djaef's verbiage

yet another blog #2

2007-04-19T16:17:00.000+10:00

I haven't been posting here as all my energy has gone on surviving lately. With studies, kids and a wife, as well as a photoblog, I just haven't been motivated to use this blog. But strange as it may seem, I've created a new blog! What? Why? Well, oringinally I just wanted to install it on my own server, as opposed to this one being hosted elsewhere. But then I thought about it, and figured I really do want another blog, and so I am hoping the difficulty and effort of setting up a WordPress blog might make me start blogging again.

In any case, my new blog is Photografica Weblog.

photografica blog

2006-10-09T14:03:00.000+10:00

In the off chance that anyone in the universe actually stumbles across this electronic flotsam, I can announce that photografica creative services is open for business. Visit photografica.com.au for all your photographic, web site design and writing needs. :) Also, check out my personal blog here. I will be posting a photo a day.

to blog or not to blog

2006-06-25T12:32:00.000+10:00

I'm actually more interested in a photoblog at this point in my life. My writing has taken a back seat to photography at this point in time, but a photoblog needs a good design and a lot of energy.. But just look at the possible result. www.chromasia.com must be the best photoblog on the web. Awesome work at times.

I've never managed to keep a consistent diary in my life, so I don't see why a blog would be any different.

Anyway, I'll post here as I see fit.

Here is a random photo:

A New Life

2006-06-17T15:55:00.000+10:00

I've just reviewed my 1000 things to do before I die list. It's mid 2006, and I've been skydiving, I've grown a beard, and I'm a quarter way through a Diploma of Photography. Things happen if you make them.

a clearing in the woods

2004-12-09T15:30:00.000+10:00

It's been a tough few months...

I've been doing a lot of brooding. I've been doing a lot of thinking. I've been distant, unattached, depressed, confused, angry, and lost.

I'm still in the middle of it all.

Answers are so god-damned hard to come by at times.

For a couple of weeks, I just put life on hold, and retreated into mindless relief - superficial, yet enjoyable. A holiday retreat called the Internet.

That is until my wife reminded me that I had a family, and responsibilities that came with that. If I didn't pick up my share of the load, it fell to her.

I'm still in the woods. It's dark, I still can't find my direction, and I'm feeling a little cold and tired and lonely. But it's not all gloomy. I can see up through the trees that the sun is shining, and I can hear birds singing. I think there is a clearing coming up where I can rest a while and renew my energies.

But such emptiness cannot be filled by prattle, or verbiage as I have so blithely called it.

I'll be back when I have something further to say.

Queen On Fire At The Bowl

2004-10-25T19:29:00.000+10:00

QUEENONLINE.COM

Queen - On Fire - Live at the Bowl

One of the best rock bands in the world, no doubt! 14 years have passed since Freddie Mercury died, but Queen is still a huge name around the world. Today (in Europe at least) they released the new live dvd, from a concert in 1982.

You want to see why Queen are considered to be one of the ultimate live acts in the world - watch this dvd. It will blow you away.

limbo dancer

2004-10-23T13:40:00.000+10:00

Two weeks later, and I'm still in limbo. By choice really. I had already decided to take a holiday, and now I've done that. But I'm no further to figuring out how I'm going to secure an income. I don't want a shitty job. That's not laziness either. I've worked like a dog for next to nothing the last twelve months, and it's just plain stupid. Neither do I want a career, with a high wage and long hours. Money is nothing if you have no time to spend it. I'm not going to waste my life for a decade of retirement. I might die in a car crash the day before I retired...

So what do I do? I'm not sure. My life is in a holding pattern while I think. We won't starve. I could get a job driving taxis again pretty easily I think, but I am loathe to do it. I want to start my own business, as this seems like the best of options, but I don't have a lot of capital. (Face it, I have next to none :))

I'm waiting. Maybe something will pop up in my time of need. The direction of my life is open again. That, at least, is something to celebrate. I think I'll have a beer :)

new direction

2004-10-10T21:00:00.000+10:00

What a weekend. Howard wins the election (argghhhh...) and then I get fired. Shit.
It was definately the worst job I have ever had in my life, but it was also at times, very enjoyable. Not to mention that it paid the bills. Now I am officially unemployed. Shit. Ooops, I said that already didn't I. Murray, I hope you boil in the fat of eternal damnation (or whatever fire and brimstone end of the world scenario it is you Seventh day types believe in). Shit.

scattered ambition

2004-10-05T13:32:00.001+10:00

I heard this phrase in a film the other night. A good film - it was called "Personal Velocity". Very interesting film-making, a very atypical American film. Certainly not for everyone, but quite good.

But this phrase stuck out to me. It was in relation to one of the caharcters, explaining why their life was where it was. I just thought 'yep, that's me.'

Scattered ambition(s) - I've never been of those types that were highly and narrowly focussed. I've always been a try this and try that kind of guy. I've been good at every job I've ever had. I mean above average good. I have skills - there's no doubt about that. I learn quickly and I'm a good thinker and a hard worker. But I have scattered ambition... Sounds good doesn't it. Sounds like the title of a book, or the name of a rock band :)

I've always been careful not to become too ambitious, as I don't think it a very worthy quality, full of lusting and desire as it is. But maybe I haven't focussed quite enough, as a lack of ambition is also a dangerous attitude.

It begs the question though, doesn't it. To me it sounds like a criticism, as if ambition should not be scattered. I suppose that sounds right. If you are going to be ambitious, it makes more sense to narrowly focus those ambitions. But what about ambition? Is it a good thing, something that we should all accept and teach our children? I think the answer might be rather more complicated that most might think.

100 things to do before I die (Part 2)

2004-09-23T22:30:00.000+10:00

11. Have a really good organic home garden, providing my family and I with a good share of our needs.
12. Go 10 years without having a cigarette
13. Get rid of my excess weight
14. Lead my children by example
15. Listen to another 1000 hours of Queen ballads :)
16. Master Photoshop
17. Give up driving taxis
18. Read Cold Mountain in one sitting in a quiet place
19. Marry my wife once more
20. Forgive my parents...

another way?

2004-09-20T14:21:00.000+10:00

How can we enjoy life if we are contantly working, shopping, cleaning etc.. Where is the time to enjoy nature, our children, to just be? I'm deeply unsatisfied with the social structure on this planet. Working culture just perpetuates economic inequalities, and leaves most of us with very little spare time. We struggle to provide for our families, but "provision" is also about providing quality of life, not just money. I work like a dog, (which is actually a terribly inapt metaphor, because dogs do nothing but play, eat and sleep) better to say I work like an idiot, 45 hours a week for very little money and getting nowhere fast. But where do I want to go? I just want to find another way. I want time back. I want to be able to spend time in the garden, growing my own food. I want to be able to go for long walks by the river, play more with my children, have time to myself to write, have time to enjoy the company of my wife. Instead I, like nearly everybody else, sruggle to get the dishes washed, the shopping done and spend more than 5 minutes on something relaxing.

It's not a whinge. I know there is no magic answer. There are as many ways of living life as there are creatures on the planet. But I am dissafected. I am brooding today, frustrated by my inability to see another way.

100 things to do before I die (Part 1)

2004-09-10T09:34:00.000+10:00

(inspired by Glamour Goddess )

in no particular order...

1. Go skydiving
2. Write a novel
3. Take a diploma degree in photography
4. Visit Great Britain
5. Make love to my wife at least 4000 more times :) Edited to say 'make that 3800' :)
6. Buy a decent sound system
7. Sing some songs in a karaoke bar
8. Grow a beard
9. Shave my head
10. Visit Malana (not 100% sure about this one. This is the village in the Himalaya where my oldest brother disappeared in 1995)

more later...

profundity vs banality

2004-09-10T09:22:00.000+10:00

my mind is not empty, but I can't seem to drag anything out worth writing. I talk all day, but it's a different matter to put something in writing. Maybe it's my desire to have something profound to say. Profundity is no doubt overrated. Life is full of the banal, the boring, the perfectly ordinary (or is that the same as banal?). Chasing the profound seems like a quest doomed for failure.

Maybe my blog should be about the insignificant details of life. The fact that a butcher bird comes and shits on our balcony, along with a koala and lots of myna birds. Maybe I should write about the fact I need a haircut despite hardly even having any, or that I took a day off to allow my wife to attend a meeting with her doula educator, who then cancels the night before, leaving me $170 out of pocket. Maybe I should mention i had muesli for breakfast this morning, and took a walk down to the river. Maybe I should write a long article about my struggle with smoking...

Then again, maybe not. Maybe I should just shut up until I have something meaningful to say. Its' a quandry isn't it...

the arrogance of the rich

2004-09-05T13:33:00.000+10:00

I picked up these wealthy people late last night. There were three couples going home. I drive a maxi-taxi, which is a Toyota Hi-Ace 3.0lt diesel 10 seater van. As I left the pick-up, I might have taken the first corner a little sharply. I heard one of the women in the back call out slow down, as it seemed she nearly slid off her seat. That she was drunk and didn't have her seat belt on had nothing to do with it of course. OK. I slowed down. I drove at 45-50kms an hour, being very careful going around corners. Two corners later the women slides off again. I heard a string of expletives in the back and realised suddenly that she was directing them at me.
"You're driving like a maniac. Are you on drugs or something?" was the first clear thing I heard. What?!! A maniac on drugs? I was furious. "Have you even got your seatbelt on?" I called. I was boiling up. I was a millimetre away from braking (very suddenly) and telling them to get out. If you don't have respect for a guy who works all night, taking drunk people home when the only alternative is a chilly 6km walk, you deserve to freeze. That the bitch obviously thinks taxi drivers are lowlife on drugs shows just how narrow minded some of the rich are.

I held my temper in check and drove them home. The bitch got out first, and I did notice her husband made an effort to look me in the eye and thank me. She of course didn't say anything and I totally ignored her. The four others in the car were then very polite for the rest of the trip, thanking me, but not, as I noticed, tipping me. Assholes.

Things like that put you off. It took me several fares for me to regain my normal good disposition. If there's one thing I hate it's people thinking they are better than someone else, when they clearly don't have a rat's anus of an idea who the other person is, instead just blindly judging someone by their occupation or appearance.

But I suppose that's the sort of society we get wen we value wealth higher than anything else, and correspondingly base our identities on our occupations (ie. ability to earn money).

ideology

2004-09-02T16:54:00.000+10:00

Whatever happened to it in politics?

With elections coming up in Australia, Great Britain and USA, it seems they are all going to be reasonably close. The swinging voter is a person that I just don't understand.

In Australia, at least, we have two major parties. One is conservative. Very conservative. The other is, despite a decade of drifting to the middle in an attempt to win power, is left leaning. But all we hear about are policies, and how specific policies are going to win or lose the election. I don't get it. What ever happened to a belief in a political ideology? How can you vote for neo-conservatives one election and then vote for a left wing party the next? Surely, it is through the broad ideology of the parties that the best chance exists to separate them. Labor is a left wing party and the Liberals are definately not (liberal that is). Despite Labor drifting to the middle in economic policies, surely there are other things that matter more. The left wing in politics will always be more compassionate, always supporting the arts and the environment better than a right wing government. The right wing will always have the interests of the rich at heart.

I could never vote for a right wing government, because my political ideology is that of the left. That the next election will be decided in marginal seats by swinging voters leaves me bereft of understanding. I just don't get it.

life and golf balls

2004-08-31T12:55:00.000+10:00

A professor stood before his philosophy class, some items on a desk in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked his students if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up all the available space. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unaminous "yes".

The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

"Now," said the professor, as the laughter subsided. "I want you to recognise that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things - your family, your children, your health, your friends, your passions - things that, if everything else was lost and only they remained, would mean your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job and your home. The sand is everything else - the small stuff. If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Look after your health. Take your partner out to dinner. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the dishwasher. Take care of your golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."

(source unknown)

-------------------------------------

Nice story. But what about the beer? :) I suppose we should just drink that...

5 reasons why blogs are useless

2004-08-31T12:09:00.000+10:00

1. people don't read anymore, they watch television
2. how could you possibly think you are witty or intelligent enough to entertain people.
3. the chances that anyone would ever actually find your site are like, 15,000,000,000 to 1
4. you should be out there having a life, playing with your kids, not trying to conquer the world by web site.
5. no-one actually gives a rat's ass what you think anyway.

edited to say,
a) of course this post went against the grain and attracted a comment from some Brazilian guy on the other side of the planet
b) it was a little tongue in cheek, cause if I thought blogs were so bad, I just wouldn't have one.

c h r o m a s i a

2004-08-30T20:57:00.000+10:00

My blog of the month is awesome. This guy is one of the best photographers. He is incredible. Check it out at c h r o m a s i a. I don't know anything about the guy. It could be he's a professional photographer. But I get the feeling he's not. He doesn't advertise anything about his work, so I suspect it is just a hobby. But he is bloody good at it. You'll need at least an hour and a good broadband connection, but it's well worth the time. Enjoy!

windows service pack 2

2004-08-30T20:22:00.000+10:00

I'm in the middle of installing it right now. (Yeah, it takes a long time) Here's hoping that the few people I've read about having trouble with the installation were twits with virus riddled old dogs without the latest patches or updates already on them, and loads of problems already.

My only problem is that I'm running out of hard disk space. I knew I should have gone the 50GB...

OK, time to reboot soon. Better go.

monday mornings

2004-08-30T10:43:00.000+10:00

arrrggghhhhh.... I hate Mondays. After working all Saturday night and then Sunday night, I wake on Mondays with a head like a stuffed pepper. I can't think straight, let alone write, so I shouldn't even bother with this.

The weekend has seen two events unfold that have taken my attention. The Australian federal election has been called for October 9. Bring it on Johnnie. You are going to loooose! The second was the end of the Olympics. A 16 day orgy of patriotism - I think I had enough after about a week. Thank goodness it's only every 4 years.

OK, that's it. I'm going to take some paracetamol and lie down.

computers

2004-08-24T10:36:00.000+10:00

They totally captivate me. I think it's mainly because they so strongly appeal to the autistic side of me (hey, doesn't everyone have one?). I love structure and order. I remember as a 10 year old my idea of fun was coming home from school and putting my cassette collection into alphabetical order and typing up labels for them :).

No, I am not embarrassed.

It's the same around home. With two kids under 4, the house always looks like Hurricane Betty just went through. The floor has needed washing for about a month and the toilet just doesn't get cleaned enough. But me - I don't care about the lack of cleanliness. Germs and bugs and all that bacteria paranoia just doesn't touch me. But I HATE the disorder. I am learning to live with it, as I just don't have the time or energy to constantly pick up, but I really have to fight my nature to leave things alone.

Ahh, back to computers. They do such an excellent job of keeping things in order. Their very existence depends on so many million lines of perfectly structured code. Consistent, orderly, great for the anal retentive - no wonder they have captivated the world.

Of course, I am also a very creative person. My efforts on the computer are always directed in a creative manner. Blogs, photo galleries, web sites, forums, writing.. I love communication and I love creativity. Now I just have to get these suckers to start making me some money...

night shift

2004-08-22T13:43:00.000+10:00

Driving a taxi on a Saturday night is a good window into society, and while it's often a lot of fun, it's not all pretty. Ferrying carloads of drunk teenagers home, or even worse, out to party further at 2am when they are already blotto, is just plain hard work. Obnoxious behaviour is par for the course, and sometimes it's all you can do not to just say 'screw this for a joke, I'm going home'. Of course, the lure of the money keeps you out there. Because it's a lucrative night. I can earn up to $400 on a Saturday night: up to half my weekly income in 12 hours. But it's very hard on the body, and hard to see humanity at its worst. The kids take the gold medal in the bad behaviour stakes, but that's not to say all the oldies are friendly, generous and polite. Far from it. Some senior citizenss seem to have perfected the art of twisted bitterness. Ahhh.. it's a tough shift. 12 hours straight. Last night I clocked up 650km. That's a lot of driving in anyone's language. I finally got to bed at 4.30am. Now it's Sunday afternoon and I soon have to go out there and do it all again. :)

addicted to therapy

2004-08-19T19:49:00.000+10:00

I just found this after going through my uni things. This was one of the last subjects I took before graduating, so if it's crap, I don't really have any excuses now do I.. Personally, I have absolutely no idea whether it is rubbish, genius or somewhere along the line between the two (probably a safe guess :))

If you happen over this blog, I assume you like reading. I hope so, otherwise you'll never make it to the end of this essay.

-----------------------------------------

addicted to therapy

A meditation on scriptotherapy and the multiplicity of styles available in life narratives.

My life’s lowest point coincided with takeoff, as the 747 lifted its wheels and disconnected itself from the Indian subcontinent. All the frustration of the previous 18 months suddenly and violently found a release valve. I wept openly, tragically, causing much consternation and discomfort in the passengers around me. I was not normally capable of letting my feelings find full force around so many people, but for the first time in my life, I was oblivious to everything but my own pain. The genie was loose and there was no way of putting it back in the bottle.

After we had reached cruising altitude, a stewardess came and gently put her hand on my shoulder, and with her touch, I found I could put my tears away. I became quite self conscious and aware of what I had done. In the place of my tears, a fog of self hatred, self pity and seething anger descended on me, and I sat staring blankly at the headrest in front of me. My countenance brooked no invitation, and the surrounding passengers gratefully accepted my signal and turned to their novels and films. Finally I slumped back against my own headrest and collapsed into an unsettled slumber. With each passing second India was receding further and further into the past.

I woke slowly, dreamily, unsure of where I was. In the moment before I opened my eyes, the soft jolting of light turbulence reminded me of long trips I took as a child in our family’s station wagon, when I would lie in the back looking up watching the clouds go past. But then reality slotted into place. I was no longer a child. Those days had left us all behind. I was heading back to Copenhagen to my wife. I had failed for a second time at my task, and I had no choice but to suffer the ignominy of abandoning my missing brother to mother India, to her timeless embrace. Untold millions had suffered and died at her hands; it was an ordinary enough fate. And my brother surely no longer cared. But for me, it was the culmination of the hardest few years in my life, and I felt like I’d been taken apart and poorly reassembled.

I let my mind wander back to earlier days, trying to see if there were any portents I should have noticed, trying to see if there were now any reason to reconsider my disbelief in fate. Fate was an illogical concept to grapple with, as it could be applied in retrospect. To consider ‘that which came to pass’ as being one’s fate was a common enough interpretation but was just too facile for my sensibility. To believe that something ‘was meant to be’ took a leap of faith much more considerable and faith was anything but my strong point. Nevertheless I trolled the depths of my memories for any sign of what was to come. Strangely enough, I saw omens in every corner, unheeded warnings that had now come home to roost. Ignoring these as the result of my unbalanced psyche, I tried to empty my mind and sleep again, but the past would not yet let me rest.

Greg was on his way to visit my wife and I in Denmark when he disappeared, his two-week stopover turning into an eternity. He was thirty four.



This is how the story might begin; one version of it at any rate. For there are many possible versions; many approaches to take. For me, it began six years ago with a short story. A structured re-telling with a beginning and an end – and a conclusion that I didn’t have in real life. Then came several clumsy attempts at starting larger projects, in both non-fiction and fictional formats. These were followed by a dark piece of poetry, a journalistic piece, a hypertext, a ficto-critical essay and finally the beginnings of a more considered, longer piece, using a creative non-fictional approach. All had their origins in the disappearance of my oldest brother in 1995. All had him, or more correctly, myself in relation to his disappearance, as the subject. Collectively, they form my literary attempts at self therapy. They are what Suzette Henke, in her book Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, calls scriptotherapy - the “process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic re-enactment.”

I had been writing about my brother’s disappearance for six years before I ever heard that term used, but as soon as I did, recognition that therapy was indeed one of my writing’s most useful functions promptly asserted itself in my mind. Connecting with others had been a more collateral bonus, in that a few of the pieces were published in various forms on the Internet and had inspired many people to contact me with their feelings around my writing, and the events depicted within. But I had never set out to write about my experiences for profit or to affect people emotionally. It was always something I felt I needed to do. In the back of my mind I knew its main function had always been to try and help me understand what had happened in my world. Putting it on paper, in concrete, and perhaps more importantly, completed form, has helped me come closer to understanding and slowly accepting what has happened. I have come to think of it in the terms that I have been slowly writing myself into a position where I can accept the unacceptable. Anaïs Nin puts it in similar terms: “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live” .

Particularly for me, in the specific circumstances of dealing with the open ended loss of a missing person, in which there is no closure, I also feel that the writing of narrative helped me by way of its very structure. No matter how ambiguously I ended my pieces, at least they all had one. It was more than I had. Writing again and again gave me the chance to finish Greg’s story, providing me the smallest amount of closure, however ‘literal’. Another effect it had on me was that through the years, it helped me assuage my feelings of guilt. When I was writing, I felt like I was doing something; that I hadn’t just abandoned my brother to a cold grave on the side of a mountain. In a drawn out missing person case, any feeling of ‘doing something’ is therapy in itself.

Henke’s ideas on scriptotherapy initially came from an interest in psychoanalytical theory. She argued that if one accepted the basic premise of Freud’s talking cure – “a psychoanalytic working through of repressed memories brought to the surface and abreacted through the use of language and free association” – a question arose whether the analyst was even necessary. Might not the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis “reside more in the experience of ‘rememory’ and re-enactment than in the scene of transference posited by Freud?” This question led her to a detailed analysis of life writing, in particular women’s life writing. She stumbled across the fact that trauma and testimony played a large role in many of the autobiographical works she examined. This was evidently more of a re-discovery than an original thought, but led to Henke producing a detailed theoretical analysis of the functions of autobiographical writing as seen from a psychoanalytical perspective. As she articulately summarises in her book:

“The connection between writing and healing is an ancient one, as is the notion that narratives often evolve from the impetus of psychological pain. One could return to Aristotle's principle of dramatic catharsis or consult more recent texts like Arthur W. Frank's The Wounded Storyteller. As fragile human beings, what can we do with our pain but write it, sing it, or talk about it? Although writing may not provide a panacea, it does seem to offer palliation for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder by giving the survivor an opportunity effectively to reformulate traumatic memories in the shape of coherent autobiographical testimony.”
Other theorists support her thesis. In Opening Up, James Pennebaker concurs that the very process of articulating painful experiences, especially in written form, can in itself prove therapeutic. "Writing about the thoughts and feelings associated with traumas . . . forces individuals to bring together the many facets of overwhelmingly complicated events. Once people can distill complex experiences into more understandable packages, they can begin to move beyond the trauma". Another influential theorist, Shoshana Feldman, speaks of how life writing becomes much more than just words: A "life testimony is not simply a testimony to a private life, but a point of conflation between text and life, a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life."
From my perspective, the theory surrounding life writing, and in particular trauma writing, is like a light being shone onto something I already knew was there. I had never thought of the many facets and implications of my recurring literary flirtation with my traumatic past, but in retrospect it clarifies what has been happening within me for many years. It is somehow reassuring to find a text such as Trauma and Recovery, in which Judith Herman identifies the fundamental stages of recovery as a “tripartite process that involves establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and regaining a sense of community”. It makes me feel very human to have responded in the way proscribed by the experts. I am however still in the process the last two phases, in some ways hopelessly so, in that the reconstruction of my trauma story is an arduous, recurring process that does not feel to have found its right form; rather it feels to be something that I might continue to tackle for the remainder of my adult life. Regaining a sense of community has also been a complicated task, one hampered by our decision to leave Denmark for my homeland two years after Greg’s disappearance, and less than a year after the initial stages of any recovery from the depths of my depression. I was only just beginning to find my feet again in Denmark when we threw ourselves back to a land that had become nearly foreign to me. Added to this dislocation was the regret we experienced after we had children, when our decision to leave behind an extensive network of family and friends for a life in the Antipodes, with isolation and strained family relations the hallmarks, seemed to have been revealed as a decision of utmost folly. Community then is still on the list.
I lurch upright as I wake, eyes wide and heart pounding. I fall out of bed into the hall, tripping over something and stubbing my toe. I wrench the back door open in a combinatorial flourish of bolt, deadlock and knob, and fall outside into the cool night air, huge, gulping breaths filling my lungs, slowly bringing some sense of stabilisation. This rush of oxygen brings me back – I suddenly know where I am and when it is. My wife and children are asleep in the bedroom, and it is May 2003. My brother has been missing for nearly 8 years, despite the fact that he was just there in my dreams, so close, close enough to touch, crying out to me as two men held his arms, and another drew a large blade across his neck...

Thankfully, dreams like this are now few and far between. But there was a time when they were the norm. The event of my brother’s disappearance was traumatic enough, but the two trips taken to India in the company of, respectively, my brother and my mother, were just as traumatic. Apart from dealing with our own complicated feelings (in retrospect it is clear we were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), the hardships and complexities of India and the suddenly very complicated inter-personal relationships between us meant that they were nightmare trips in the truest sense of the word. I think I slept an average of about three hours a night in the entire six weeks. Without going into a detailed discussion of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder it is useful to note some of the symptoms documented by the American Psychiatric Association, including "self-destructive and impulsive behaviour; dissociative symptoms; somatic complaints; feelings of ineffectiveness, shame, despair, or hopelessness; . . . hostility; [and] social withdrawal." I am intimately familiar with most of those symptoms, and equally convinced that my writing has quelled their fires quicker than what otherwise would have been the case.

One thing has always been clear to me, if also a little puzzling, from the outset. I have always had most interest in telling my own story as opposed to that of my missing brother’s. In many ways, that is understandable enough. From my perspective, I can’t see his story. That is the mystery. His life is like a book, the pages of which have suddenly gone blank. But more importantly, what is concrete for me is not so much his disappearance, but the effect his disappearance has had on my life and that is the story I tell and retell.
My brother is just dead; I am the one that has been traumatised.
So instead of expensive therapists, I punch at the keyboard, slowly knitting coherency back into my life. As Herman notes in Trauma and Recovery, the object of autobiography as scriptotherapy is to "reassemble an organized, detailed, verbal account, oriented in time and historical context" out of "fragmented components of frozen imagery and sensation.” She continues: “In the very act of articulation, the trauma story becomes a testimony, a publicly accessible ‘ritual of healing’ that inscribes the victim into a sympathetic discourse-community and inaugurates the possibility of psychological reintegration." All hope, it seems, is not lost.

It is useful to note that at the time of his disappearance, I was living in Denmark, nearing completion of an advanced computer course, and finding myself finally well placed to gain employment and feel like an integrated member of Danish society. I had spent two years learning the language and improving my job skills, and I was on the verge of being offered an interesting job in a large Danish publishing house. Greg’s disappearance rudely interrupted all that, and on my return from India, after our first fruitless search, my life suddenly collapsed. The event had an appreciable effect on my emerging Danish identity, and the social construct I had been building buckled under the weight of stress. I suffered severe depression for many months, unable to face my life in any meaningful way. My one and only attempt at traditional ‘therapy' was a farcical tragi-comedy in its own right, and I lost all nerve to try again. It was first a year later, with the act of writing a short story, that I began to feel I might be able to heal myself. It was painful to work with the material, to force my memory into areas I had no joy in revisiting, but from the start I felt that it was the right thing to do. I had to do something. My grief was overwhelming, my identity in total disarray. Apart from having to totally renegotiate what it meant for me to be living in Denmark, I also had to cope with the position of experiencing my loss in isolation. My family were on the other side of the world, and denied any support from the familial quarter, or being part of any collective position on our loss, I felt myself fracturing from them; a split that has never quite healed to this day. My in-laws as well, though while very supportive, were at a loss how to more than superficially understand my situation. It was here that I found my writing to be more than just cathartic. Used as a starting point for discussion, my writing served, as Herman suggests, as a conduit to understanding, and the beginnings of healing.

By degrees, my writing on Greg, in its various incarnations, became more than an end product. It also became a journey, a place in which I could work on the re-imaginings of myself, constructing, through an analysis of my positionality in relation to this traumatic event, the bones of a new post-Greg identity. It is a process that I have still not completed. As Stuart Hall writes, identity is “a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” Over the last six years other events and perspectives have come to figure more in my ongoing production of identity and Greg has slowly faded from having a central position. But considering the confluence of events; my total cultural re-imagining that was already well underway interrupted by another, even more traumatic experience, it doesn’t surprise me how central to my identity his disappearance has been.

As I look back on my various writings through the years, it is interesting to trace the changes. There are literary changes, as my writing slowly improves (albeit too slowly for my taste) and an increase in sophistication coming from my enhanced understanding of the effects of loss and grief. But there are also more subtle changes; perspective changes, changes in how I have remembered and what I have remembered. The complexity of memory in autobiographical writing is something I am only beginning to understand, and a much better understanding of the issues are needed for me to analyse the deeper meaning of my literary choices and omissions. It is clear though, that memory plays a major part in my recollections. Perhaps another reason I have felt so drawn to my dark project is that it also helps me remember Greg (lest we forget). That remembering may change over time, as the context and circumstances change. But a methodical working through of any ‘remembered’ story will uncover many forgotten details, which can then be recorded and remembered for posterity. It is my only way of keeping him alive. It is interesting to note how connected I have become to the few material possessions I have of Greg’s. His letters to me have top spot on the pyramid, followed down by old suitcases, collections of old toys, pictures and even fabric. Everything he owned, or even admired, has taken on significance far greater than its material value. For now, it is only the symbolic that matters. It is often through these objects that memory best serves its function. From the folds of a sarong float memories of summer days long passed, and in the lilting tones of a Cowboy Junkies song, many nights of reflection and camaraderie are retold. Music particularly, has the ability to awaken both deep pleasure and trembling loss. It was with some surprise a few years ago, at a Cowboy Junkies concert, when a particular song, so evocative of Greg, had me both smiling broadly with tears streaming down my face.

Poppy, by Drusilla Modjeska is a good example of the type of (auto)biography I might one day write. It is ostensibly a biography of her mother, Poppy, and the narrative is basically a record of Modjeska’s attempts to slowly unravel the mystery at the heart of her mother’s life. But Modjeska cannot avoid it being partly autobiographical. Positionality and subjectivity play an important role in her book, and unlike traditional biography she does not attempt to hide her authorship. Her subjectivity is a central part of the narrative, and this method is closest to the way I have best managed to approach my own writing. Many options exist, and if decisions were to be taken with the thought of publication and sales in mind, then a fast paced journalistic approach to the disappearance and subsequent searches might be the way I would go. But obsessed as I am by my inner life and by the silky thin threads of cause and effect that join this one event to my whole life, it is not likely the path I will take. I am more interested in analysing my over-protectionism of my first born than I am in recounting the apathy of the Indian Police Force or the resistance of suspicious villagers.
The Fog Garden by Marion Halligan and Unless by Carol Shields are examples of totally different ways of writing trauma. My knowledge of these books is limited to extracts, but their formats seem clear enough. The Fog Garden appears to be thinly veiled autobiography, an approach said to give the benefits of distance and the freedom of using creative techniques. For me though, such an approach simply loses authenticity. My attempts at thinly veiled fiction were the least successful of all. They felt farcical. Unless takes a different approach. Shields writes a fictional story, but one using themes that draw deeply on her traumatic life circumstances at the time. This approach feels to have much more validity to me, in that it is what fiction writers do all the time. Experiencing trauma personally will just give the writer’s portrayal of the same themes so much more depth and resonance. The subject of writing itself features heavily in the novel, as Shields discovers her own form of scriptotherapy:

But more than anything else it is the rhythm of typing – and – thinking that soothes me, what is almost an athlete’s delight in the piling of clause on clause. Who would have thought this old habit of mine would become a strategy for maintaining a semblance of ongoing life. ... On days when I don’t know which foot to put in front of the other, I can type my way toward becoming a conscious being.

Some days I don’t think I will write a book about Greg until I am fifty or so, with a doctorate on my wall and a wealth of theoretical tools to understand exactly what it is I am trying to do. On other days, I think I will write many books, each one with a different approach, but all with Greg’s disappearance as its subject. On yet other days, I don’t think I will ever publish a book on Greg at all, keeping my many and varied efforts of scriptotherapy locked firmly away in a filing cabinet, to be released only to my children so that they may understand the course of my life and the things that were important in it.

Published or not, some things will always remain important.

------------

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Suzette A Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, New York: St Martin's Press, 1998, p. xviii.
Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976, p. 12.

Suzette A Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, New York: St Martin's Press, 1998, p. xi.

ibid

Suzette A Henke, Trauma and Narrative Recovery, Online
http://www.louisville.edu/a-s/english/projects/ModernLit/TraumaandNarrativeRecovery.htm, Accessed 21/05/2003

James Pennebaker in Suzette A Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, New York: St Martin's Press, 1998, p. xi.

Shoshana Feldman in Suzette A Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, New York: St Martin's Press, 1998, p. xii.

Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York, Harper Collins, 1992, p.3

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, 4th ed., rev. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 425

Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York, Harper Collins, 1992, p.177

Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York, Harper Collins, 1992, p.181

Stuart Hall, in Sidone Smith & Julie Watson, Reading Autobiography, A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, University of Minnesota Press, Mineapolis 2001, p.34

Carol Shields, Unless, London, Fourth Estate, 2002, p.109.

my kids

2004-08-19T18:03:00.000+10:00

I love them dearly, but they are driving me crazy!!!

I feel like I need a month's holiday at a Buddhist retreat. I'm not getting enough time to relax. It's incredible how hard it is having kids. Male politicians should have to a) have kids and b) played a very large part in their young lives, before they make any decisions regarding parents and children. Female politicians that already have children would know how it is. It's likely they had to look after the kids and go to uni, while the husband just went to work.

I seriously don't know how my wife does it. I find it so hard. But for me, so much of my childhood plays into my parenting and I find myself so incapable in so many situations. It is certainly a great learning experience, but at the moment I'd like a week to myself, just to chill, go and see a few movies, read a book, have time with my wife, that sort of thing. I suppose they will be moving out of home in the blink of an eye, and I'll be all nostalgic then. It's hard to see things from the centre sometimes.

laziness, work and time

2004-08-19T14:52:00.000+10:00

OK, I'll admit it. I am a bit lazy. But that's not the reason whywork.org is one of my links. I would certainly rather sit around at home playing with the kids than working my ass off for $13 an hour at some mindless task, but that's because I hate mindless work and I love my kids. I am definately a homebody. I love my home, and want to spend as much time here as possible. But I'm also a little lazy. I'd rather sit on the Net or do some sort of intellectual task than go for a walk. I have to find more balance in that regard.

Maybe I'd feel differently about work if I had a job I was absolutely passionate about. But even working your (well paid) ass off to make someone else rich has never sounded to me like the Marxian paradise :) But I've just never been career focussed enough to ever get to that point anyway. And in many ways I'm paying the price for that. On the other hand I'm also reaping the rewards of that decision (or lack of it).

It's always going to be one of those issues isn't it. Money vs time. How to get lots of both is the goal as far as I can see. Or at least enough of both. I've got nearly enough of both, so I suppose in the end I'm not doing too badly.

atheism

2004-08-18T19:47:00.000+10:00

I'm still a firm non-believer in God. I imagine I always will be. If the death of my two year old niece from cancer, or the disappearance of my brother didn't make me reconsider the existence of a deity, I can't think that anything else might make me.

I consider religion to be one of the silliest ideas humanity ever had. That a God made man in his own likeness is even sillier. That the president of the most powerful nation on Earth believes that God speaks through him, well that's downright scary.

I find solace in the billions of stars, in the knowledge that there are many 'others' out there, that life is exactly what it is, and is only that because we die. Life after death is, after all, a contradiction in terms. I find peace in the idea that when I die, I am no longer, and that I don't have to endure an eternity in some flowery garden, or come back again as a Chinese beekeeper.

I would like to meet my brother again of course, but all this hankering after the eternal just takes our focus away from the present doesn't it...

greg

2004-08-18T12:41:00.000+10:00

Greg was my oldest brother. I say was because he is no longer alive. He went missing in northern India in late 1995. He was on his way from Australia to visit my wife and I in Copenhagen, where we were living at the the time. We have never found him, but all the same I am certain he is dead. We went to India looking for him - in fact we went several times. My other brother and I went, he went with my mother, and my mother and I went. Three trips in two years, which yielded much and almost nothing.

I miss him still terribly. I was very close to him. That my children will never have him for an uncle greatly saddens me. He was very intelligent, incredibly motivated, and very passionate. He was one of the most perceptive people I have ever met, and one of the nicest as well.

It has been nearly nine years now. I will never forget him. I wrote a hypertext a while back about his disappearance. I think it's really good. You can view it here

Here is a picture of him, taken in Kashgar (he had just crossed from Pakistan into China on the Silk Road) sometime in the early 90s.

scout

2004-08-18T08:58:00.000+10:00

here is a picture of my beautiful little girl. She is 2 years old.

my jobs

2004-08-18T08:42:00.000+10:00

I thought it'd be interesting to list the jobs I've had so far:

Chemist delivery boy
Bakery sales staff
Bottle shop attendant
Barman
Offset printer
Builder's labourer
Painter
Concrete repair
Bottle shop assistant manager
Bottle shop manager
Film director's assistant
Cleaner
Postman
Taxi driver

hmmm... there's a clear career path somewhere in there I'm sure :).

freddie mercury

2004-08-18T08:32:00.000+10:00

Getting stuck in the past musically seems to be a real risk for most people as they get older, and I'm no exception. I think 90% of what I hear on the radio is utter rubbish and of a quality far below that of the 60s-80s. But that said, I can think of a lot of rubbish coming out of all three of those decades as well.

Queen may not be the most trendy or current music around, but every time I hear Freddie Mercury sing, I think that he is an example of the best of modern pop / rock. He was the ultimate showman, and a singer of the absolute highest calibre. Queen also had a few lousy songs, as all bands do, but 90% of their material (and particularly Freddie's songs) was first class, and very few can follow in his vocal footsteps.

I can't help but imagine what sort of music he would be making if he were alive today. I'd imagine he would have moved on from the type of glam rock Queen were so good at. Maybe he'd be doing Michael Bublé type ballads... Now that would be something.

work

2004-08-18T08:25:00.000+10:00

I've spent the last hour trying to come up with a good excuse not to go to work tomorrow. Not that I don't need the money, but I need the break even more. I drive taxis. The work is hard, as the shifts are long, and the money not very good. It's not something I can't wait to get up for, but on the other hand, I've had plenty of worse jobs. So far I'm down to 'the kids are sick and the wife has a prior engagement' or 'stomach cramps and diarrhea'. It doesn't matter that much in the end - I just like being convincing when I lie.

birth connection

2004-08-17T21:11:00.000+10:00

birth connection

This is my latest venture - an Internet forum made for doulas (if you don't know what it is, look it up), childbirth educators and the like. It's a pity no-one is using it. I think it's pretty cool.

rishikesh

2004-08-17T19:09:00.000+10:00

I just had a lovely memory of a most beautiful town square in India. Rishikesh to be precise. The town is most famous in the West for the visits The Beatles made to it in the sixties, but even in India it is well known. The town sits in the foothills of the Himalaya, straddling the newly born River Ganges. 25kms or so down river is Haridwar, one of the sites of the quadrennial religious gathering known as the Kumbha Mela; the largest gathering of humanity on the planet. As both Haridwar and Rishikesh are holy towns, meat is forbidden. They are strictly vegetarian towns.

Rishikesh itself is split into two parts, the main town, which is a very hectic, typically Indian town, full of blaring horns and holy cows. But on the far side of the river there is a part of the town where cars cannot come, populated by ashrams and the occasional guest house. To get there, one must take a boat or cross a lovely footbridge (which was built by the British during WWII). On the peak of the hill on that quiet side of town, there is a very serene, and seemingly very ancient, town square, which I stumbled across late one afternoon in 1993.

The afternoon light was lovely, and there were many sahdus (Indian holy men) sitting around. One sahdu was standing, but leaning on a swing hanging from a large tree. "He's been standing for nearly 10 years", one of the sahdus later told me proudly. "He sleeps standing, he eats standing, he even shits standing". Wow, I thought. Impressive.

I smoked a chillum with a few of the sahdus as the light went from yellow to gold and the afternoon shone in its final glory. Whether it was the surroundings, the light, or just the hash, I will never be sure (most likely it was a combination of all three), but I felt a connection to the human social condition that afternoon that I have never felt since. The symbolism of the town square was intensely powerful - particularly without the modern irritations of traffic, noise or advertising. People came and went about their business, as they purchased vegetables for the evening meal, or just sat and talked to their neighbours at the end of the day. I was very envious of the standing sahdu. It was certainly a nice place to hang around (groan..) for a decade. Not that I envied him his feat of religious asceticism.

Just the view.

internet forums

2004-08-17T18:19:00.000+10:00

I suppose they are sort of a distant cousin of blogs. But whereas blogs could arguably be described as lonely, self-infatuated, rantings to the world, forums are hubs of community and communication. The blog somehow has a sense of desperation about it - here I am - this is me - this is MY spot on the Internet! - Love me! - I'm interesting...

Forums are not so egocentric - they are just places - village squares so to speak, where people can meet to discuss certain topics. Hell, they don't even have to meet. It's like someone coming to the town square and finding it empty, but writing his thoughts on a piece of paper and leaving it under a tree. A few hours later, someone else comes along and replies to those thoughts.. And so forth and so forth...

ego trip?

2004-08-17T11:04:00.000+10:00

So, what do you write on a blog? It just seems like some wild ego trip at first. Who cares about the random thoughts of chairman djaef? Why should I think anyone gives a damn? Am I not just clogging up the Net with more meaningless drivel posing as information? Well, maybe drivel is a bit harsh, but what is the point? Is it all for posterity? I've never been one to keep a diary. And believe me, I have tried. I would like to be a writer. I even have a university degree in communications, majoring in writing. Ahhh.. maybe this is what a blog is for. I blog, therefore I am a writer :) Time will tell...