Oliver Sacks and “Soul Murder”

May 21, 2016 | Australian Values, Border Security, Capital Punishment, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Education, Immigration, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Values

Oliver Sacks and “Soul Murder”

 After:  Oliver Sacks  by Luigi Novi  9.13.09

. . . the arms that long for love

  Sir Roger was listening to the ABC Science Show today. It was Robyn Williams’ homage to Oliver Sacks (Awakenings, The Man Who Thought His Wife Was a Hat, Seeing Voices, Uncle Tungsten etc. etc. etc.) and was jolly-well enjoying it immensely. The sun was shining into the conservatory, the hounds had been exercised, the ice was clinking cheerfully in the Glenfiddich, all was right with the world … when suddenly his Lordship was shaken by these words:

 Listen to the complete ABC Science Show feature on Oliver Sacks

In the show, Sacks recalled his early (wartime) childhood experience after being evacuated to the country from London during the blitz.

He called it “soul murder”.

Sir Roger’s glass slid from his hand and he watched it slowly fall, like an overcranked silent film, to be dashed on the Italian tiles of the conservatory floor.

The idea of murdering a child’s soul – what would that mean? To thrust a knife into the heart of the spirit of playfulness and enthusiasm and joy, to cut off the hands that grasp so eagerly for learning, to amputate the arms that long for love, to sever the legs that long to walk tall, to blind the imagination and every dream, and to gut the body of hope.

To replace it all with what — an interminable desert of dust and ash and despair, and the nightmare of blank nothingness.

Repairing to the Library Sir Roger blew the dust off an article about “soul murder” by Leonard Shengold who said:

“ Soul murder is the term I have used for the apparently willful abuse and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be traumatic. By that I mean that the children’s subsequent emotional development has been profoundly and predominantly negatively affected.”

The mind of the master of Migently Estate flashed into flame, like ancient nitrocellulose film in a poorly maintained projector on a hot day, with the thought that the treatment of asylum seekers by successive Australian governments, and particularly their Prime Ministers and Ministers, their bureaucracies and bureaucrats, and their profit-driven corporate contractors, matches the description of “soul murder”.

Especially — though not only — when it is perpetrated against children for whom as a society we are collectively responsible. And more damningly, as a Culture — which we so pridefully contrast with others we call barbaric, backward, primitive, knuckle-dragging, inhumane – we are deeply shamed.

And so Sir Roger slumped into the rattan and pondered to whom, on Shengold’s definition, the term “soul murderer” might be applied. Who had publicly and wilfully perpetrated, advertised and perhaps boasted of abuse against children who are, after all, in the broad sense in Australia’s care (you know, to discourage people from getting on boats and to break the people smugglers’ “business model”)?

And, he mused, those would include Dutton, Morrison, Turnbull, Abbott, Rudd, Gillard, Howard, Keating, Evans, Bowen, Ruddock, Vanstone.

Who else?

All those who voted in parliament for them and their policies.

All those facilitators, such as bureaucrats and others, who were ‘just doing their jobs’. Heartlessly. 

And all those who are complicit because they voted to put those people in parliament.

And he shouted to the cat, “You can say ‘not in my name‘ as much and as loudly as you bloody well like, but actually it is in your name and you are not absolved unless you do something about it. It is in your name if you vote for either of the major parties party.”

“And that’s all right, puss,” he said quietly, “as long as you are clear and okay with yourself that that is who you are: someone who is okay with the murder of children’s souls.”

Pigeons on Ice

Nov 14, 2015 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Terrorism, Values

Pigeons on Ice

Get the Flock Out of Here

 

Years ago (in 2009) Sir Roger reached out to his readers about the standard, weaselly,  platitudes politicians drag out in response to catastrophes.

 Now you and Sir Roger both know that he didn’t “reach out” at all. His arms are not that long. But the phrase is one of those ugly metaphors we can’t seem to get enough of and that we think will “do”, as if it was as full of all the chewy, tasty, nourishing niceness of the real thing. Which it’s not. It’s one of those cheap and easy throwaways we hope will give, without effort, the impression of depth and sincerity. Which it doesn’t.   

Sadly, Sir Roger has had too many opportunities to review his advice and now, once again, in the aftermath of yet another foul and grotesque public demonstration in Paris of the moral superiority and loving-kindness of a middle-eastern god . . .

. . . as he says in this pod-like communique to the hurt and angry: 

 

Music:”Relent” by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com

 And this is a rough transcription for those who prefer to read: 

“ Back in 2009 Sir Roger said:

At a time like this hearts, thoughts, prayers, condolences and sympathies are thick in the air like a flock of pigeons on crystal meth.

Our question is, PMs and Presidents not only send, convey and extend thoughts, prayers, sympathies and condolences to us – and their hearts autonomously “go out” to us – but they also inform us that they have already arrived – “our thoughts and prayers are with you”; so how exactly do they get here? Wifi? How many megabytes will I need, because there seem to be a lot of thoughts and prayers on their way? How can we tell they have arrived? Could they be behind the dresser? Under a cushion on the couch? On top of the cupboard? What do they look like? Do we have to unwrap them? How big are they – will they all fit in my sock drawer? If they are “deepest” sympathies, do I need a larger drawer? When someone’s “heart goes out” to us, do we have to have a special jar to keep it in? Will I need tubes and pumps and plumbing? And how will you get on without it? What actually are these things? What do they mean? What actual value are they to us? How much did they cost?

The answer to the last four questions are: nothing, nothing, fuckall and fucking nothing. Talk is cheap and mealy-mouthed words and pompous forms of words are empty and meaningless. So, for a politician, the price is right.

Watch for the first politician, French or American probably, to paint with chocolate-coated bullshit the deaths in Paris as “sacrifices”, as people who “sacrificed their lives for freedom”. And then watch them try to stitch the unlucky dead into the false myths of the faded, fraying, fabric of a national flag1.

Now, Sir Roger is not actually obtuse. He does understand the desire to say something. A politician’s main job is to say things (although usually that is “give me money”). He does understand. Yes, we know it’s all metaphorical language, but it’s also an endorsement and perpetuation of bullshit magical thinking.

What a politician says in these times ought for goodness’ sake to be meaningful and useful. And should not be lies. Prayers don’t actually work. Telepathy and Telekinesis are not real. Condolences need to actually have the power to console. Of course you can tell the truth and say you are shocked, upset and angry and that you have empathy for other people’s suffering. Good for you. And I feel your pain and my heart goes out to you.

The people who are hurting, however, can’t use your pain. Also, don’t address your remarks to dead people. One of the symptoms of being dead is that you can’t hear stuff, not even American Presidents’ gold-plated, ringing oratory.

So say it is a bad thing. Then say exactly how you will help relieve the pain, as much as it might be relieved, and say how you will try to stop it happening again, and how you are going to deal with the bastards who did this and the other bastards who still want to do it in the future.

By the way, our own Malcolm Turncoat today said today, just after he opened his doublet and released his heart to fly its way from Berlin to Paris, that there is

“a global struggle for freedom against those who seek to suppress it and seek to assert some form of religious tyranny. A threat in the name of God, that is truthfully the work of the devil.”

Now be careful, Malcolm. You may be invalidating basis of western political culture. After all, the christians  — whose hodgepodge of religious beliefs, schisms and secular values made possible, and now underpin, both liberal democracy and perpetual ideological friction — spent many hundreds of years brutally forcing others to follow their beliefs, destroying people and cultures, cities and countries who would not submit, through crusades, wars, terror, torture and inquisitions, and social degradation. Threats in the name of god.

Sir Roger would agree with him if he is really saying that the history of Christianity is truthfully the work of the devil. Except that there is no such thing as a devil of course. Or a god.

Sir Roger’s heart goes out to … you know …

 

1 After all, just 54 years ago in Paris, police massacred 200 demonstrating Algerians or drowned them in the Seine. So much for the myth of liberte, egalite, fraternite. So much for Malcom Turnbull’s ‘France: the home of Freedom’ myth. But then, what does that matter when a great myth is hungry.

 

Scott Morrison’s Ghastly Apparition

Jan 1, 2015 | Australian Values, Border Security, Cultural Values, Democracy, Immigration, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Values

Scott Morrison’s Ghastly Apparition

 

Auschwitz in the morning

  

Sir Roger is having a short break from the hard work of watching his serfs tiling the fields, shaving the sheep and milking the bulls or whatever they do.

He has tried to fit in some self-improving rest and recreation activities (see photograph above) and has had some time to read.

He read this by George Steiner (1967):

“ We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.

And Sir Roger had a sudden moment of déjà vu.

A ghastly vision of Scott Morrison swirled ethereally into view – happily going to church to improve the odds (which are Ø) of his personal salvation; on his knees humbly praying for forgiveness from someone he couldn’t possibly — and obviously doesn’t — comprehend; jovially supporting his football team while children in his care cut themselves from despair; and then back to the serious business of bastardry, sitting behind the big desk of his own Auschwitz coldly making the lives of innocent others a misery.

For the Party.

Oh, and his career.

 

 

 

Sprezzatura – the New Cool

Dec 29, 2014 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Values

Sprezzatura – the New Cool

Only Connect!

 

S ir Roger has been somewhat troubled of late that persons of his (ahem) “vintage” have become quite out of step with the young’uns these days.

Not in terms of worldliness, because after all his generation have seen a lot more world (times Time), with all its available varieties of grief and joy, of wonder and horror, of peoples and places, than the young’uns — although they apparently believe they invented the world in 7 days (more or less) and are piqued that the old cheeses don’t give them credit for their creativity (as we also complained, to be honest).

“See that Pops? That’s a car! I invented that.

See that? That’s a smart phone!

See that? That’s the internet! I had the original idea and created them with my bare hands out of thin air.

No-one ever did anything before me.

No, don’t bother, you wouldn’t understand with your tired old alzheimery brain lol.

(I also invented music and dancing btw.)”

No, the trouble is in terms of personal relationships.

 

 

 

SIDEBAR:


Way back in 1528 Baldassare Castiglione published Il Libro del Cortegiano, The Book of the Courtier, and brought to the world the term Sprezzatura.

Sprezzatura is:

“rehearsed spontaneity, studied carelessness, and well-practiced naturalness”

intended to:

“avoid affectation in every way possible . . . and to practice in all things a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”

It is the ability of the courtier to display:

“an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them”.

Sprezzatura has also been described

“as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance”.

 

 

So Sir Roger is cogitating on his apprehension that sprezzatura translates very roughly into what the young’uns call being “cool” (as if they invented that word as well), or “chill”.

What it looks like is that the kids — with whom, of course, one is quite embarrassingly down — find it very uncool, not at all sprezzatura, to express an emotion or to actually give the faintest appearance of having actually noticed anything at all.

Now, there are two important exceptions to this.

One is permitted to (or one does anyway) express the emotion of tanterum provoked by an unfairness or frustration that one perceives is directed at one’s spoilt-child-self, usually by authority figures (or parents – not necessarily the same thing), and to use a full range of expletives and explosive actions to describe these offenders-against-one’s-divinely-bestowed royality.

The other exception is that while it is uncool to notice almost everything external to oneself, it is almost compulsory to notice oneself constantly, and to take photographs of these earth-shattering moments and share them with an adoring public – a public which, ironically(?), is spending a lot of – studiously disguised – energy and effort not noticing anythingoranyone but itselfie. Sir Roger does note that some fringe dwellers do notice the food they are eating and take a cornucopian photographic record of their every repast to share with what they imagine is a drooling, breathlessly waiting, deeply impressed world that is starving for the latest news of their banquetations. However, this behaviour is deprecated and thought to be uncool by the Sprezzaturati.

Lol! All this light-hearted fun, eh? lmao, right?

Well, it does have its sad side.

Alphabetical Gens of every tribe appear to have no authentic, meaningful time for the human reality of actual other people. Perhaps they are not being cool at all but are merely, and actually, unaware of others. Or they are simply too busily absorbed in and fascinated by broadcasting the minutiae of what in their fantasy are their own extraordinarily interesting lives as social media celebrities, and having what they call “fun”.

This “fun” involves superficial and content-free banter, often electronically, with what they call their “friends” (lol), competitively drinking buckets of poisonous liquids before staggering out from their squat/ share-house/ apartment/ parents’ place on a recreational excursion where the agenda is to drink a mixture of as much intoxicating beverage, of whatever malt, as possible, perhaps augmented by a range of cutely acronymous drugs of uncertain pedigree and even more dodgy consequence. The goal, apparently, is to cause a swoon, to crumple at the knees, to fall on the floor, or even more hilariously in the gutter, to vomit, and magically to awake the next day and find oneself in bed with a bad headache, a bucketful of remorse and probably an ugly stranger, wondering what happened after the first drink at 3 o’clock in the afternoon the day before.

So there is no difference, even in detail, between this fun and the way fun was pursued when Sir Roger himself was a young’un.

In fact in most respects Sir Roger’s generation – the BoomBoxers – who also thought they invented everything and understood everything and were instant experts and were immortal, and were shallow, too — were no different from today’s young’uns.

But my dears (says Sir Roger), there is a new shallowness, an existential hollowness, a bottomless pit of empty dread in the New Cool, the Sprezzatura nova, and it is either actual indifference to the multi-dimensional reality of other minds; a terror of touching the wobbly-jobbly, smelly-messy emotional innards of others (or what we used to call “intimacy”) because either they fear catching something from it, or they have no idea how to deal with it; or a fear of being thought uncool rather than a desire to be cool – that is, a dread not so much to connect as to be seen to.

You can’t touch them. Your fingers slide off them like burnt bacon off a teflon frypan. And yet as humans our greatest need is to connect.

“  She might,” said E M Forster, “yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going…

Only connect! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

 

 

And by the way, since Sir Roger has mentioned Forster:

“  This woman was a goddess to the end…This episode which was so tragic for him, remained supremely beautiful. To such a height was he lifted, that without regret he could now have told her that he was her worshipper too. But what was the use of telling her? For all the wonderful things had happened.

“Thank you,” was all that he permitted himself. “Thank you for everything.”

Sir Roger wishes to say to his particular goddess, “Thank you. Thank you for everything. And by the way, and I know there’s no use in telling you but, I am your worshipper too…“

 

  

Special Intel Ops

Nov 3, 2014 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Humour, Immigration, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Terrorism, Values

Special Intel Ops

Night of the Big Dicks

Special Intel Ops, Sir Roger is required to inform his readers, may actually AT THIS VERY MOMENT be taking place, or may be in preparation, or may at the very least be in prospect.

(Clutches pearls)

It has come to Sir Roger’s attention, or may have come to Sir Roger’s attention, or may in the future come to Sir Roger’s attention, that spooky types with false beards stuck on, dark glasses pulled on, black hats pulled down and coat collars pulled up, are probably at this very moment — or perhaps not — engaged in Special Intelligence Operations, looking for, and even looking at, evidence, or what may or may not turn out to be evidence, of fundamentalist jihadist islamist/ christian/ buddhist/ hinduist/ atheist thoughts and feelings that, if turned into actions, may disturb the status quo and the little old lady next door, who has always voted Liberal and will again if she lives that long without a bomb blowing up her tiny flat, or if she doesn’t choke on her cornflakes or swallow her dentures and if she’s not too terrified to venture out of the only safe place she knows.

WE MUST PROTECT HER in her fantastic delusions so that she can once again vote for Tony’s Tamer Straya (waves colonial-era jingo flag [made in China]) so that the jesuit interloper and his fundamentalist christian fellow-travellers might win the most unlikely election victory in living memory – even if that is at the expense of the freedoms of the rest of us.

It is believed the Specious Intel Ops in question — if there is one, of course — may be on foot in an Australian suburb which has a high (or cunningly low) concentration of persons of a [ahem] “specific” cultural-religious-ethnic heritage.

The Special Intel Ops may — or perhaps may not — currently be in the final planning stages of a secret pre-dawn raid which will be unknown — or perhaps known — or perhaps leaked — to all besides selected members of the media.

Residents of the — allegedly — targeted street [unless it is a highway, or an uninhabited desert] will need to be patient for as long as the television news vans need to remain in the area to interview the tumescent penises of the Attorney General, the Minister for Death Stares and the Minister for Immigration-&-Everything-Else-He-Can-Lay-His-Hands-On (and his 90 media distorters).

You have been warned.

The Night of the Long Penises is coming!

Welcome to the new world of Special Intel Cocks.

Men and Whitlam of Australia

Oct 21, 2014 | Arts, Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Education, Fame, Indigenous, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Love, Media Values, OzPol Values, Science Values, Values

Men and Whitlam of Australia

On Your Knees

 

Men and Whitlam of Australia . . . 

“ T he decision we will make on December 2 is a choice between the past and the future, between the habits and fears of the past and the demands and opportunities of the future. There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided by a single decision. For Australia, this is such a time.

 

“We will abolish conscription forthwith.

 

“We will abolish fees at universities and colleges of advanced education.

 

“We want to give a new life and a new meaning in this new nation to the touchstone of modern democracy

— to liberty, equality, fraternity.”

Yes, sadly

It’s time.

Now is the time to say goodbye.

Now is the time to yield a sigh.

Now is the time to wend our way-eee,

Until we meet again

Some sunny day

Time to bid farewell to a fading myth of the socialist left that no-one under 40 has ever heard of: old plinth-bound, red-taped Goth the Whittler whose soul, vision and legacy are chained and frozen in stone within the walls of the Wiblam Edifice, protected by the Hooded Brethren of the Whitlam Industry (UWS) Inc.

His name was “Goth”, now a legal personage, a mere trademark, hijacked by a “controlled entity”  bearing the name of the once terrifying but now sadly faded and hardly remembered mythical hero of long ago.

His time, comrade, was a time of social earthquake, of cultural lightning and of political tempest whose like we shall not see again.

Heralded by fiery comets, bare-chested and thumping did he unchain the creativity of the nation’s sleeping Beast.

With the life-giving elixir of freedom did he quench the crumbling leaves of its dreams.

And “Liberté, Egalité! Fraternité!” was his battle cry. To those who awoke it was as if St Crispin himself were there amongst them.

And the Beast was roused! It shook off the dust of the dead, Mingsian years and romped and played for joy.

But the Beast grew and grew and its liberator, though mighty, was no match for the Beast which became a monster and destroyed him.

The largest stars shine brightest and briefest and explode with shocking spectacle. And are gone.

Their glowing supernova remnants linger for a time but fade and are forgotten.

As Oscar Wilde almost wrote of the Star Child,

“ Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he was destroyed. And those who came after him ruled evilly.”

And they still do, and today they promise to rule more evilly than ever before.

If there is one thing Sir Roger despises it is people who are so far up themselves they can look through the back of their own eye sockets, and who then insist that everyone else take them seriously. Such are the rulers of our day, the Mad Rabbit, Jolly Joe Porker, the Cormorant and the Death Stare.

Yet still a few remember the torpid days of The Beige Oppression and The Monochrome Society during the reign of Ming the Dreadful and his inept successors. And these few who remember know and cherish the bright and cheerful contrast of The Sir Gough Rainbow.

Sir Roger since 1972 has found in every new day a new excitement, a new challenge, a creative opportunity to influence his world for the better and to make it a better, more loving and more humane place – much the way that Gough inspired us all to do and be.

And everyone now has the constitutional right, the moral duty and the precious freedom to do so.

 

So now to Gruff the farter, Gog the sun and Goth the gruff old goat.

Gough be with you.

But wait! This just in:

 

TONY BURKE:

The late Cardinal Clancy used to often relate about his conversation with Gough when Gough had inquired as to whether or not St Mary’s Cathedral might be available for a funeral, which surprised Cardinal Clancy given that he was not expecting Gough to convert to Catholicism.

Gough explained: no, no, no, it wasn’t for the Catholic funeral — it was because he wanted to be buried in the crypt, claiming that he was willing to pay but would only require it for three days.

Is there yet hope?