What is voyeurism? My look at Kinglake

So, I have a question. What is voyeurism?

Ben and I drove through Kinglake on our way from Geelong to Mansfield on Saturday. I have been through Kinglake only twice since Black Saturday, once returning from Mt Buffalo two years ago and then, again, last weekend.

I’m not going to lie. Kinglake fascinates me. Chilling. The raw, incomprehensible power and energy that destroyed so many lives and homes seems to linger, strangely so. There are so many houses for sale along the main roads, new houses nestled into nooks of black trees garlanded with thick, green growth up and down their trunks. I would not want to move there. A community whose steeling has already taken place I imagine to move there now would be to make peace with the fact that you would always be an outsider, excluded from the joint experiences of those that still live there. The connection (so fraught) many would now have with the land. Or, perhaps, I am wrong. Perhaps people have moved on far more staunchly (firmly) than I imagine, sitting here, in the house that has been in my family for over sixty years, safe in the South East suburbs. It is, like so many other things, beyond my ability to realistically comprehend.

Black Saturday. I purchased a Salvation Army book sharing many people’s stories. I curled up with it and cried. I googled the sequence of events on the computer, correlated each horrific turn of the firestorm with the safe and quiet life I lived that day (got up late, went to a gig, declined going to a friend’s swimming pool party afterwards). I thought of the fear I experienced waiting for fires to hit where my horses agisted near Belgrave. I had wool blankets, water, wore cotton. How naive to think that that would have saved me if the fires had hit like they did in other places during that horror summer. I cried over people who had died trying to save their animals. I cried over families along Pine Ridge road who had been turned back to their houses to die. Driving through Kinglake I kept an eye out for Pine Ridge road and closed my eyes as we passed the turn off to it in Kinglake West.

Behind my Pony Club lots of properties went up that summer. One rally was conducted in a haze of smoke with the fires, now controlled, still burning behind us in the hills. The road that led along the right side of the Pony Club and up into the hills of Harkaway and Narre Warren was normally a very quiet road. The day the fires had been contained it was gridlocked, despite the CFA asking people to turn back.

I would not turn down Pine Ridge Rd. Would not feel comfortable doing so. Nor would I be comfortable taking photos of the damage. I could not venture to a place with the lone reason of seeing the damage motivating me (yet, this does not stop me googling).

Still, I find Kinglake fascinating.

I wonder, is my interest in Kinglake about sharing stories I can’t ever hope to truly fathom? Is my interest, rather, about acknowledging their pain, their bravery, their stories? Or, as someone who hates living in the suburbs, is my curiosity about weighing up the risks of living on land, in the green? Is the difference I see between myself and the rubberneckers who turned up days and weeks after the event, imagined?

Is the fact that I would intellectualise my experience, think deeply and existentially, that I would write about thoughtful pieces and share them, enough to counter the fact that I am curious about such senseless destruction? Is the fact that I would not drive down Pine Ridge Rd, would not seek out any locale of such deep sadness and grief, enough to stop my curiosity tipping into voyeurism?

Or, is there no division between voyeurism and curiosity? Does intent amount to nothing? Does the line between walking somewhere of morbid fascination and reading about it truly exist?

Perhaps we are all drawn to places of loss and destruction. Places of grief and sadness where everything about life and living is reflected back to us so sharply. It is in the shadow of such places that we feel our own heart, our own places, our own stories most acutely.

Most deeply.

Why Equine Assisted Psychotherapy annoys me.

I have a problem with equine assisted psychotherapy and learning. My problem is that some of the practitioners and facilitators I’ve met seem hell-bent on mythicising horses.  I don’t want to hear about horses encouraging visionary sessions or healing people’s souls. I don’t want to hear about horses sending people dreams that foreshadow events (see http://eponaquest.com/a-tribute-to-tabula-rasa).

Aren’t horses simply as they are sufficient? Isn’t the purity of their responses to us, their incredible ability to read even the slightest shift in our emotional state wondrous enough without anthropomorphising them and turning something simple and wonderful into something on par with water having memory and crystals having healing powers?

Horses weren’t put on earth to educate and heal people. Horses are flight animals whose main goal in life is to thwart predators (us). Our ability to communicate and gain trust from an animal that’s every instinct is to avoid us is part of what makes spending time with horses so therapeutic.

Horses have the ability to form connections with people and, I have no doubt, will protect them and interact with them as they would with other members of their herd.

I believe horses lower blood pressure and heart rate. I believe horses read even the finest shift in our body language and (therefore) our emotional state. I believe horses will connect with us only if we prove ourselves (through patience, innovation and an ability to communicate honestly) worthy. I believe horses are very intelligent in some ways, but as dumb as all get out in other ways.

To make them something they are not is doing them a disservice and has no place in the community services, counselling or psychotherapy professions.

I do not believe horses are out to heal us. However, through them, we may be able to heal ourselves.

On Sex

This is a big topic. Probably one of the biggest there is. I’ve spent a lot of time discussing sexuality, porn-culture and sexualisation with people. It’s something that fascinates (and horrifies me) quite endlessly.

Sex is such a huge taboo. Sexualised imagery is everywhere. It’s represented in media, art, books, movies. Yet, there is so little clear communication around sex itself. The dialogue is skewed, sexualised, made somehow dirty. So young teens, equipped with the factual stuff from sex-ed, turn to the only avenue available to sate their curiousity around what sex actually is. What it looks like. How it works. Once, this would most likely have resulted in a raid of daddy’s Penthouse magazines. Now, it results in words being typed into google (a question, of sorts, posed by a curious teen) only to be answered by hardcore pornography. This is explored in Pornland Gail Dines.

Teens talk to each other about sex, too. But when the common information source is internet pornography (including the horrifically violent pornography known as Gonzo porn) information becomes murky and skewed. Norms, which should not be norms, are formed based on this common source. The result, often, an unrealistic expectation of how people look beneath their clothes and men as a dominant, all encompassing force (when sex should be about unity and mutual satisfaction). Does this happen all the time? No – but, if you talk to the people around you, chances are you will realise it is happening more often than it should.

I feel one of the biggest obstacles that prevents a strong and healthy dialogue around sex is that, compared to just about any other topic, there’s so little inter-generational discussion about it. Sex is just about the only thing I can think of where each new generation is largely left to work it out for themselves.

There are few parents who are willing to have a frank, open discussion with their teenage children about sex (“If we talked to her about that stuff, we’d be condoning it.Besides, it makes me bloody uncomfortable”) and few teenage children who would respond with something other than rolling their eyes and vacating the room as quickly as possible. Things learnt through years of exploration are not, like so many other subjects with equal time invested, passed on to the next generation. Strange, when sex – along with breathing, food and death – is a commonality across humanity, regardless of culture or generation.

Where does this lead? For me, it’s being  horrified by friends airily telling me that their boyfriends have choked them during oral, made them vomit. That they have been surprised by anal sex, ejaculated on and been called monsterous things (‘dirty bitch!’) in the throes of sex. That they have been pressured into sex – and acquiesced. Pressured into swallowing semen of giving oral without a condom. They have never had orgasms because their partners say ‘that’s your problem’. My horror is not that they have experienced what I consider sexual abuse, but that they aren’t fussed by it. Aren’t troubled.  That, in these cases, the behaviours of their sexual partners are not only normalised in the male gender, but in the female gender, too.

Sex needs to be talked about. It may never be something a son or daughter will be able to openly talk about with their parents. But it needs to be open. Across all things, all cultures, all places – sex is something universal. We need to talk about it. What works. What doesn’t. Times when we’ve felt empowered, times when we’ve felt devalued. Talk to someone, so that sexual abuse stops being normalised, so that pornography no longer polarises the dialogue around sex. So that sex moves towards being as it should be – pleasure, closeness and wonder.

10 happy things

1. Puppy breath

2. When a baby looks you in the eye (in those rare, sweet moments between crying and sleeping)

3. The empty feeling reaching the last page of a beautiful book

4. Pulling on a pair of perfectly fitting shoes

5. Waking up to sunshine, when you were expecting rain

6. Blowing all the fluff off a dandelion with one breath

7. The smell of garlic when you’re hungry

8. Accelerating down an empty road

9. The clammy feeling after your fever’s broken (and you know you’re soon to get better)

10. Holding someone’s hand

Hoarding Happiness

I’ve been thinking a lot about moods and emotions lately. The need to communicate it’s transience to children, the need to step away from them, as much as possible. I have also noticed the phenomonen of hoarding happiness.

I rarely let myself be happy. Happiness is reserved for those rare, transient moments when everthing is ticked off my ‘to-do’ list. In this, it is through relaxation, through a deep sigh, that I find happiness. I do not mean that I am never happy. Rather, I mean that I sabotage myself, keep the happiness in check until I’ve done what I need to do.  This is not altogether a bad thing. It is a motivator, leverage to use with myself.

Yet it also means that I am perpetually caught up in small things. A net of niggling tasks, hoisting me above the sea on a hot day.

Tick tock

Strange, how relationships are often gauged by their length.  Time –  measured in weeks, months, years  – is seen to offer insight, to offer something measurable (when, in reality, nothing in a relationship is measurable).

Dating/Being in a relationship/going out/seeing each other/being in a SERIOUS relationship – too narrow a thing for something that on each occasion is unique.

Some people ‘in relationships’ live in each other’s pockets. Other couples prefer to see each other two or three times a week. Yet, even this ‘measurable’ thing (this frequency) within the length (duration) of a relationship cannot gauge a relationship itself.

If a couple wants to marry after three months, everyone is surprised (some horrified). If a couple wants to marry after five years, people are happy (they are thrilled). Yet what is this duration indicative of? What if the people who have dated for three months have a real connection? Have lived and breathed each other for that time?

And what of the people marrying after five years? What if those five years are an accumulation of going to parties, out to dinner and having sex? What if there is nothing in common, so little to talk about, so little shared (despite the time)?

Time means so little with relationships. One couple’s three year relationship does not in any way equate with another couple’s three year relationship.

And nobody has the right to shake their head: “God, they’ve only been going out a year!” because there is so much more to a relationship than time.

Reading

Putting aside the arbitrariness (and subjectivity) of what ‘good’ actually is, what makes a book ‘good?

It’s not a thing that I can gauge when I turn the last page. Often, after investing hours into the text, I can find strengths in something I have just finished. I am impressed with the language, with the characters, with the plot. In most cases, I am impressed simply by the fact that something has been worked up to the form of a book (even if the content is disappointing).

For me, the value of a book (of  a story) lies in it’s ability to haunt me. And this is not a thing that can be gauged when I’m still filled with a story, still walking it’s roads and fumbling through its houses. Not something to be gauged when the pages are still warmed from my fingers.

So many times I have finished a book, turned to Ben and exclaimed that it’s one of the best stories I’ve ever read. I implore him to read it (YOU’LL LOVE IT!) and rant for a while about it’s beautiful language use, it’s intricate plot, it’s emotive characters. Too often, the story fades. The characters become thinner and thinner until they disappear altogether. Something I had planned to stay with me, change me in some way, falls to the wayside.

This does not mean they are not worthy texts, does not mean I have not gotten something from reading them. It means that they have not pushed forward, have not kept their form –  their weight – as time has passed.

Stories that haunt me are so few, so far between. Stories that, when I close my eyes and think of emotive narratives, spring forward with the same vividness that had rendered them when they unfolded for me, page by page.

Stories that, so long after finishing, still linger as an odd hollowness (a hollowness from finishing the story, from being excluded. From having your time in that world so cruelly cut short). Thinking of haunting stories is a twinning of enjoyment and faint sadness.

What stories haunt me? Regardless of their technical prowess, their literary value, what stories are sill with me? When I close my eyes, what worlds unfold on the screens of my eyelids?

I know this Much is True – Wally Lamb

Never Let me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

With my Body – Nikki Gemmel

The Girls – Lori Lansens

The Horse Whisperer – Nicholas Evans

Cloudstreet – Tim Winton

Careless – Deborah Robertson

On the Jellico Road – Melina Marchetta

Bereft – Chris Womersley

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Death of a River Guide – Richard Flanaghan

Nights in the Asylum – Carol Lefevre

And others, lurking in the shadows of these.

Memories from the Road

So, we’ve now been on the road for eleven days and are currently at the Flinders Ranges National Park. Tomorrow we’re heading to Lake Eyre via the Painted Desert.
A few things have struck me so far.

I. The Quiet.
Although only 11 days in, we’ve already had three nights spent in relative seclusion. Two of these were at Canunda National Park, where we were the only people there, bar hearing a few 4WDs pass by at dawn and dusk. The other was at Burra Gorge, on a road called ‘World’s End’. They’ve been still nights and it’s strange to hear nothing.

II. The bones.
The sheer volume of animal bones on the side of the road. Yesterday we passed an eagle, freshly killed. We conjuctured it was perhaps undertaken by a farmer fretting over his lambs, rather than a car.
It was strange, all the carcasses and bones when the only animals we encountered were either specks in the sky or fenced in and grazing. Then, driving at dusk, we saw hundreds of kangaroos, wallabies and had to stop dead to let three emus run across the road. Even 40kms felt too fast.

III. The Homesteads.
We’re used to celebrating antiquity, so it’s strange to pass by dozens and dozens of crumbling homesteads by the side of the road. Strange, too, when there’s nothing but a pile of rubble to mark the lives and stories and emotions played out there. It seems miraculous that people would choose to live in such a harsh landscape. And I wonder, how much has it changed? Was it lush in the 1800s?

IV. The Shadows.
It’s spectacular watching the play of cloud shadows over hills and rocks. To drive in shade towards a rise illuminated in sun. Beautiful, too, to watch the shadows pass across long grass, where for a moment it appears as vapour.

V. Floodways.
We have past over twenty dry creek beds. At first the road passed over them, becoming – for an instant – a bridge. As we continued North, the creeks pass over the road. Despite the depth of the beds on either side, I imagined a flow of water no deeper than one or two foot. Ben then pointed to brush left in the crook of a tree from the last flood. It sat over two metres high.

Fading

I’ve written before about the shift we experience in the people around us. How relationships are fluid, not static. How things change.

We’ve all been with friends and had those sparks happen, those moments when we’re sitting around a fire or in a bar, giggling over years spent together, over a wine or a beer. When somebody is crying at your grandmother’s wedding. When someone answers our call at 2am and says not to worry “I was already up”. Those moments where we look across at the friend and think to ourselves we’re two peas in a pod, we’ll be close forever. There is certainty in those moments. Something solid. We know ourselves, we know others and in this knowledge a snippet of future crystalises. We may not know what’s going to happen but, barring disaster, we know who it will happen with.

And then something happens (or it doesn’t).A fight (or maybe not). Maybe a drifting happens, instead. A shift from being close to acquaintance or to stranger.

And that certainty wavers. There is fear. We had been so certain! And now we don’t even stop and talk if we see each other in the street. We are strangers.

Then, inevitably, we look at the people still around us. The ones still linked to us by sparks and closeness. By in-jokes and laughter and deep and meaningfuls over coffee. We look at those moving with us, tidal, in the same direction. We look back to the now-stranger hurrying past us on the street, eyes fixed ahead, mind full of stories and events of which we now know so little.

Wavering. We had been so certain. And if we had been wrong about the now-stranger, will we be wrong about those around us, now? Those people we still look at and think forever? We realise, as the now-stranger disappears around a corner, that there is so little certainty. That there is only the moment.

There is fear, a gloominess. If not for the person you’ve lost then for the other losses that are still to come. Impending, rolling closer. It dampens those frenzied, warm and happy moments. We look across at people we feel a spark with, a forever, and think maybe not forever.

We look at our partners. Maybe not forever.

We look at our family, who – for once – we’re getting along with. Sparking with, when so often our interactions are founded on shared blood, not sparks. Maybe not forever.

Slowly, so slowly. Or in a crash. We realise that the moment is all there is. All there ever will be. And if we’re sparking with people right now, in this moment, in the now that we never leave, then that’s all that we can ask for. We can never be certain of anything.

It’s scary – the unknown, shoved into our face. And that’s okay.

(some things are meant to be scary).

Attention Seeking

We are born attention seekers. When we are infants, attention seeking is our sole function. We are programed to woo adults – to smile at them, make eye contact (make endearing noises). We are programmed for our caregivers to bond with us.

We are programed for them to fall in love with us (so that they are able to resist the frequent temptation of throwing us out windows, off buildings and into the ocean when we wake them up at 2am and squeal for four straight hours).

As we grow, we rely on others less but we never stop needing them. The needs themselves change as years pass, too. We no longer need nappies changed or food mushed up and spooned into our mouths.

We need support. To be heard.

I am one for believing we must stand on our own two feet before we can hope to stand beside another. But this does not mean standing alone. For me, standing on your own two feet refers to a knowing of oneself, an understanding of how we work, what we need. It is not a question of isolation or weakness versus strength.

“She’s such an attention seeker”. Two girls on a train, talking about someone who’d cut her wrists. “She did it sideways. Everyone knows you do it longways if you’re serious.”

Self harm – too often – equated as a cowardly suicide attempt. Disdainfully labelled the action of ‘an attention seeker’. Bu we need attention. Sometimes, when life becomes dark and curved, we need it more than usual. One of the hardest things in the world to do is to ask for help. To say to someone ‘I need you’. We are ingenious at non-verbal communication. We self-destruct. We hurt ourselves. We shave our heads (we dye them blue). These actions are our flags, waving out of the wilderness.

Two girls sitting on a train. ‘She’s such a fucking drama queen.’