, to forgive mistakes and transgressions when they are redeemed by acts of reparation to those who have suffered by our hands

· It is being unambiguously opposed to State aggression or exploitation of any form, against individuals or in war. It is believing that there are always non-aggressive ways in which we can sort out our differences, even if they take time, and that war is never an answer to anything.

· It is an obligation to critical consciousness. This is an important characteristic, but it is also something that can be an Achilles Heel, for they too frequently turn the critical spotlight to their own differences and diffuse their energies in factional disputes. The trick is to find what we have in common and join forces in those.

· It is believing that we are miraculous creatures, all of whom deserve the right to fully enjoy that state of being human on this marvelous planet, and that life and work are not separate but integral to that enjoyment. Our technology has the potential to free us all from the more base vicissitudes demanded by what we need to survive with a modicum of comfort, to give us all that enjoyment of life, not in an obscene degree for some and a pittance for others.

· And finally, for now, but perhaps most importantly, it is the recognition that we must treat that planet which is our home with the greatest respect and reverence, and must not plunder it wastefully, but nurture its bounty and repair what damage we have done, so that it may continue to be ours, and our children’s bounteous home.

Piscina Podium - The house of my dreams

The house is neoclassical Roman peristyle built in stuccoed hay bale with a wide, colonial-style veranda all round, the roof of which is made from photovoltaic cells and also catches the house water. It has an uncluttered, elegant, ethereal feel, the colours vivid yet subtle, and translucent, like watercolour paintings.

Along both sides french doors open onto flagstone paved, arched colonnades that run either side of a peristyle garden with a lap pool surrounded by fragrant vines, perennial bulbs and a plethora of orchids. A delicate, curved wrought iron, covered bridge crosses the pool mid-way.

The front end of the peristyle garden is a wall of wrought iron littered with stained glass sea creatures, in the centre of which is a nine-foot, slumped glass wave fountain that acts as reticulation for the pool water. This provides a glorious precursor to the Art Nouveau, seahorse motif, convex curved, frosted-glass entrance doors to the right. These open into the living area stretching that side of the building, at the far end, becoming dining then turning left into kitchen.

The the colonnade on living space side ends in a ramp to the roof garden. There are deep bay windows looking out to the external verhanda, with cushioned window seats above storage cupboards and recessed alcoves for bookshelves and artworks. The the window seats and alcoves have softly curved edges, those on the alcoves giving a subtle impression of ribs.

Indeed, the whole interior has few hard edges, all corners being softly curved rather than angled. This is a subtle effect though, and not a profiled feature, as such, meant more to endow an organic feel to the spaces. It is important that the proportions of all spaces follow the ancient geometric principles, so that there is a sense of harmony, both between and within all spaces.

The terrazzo floor’s pattern evokes the shore on a retreating tide at dusk, with sea flotsam embedded therein. Midway is a sunken, asymmetric semicircle lounge with large cushions facing a walk-in fireplace that has a tripod for smaller fires.

At the far end corner, the dining table is adjacent to French doors leading onto the veranda. The kitchen area can be shielded by a folding door when desired. There is a slow combustion Aga stove, its chimney replete with smoking chamber, plus a gas range on an island bench, a twin-tub, twin apron sink with good bench space either side, a rack for implements above and cupboards below.

Dutch doors lead to the walled kitchen garden and to the left a large walk-in pantry and preserving room, with a weighted lift to a cool storage cellar, can be entered from both kitchen and veranda. At the far end is an ensuite and laundry replete with gas copper for kitchen as well as washing purposes.

The number of bedrooms and size of study and studio on the left side depends upon the budget. Each bedroom has light golden coloured or limed timber flooring, ensuites, the main with a walk-in wardobe, and French doors leading onto both veranda and colonnade. The studio is at the front end and the study at the rear, in a raised, enclosed section overlooking the kitchen garden.

On this side the colonnade ramp leads to the main bathroom, raised above the lap pool and shielded by plants so that it remains private, but can also be accessed from the spa at the end of the pool. There is a sliding roof so that one may bathe and dry off in the sun when one chooses.

Lastly, there is a mosaic-tiled roof garden with sculptures, Gaudi-like minarets and a wrought iron, glassed pergola for dew-free stargazing.

I could elaborate further on accouterments, such as the glass door handles with shells and flowers embedded but, ah, enough of dreaming for the moment! Back to real life!

Piscina Podium - Redesigning education

A New Order: Family and Education

I believe that we have our society’s order quite literally arse over tit. Rather than suppressing the healthy young body’s impulse to breed when it is best able to produce quality eggs and sperm, we should facilitate reproductive urges with community and family support. Children mature, physically and emotionally, at different rates, some are less hormonally driven than others and some have intellectual artistic or physical preoccupations that require a continuous path. However, the vast majority of adolescents become preoccupied by their hormones, diverting so much attention to their physicality that it is a testament to human intelligence they achieve anything else. My model proposes an educational system based upon Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, whereby the child’s learning patterns, strengths and weakness are identified early and their education is designed to nurture talent and reinforce lesser capacities. There is a panel of responsible adults, parents, teachers and doctors that assesses the individual throughout development. On achieving physical and emotional maturity, there is some ritual celebration of passing into adulthood similar to the Jewish Bamitzvah. The young adult then becomes an active participant in their life, with the option of following an academic or skills development pathway, doing their National Service. If they choose to find a partner, they can begin a family that will be supported by family and community.

In this ideal order, post puberty education is a matter of choice and appropriate timing. Each individual has some twenty years of publicly supported education to be accessed as they choose over a lifetime. Someone with a talent requiring a continuous path, such as mathematics, music, or dance, would remain in education. Another whose hormones were more urgent might find a partner and complete secondary education part-time while having a family, then work for a while before undertaking tertiary education when they find something that interests them. There is a two-year commitment to National Service component to be completed at any time before the age of thirty, done in one session or periodic stints, and also a matter of preference. If an adolescent is proving difficult, their guardians might advise some National Service program that includes a disciplinary element, such as the military where they will also gain further vocational training, but this should be a matter of agreement between all parties. The options for National Service provide a wide variety of options, from military service to living in kibbutz-style accommodation and working on land or sea rehabilitation projects, or participating in local social or cultural programs, all with an educational component in the science and skills of the task. The educational allotment allows a quotient for mature career change or development, with which an individual might take a sabbatical on a basic living stipend to pursue a new private or professional interest, or advance an existing one. This system would then preclude the terrible waste of human potential currently still blighting our civilisation.

Piscina Podium - Astrology board game

Proposal for an Astrology-based digital, flat-screen board game

I first conceived this project in the mid 1990s when the technology was not yet able to produce it, and have subsequently suggested it as a joint project to a number of people. To date, nothing has eventuated and now the technology is up to speed I'd just love to see someone take the idea and run with it, as long as they gave me some credit for original conception.

Overview

This is a ‘next-generation’ board game that offers a valuable, empowering life tool and an entertainment center in one striking piece of equipment. It places the power of charting individual and group entity[1] astrological charts and casting horoscopes for any designated time, for one specific hour, a day or a lifetime into the user’s hands. It offers a complex and enriching entertainment, with games that can be as close to, or as different from real life as the players choose to make it.

The various games software available will require considerable creative and technological development, but the range of potential topics is as wide as life and the details are as rich as human imagination can make it. This provides huge ongoing games software development and publishing potential. It will also offer list of classic board and card games, eg. chess, snakes and ladders, monopoly, scrabble and oracle card games such as Tarot and the Sabian symbols. With the combination of a touchscreen, inbuilt directional mouse and hardware add-ons, the variety of games styles is virtually unlimited.

Hardware:

The unit is slim-line, comprising a surface protected flat touch-screen the size of a chessboard, set into a protective casing suitable to sit flat on the average coffee table. It could be offered in two sizes, the smaller might contain a battery and be the weight of an average laptop and so also portable.

The casing is strong and light, possibly anodized aluminum, with buttons and dials either set flush or, if necessarily raised, may be set into a decorative pattern, like studs or jewels. The casing is engraved with a uniquely stylized version of the Astrological signs, the star patterns of which are identified in tiny lights.

The display unit is a flat touch screen, covering a CPU of sufficient power to store the databases, make the complex calculations and run a range of functional programs and Astrological fantasy games as well as a range of the normal board and oracle card games.

The ports each of the four sides are set in to the lower edge of the sides, so that they disappear into the casing and sit flush with the table surface. These ports accommodate four players with hardware add-ons, such as a private strip screen, mini keypad, flash cards, speakers and earplugs and also may link the board to more powerful technology. Offsite player numbers might be extended by add-ons.

Screen display appearance

Being a digital display screen, it is capable of any visual effect possible through the software programs. It is desirable that the overall visual style be unique, consistent and striking. There may be a range of styles available to suit different decors, but the general look is ‘B’ beautiful, not too ornate, with simple lines and jewel-like colours.

Research would need to be conducted to identify the right level of visual stimulation, so that the board was clearly visible for an average range of capacities while sitting at a comfortable distance and the various icons were easily identifiable and not overly complex. [2] The board can also carry a sleep function with any number of wallpaper designs, making it an attractive piece of artwork when it is not in use.

Programs and Software

The core database program of the CPU contains an ephemeris for both southern and northern hemisphere’s astronomical and astrological data, and capacity to produce astrological charts. These would be accessible in a number of pre-set levels of required richness and expertise, from generalist information on trends to complex interactions, from today’s popular stars to an individual life forecast, from calculating one individual’s data to the interplay of a combination of players, all with unique horoscopes.

The database and core program should be able to calculate and cast a chart from any given birth time and place. From any given chart, and/or any number of charts, this program is able to calculate the various interplays of both the prevailing astrological conditions within one chart and its designated time and the interplays between any number of other designated charts.

As a functional tool, it might be used to chart and store real or fictional individual/s personal charts and be able to access and forecast horoscopes for any particular day or time cast their and/or other’s horoscopes for particular events, appointments or certain days for any time, day, week or year/s.

As an entertainment tool, users can provide their own data for a character, or create hypothetical horoscopes for the role/s they assume in the various games. The players will develop complex planning and prophesying capacities, both within the interplay between their own character and the others within in the various games’ scenarios.

These offer almost endless possibilities for known and unknown factors, all still moderated by the randomized element of fortune. The charts will be guiding principles that influence how the fortunes of those characters interact, both with each other and within the scenarios of the games.

There are bonus and default cards that can aid options or impose sanctions, somewhat similar to the Monopoly board game design. These are gained a certain predetermined junctures in the game, for instance, at a given point in a quest game a player might draw a card that allows them to cast their character’s horoscope for an event in the immediate future, which also brings benefits and constraints. Bonus cards provide icons of power or advantage, penalty directives will mark the loss thereof or designate a task. These become more complex when related to the character’s chart, as some may be more or less compatible with other characters’ ranges of capacities.

In quest-type games, each character will have its own astrologically determined repertoire of attributes and constraints, for which the player can either use their own data or invent a birth date for.

For example, in a ‘quest’ role play with four players, each will have chosen from a variety of roles that belong within the story line. Those not chosen by players are randomly assigned a horoscope generated by the program and behave according to that – this can be a known or unknown quantity. When a character reaches a fork in the road that requires a choice, they roll the digital dice and draw a card that tells them to take the right fork and meet with a ‘test of physical strength’ or take the left and a ‘test of honour’ will find them.

Project development team: the creative directors

· The Conceptual Director is the overall creative coordinator and arbiter for the directorial team, networking between Directors and chairing all meetings and proceedings. They negotiate where consensus is practicable and have the casting vote where dissent occurs.

· The Astrology Director provides the Astronomical, Astrological and philosophical data and creates and allocates characteristics to the elements and factors of the Astrological effects of the various multiple combinations. This role is the creative author of the related astrological characteristics and advises on the outcomes of interactions between these.

These roles are proposed as being in a creative, overseeing capacity on team-based projects

· The CPU Design and Program Director This role requires high-level hardware and program design skills as they will design the CPU programs and oversee the software development.

· The Games Director This role designs and coordinates the design and development of game scenarios. Since this aspect of the process is likely to engage a sub-level team project, they will network and oversee this team. They work closely with both the Astrology Director and the Program Director.

· The Animation Director This role designs and creates the visual appearance of the games, including the icons and animation. Similarly to the Games Director, this part of the project is likely to engage a sub-level team of designers and animators, so they will network and oversee that team. They work most closely with the Astrology Director and the Games Director.

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[1] For instance, business or other organizational entities can have charts based upon the moment of their legal inception as a birth date equivalent.

[2] There may be an equivalent of the ‘large print books’ version for sight-impaired users.

Piscina Podium - what comes after Gen Z

Gen Z, The Last Generation?

posted 18.07.09

It is quite astounding how something as simple as losing your mobile phone can incite a raft of serious social issues, but this loss of a relatively minor piece of property has brought me hard up against a generation gap with implications for the future of society. It started simply enough, with an incoming text message when sitting at a bus stop and the bus came. It was not until arriving at my destination that the phone’s absence became apparent. I retraced my steps, but despite the fact this stop is not busy, someone had evidently been there before me. Well, there went a pleasantly anticipated outing, and my optimism. The rest of the day and my energy were consumed with attempts to contact the finder, then calls to police, bus and ferry lost property, and finally Telstra to have the account suspended.

Over the next few days I’ve vented frustration at the pointlessness of keeping someone’s older-model phone when the line is blocked, and the absence of conscience about the inconvenience and possible distress that not handing the phone in may cause. Recipients this venting comprised a limited sample and amount to nothing more than a straw poll, but the responses have coalesced previously disparate concerns. Response comprised two distinct world-views that can be clearly identified as those under the age of twenty-five and those over. Anyone over readily confirmed my sense of outrage whilst the younger group couldn’t see what I was going on about. Indeed, a quote from one sums it up: “No one bothers to hand in phones. They’re like, disposable items. If you find one its yours.”

Now, this statement is about a product that can cost hundreds of dollars, let alone has high personal value in the essential information stored and the replacement time. This is not some item worth a few paltry dollars and of no consequence to the loser. The disparity prompted recall of seeing a young person who had just found an expensive mobile phone and was crowing with their good fortune as they transfered their sim card into it. My protest then, that the phone was a valuable item and should be handed in, was greeted with derisive incomprehension. At the time, I attributed this to an individual lack of ethics, but now realise such behaviour is common wisdom to the peer group.

I’ll preface the following analysis with the assurance that I do realise not all Gen Y think this way and, as in every generation, a proportion will possess an innate moral compass guiding ethical behaviour. However, the sheer commonality of the attitude evinced by those that fall into Gen Y in my straw poll reveals an underlying absence of the ethics that have been universal for preceding generations. This is not to say Gen X and the Baby-boomers always abide by common ethical principles, but at least they are capable of recognising unethical behaviour and its consequences. From my straw poll it appears a significant proportion of Gen Ys are not. Such a common perception in even a small sample elicits the question how such a basic sociocultural more has diminished so rapidly, resulting in the following theory.

Firstly, whilst many Gen Xs did have working mothers, Gen Y is the generation of almost universal day-care, spending extended periods of peer age play in controlled environments with limited individual attention and little exposure to diverse people or unpredictable events. In family interactions the focus is on essentials such as feeding, homework and preparing for bed, with intensive peer age-group activities and ‘quality time’ with parents at bedtime and on weekends; maybe. To compensate for limited presence, Gen X parents have smothered their children so that they have been coined 'bubble wrap babies,' taught to view all strangers with suspicion and kept so safe they become desperate for risk and turn to extreme sports and binge drinking. They have had neither the interaction with an omnipresent parent that transmits and reinforces social values and models parenting, nor the extended experience of mixed-age social environments, wherein the cognisance of the subtleties of social morality and ethical practices are inculcated and refined. So what sort of parents these people will be is anyone’s guess.

Secondly, their formative period has been during the dominance of the economic rationalist paradigm, their social values inculcated with its rhetoric of ‘winners and losers,’ ‘survival of the fittest,’ ‘dog eat dog,’ etcetera, etcetera. They have been told that they can ‘have it all,’ indeed, are entitled to ‘it all,’ and wanting is having with a credit card; brand name clothing and technological accoutrements the measures of success. I see the same world-view in my teenaged grandchildren, who show not the slightest compulsion to civility, that is, of course, unless they want something. Carefully chosen presents at events like Christmas and birthdays evoke a mere shrug, and there is never a return gift. Its like I don’t exist.

And thirdly, they have been raised on a raft of violent computer games, where morality is a foreign territory and actions have no real consequences. Reality has become too complex, too onerous, and life is simpler when it is approached through a screen with a keyboard and/or gear stick that bestows virtual power. They are the first generation for whom virtual reality merges so continuously with reality and communication has become a form of solipsism, where the communicator has precedence and the more convoluted subtleties of body language are conveniently avoided. Its all about image, what ‘I’ am saying and how smart I appear. ‘I am, therefore I communicate’ is their signature, but much of it is in the shorthand of textmessaging and so lacking in intellectual and emotional depth. In addition for older Gen Ys, is the ubiquity of affect-altering drugs such as Ecstasy and Ice, and the emotional black hole of hydroponic cannabis - an entirely different species from the creative stimuli of free-range known to boomers. These later drugs interfere with the brain’s ability to develop constructs such as empathy and sympathy and so respond normally to emotional stimuli. Hence that other signature of theirs, "Whatever!"

These developmental failures, exacerbated in the generation now in their teens, have dovetailed to produce what is, in effect, the evolution of a species of humans different to all preceding generations. We baby-boomers experienced our own version of the generation gap and ran the gamut of mind-altering drugs and their casualties and Gen X has followed a similar developmental path. Ultimately, many have come to realise they are more like their parents than expected, or perhaps desired. This is a realisation I doubt will come to Gen Y or their successors. Their brains seem to be wired very differently. The baby-boomers have been accused of creating the consumerist world in which they grew up, and to some extent that is true. But at least we were largely motivated by a sense of optimistic adventure and the desire to change the human condition for the better. We also created a lot of the humanitarian and idealist organizations that have, indeed, achieved those goals.

Unfortunately, in our enthusiasm to challenge the small-minded prejudice and hypocrisy we’d grown up with, we do have to accept responsibility for throwing the ethical baby out with the moral bathwater. Towards the end of the 70s baby-boomer idealism was starting to unravel without that moral compass and the adventure got lost in an ethical vacuum during the 1980s. I do accept that the traits outlined here are not unique to Gen Y, and remember a late 70s Playboy article (yes, I did occasionally buy Playboy for the articles) on USA survivalist communes. This one ended with the author's comment that he'd found them so scary, if they were the only ones to survive he'd happily stand under the bomb. But, whilst we may be the unthinking progenitors of this latest scary brood and have to accept due consequence, I’m actually rather glad I won’t be around to see the world they will create.

In Search of Merlyn - Introduction

This is the introduction for a travel memoir project that I plan to undertake when the opportunity to complete that journey arises. I went to the UK for thesis research in 2000 and intended to begin this project by walking through SE England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, finishing at Findhorn, tracing the remnant histories of the fairies and Celtic earth magic in pre-Roman Britain. Circumstances prevented this ambition at the time, but its something I still plan to do. As this introduction indicates, the travel memoir interweaves ancient sociocultural history and personal mythology with the immediate sensual experience of the land and its people. I'd love to do this project with a photographer who has a similar yen for the magical wonder of nature.

In Search of Merlyn's Cave:

The Chthonic Yearning of the Celtic Aesthetic

A travel diary of the interior by

Teri Merlyn

How many layers of skin in

This deep ecology of belonging?

Where blood’s wellspring

Courses with chthonic memory

Of that nascent being,

Emerging into consciousness

First dreamed itself Human,

And loved being so

Looked up from their labours

And loved the land

First as the hand that fed

Then for its own sake

A Sense of Belonging

An Australian 'baby-boomer', my ancestry is 2nd Fleet Welsh-Irish on the paternal side and post-WWI emigrant Scots-French on the maternal. Along with my peers, I grew up suckling on the pap of all things British. As all emigrant groups are wont, we British had transported our cultural selves with our trunks and technology when we came to this land. We breathed new air, ate from new soils, drank new water, saw new colours and gradually assimilated our bodies and adjusted our minds to separation from the 'mother country'. But we continued to interpret that phenomena from within a British cultural umweldt[1] and the adjustment of our spirits to a new land's iconography has been much slower. There is more than pragmatism at stake in the current contention over becoming a Republic. It is also the deep-seated resistance by those of Anglo-Celtic backgrounds to that final symbolic severing from the parent culture. Culture is like that. It permeates everything. It travels with you like the bacteria in your gut, rendering every new experience into a digestible form or violently rejecting what it cannot.

To continue the metaphor, while some have stronger digestive systems and can graze upon the cultural bazaar with impunity, so much as a sip of exotic water for some means an instant dose of 'Dehli Belly'. So it is with culture. Culture itself is a slippery concept. It can mean high or low, ethnic or dominant, and the languages that carry culture can develop variations with their vernaculars. Here, it is global, describing the aesthetic umweldt of a people, developed over thousands of years, encompassing all the vagaries and permutations with which untold generations of human conflict, concourse and inventiveness worked to forge an identity and the very elements of the land are embedded in the language. In an alien environment many avoid cultural indigestion by clinging to common understandings, using the iconography of familiar things. With the benefit of hindsight and two centuries of assimilation to this land, we now criticise those early settlers for their cultural opacity, their inability to spontaneously accept what the new land offered and their insistence on transporting as much of the old-world environment as possible. But we overlook this fundamental human need for the familiar face of their culture. Its not that those explorers, who starved amidst unrecognised plenty, were any less intelligent; their cultural filters were just stronger than their hunger.

However, being a highly adaptive organism and inevitably dependent upon its historicity, an old culture will gradually assimilate to the new environment, adapt old cultural bacteria to the new conditions, synthesize an aesthetic from old roots and elements of the new land with which to apprehend the new surroundings. In time, the culture reinvents itself, becomes something different again. In our case it has remained underpinned by the language of the old culture, although in a new form to fit the elements of its new land. In recent times Australians, as a nation of peoples gathered from many parts of the world, can be said to have formed a distinct culture, one that is still British in origin but now separate and unique to this land. Yet its people, while appreciating their new environment, still blend the elements of their various old lands into the new. When my own generation was growing up Australia was pretty much a monoculture. The umbilical cord that kept us tied to the British mother-culture was stretched but as yet uncut.

Now attenuated to breaking point, this bond makes its presence felt only in a chthonic yearning of this emigrant Celtic aesthetic, a mostly unconscious ache for that deeper belonging. I think that perhaps my own generation will be the last for whom the source of that ache is identifiable. It is enough to drive many of us back to a place we have never been, feeling blindly for something we vaguely know is missing. Tourists from ex-colonial British countries flock to the motherland in droves, exchange their hard-earned dollars for an exorbitant Pound to gawk at a reified Culture in carefully composed museum settings, a Ye Olde Worlde theme park on a massive scale, and think "this is our Culture". But it isn't. Most are more recent cultural artifacts, preserved for their value as cultural theatre, they are Disneyfied historical sites, many that interpret the relatively recent institution of royalty as a given, and pretty symbols of British imperialism at its peak. This is not what I am looking for. My pilgrimage is to places where I can feel the old soil, breathe the old air, drink the old water, see real colours unlit by stage lights. I am going to Wales and hug a tree, one that grew from a seed in soil where my earliest people left their bones, that sprang from a seed of a long line of trees going back to the tree of my spirit's language. I will walk in the wild places, on the earth where my ancestors trod, in the air where their spirits whisper on zephyr winds and howl on the moors. I will drink from the birthplace of singing streams and bathe in moonlight that has shone on my most ancient self. Although many of those emigrants were already well and truly urbanised when they landed here they were closer, much closer, to the source of all this. And I want to know in my bones what my ancestor's bones knew.

The British had got to Australia first (or so they insisted), at the peak of their colonial imperative, and made their imprint upon the country in no uncertain terms. By the 1950s, despite the presence of this land's indigenous people, early immigrant groups from other parts of the world, the post-war influx of migrants from Europe and a vocal dissenting minority, Britannia still ruled the waves and Australian culture was still British . So what is this British culture anyway? What is so powerful about it that, despite two hundred years of separation, even now that my adult self owns to a well and truly assimilated, Australianised aesthetic, a chthonic yearning for the cultural iconography of the motherland gnaws at my metaphorical entrails? This vague, restless yearning for the land of my Dreaming, the land that formed my organic self, may be attenuated but it is not a phenomena unique to indigenous peoples. The term 'Dreaming' itself, one that was first treated as childlike and naïve by colonials, has proved so apt, so universally appropriate to this sensibility, that it has proved valuable linguistic currency in the language of all origin mythology.

Once upon a time all peoples were 'indigenous' peoples, belonging somewhere, to a land of their beginnings. In that place, which their primeval ancestors had claimed for their genesis, a cultural ethos had formed breathing that air, eating from that soil, drinking that water, seeing those colours and worked to build the human-land interface that is their cultural iconography. From this came the early languages that resonated with those places, a unique cultural gut that digested all this, fed its people spiritually, emotionally and physically and imprinted itself in their genetic memory; became their unique Dreaming[2]. Due to the vagaries of cultural development, climate and topography, some groups achieved a more powerful link with their patch of planet than others. Those who failed to find a reliably hospitable piece of earth on which to form an unbroken chain of belonging, or grew too populous, reached out in migratory waves that dominated the more permeable cultures, destroyed their enemies and assimilated with those that were resilient. From these groups grew more mobile, permeable cultures that rose and fell with remarkable frequency during the European Bronze Age.

The demographic history of most of this planet is one of such migrations. Few but those living in the most inaccessible regions had complete isolation from the press of the migratory hordes. So it was, and still is, with the indigenous peoples of the British Isles. Although they had long enough in isolation to send down deep roots into their fertile soil, the hapless Britons were perpetually under siege. Conflicts from within and invasions from without, their little isle attracted successive waves of slaughter, each new arrival producing a layer of cultural phenomena like sediment over the indigenous land. Yet the culture formed in that old, deep soil of Britain was fecund and its old life did not fossilize under the weight of but permeated all that overlay it. Owing to its predominantly oral culture, the iconography of British Celtic mythology is acknowledged to be mutable, anything can mean almost anything. Perhaps that is why it has been so resilient.

Since those earliest peoples had a cabalistic, oral culture that leaves few tangible traces, there has been much speculative consideration about just what it is that they believed. There is some contention as to whether we can ever really know anything about them beyond what archaeologists divine from their ruins. But this is to deny the strength of an indigenous Druidic culture that built such miraculous structures as Stonehenge and is rumoured to have had an established cultural and educational exchange with Hellenic Greece. Indeed, once looked for, the thread of the British mythology is evident, deeply embedded in the contemporary cultural imagination, in our language and our inspiration. Quietly, as we listen to the echoes across millennia, the resonance of the old Briton's heritage sounds like a deep harmonic hum, a resonance never completely extinguished by Roman boots and bells or Anglo-Saxon tenure. Mutant and reified, there is nevertheless a lingering trace of the old bones, strong enough to strike a deep chord when we hear those names, sense the old story's bones in new clothes.

The Olde Country

As the science of 20th century archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists add to the findings of earlier scholars of British Celtic myth and legend, old bones take on flesh, drape in fur and flax, leather and gold. Over two millennia of invasions by the Picts, Saxons, Angles and Scots, their respective cultures, overlaying, assimilating, but never completely extinguishing those earliest of Celtic forms. For, as Britain in its own imperialist period found, the iconic pantheons invaders bring are not a perfect fit in their new home, as Charles Squire (1975:4) exclaims:

How strange Apollo would appear naked among icebergs, or fur-clad Thor striding under groves of palms! But the Celtic gods and heroes are the natural inhabitants of a British landscape, not seeming foreign and out-of-place in a scene where there is no vine or olive, but "shading in with" our homely oak and bracken, gorse and heath.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History (1890, 1959:25-7)) tells of how fair and fecund the Isles those early invaders found, with Ireland, 'the true home of the Scots', as the fairest, most abundant of all. Much of what those barbarian hordes and Roman legions brought to the British Isles made itself at home, by persuasion or force, bringing with them their gods and bestowing the land's old gods with new names, building new churches on the old temple sites, grafting new branches on the old linguistic tree. The Angles and Saxons, first invited in by the Briton as mercenaries to defend them against harassment by the Scots and Picts, in turn became invaders. Their original fee involved land but they took more by force, made their homes there and, like all migrant groups, brought their own cultural practices but gradually assimilated into the British landscape.

From around 700AD the Vikings began to raid, spread their semen and, mostly, return to their icy aeries with their plunder, but many also stayed behind and assimilated into the existing population[3]. Dublin and York are old Viking towns and the Orkneys were almost entirely populated by Nordic tribes and while English are referred to as Anglo Saxon, in truth there is perhaps a greater presence of the Vikings in contemporary English language and culture. Indeed, the Norman French who have had so much to do with England's historiography can be traced back to those Vikings who began raiding the 400s AD and in 911AD held Paris under siege for so long that they were given Normandy to distract them. Unlike these permanent settlers, the Roman Empire in Britain was a relatively short physical occupation, but the 470 years of Roman rule had perhaps the most profound influence.

The Roman's enormous capacity for civil organisation and rapacious imperialist energy, extant in the Church of Rome, worked hardest to expel old Celtic Britain from its grounds. However it is the power of the land itself that, in the end, forges the essence of such cultural phenomena. Despite these waves of invasion and the massive cultural imperialism of the Roman Church, the old roots held true, entwining up through the Viking pirates and Anglo-Saxon mercenaries who had made that part of England their home, first by invitation, then by plunder. The elemental force of the air, the soil and the water eventually permeated all these invaders as the hybrid gains its vigor from the old root stock. In more recent times, driven by conflict and famine, our ancestors went out into the world to find new homes in strange lands, there to gradually assimilate to an alien aesthetic. Yet, like the briar root stock, the old elementals live on in our memory, the old spiritual rites still dwell in our hearts and the old names resonate in our mouths, even here, halfway across the world.

My childhood imagination was fed on the Empire's best, on Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard, Schoolgirl's Own Annual and Enid Blyton, Roundheads and Cavaliers[4]. Most importantly for me, the tales of Arthur, his knights of the Round Table and my especial hero, Merlyn the magician. I read every fictional permutation of those cycles that my local library could provide, steeped my imagination in the iconography of an ancient Britain. It was not until my early twenties that I read Tolkien and by then, with a more sophisticated understanding of cultural iconography, recognised that what I felt was my deepest soul resonating to the images and the language of an older world still. I realised then that what had stirred me all along was not the prettified tales of the French Romances, but the deeper images and sounds that lay like still water beneath the frivolous waves. For that is what Tolkien also taps into. With the iconic forms his characters take, and their ancient-sounding Celtic names, they resonate with my deep-soul-self, the genetic memory that permeates to the marrow like an organic version of the astral body, not yet expunged by assimilation to this new land.

This most recent generation born here in Australia is somewhat different to mine. They are a more successful synthesis, an adaptation of the many different lands their parents have

come from and much closer yet to the unique iconography of this land of their birth. The old British cultural aesthetic is slowly being replaced by the new land's elements, as something these diverse progeny all share in common. Their very differences will be what eventually draws them together, for the sake of mutual survival, provides the ethos of a shared culture. Perhaps, one far distant day, Australian culture will have more affinity with that of the indigenous people of this place. For now, with my generation in its maturity, a chthonic yearning for the old land's elements still permeates our cultural dreaming, the old words resonate in the most ancient corners of our souls. All my life I have seen my new land through the filtered lens of another world, tried to describe it with a language formed to describe another land, tried to apprehend it through another aesthetic.

Do not, for one moment, think that I do not love this land of mine, do not, everyday, thank those powers that brought my ancestral genes to this place. With its air that captures the feel of a 360 degree horizon and lets my spirit expand to its utmost, its wild and secret waters that quench any thirst I bring to it, its thin but fertile soils that have given me this big, strong body and the brightest, clearest colours for my eyes to feast upon. I do, indeed, love this place with almost all of my heart. There is no way that I desire to exchange these wide-open-spaces for the wall-to-wall people of the old place. But there is this chthonic layer of my soul that yearns, that aches, like a long-distant, timeless empty space, to see, to feel, to stand in that place where my people began, where those old words sprang from the air, the water, the soil that grew the trees that gave these sounds form. For that is the foundation of the old language, trees. Well, Robert Graves, in his seminal The White Goddess has said so, convincingly enough for me as an intellectual construct, and Tolkien's sentient trees the Ents confirmed it to my heart. The iconography of the oldest world lies deep in the marrow of my bones and the language of my mind.

Cultural Caves and the Iconic Merlyn

In an important essay Merlin the enchanter, and Merlin the bard, Nash (1899,1969:i-xvi) traces the legendary and fictional permutations of Merlyn, arguing that the Welsh Emrys is most likely a corruption of the Roman Ambrosius and quite possibly a Christian clergyman. But then, one has to consider the dominance of the Roman Church and its effect of masking earlier iconography. The deities of the Celtic mythological iconography are, in themselves, nebulous, without all the confabulations of their later appropriators. With such looseness comes license, and my own version of 'Merlyn', though informed by the fictional forms that have fed my imagination and augmented by later scholastic inquiry, is unique to me. My Merlyn[5] is much closer to the sun god Llud or Emrys and the Druid-bard Myrddin of fragmentary Welsh poems. Like Squire (1975:323), I see the iconic Merlyn character as a confluence of the Celtic Zeus and the actual people who wore this name in their role as human-god interface in Druidic cabalistic lineage. As pagan lore masters, the early druids passed on their cabalistic lore and title to each generation and, as The Book of Taliesin[6] tells, their presence spans the preliterate years of the most ancient Britons. These are the bones, this the earth that I need to feel, to know my old place.

King Arthur has a fairly consistent image as a war-leader who was the uniting force of his people. Squire suggests that the iconic Arthur is a confluence of an earlier divinity and an actual person who held the post of "Count of Briton" under the Romans. He replaces the earlier Gwydion, a benevolent god of culture and the Arts who is aided by a "mighty ruler of heaven … some knew him as Lludd, others as Myrddin, or as Emrys" (Squire, 1975:313, 329). While Gwydion- Arthur has a fairly straightforward role, and can be traced to a number of historical identities who actually existed, there are as many faces to Merlyn as there are storytellers and scholars.

Merlyn's cave, the place where he remains in thrall, that too resonates with deeper meanings than a French Romance of a sorry tale of a man's fatal weakness versus feminine power and deceit. For as Squire tells it, "according to Celtic ideas, all things came from the underworld" (330). It will be noticed that in the French Romances Arthur also fell foul of a woman. Women, with their internal sexual organs and wombs have long been associated with the cave, both in an erotic and a procreative sense. In patriarchal Christian society this became a means of male oppression, with the underworld becoming the domain of Satan and forging a conceptual link for the persecution of women designated as witches. These so-called witches were also a repository and perpetuators of the old Celtic pantheistic lore. Early Celtic society revered the social and symbolic value of women, in direct contrast to their invader's gender hierarchy, and the relegation of the underworld to a place of evil would have been just one more form of cultural destruction and domination. To destroy the cultural role and power of women was to destroy their knowledge, negate the whole balance of the Celtic culture and to encourage the Celtic males to adopt the new power, as the dominant gender, that their rulers offered.

It could be that the retreat of Merlyn to a cave was indeed symbolic, as a metaphor for the retreat of a whole culture to the womb-cave of its origins. As the harsh modern world dawned, that is where Merlyn retreated with the treasures of Britain.

References

Graves, Robert. (19 ) The White Goddess.

Miller, Thomas (trans.& ed.). (1959) The Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of

the English People (Part 1). London:Oxford University Press.

Squire, Charles. (1975) Celtic Myth and Legend. Newcastle Publishing Company.

Wheatley, Henry B. (1899,1969) Merlin on the Early History of King Arthur: A Prose Romance.

V.1. Early English Text Society, New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers.

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[1] From the German, meaning the constraints placed upon perception by sensory capacities.

[2] I do not feel that I am misappropriating an aboriginal word as this term was attached to the Australian aboriginal myths and legends by their European invaders, not one that they themselves defined their culture by.

[3] There are many linguistic traces, with words like 'knife' and 'calf' Viking in origin, as was King Canute (1016-1035), ruler of England, Denmark and Norway.

[4] Somehow those Cavaliers always seemed to be the oppressed heroes, cruelly persecuted by Cromwell's evil Roundeads.

[5] I use the 'y' to align my association of this name with its early Welsh heritage, as different in kind from the Merlin of the later French Romances.

[6] Squire cites this as attributed to a sixth century bard whose Book of Taliesin is found in mediaeval Welsh MSS.