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Death and Baking: Josh Thomas’ ‘Please Like Me’
18
10
A good friend of mine used to wonder why there aren’t more stories on screen exploiting Melbourne as a setting – tapping its potential for romance. One of the achievements of Josh Thomas’ Please Like Me is that it does precisely that. Thomas’ Melbourne is not a place of grey skies and fashionable blacks – it’s an inner-city Wonderland of green Formica and fairy lights and staked tomatoes. (In some ways – its preference for pastel pinks and yellows, its op-shop chic – its aesthetic resembles Frankie magazine, but unlike Frankie it’s never precious.) In the second season (which concluded this week on ABC2) Josh runs a coffee cart on the sunny banks of the Yarra; the Greyhound becomes a glamorous nighttime world of smiling dancers and drag queens; in the final episode he walks through St Kilda at night and then watches the sun rise over the city from a hot air balloon. These visions are always undercut: there’s always something dissonant going on in the foreground. This doesn’t negate the fact that the show is a love letter to the city. (Director Matthew Saville showed a similarly detailed knowledge of Melbourne in The Slap, but there the intention was different: to contrast different social types by suburb.)
The show comes on as slight – charmingly so – but it has a way of surprising you. In this it’s finely attuned to Thomas’ persona. He’s a singular screen presence – with his voice that breaks and seems to carry the trace of an accent, his gangling, willowy body and mussed blonde hair, the spacey, behind-the-beat delivery of lines that are frequently barbed. The second season’s been conceived as Josh-the-character’s growth to maturity – ready for romantic involvement now, he reaches out to a series of prospective partners – and Thomas shows new assurance as a performer, varying his usual geniality with moments of tenderness, anger and sadness. (One of the show’s strengths is its insight into how geniality can be defensive – a way of keeping other people at bay.)
The two seasons so far have shared the same basic outline – each has been defined by the ongoing mental illness of Josh’s mum Rose (Debra Lawrence), the death of an important character and Josh’s involvement with a troubled young man. The second season has four additional episodes (the first had only six), and it’s not shaped as satisfyingly as the first – it peaks in the middle and then slumps towards the end. There are some other flaws: early on, the scenes revolving around Rose’s illness are rather repetitively antic – they’re all on one note. The characters at her hospital are perhaps excessively quirky, in the oddball tradition that’s been a strand of Australian pop culture ever since Muriel’s Wedding. And this season’s love interest, Arnold (Keegan Joyce), is not as compelling a presence as Wade Briggs as Geoffrey: I found myself missing Geoffrey’s weird intensity, the suggestion of damage that was never made explicit. But, keyed to Josh-the-character’s new emotional openness, the brilliant middle stretch of episodes takes the show in new directions: there’s a new dexterity to the handling of the various characters and subplots; a character’s emotional reality will suddenly intrude, blindsiding you. A two-hander episode strips all this away: it’s just Josh and Rose, walking and talking for half an hour.
Thomas’ co-star (and frequent writing partner) Thomas Ward also emerged as the show’s secret weapon. Tom-the-character is a terrific illustration of how an unassuming, soft-spoken guy can be a tyrant in relationships. (He’s another case of geniality as defence.) Even though this tyranny stems more from his emotional confusion than any malice – one of the season’s funniest scenes shows him using a rabbit to win back a girlfriend he’s not sure he wants anyway – Tom is quick to seize on any weakness he perceives in his partners. Despite his brutality, Tom goes about in pity for himself: it’s a funny, unflinching portrait of male privilege.
Please Like Me offers a distinctive sensibility: the charmed share-house world of video games and homemade musk sticks is haunted by the spectre of illness and death. It’s death and baking, and I think it’s terrific.
God (and Love) and Family, Part 5
22
06
(This is the final part of my essay “God (and Love) and Family”: you can find the first four parts here.)
My theological studies only lasted a year: in the years since, I’ve often regretted that false start. Now, I’m taking units in Biblical Studies as part of an Arts degree: a more modest approach, without the old vocational intensity. At the outset, my teacher made the distinction between exegesis and hermeneutics. Exegesis is the close study of a text – in this case, the Bible; hermeneutics is the attempt to interpret and apply it to one’s life. My teacher made it clear that hermeneutics had no place in Biblical Studies. It’s an apt summation of my relationship to the Bible these days: it’s an abiding interest, definitely part of my personal culture, but it no longer addresses me with the same powerful voice. I still reflect on it, but I no longer feel compelled to answer it – to conform to or defy it.
This places me in interesting contrast to most of my classmates. Most of them are young, familiar to each other from meetings of the Evangelical Union on campus; they have the energy and the freshness of response of recent converts. They wear T-shirts printed with Christian slogans; they play Hillsong music on their phones in the lulls before tutorials. Their approach to our Biblical Studies classes is very different to mine. It costs them an effort to restrain their hermeneutical instincts: they want to make meaning of everything. In a course on the Old Testament prophets, they leapt on the passages that seem to anticipate Jesus. It’s important to them that the Bible speaks with one voice, so they tend to efface contradictions within the texts. They seek to harmonise it, to make it seem more coherent than it is.
My chief interest is in teasing out the contradictions, the silences, the varied points of view. My classmates may want to harmonise the Bible; I concentrate instead on the differences between its voices, to acknowledge their polyphony. This is not from a desire to debunk or discredit it; there is something grand and very moving about the efforts of the Bible’s many authors to understand their moments in history and their relationship to the divine. I think one of the Bible’s chief virtues is the way it preserves these overlapping perspectives, the way it permits contradictions. The closer you look at it, the looser its weave becomes, and the more the individual threads seem to dangle. The Bible grapples as I do with questions of our purpose here and our relationship to reality: if I no longer find its answers authoritative, I’m still inspired by the attempts at truth it preserves.
My relationship with my father has changed in similar ways. I moved back to Sydney several years ago after living for some time interstate: I see him much more frequently now and our relationship has taken on a new dailiness. This new level of contact has robbed him of the mythic proportions he took on in his periods of absence: he’s man-sized now in my consciousness. This has led to a steady ebbing of fear: he no longer intimidates me the way he did as a giant. The surprise is that I’m less sure now of who he is; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that proximity has given me a new sense of the contradictions he embodies. Like the Bible, his diversity becomes more apparent under close observation.
Dad often sits out on the balcony of his apartment, beadily watching the children at play in the complex’s common area: he dislikes their disorderliness, their noise, and complains about them at length. Yet he adores dogs – particularly small, yappy dogs – and lobbied for months to get one until he wore his partner down. He has a slow, rather taciturn temperament (much like mine), but in social settings he adopts a hearty public manner, with a booming voice pitched from the mask of his face: I’m still amazed by the speed with which he can turn this on.
Knowing him better – in more detail – means knowing him less. I no longer expect to arrive at a stable concept of Dad; my feelings about him will never be settled entirely. But this prismatic knowledge – this knowledge in depth – is infinitely more precious than the terrified glimpses I had of him when I was younger. From those glimpses I extrapolated a figure all the more vivid for being so vague. Now, the terrifying certainty born of a lack of information has given way to a love that has room for ambivalence and doubt. This relationship has been achieved, over time, and I would not trade it for anything.
I’ve travelled a similar distance in my relationship with the Christian God. He is the passage to the divine that I am most familiar with; the passage that I will most likely always use. The older I get, though, the more important it seems to me to approach these questions with a modest sense of my limits. The more closely I read the Bible, the more apparent the limits of its authors become: it’s a collection of fellow seekers constrained by their human perceptions. Yet that does not invalidate their efforts or make a relationship with God impossible. The nature of the relationship changes: it becomes a series of enquiries, a habit of reaching out, rather than making or bowing to assertions. It goes without saying that we humans will always come up short in our efforts to comprehend the divine. The attempt is still worthwhile.
God (and Love) and Family, Parts 1-4
22
06
My parents couldn’t agree on where to have me christened. Neither one of them was especially religious but, like circumcision, baptism was one of those forms that parents in the 80s felt they had to honour. Mum was raised Methodist – had even been a Sunday school teacher – but after a crisis had abandoned her faith. Dad was raised Catholic, and though he still identifies as one it’s more for the form of the thing than any compelling felt reality. Both Mum and Dad had been married and divorced when they decided to marry, which made finding a venue for that event a challenge, too. Mum had inherited her father’s Masonic suspicion of Catholics: when she discovered that the Catholic Church would only marry them behind the altar, it confirmed her in her bias. Dad could not countenance being married in a Protestant church. In the end they settled on the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross – neutral, ecumenical ground. This too is where they had me christened. It took me some time to appreciate the way this placed me – broadly within the Christian tradition, but without a strong attachment to any one denomination. If I don’t belong to any church, exactly, I’m also free to learn from them all.
It’s hard to disentangle my experience of religion from my experience of family. Those of us who are religious generally encounter religion first through our families. Family is Christianity’s dominant metaphor. God is the Father, Christ the Son; Catholicism makes up for the patriarchal one-sidedness of this by emphasising the role of Mary the Mother. And though these relationships are intended as metaphor, it’s on this level that many of us experience religion. I’ve been struck by the mixture of hope and exasperation in the responses to the new Pope Francis: hope at the new notes he strikes in his rhetoric, exasperation at the gap between those words and the stubborn status quo (and at the bigoted attitudes he continues to endorse). It’s much like the adults who persist with the families that damaged them as children: unwilling (or unable) to swear off the relationship entirely, perceiving value and potential in their difficult relations. Religion marks us as surely and as permanently as does family.
When my parents separated I sided entirely with my mother. Mum had abandoned her faith after watching her grandmother die slowly and painfully: she could not square that protracted suffering with the existence of God. The end of my parents’ relationship had a similar effect on me: it so polluted the family metaphor that I wanted nothing more to do with it. My newfound atheism doubled as a handy way to mortify Dad. It upset him to think that his son was growing up Godless. As an eight-year-old, I took pleasure in the consternation I was causing him – felt it as a kind of power. It also struck me as a grave and momentous decision – the beginning of autonomy. When I ended up at an Anglican school, it became a point of pride to refuse to bow my head for prayer, to stand silent during hymns. I would not observe any form that I felt to be false. It made me stand out. It made me original.
If you take the Bible at its word, God is a terrible parent. When the human race is in its infancy, he responds to its first mistake not with rebuke or correction but with exile and permanent disfigurement. He sets one child over another. He orders a father to murder his son as a spiritual test. Again and again, God puts his offended sense of righteousness above love for his creation. This is the ugliness at the centre of the great Christian transaction: the way Christ is supposed to have died for our sins. If our offences are against God, then it is for God to forgive them: to require the death of his son for the sake of form – to balance the ledger – puts ceremony before feeling as surely as the murder of Iphigenia on the altar at Aulis. I wanted nothing to do with that bargain.
Looking back, it’s clear to me how much my feelings about God the Father were bound up with my ambivalence about Dad. We continued to live in the same big house when Mum and Dad split up, but on very different terms. Dad kept Mum on as a paid housekeeper, and she moved into a smaller room at the other end of the house. The big house wasn’t ours: Mum was the housekeeper and I was the housekeeper’s son. Dad was home only infrequently, and in his comings and goings I saw the arbitrary will of God. His bedroom became a sort of shrine, hallowed ground that I visited quietly, looking for clues to the mysterious deity. In particular I loved his walk-in robe: the ranks of gleaming leather shoes, the different colours and fabrics of his suits. They were religious relics. If I could not have contact with him, then these things at least had touched him. It was the next best thing.
The religious impulse found expression in other ways. Even as I emphatically denied the existence of God, I fell in love with C.S. Lewis’ Narnia stories, and with Aslan the lion especially. I loved the tactile relationship that the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had with Aslan: the way that Lucy ran her hands through his mane, the gentle understanding in his eyes and voice. With no idea that the books were intended as a Christian allegory – that Aslan was a Christ figure – I began to cultivate my own relationship to Aslan, to pray to him. Even when I had most consciously struck out from God, I found my way back to him in fiction.
* * * * *
As a child I abandoned my faith not casually but emphatically: as a teenager I returned to it with equal enthusiasm. My school was tied closely to the Anglican diocese in Sydney, and Christian teaching was an important part of the program there. We had regular classes in Divinity, and Chapel before lunchtime. For most of the boys, it was something to be endured – the half-hour before lunch was a particular trial. (The Chaplain often kept us back if he thought we’d sung with insufficient gusto.) It was understood as a form to be respected, much like our uniforms of heavy grey wool or the year we spent as military cadets: the trick was observing the forms without allowing them to affect too much our sense of self. We were, for the most part, heathens, untouched by the prevailing orthodoxy. Given the Sydney diocese’s reactionary brand of Christianity (our Divinity classes featured diatribes against contraception, abortion, homosexuality – all the usual suspects) this was probably a blessing.
The message reached me. I started to pray in earnest; started going to church each Sunday morning. Now it was Mum’s turn to be discomfited: my life had taken a turn she had not anticipated. It was another chance to prove my autonomy. Each Sunday I put on my good clothes and walked to the local church. Mum was usually kneeling out in the garden, a trowel or a pair of secateurs in her hand; she looked me over satirically, as if I was putting on airs. I felt conspicuous at church too: the congregation was comprised mostly of men and women in their sixties and seventies. They were refined, obviously wealthy, with the sort of dulcet voices I have always associated with Radio National. I felt clumsy, coarse: my good clothes were not very good. The church dealt with its few young members by sending us downstairs halfway through the service. There was only one other teenager, and as we dutifully coloured in with five and six year-olds I began to wonder if I was in the right place.
It was the acknowledgement of human brokenness – and the promise of wholeness, of brokenness transcended – that touched me. The Gospels are full of broken people – people broken by illness or made outcast by intolerant communities. When they approach Christ he makes them whole again. He does this by literally curing illness but also through the simple power of acknowledgement, by affirming the human dignity of those he encounters. I found a new way to understand Christ’s crucifixion. On the cross he exemplifies human suffering – he goes to the limits of human experience. With his resurrection he transcends that suffering: he robs it of its permanence. It’s a beautiful dream of healing. As I began to experience the first symptoms of mental illness – as frightening chasms opened up in my consciousness – that dream became very precious to me.
I have a religious temperament. This impulse to worship, to commune intensely, is fairly promiscuous – it applies not only to religion but also to my experience of art and to my human relationships. As a teenager my depression became a mystical experience. Today, I bear with its onset as I would any other chronic illness: it’s become a routine. At seventeen, the numbing absence of self hit me like an opiate; it was as coldly intoxicating as morphine. I felt like St John of the Cross, whose frenzied search for his lover-God becomes a sort of ecstasy: the ecstasy of absence. I believed that I had been granted insights denied to other people. I believed that I saw things more intensely, more purely. I began to plumb the depths of my illness deliberately, to force myself to extremities. I was fascinated by my capacity for suffering. A certain vanity crept in – the vanity of the mystic.
At the same time I tried to reconcile my faith with my sexuality. The Christian teaching at school had made it abundantly clear that gay sex was a sin, that gay orientation was an aberration that could be overcome with prayer. (My school had links with Exodus International, the notorious “ex-gay” organisation that shut down last year.) My fantasy life was overwhelmingly populated by men; the locker room at school became an increasingly heady experience. These fantasies were followed by long bouts of apologetic prayer. I bargained with God, attempted to draw a line under each fantasy by instituting stern consequences: “If I do it again,” I prayed, “may I go straight to Hell.” I did it again, of course, which necessitated another round of contrition and promises I couldn’t keep.
All of this isolating intensity was bound to boil over. By this time I was living with Dad; one day he came home to find that I’d tried to electrocute myself in the bathtub. Even this awful moment felt religious to me: the mystic’s failed attempt to approach God. I sat in the bathtub and dropped a hair dryer into the water. There was a second that seemed very long: the dryer coughed blue sparks and the bathroom light blazed above me like the sun. Then the power cut off and I was sitting in darkness. Had God been present in that surge of electricity? Why had he left me behind?
My family closed around me then and rescued me from my madness. I had mistaken myself for a visionary. Neither of my parents had much use for abstraction: I had faulted them for their complacency, the untroubled way they inhabited the physical world. Now it was a bulwark; I could take shelter in that simplicity. Mum and Dad put aside their differences. They put me in hospital; when I was discharged they kept me sedated until I arrived at some kind of calm. I had struck out from my family, seeking identity, autonomy, a form for my spiritual impulses in religion. Now I made the opposite journey, taking refuge from what I had found. It was not the last time I shuttled between the two.
* * * * *
“Some kinds of love are mistaken for vision” – The Velvet Underground
For some time after that I kept God at a distance. My intense relationship with religion had turned dangerous: it was better to concentrate on what I could touch. I came out; had my first sexual encounters, my first boyfriend. These experiences held plenty of fascination: discovering what my body could do and feel, realising that it could be desirable to others. Both my parents were hedonists and I found I had inherited that trait: I threw myself into this new realm with abandon. I learned to navigate the gay scene, recoiling from its boozy, predatory aspects even as part of me longed to be taken. There were areas of shame that I had yet to exorcise, particularly around the act of fucking: afterwards I felt hot, sick to the stomach, all the noxious teachings of my Christian Studies classes come back to haunt me. While I was at school I had struck up a personal friendship with the Chaplain; I met up with him for coffee one day after the news of my sexuality had well and truly broken. (It was, for a while, hot gossip amongst my former schoolmates.) “I wish I could tell you that it’s okay,” he said, and he was, I think, truly sorry. However much he might love the sinner, though, he could no longer be my friend.
If it was a choice between religion and sex, sex had the advantage. Increasingly I could not see the point of trying to accommodate a faith that so pointedly excluded me: like Jane Eyre, I was ready to choose earthly love over a divine mission imposed by others. Then I learned of a church in Petersham that served a gay and lesbian congregation; a church that insisted that it was possible to be Christian and gay. Wary but hopeful, I went.
It’s always seemed to me that I live out my conflicts in a very literal way. Seeking to reconcile these two apparently incompatible impulses – the religious and the sexual – I not only started attending a gay church; I fell in love with one of the pastors.
His name was Johnathan: the allusion to King David’s friend (and possible lover) did not escape me. I fell in love with him almost immediately, and he with me. At the same time, I became a part of this new congregation; week by week I re-established my faith on new terms. The two discoveries became inextricably bound. It was the first time I had experienced the sudden, stunning certainty of love; before Johnathan, my relationships had been somewhat prosaic. It was like Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus: a new reality was disclosed to me, and part of its beauty was how self-evident it was. There was no uncertainty, no ambivalence; it was simply a truth to be acknowledged.
He came from a Pentecostal background, which put the emphasis on the performance of faith: ecstatic states, emotional displays. I began to respond emotionally during services as I never had before: I was moved to tears while receiving Communion, the wafer burning in my chest. Johnathan was still in formation as a minister: he attended theological college while training under Greg, the church’s senior pastor. Greg came from a Methodist tradition that prized thought over emotion. His approach and Johnathan’s constantly chafed: Greg regarded Pentecostal displays with suspicion and bemoaned the lack of intellectual content, while Johnathan found the Methodist approach cerebral and cold. (The church would later split into two congregations along these lines.)
It was a public role that Johnathan held and I quickly grew to relish the role of preacher’s wife. It was a curious mixture of self-abnegation – I was defined chiefly in terms of my partner and what he did – and notoriety. Everyone knew who I was; I had, I felt, a special place. I worked the church hall after services, offering tea, making people comfortable, triumphant in my new status. The church drew – like so many churches do – sheepish, damaged people, and I practiced a very dubious sort of kindness towards them, conscious always of my superiority. At the same time, I chafed at the fact that my importance derived from my relationship with one of the pastors. I tried to convince myself that it was a form of Christian sacrifice to put Johnathan first; a part of me always rebelled, insisting on recognition on my own terms. I’ve never entirely settled that conflict.
I admired and envied Johnathan’s sense of vocation. I thought perhaps I could make a vocation of loving him. This is not to say that I experienced him as an abstraction: I loved him as a specific human being. I’ve always been drawn to goofy, daydreaming men, and Johnathan – from the redundant h in his Christian name to his passionate love of The Carpenters – was no exception. He came from a large, messy family in the country. There was no precedent in that family for what he did; he was the first to move to the city, the first to study for a degree. It took extraordinary ambition and focus to follow his vocation. I identified with his outsider status; I admired his courage. However, my love for him began to shade too easily into worship; this was only accelerated by the power he held over me as my pastor. I scarcely knew where he ended and God began.
The relationship was only short-lived; probably it was too intense to last very long. Part of the anguish of our separation was the conviction that I had also lost my new relationship with God. That relationship and Johnathan had arrived in my life simultaneously: how could it continue now? Somehow, I had to disentangle the two.
* * * * *
There’s a scene in the movie Higher Ground where Vera Farmiga – playing a woman on a Christian commune – stands in front of her bathroom mirror, willing the Holy Spirit to manifest itself in her. “Come on, Holy Spirit, come on,” she croons, breathing heavily; one moment she’s like an elite athlete preparing herself for a meet, the next a woman trying to coax a dangerous animal. Speaking in tongues seems to come easily to everyone around her, but no matter how much Farmiga might long for it, she cannot force an intimacy with the divine.
My relationship with Johnathan only lasted a few months, but it cast a long shadow. I spent years afterwards trying to capture the intoxicating sense of certainty I had felt with him. Furiously, I manufactured feelings, trying to work myself into the same zone; later I lashed out at the objects of those feelings for being pale imitations of Johnathan, and God. I was on the rebound.
I started going out with another man, and led him astray with this false intensity. I didn’t do this cynically; I really wanted to believe that I loved Brad as much as I did his predecessor. Johnathan had by this time moved on to another member of the congregation; this gave me another, prideful, reason for wanting to believe that I had moved on. At the same time I was curiously cerebral about the whole thing: I viewed it almost as an experiment. Brad and I had very little in common. His politics and mine were opposed: this was the Bush/Howard era, and he was all for the war in Iraq and the prison on Guantanamo Bay. He managed a large shopping centre, and his total identification with his corporate employer repelled me. I posed myself the question: can two people with totally different values and priorities build a successful relationship?
Looking back, I cringe at this cold speculation, and at the way I led Brad on. He entered into the relationship simply, sincerely: I tried to make him into Johnathan and then blamed him when he remained stubbornly himself. I was plunged back into the ambivalence of knowing what I should feel – what I wanted to feel – and how distant that was from what I actually felt. It was very much like my efforts as a closeted, guilty teenager to fake an infatuation with Mariah Carey. (I bought a large black-and-white poster of the wholesome, young Mariah and stuck it above my bed; every night before I went to sleep, I climbed up on my bed, kissed her lips and told her that I loved her.) Now, however, my delusions were no longer private: they had the power to harm other people.
I continued to go to the church in Petersham. I wanted to see if I could find a place there on my own terms, if I could tease my relationship with God apart from my relationship with Johnathan. I realised that I envied the latter a number of things: not only his power as pastor, but the way that his relationship with God and his developing understanding of his role serving God formed the central narrative of his life. He spent his life attempting to understand God and what God wanted of him. I envied the moral seriousness of this, and the sense of purpose. It was not a career that he fell into through accident or family connection; he felt it as a calling – as the only thing he could do. How I envied that certainty! While he and I were together I had seen some of the drawbacks of that calling – the way he was expected to be available constantly, the way his role often effaced his personal identity. I remembered the ease with which I navigated the church hall as preacher’s wife; I began to wonder if I too had a vocation.
I spoke to Greg about it, and though I could sense his dubiety, I began to meet with him on a regular basis. Though a kindly man, there was something in him that seemed to withhold approval; I was never quite sure what he thought of me. Perhaps it was his Methodist reserve; perhaps he sensed the way I confounded religious and romantic feelings; whatever it was, it made me even more determined to win that approval. He would see that I was serious.
I enrolled at the Uniting Theological College in Parramatta. By this time, after a succession of share houses in Newtown and Stanmore, I had retreated to Mum’s place in Lane Cove. To go to class I walked to Chatswood, caught the train to Parramatta, and then walked across the river and up the hill to Pennant Hills Road; the journey took a couple of hours. (I’ve never learned to drive.) I was pleased with the obstacles; it was an opportunity to prove my commitment. Mum regarded it much as she had my teenage churchgoing; she shook her head at my impracticality, at my dogged pursuit of an impulse she had abandoned long ago.
If I’d had a little more self-knowledge, I might have wondered how I could ever be useful to a congregation when I seemed compelled to do things in such a roundabout, solitary manner. But I was too intent on what I wanted to feel – on cultivating the self I had decided on – to think about what I might be suited for. I was Vera Farmiga in the bathroom, longing to see the Holy Spirit in the mirror. All I saw was my stubborn, limited self.
Some Thoughts on ‘Breaking Bad’
10
03
Bryan Cranston in ‘Breaking Bad’.
I watched the final season of Breaking Bad over the weekend – all sixteen episodes in the space of two days. I found it gripping and funny, but also quite shallow for a show that’s mentioned in the same breath as The Sopranos and The Wire.
The Sopranos is the more obvious comparison. Many (if not most) of the dynamics are the same – the criminal antihero running up against various ruthless opponents while running his business, the wife wrestling with her complicity in that life of crime, the adopted son who’s closer to the antihero than his biological son can ever be.
Breaking Bad relocates these elements to New Mexico, with the added difference that, unlike Tony Soprano, who was born into an existing Mafia culture – who inherits his mantle from his father – Walter White comes to organised crime as a neophyte. A great part of the richness of the early seasons of Breaking Bad is the way Walter tries to live in two worlds simultaneously – the crystal meth trade and his civilian life as a high school science teacher.
Tony’s two worlds – the Bada Bing and Carmela’s suburban palace – were always at the centre of The Sopranos. However much Tony might try to keep them apart, their boundaries were always porous. It’s not a perfect show. To my mind, it peaks with the three incredibly intense episodes at the outset of season three – when Livia dies, Dr. Melfi is raped and then refuses to go to Tony about it, and Carmela hears the brutal truth about her marriage from her therapist. Those three episodes say everything about the aridity of Tony’s family relationships, what set Melfi apart from Tony and his world despite her sympathy for (and attraction to) him, and Carmela’s inability to act on her guilty conscience. Much of the rest of the show’s run was simply these themes restated, though it does pick up towards the end as the rival gangs go to war.
Even when the show is repeating itself, however, it never ceases to insist on both its worlds. Nor does it forget its large cast; Tony is always at the centre, but the show is stacked with indelible characters like Paulie and Janice and Adriana and Vito, and it spends considerable time exploring their perspectives. It has the richness of lived experience.
In its early seasons, Breaking Bad had much of this richness – as well as a trenchant sense of humour about the American economy and the failures of its health-care system. Walter was a cosmic loser, forced to wash his students’ cars after school, patronised by his swaggering cop brother-in-law, saddled with a cancer diagnosis. It was funny and satisfying when he found something he was good at, even – perhaps especially – if it was illegal. The show’s location was something of an accident (it was cheaper to film in Albuquerque than Los Angeles) but it too added something – it took us away us away from the usual East Coast/West Coast binary and showed us less familiar territory.
The show was moral, too, as Walter and his partner Jesse learned that participating in the drug trade was not as simple as providing a quality product to a willing market. As their profile increased, they came into contact with increasingly powerful dealers and heavies: these powerful men saw the upstarts as unwelcome competition, and acted ruthlessly to stop them. It became obvious early on that killing was a necessary part of this business, and watching Walter and Jesse find it in themselves to act with equal ruthlessness was a good part of what made the show so compelling. It took murder seriously.
Breaking Bad also peaked in its third season, with a weeping Jesse poised to commit his first murder. The fourth season suffered from repetition – once again, Walter was Gus Fring’s employee in his massive underground lab, chafing at the constraint – and what came to be the show’s biggest fault in its later run, plot for plot’s sake.
Vince Gilligan and his team of writers lived by the seat of their pants while creating the show: often they didn’t know where a season’s story was headed. (When Gilligan showed us Walter loading a machine gun into his car at the beginning of season five, for example, he wasn’t sure yet of how Walter would use it.) This sometimes led to marvellous unpredictability, like the Mexican twins – introduced as Walter’s main opponents at the beginning of season three – being dispensed with halfway through that season. It also led to a sort of bull-session implausibility in the later seasons, as Walter’s schemes become more and more ornate. The fourth season and the first half of the fifth are largely devoted to these capers – slow-acting poison, a bomb triggered by the ringing of a bell, a powerful magnet used to destroy evidence, a train heist.
These set pieces are tense and exciting in themselves, but increasingly abstract – a chess game. As the show foregrounds Walter, and he becomes more completely (and simply) the villain of the piece, the show loses its context, its situation in the real world. Much like Don Draper, the very different antihero of Mad Men, Walter becomes less, not more, complex the further he descends into depravity. (In season five, he’s given to campy pronouncements like, “I’m in the empire business.”) The characters are defined by their relationships to Walter, their interactions with him opportunities to showcase his Iago-like powers of persuasion. The show’s civilian world is more or less completely subordinated to its criminal one.
* * * * *
You could argue that I’m using the wrong terms to assess Breaking Bad; that the show’s priority is not depth of characterisation or breadth of world, but rather narrative momentum. On this front, it’s a delirious success. Both halves of the final season open with a flash-forward to a future in which Walter’s fortunes have clearly collapsed; it’s a terrific device for urging us forward through the episodes that follow, to find out how he arrives at that point. The show’s endings are just as effective – cliffhangers that cry out for resolution. Crystal meth is an apt metaphor for the show itself; it induces a state of mind just as hectic and single-minded.
What I’m describing is pulp – the sort of compulsively readable genre fiction you might consume on a long plane ride. The Sopranos and The Wire both have roots in pulp; both shows transcend those roots. In the case of Breaking Bad – particularly its final two seasons – I’m not so sure. The movies Argo or Speed are much better parallels – terrifically well-made examples of the thriller genre. Both films are tense and gripping and entirely digested in one sitting. I’m a fan of thrillers, but their intention is usually so specific – to induce a state of tense excitement in their audience – that it limits their comprehension of the world. (Of course, there are thrillers – like The Hurt Locker or Heat – that explode the form.) I think this is what Breaking Bad becomes – a very well-made thriller.
It’s a feat in itself to sustain such a high level of tension over the long haul of a TV series, particularly one that ran for six years. (Movies only have to keep it up for two hours.) The longer something runs, however, the more of our time it consumes, the more we as an audience have the right to demand of it. Good pop (and pulp) is usually concise.
There’s a noticeable lift in quality in the final eight episodes. Hank has finally discovered Heisenberg’s true identity; the confrontation between the two men happens almost immediately, in the first episode. Walter’s family unit, which he has always considered sacrosanct, is suddenly under threat. The stakes are high, the storytelling terse, the drama personal; the MacGyver excesses of the previous run of episodes are soon forgotten. From Carol’s terror at Walter’s reappearance to Huell lying down on his bed of money, the show begins to be funny again, too.
The show’s past mistakes continue to impact on its storytelling, however – much as Walter is hounded by his errors. Chief among these is the Nazi gang. Once Walter assumed the role of Heisenberg, Gilligan and his writers endeavoured to introduce worse villains for him to face off against (in large part so he could retain audience sympathy). This was the role of the Mexican twins in season three, almost robotic in their killing efficiency; the purpose of the (transfixing) scene in season four in which Gus Fring calmly dons a biosuit before slitting his lieutenant’s throat. In season five, Walter employs a Nazi gang to carry out a series of murders; they come to play a large role in the final run of episodes. It’s both a distraction from the far more compelling drama going on in Walter’s family, and a cop out, morally – we’re meant to cheer Walter as he returns to face the gang because, obviously, no one’s worse than a Nazi.
The character of Skyler, too, is a problem. She’s well performed by Anna Gunn, but she’s hopelessly inconsistent – largely because she’s written as an obstacle for Walter to get around. One moment, she’s looking forward to Walter’s death as her only hope of escape; the next she’s so loyal to him that she refuses the sanctuary offered to her and her children by Hank and Marie. One moment, she’s repulsed by the knowledge that Walter has committed murders; the next, she’s urging him to kill Jesse. It may be a result of Gilligan’s make-it-up-as-we-go-along approach; certainly she’s less fully imagined than Carmela in The Sopranos. (This is true even though Skyler is far more actively complicit in her husband’s life of crime.) In the end, it limited my involvement in the climactic fight between Skyler and Walter, because she felt more like an exigency of the plot than a real person.
God (and Love) and Family, Part 4
28
02
There’s a scene in the movie Higher Ground where Vera Farmiga – playing a woman on a Christian commune – stands in front of her bathroom mirror, willing the Holy Spirit to manifest itself in her. “Come on, Holy Spirit, come on,” she croons, breathing heavily; one moment she’s like an elite athlete preparing herself for a meet, the next a woman trying to coax a dangerous animal. Speaking in tongues seems to come easily to everyone around her, but no matter how much Farmiga might long for it, she cannot force an intimacy with the divine.
My relationship with Johnathan only lasted a few months, but it cast a long shadow. I spent years afterwards trying to capture the intoxicating sense of certainty I had felt with him. Furiously, I manufactured feelings, trying to work myself into the same zone; later I lashed out at the objects of those feelings for being pale imitations of Johnathan, and God. I was on the rebound.
I started going out with another man, and led him astray with this false intensity. I didn’t do this cynically; I really wanted to believe that I loved Brad as much as I did his predecessor. Johnathan had by this time moved on to another member of the congregation; this gave me another, prideful, reason for wanting to believe that I had moved on. At the same time I was curiously cerebral about the whole thing: I viewed it almost as an experiment. Brad and I had very little in common. His politics and mine were opposed: this was the Bush/Howard era, and he was all for the war in Iraq and the prison on Guantanamo Bay. He managed a large shopping centre, and his total identification with his corporate employer repelled me. I posed myself the question: can two people with totally different values and priorities build a successful relationship? My conclusion was no, they cannot.
Looking back, I cringe at this cold speculation, and at the way I led Brad on. He entered into the relationship simply, sincerely: I tried to make him into Johnathan and then blamed him when he remained stubbornly himself. I was plunged back into the ambivalence of knowing what I should feel – what I wanted to feel – and how distant that was from what I actually felt. It was very much like my efforts as a closeted, guilty teenager to fake an infatuation with Mariah Carey. (I bought a large black-and-white poster of the wholesome, young Mariah and stuck it above my bed; every night before I went to sleep, I climbed up on my bed, kissed her black lips and told her that I loved her.) Now, however, my delusions were no longer private: they had the power to harm other people.
I continued to go to the church in Petersham. I wanted to see if I could find a place there on my own terms, if I could tease my relationship with God apart from my relationship with Johnathan. I realised that I envied the latter a number of things: not only his power as pastor, but the way that his relationship with God and his developing understanding of his role serving God formed the central narrative of his life. He spent his life attempting to understand God and what God wanted of him. I envied the moral seriousness of this, and the sense of purpose. It was not a career that he fell into through accident or family connection; he felt it as a calling – as the only thing he could do. How I envied that certainty! While he and I were together I had seen some of the drawbacks of that calling – the way he was expected to be available constantly, the way his role often effaced his personal identity. I remembered the ease with which I navigated the church hall as preacher’s wife; I began to wonder if I too had a vocation.
I spoke to Greg about it, and though I could sense his dubiety, I began to meet with him on a regular basis. Though a kindly man, there was something in him that seemed to withhold approval; I was never quite sure what he thought of me. Perhaps it was his Methodist reserve; perhaps he sensed the way I confounded religious and romantic feelings; whatever it was, it made me even more determined to win that approval. He would see that I was serious.
I enrolled at the Uniting Theological College in Parramatta. By this time, after a succession of share houses in Newtown and Stanmore, I had retreated to Mum’s place in Lane Cove. To go to class I walked to Chatswood, caught the train to Parramatta, and then walked across the river and up the hill to Pennant Hills Road; the journey took a couple of hours. (I’ve never learned to drive.) I was pleased with the obstacles; it was an opportunity to prove my commitment. Mum regarded it much as she had my teenage churchgoing; she shook her head at my impracticality, at my dogged pursuit of an impulse she had abandoned long ago.
If I’d had a little more self-knowledge, I might have wondered how I could ever be useful to a congregation when I seemed compelled to do things in such a roundabout, solitary manner. But I was too intent on what I wanted to feel – on cultivating the self I had decided on – to think about what I might be suited for. I was Vera Farmiga in the bathroom, longing to see the Holy Spirit in the mirror. All I saw was my stubborn, limited self.
God (and Love) and Family, Part 3
27
02
“Some kinds of love are mistaken for vision” – The Velvet Underground
For some time after that I kept God at a distance. My intense relationship with religion had turned dangerous: it was better to concentrate on what I could touch. I came out; had my first sexual encounters, my first boyfriend. These experiences held plenty of fascination: discovering what my body could do and feel, realising that it could be desirable to others. Both my parents were hedonists and I found I had inherited that trait: I threw myself into this new realm with abandon. I learned to navigate the gay scene, recoiling from its boozy, predatory aspects even as part of me longed to be taken. There were areas of shame that I had yet to exorcise, particularly around the act of fucking: afterwards I felt hot, sick to the stomach, all the noxious teachings of my Christian Studies classes come back to haunt me. While I was at school I had struck up a personal friendship with the Chaplain; I met up with him for coffee one day after the news of my sexuality had well and truly broken. (It was, for a while, hot gossip amongst my former schoolmates.) “I wish I could tell you that it’s okay,” he said, and he was, I think, truly sorry. However much he might love the sinner, though, he could no longer be my friend.
If it was a choice between religion and sex, sex had the advantage. Increasingly I could not see the point of trying to accommodate a faith that so pointedly excluded me: like Jane Eyre, I was ready to choose earthly love over a divine mission imposed by others. Then I learned of a church in Petersham that served a gay and lesbian congregation; a church that insisted that it was possible to be Christian and gay. Wary but hopeful, I went.
It’s always seemed to me that I live out my conflicts in a very literal way. Seeking to reconcile these two apparently incompatible impulses – the religious and the sexual – I not only started attending a gay church; I fell in love with one of the pastors.
His name was Johnathan: the allusion to King David’s friend (and possible lover) did not escape me. I fell in love with him almost immediately, and he with me. At the same time, I became a part of this new congregation; week by week I re-established my faith on new terms. The two discoveries became inextricably bound. It was the first time I had experienced the sudden, stunning certainty of love; before Johnathan, my relationships had been somewhat prosaic. It was like Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus: a new reality was disclosed to me, and part of its beauty was how self-evident it was. There was no uncertainty, no ambivalence; it was simply a truth to be acknowledged.
He came from a Pentecostal background, which put the emphasis on the performance of faith: ecstatic states, emotional displays. I began to respond emotionally during services as I never had before: I was moved to tears while receiving Communion, the wafer burning in my chest. Johnathan was still in formation as a minister: he attended theological college while training under Greg, the church’s senior pastor. Greg came from a Methodist tradition that prized thought over emotion. His approach and Johnathan’s constantly chafed: Greg regarded Pentecostal displays with suspicion and bemoaned the lack of intellectual content, while Johnathan found the Methodist approach cerebral and cold. (The church would later split into two congregations along these lines.)
It was a public role that Johnathan held and I quickly grew to relish the role of preacher’s wife. It was a curious mixture of self-abnegation – I was defined chiefly in terms of my partner and what he did – and notoriety. Everyone knew who I was; I had, I felt, a special place. I worked the church hall after services, offering tea, making people comfortable, triumphant in my status. The church drew – like so many churches do – sheepish, damaged people, and I practiced a very dubious sort of kindness towards them, conscious always of my superiority. At the same time, I chafed at the fact that my importance was conferred by my relationship with one of the pastors. I tried to convince myself that it was a form of Christian sacrifice to put Johnathan first; a part of me always rebelled, insisting on recognition on my own terms. I still had a lot to learn about service.
I admired and envied Johnathan’s sense of vocation. I thought perhaps I could make a vocation of loving him. This is not to say that I experienced him as an abstraction: I loved him as a specific human being. I’ve always been drawn to goofy, daydreaming men, and Johnathan – from the redundant h in his Christian name to his passionate love of The Carpenters – was no exception. He came from a large, messy family in the country. There was no precedent in that family for what he did; he was the first to move to the city, the first to study for a degree. It took extraordinary ambition and focus to follow his vocation. I identified with his outsider status; I admired his courage. However, my love for him began to shade too easily into worship; this was only accelerated by the power he held over me as my pastor. I scarcely knew where he ended and God began.
The relationship was only short-lived; probably it was too intense to last very long. Part of the anguish of our separation was the conviction that I had also lost my new relationship with God. That relationship and Johnathan had arrived in my life simultaneously: how could it continue now? Somehow, I had to disentangle the two.
(In case you missed them, here are links to Part 1 and Part 2.)
God and Family, Part Two
8
01
As a child I abandoned my faith not casually but emphatically: as a teenager I returned to it with equal enthusiasm. My school was tied closely to the Anglican diocese in Sydney, and Christian teaching was an important part of the program there. We had regular classes in Divinity, and Chapel before lunchtime. For most of the boys, it was something to be endured – the half-hour before lunch was a particular trial. (The Chaplain often kept us back if he thought we’d sung with insufficient gusto.) It was understood as a form to be respected, much like our uniforms of heavy grey wool or the year we spent as military cadets: the trick was observing the forms without allowing them to affect too much our sense of self. We were, for the most part, heathens, untouched by the prevailing orthodoxy. Given the Sydney diocese’s reactionary brand of Christianity (our Divinity classes featured diatribes against contraception, abortion, homosexuality – all the usual suspects) this was probably a blessing.
The message reached me. I started to pray in earnest; started going to church each Sunday morning. Now it was Mum’s turn to be discomfited: my life had taken a turn she had not anticipated. It was another chance to prove my autonomy. Each Sunday I put on my good clothes and walked to the local church. Mum was usually kneeling out in the garden, a trowel or a pair of secateurs in her hand; she looked me over satirically, as if I was putting on airs. I felt conspicuous at church too: the congregation was comprised mostly of men and women in their sixties and seventies. They were refined, obviously wealthy, with the sort of dulcet voices I have always associated with the ABC. I felt clumsy, coarse: my good clothes were not very good. The church dealt with its few young members by sending us downstairs halfway through the service. There was only one other teenager, and as we dutifully coloured in with five and six year-olds I began to wonder if I was in the right place.
It was the acknowledgement of human brokenness – and the promise of wholeness, of brokenness transcended – that touched me. The Gospels are full of broken people – people broken by illness or made outcast by intolerant communities. When they approach Christ he makes them whole again. He does this by literally curing illness but also through the simple power of acknowledgement, by affirming the human dignity of those he encounters. I found a new way to understand Christ’s crucifixion. On the cross he exemplifies human suffering – he goes to the limits of human experience. With his resurrection he transcends that suffering: he robs it of its permanence. It’s a beautiful dream of healing. As I began to experience the first symptoms of mental illness – as frightening chasms opened up in my consciousness – that dream became very precious to me.
I have a religious temperament. This impulse to worship, to commune intensely, is rather promiscuous – it applies not only to religion but also to my experience of art and to my human relationships. As a teenager my depression became a mystical experience. Today, I bear with its onset as I would any other chronic illness: it’s become a routine. At seventeen, the numbing absence of self hit me like an opiate; it was as coldly intoxicating as morphine. I felt like St John of the Cross, whose frenzied search for his lover-God becomes a sort of ecstasy: the ecstasy of absence. I believed that I had been granted insights denied to other people. I believed that I saw things more intensely, more purely. I began to plumb the depths of my illness deliberately, to force myself to extremities. I was fascinated by my capacity for suffering. A certain vanity crept in – the vanity of the mystic.
At the same time I tried to reconcile my faith with my sexuality. The Christian teaching at school had made it abundantly clear that gay sex was a sin, that gay orientation was an aberration that could be overcome with prayer. (My school had links with Exodus International, the notorious “ex-gay” organisation that shut down last year.) My fantasy life was overwhelmingly populated by men; the locker room at school became an increasingly heady experience. These fantasies were followed by long bouts of apologetic prayer. I bargained with God, attempted to draw a line under each fantasy by instituting stern consequences: “If I do it again,” I prayed, “may I go straight to Hell.” I did it again, of course, which necessitated another round of contrition and promises I couldn’t keep.
All of this isolating intensity was bound to boil over. By this time I was living with Dad; one day he came home to find that I’d tried to electrocute myself in the bathtub. Even this awful moment felt religious to me: the mystic’s failed attempt to approach God. I sat in the bathtub and dropped a hair dryer into the water. There was a second that seemed very long: the dryer coughed blue sparks and the bathroom light blazed above me like the sun. Then the power cut off and I was sitting in darkness. Had God been present in that surge of electricity? Why had he left me behind?
My family closed around me then and rescued me from my madness. I had mistaken myself for a visionary. Both my parents were materialists: I had faulted them for their complacency, the untroubled way they inhabited the physical world. Now it was a bulwark; I could take shelter in that simplicity. Mum and Dad put aside their differences. They put me in hospital; when I was discharged they kept me sedated until I arrived at some kind of calm. I had struck out from my family, seeking identity, autonomy, a form for my spiritual impulses in religion. Now I made the opposite journey, taking refuge from what I had found. It was not the last time I shuttled between the two.
God and Family, Part 1
2
01
My mother and father couldn’t agree on where to have me christened. Neither one of them was especially religious but, like circumcision, baptism was one of those forms that parents in the 80s felt they had to honour. Mum was raised Methodist – had even been a Sunday school teacher – but after a crisis had abandoned her faith. Dad was raised Catholic, and though he still identifies as one it’s more for the form of the thing than any compelling felt reality. Both Mum and Dad had been married and divorced when they decided to marry, which made finding a venue for that event a challenge, too. Mum had inherited her father’s Freemason suspicion of Catholics: when she discovered that the Catholic Church would only marry them behind the altar, it confirmed her in her bias. Dad could not countenance being married in a Protestant church. In the end they settled on the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross – neutral, ecumenical ground. This too is where they had me christened. It took me some time to appreciate the way this placed me – broadly within the Christian tradition, but without a strong attachment to any one denomination. If I do not belong to any church, exactly, I am also free to learn from them all.
It’s hard to disentangle our experience of religion from our experience of family. Those who are religious generally encounter religion first through their families. Family is Christianity’s dominant metaphor. God is the Father, Christ the Son; Catholicism makes up for the patriarchal one-sidedness of this by emphasising the role of Mary the Mother. And though these relationships are intended as metaphor, it’s on this level that many of us experience religion. I’ve been struck by the mixture of hope and exasperation in the responses to the new Pope Francis: hope at the new notes he strikes in his rhetoric, exasperation at the bigoted attitudes he continues to endorse. It’s much like the adults who persist with the families that damaged them as children: unwilling (or unable) to swear off the relationship entirely, perceiving value and potential in their difficult relations. Religion marks you as surely and as permanently as does family.
When my parents separated I sided entirely with my mother. Mum had abandoned her faith after watching her grandmother die slowly and painfully: she could not square that protracted suffering with the existence of God. The end of my parents’ relationship had a similar effect on me: it so polluted the family metaphor that I wanted nothing more to do with it. My newfound atheism doubled as a handy way to mortify Dad. It upset him to think that his son was growing up Godless. As an eight-year-old, I took pleasure in the consternation I was causing him – felt it as a kind of power. It also struck me as a grave and momentous decision – the beginning of autonomy. When I ended up at an Anglican school, it became a point of pride to refuse to bow my head for prayer, to stand silent during hymns. I would not observe any form that I felt to be false. It made me stand out. It made me original.
If you take the Bible at its word, God is a terrible parent. When the human race is in its infancy, he responds to its first mistake not with rebuke or correction but with exile and permanent disfigurement. He sets one child over another. He orders a father to murder his son as a spiritual test. Again and again, God puts his offended sense of righteousness above love for his creation. This is the ugliness at the centre of the great Christian transaction: the way Christ is supposed to have died for our sins. If our offences are against God, then it is for God to forgive them: to require the death of his son for the sake of form – to balance the ledger – puts ceremony before feeling as surely as the murder of Iphigeneia on the altar at Aulis. As Patti Smith said, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” I repudiated that bargain.
Looking back, it’s clear to me how much my feelings about God the Father were bound up with my ambivalence about Dad. We continued to live in the same big house when Mum and Dad split up, but on very different terms. Dad kept Mum on as a paid housekeeper, and she moved into a smaller room at the other end of the house. The big house wasn’t ours: Mum was the housekeeper and I was the housekeeper’s son. Dad was home only infrequently, and in his comings and goings I saw the arbitrary will of God. His bedroom became a sort of shrine, hallowed ground that I visited quietly, looking for clues to the mysterious deity. In particular I loved his walk-in robe: the ranks of gleaming leather shoes, the different colours and fabrics of his suits. They were religious relics. If I could not have contact with him, then these things at least had touched him. It was the next best thing.
The religious impulse found expression in other ways. Even as I emphatically denied the existence of God, I fell in love with C.S. Lewis’ Narnia stories, and with Aslan the lion especially. I loved the tactile relationship that the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had with Aslan: the way that Lucy ran her hands through his mane, the gentle understanding in his eyes and voice. With no idea that the books were intended as a Christian allegory – that Aslan was a Christ figure – I began to cultivate my own relationship to Aslan, to pray to him. Even when I had most consciously struck out from God, I found my way back to him in fiction.
Fire
25
10
Ben Wood and I have just come back from a week’s break in the Blue Mountains. In the mornings we’d do a creative exercise to get our juices flowing – one of us would set a theme, and we’d spend half an hour responding to it. I’ve been posting the results over the past couple of days. Today’s theme is “Fire”.
Here’s Ben’s response:
And mine:
From our perch here above the bush, the changing conditions of nature are hard to ignore – they are, in fact, the chief point of interest. The way the chorus of cicadas rises and falls in volume, depending on the temperature; the changing gradations of colour from sunset to sunset, one in civilised bands of pink and yellow and blue, the next a brilliant, fiery red. These are the rhythms that govern the days; this is the complex world you inhabit.
With the news of fire you begin to notice these changes in a different way: you examine them, attempt to interpret them. You become an amateur meteorologist. The smoke, when it is still fresh enough to have a distinct form and a likely source, is coming from the west: you wonder what is happening in Mount Victoria.
Soon the smoke is so general – settled in like mist – that you can no longer tell much from it; only that there is fire somewhere. You’re reduced to checking the RFS website, as fires teeter between a state of emergency and a lower classification, to the images of catastrophe on the news. You field calls from anxious relatives. Through it all, the cicadas keep up their driving percussion, magnificently untroubled.
Windswept
24
10
Ben Wood and I have just come back from a week’s break in the Blue Mountains. In the mornings we’d do a creative exercise to get our juices flowing – one of us would set a theme, and we’d spend half an hour responding to it. I’ll be posting the results over the next couple of days. Today’s theme is “Windswept”.
Here’s Ben’s response:
And mine:
There’s a nude quality to Lithgow, a sense that the ground it covers has been cleared only recently. Perhaps this is what the white towns felt like in their earliest days: provisional, the bush glowering from all sides.
Lithgow is a valley town, long and narrow, and no matter where you go the hills packed with eucalypts are only a few blocks away. As if to thumb its nose at the environment the town is almost entirely treeless, the houses and streets worn from their repeated exposure to sun and frost.
The sky was a perfect, cloudless blue; as we walked the streets of Lithgow a ball of smoke, white and puffy, appeared over one of the shoulders that hems the town in. As the wind swept it out, teased it into a plume, it revealed its impurities: a yellow-brown underbelly, like cotton wool soaked in Dettol. Through the air carried lightly the sound of sirens.
We made our way to the station and boarded a train: as it carried us away into the mountains the arm of smoke reached after us, its source obscured by the hills so that it seemed an emanation of the landscape itself.