Outside the Game

Dancing on the Tombs

2008-04-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

This is what it’s all about.

The images of smashed graves on the television screens and online news posts in the last few days has provoked responses from horror, most commonly from the RSL, elderly citizens, and of course those in positions of political esteem.

But why? Apart from offending those families of those close to the dead, what was the destruction of headstones and mausoleums but just so much stone throne back into the ground?

What is this persistent worship of the death? Why is our natural response to this shock, horror, incredulity?

The dead are gone. We wrap them in little memories, put them in a box, bury them six feet under the ground (or burn them) then we etch their names in stone and pretend that this stone is them - that somehow by preserving the noun that signified their existence in the form of stone, we have guaranteed their name on the door list to whatever afterlife we believe in, or that we have stood them there, alive in the form of unmoving stone, never to collapse, never to utter another word - to simply exist, forever.

Numbers of the graves destroyed are for people who no one living has a memory of knowing - some for over two generations.
The dead should be burnt, cast aside, discarded like rubbish - what do they offer us after their passing?

“They live on in our memories” is a favoured saying by eulogists at funerals. So what are the point of these large tracts of untouched landfill? Aren’t the toppled tombstones nothing more than pieces of stone, once the dead escape our memory? What value is in the practice of retaining the graves of those long passed - if those memories that the dead live on in are now being hollowed by maggots not two rows away?

It comes as no real surprise that those who are most shocked by the vandalism of gravestones - the weary faces that the microphone cuddles up to - are the elderly. Those who fought in wars, those who “built this nation”. Those who are not so very far from trading in their red-brick for a nice plot with a slate roof and a named letter-box with no hole for correspondence.

Look into their eyes and you can see the fear that the youths who pulled down the tombstones were in fact pulling down the assumed safety of their imminent future - the stones are little doors to heaven, or so it seems to those not too far away from turning the handle and shutting the door behind them.

But for those who are closest to the tombs should be afraid. Death, despite years of christian/islamic/jewish (or any other religion, really) indoctrination, is not something to be embraced willingly. It’s something to be feared, something to run headlong away from. There is no safety in that hole in the ground, old man - only a dead end.

Pull them all down, I say. Bare no respect to religion, to creed or colour - as some of these recent attacks have clearly done.

Pull down the tombstones of your relatives and your enemies - burn the past and stop fearing the ghosts of the past - stop letting them stand upright in our world, untalking, unmoving, ineffectual - spectres of inaction.

And do yourself a favour and pull down your own tombstone - pull down the idea that you are guaranteed any eternity, or lasting presence in this world, or in any other, after death.

Burn the past and the future. Build towers to the now, and pull them down as soon as they are built; that’s what they were built for.

Stop sending letters

2008-04-12T01:08:00.000-07:00

“Stop sending letters,
Letters always get burned…”

Yesterday I took the day off work and spent the day walking through the suburbs.

There was no great motivation behind this, except to observe the lives and homes of the people around me. I climbed a few fences, had a look through the windows of some people. Though the weather was cold, I swam in a few pools, out here in the eastern suburbs there are more than you would think, at least from the size of the blocks, and from the outside of people’s houses.

I took the mail from several streets in my local area, where I could. Several houses had people either leaving, or returning, and this made it harder - however most people assumed that I was simply putting more junk mail in their box.

I’d taken a backpack with me, expressly for this purpose. It was really just for observation - I suppose the revulsion I felt after kicking in the Mercedes had startled me somewhat, and it felt like a foundation needed to be laid. I wanted to see what exactly
I was tying to question - wanted to know what the rules were.

It seems weird, because the further I get into this, the harder it becomes to work out what exactly I’m fighting against. In many ways the rules are what keep us fed and clothed, and it’s hard to walk naked and hungry once you’ve known that world.

But I now have a backpack full of letters to read. Fiction has not excited me this heartily in years. Of course, there are myriad account notices for mobile phones, parking tickets, health insurance, home loans etc, but buried amidst the mailbox graffiti there are little snippets of people’s lives. Written conversations - full of in jokes, awkward half-explanations, “love yous” and “wish you were here’s”, photographs of people smiling - none of which will ever find their recipients now, of course.

They’re easy to spot, the personal ones - they are usually addressed with scratchy blue or black biro text, numbers just inside the orange post-code boxes, screaming to get out (sounds familiar). Unfortunately there’s not nearly as many as their would have been ten years ago - if I had a passable hacking knowledge, I’m sure I’d find many more secret conversations - sexual, emotional, embarrassingly honest - immediate and harder than the constrained language we now save for the written counterpart.

So, I’ve saved a few, put them in an envelope, in a box of keepsakes. A time capsule of what will one day be “what was” when “what will be” has happened. It feels good to own these people’s words. To hold in my hands some part of their life that they will now never know. When they lay awake wondering why their child/partner/friend didn’t care enough to write - I’ll know.

The rest I burned in a bin in my backyard. I took some delight in being the end to all these little stories. Some of these people will get angry reminder notices, or maybe even court summons for these missed letters. I think I’m starting to learn again what this is all about, and what being outside of the game means.

It means power, it means control and means walking your own line, across the board, stealing other people’s cards and money, walking out the door and not giving a fuck about what ruin you leave behind - the lines you’ve crossed, the people you’ve left and the means to the end. Or maybe it’s all about disregarding even the idea that this is a bad thing - it’s just a different thing; a new way of thinking, a new way of walking and talking.

“…It’s not like the movies,
They fed us on little white lies.”
- Radiohead, “Motion Picture Soundtrack”

But...

2008-04-08T19:56:00.000-07:00

But it wasn’t good. Or at least, it didn’t stay good.

I initially thought it would be best to leave what I posted last night.

To leave the story there seemed really important - like I’d begun to prove my point, like breaking the rules was starting to take charge, like I was starting to pave my way out of the game.

But I woke up this morning, and the fears that hit me last night after I got home haven’t left, but they have made me think a little more about what exactly I’m trying to achieve here - with this blog, with this experiment.

The me that left the car broken and bruised last night, the me that the jogger feared, didn’t hang around for very long.

On the way driving home I looked down and realised I was bleeding from my elbow.

Only small cuts, but enough of them that a reasonable amount of blood had soaked into my shirt sleeve.

I started to feel a deep churning in my stomach, and my head started to hurt, numbly disconnected from my body, my hands seeming far away from the steering wheel.

I turned off the freeway at my exit, pulling the car over almost immediately. I vomited a thin pile of bile into the gutter, the strings hanging out from my nose, me coughing and breathing in too sharply.

I spat into the gutter and wiped my nose on my shirt sleeve. I figured it was already bloody, a bit of bile wouldn’t make much more damage.

As I pulled into my driveway, my thoughts felt distant. My breathing sounded distant, like a churning mill and what little of sense I could string together in the back of my mind buzzed in and out like a slightly out of tune radio.

I made my way into the house, and I had a big, fatty meal of sausages and potatoes, something I’d never usually eat - something solid and palpable that would sit heavy in my stomach and ground me, at least a little.

And it worked, for the most part. But those buzzing, static-hazed, vague blowflies of thoughts didn’t fly back to my head so eagerly as I would have hoped. I couldn’t hold onto anything solid in my head.

It was like I’d busted a part of me, smashed the floor out from under my self as I walked along it.

I’ve never broken a law - short of stealing lollies from the now-defunct Target choose-your-own lolly section. That and a few tickets for fare-evasion on the train.
Those acts were not as big, as intentional - not as willingly counter to all the logic I’ve been brought up to respect and follow.

I suppose I was foolish to believe it would be so easy to break out of the pattern. Habits - logical, arbitrary or not, are hard to break. Especially if that pattern, that habit, you are tying to break is the very system your brain has become accustomed to thinking in.

This feeling is natural, I’m sure, and if nothing else may simply be the flip-side of the adrenalin of last night’s excitement - my muscles and nerves catching up on some rest. It won’t deter me from the journey I’ve started, and I’m completely aware that the dogs of fear will likely nip at my heels the entire way.

But at the moment I feel a bit like a stylus skipping either side of the groove in the record.

And I’m haunted by the dreams that came to me last night when I finally fell into sleep - dreams of being locked outside of the house, of being too far away from the city to ever get back, of drifting in a world of soft, long curves with no straight edges and no surface I could grip onto.

And all the time there was a distant, familiar song that hummed just out of recognition, at the edge of my mind.

On the way home.

2008-04-08T04:07:00.000-07:00

Walking to my car, or to the tram stop from work I often pass cars that are striking in their flamboyance, clearly shouting their monetary value at the top of their lungs at passersby.

These hulks of steel, striking in their aesthetic make-up, with the value-heavy names like Mercedes, Porsche, Ferrari, Chrysler, Jeep, Audi - but essentially no different in purpose and ability than their 1930s or 40s counterparts - costing more than most people actually earn in a year, sit unattended in painted white lines down the side of main roads, or lined up in back lanes.

I walked past a CL Class Mercedes convertible tonight, sleek and black, stretched long like a sleeping black cat on the cool asphalt, its three pronged logo extending it’s grasp over the air, land and sea. I looked inside the window to see an iPod peeking out of the console, a collection of business notes flopped on the passenger chair.

I was struck by how brazenly these personal effects sat inside this immensely expensive designer label artifact. How openly this person’s life sat in this car, one small symbol of wealth sitting wrapped in another giant expensive wrapper, the whole thing mocking the passerby with it’s implied safety.

I’m not an admirer of cars generally. There are cars that strike me as attractive, as becoming to a passerby and this car was certainly within this range.

But something really hit me as I looked at this car.

There is no such thing as a car, not as a solid, irreducible element.

This was not a car.

It was really a collection of many cast pieces of metal, of shaped glass, of channelled solder and oil, of plastic and leather and whilst all of these things may have been shaped and moulded from quality materials, they remained, essentially, these elements were really no different to the cars that surrounded them, or, even, to the steel sign that stood not 3 metres from the sign proclaiming the hours one was permitted to park their car in the area.

I kicked the car’s door.

I surprised to find how easily it crumpled under my foot. The metal bent inwards, taking a not unsatisfactory impression of my shoe.

An alarm started to howl from inside the hood, and I ducked into the gutter behind the car.

After a few minutes I realised no one was coming to see what was going on. I imagined the collective groan of the people in the office buildings that surrounded me, the managers who stopped for a second to wonder if it was their car before, priming the next Powerpoint slide. The office workers who perhaps smiled to themselves; safe in the knowledge that no amount of over-time would ever earn them hearing that alarm.

I stood back up, almost disappointed at the lack of sirens and lights coming my direction.

The alarm continued to howl, which efficiently masked the noise of my elbow going through the side window.

I felt a rush, I’ve never done anything so completely outside of the rule set in my life.

I levered open the car's door lock.

They’ve really made it hard to unlock the doors from the inside in cars in recent years. In an ideal world, I guess, the Mercedes owner never has to leave the car, swaddled in the blanket of luxury; the scum forever on the outside. After all, on handsfree mobile phone conference calls, from high-priced car to the office, around the world, this is where the decisions are being made, people! Inside the womb of a luxury car are all the great new ideas birthed.

You don’t even have to think about turning on your windscreen wipers anymore, nor the headlights - they turn on with censors - the owner effectively turns on the car and doesn’t even have to play the game for themselves anymore - the rolls of the dice are pre-determined. Short of turning headlong into a truck or telegraph pole, the Mercedes owner can turn on their GPS, turn on their car, and turn on their classical music (or drive-time radio station of choice) and turn off their mind.

I picked up the iPod from the console. I unlocked it and pressed play. The last played track was “Matchbox 20 - Disease”. I picked up a few of the pieces of material and read the name the letters were addressed to.

Figuring that, despite my initial safety, with the alarm still going off, I only had a few minutes left, I went through my work-bag and retrieved a permanent marker. On the inside windscreen of the car I wrote these three things.

“Dear Mr. XXXXX XXXXXX [real name withheld]
Of [address withheld].
1. The song you last listened to as you drove to work was “Matchbox 20 - Disease”, it’s track length is 3:43, and you stopped listening to the track at 2:54.
2. Your cologne is too cheap for this car. It hangs on the leather.
3. Bright plumage leaves one open to predators.”

I laughed to myself, standing up from the car’s window and picking up my bag. I walked casually from the car’s ruined side, kicking the boot several times and spitting on the rear windscreen. I wished at that moment that I carried a pocket knife so I could puncture the tyres as well. That would leave the car totally violated.

I walked past a jogger on my way to my car, I couldn’t be sure if they’d seen me at the Mercedes. They looked into my eyes,
and quickly looked away. I couldn’t be sure what they’d seen, but they were afraid.

Good.

Rule-breakers and Box-holders.

2008-04-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”
- Susan Sontag

I was walking down Swanston st today, past the bums and beggars.

Some were eager to dance and make noise for a few coins, others content to sleep, swaddled in rags, a cardboard sign indicating their desire for your support. Still others harassed me as I went by, asking for some money for a meal, or, “to get home”, hurling abuse at my back as I kept walking, barely audibly asserting my (false) lack of change.

Now, these people are, quite obviously, outside of the system.

Some of them are people who played the game and lost. They may have been riding high on a pile of money, a Monopoly millionaire, and then some sudden change of circumstance has left them without the faculties to survive, and they find themselves down again, lower than before, asking for change from those they once played.
It may not have been that clear cut, just a slow slide into the gutter from the sidewalk.

Some, though, are people who never learnt, or maybe never understood, the rules. It’s not like they were intelligent enough to realise that there are rules and ways to circumvent or bend them, or that they chose to not be a part of the system, they simply never grasped the concept of the game. They’re box-holders to the game of life, holding the still wrapped package, reading the blurb, wondering what it would be like to play.

If they could even grasp the basic rules, they may be in a better position. As it is, they’re at the mercy of those who are rolling the dice, making their moves around them. Maybe someone slips them a donation from the kitty, maybe they don’t - it’s not really up to them. They only have the opportunity to make the choice for themselves once they begin to play by the rules.
The intellectually disabled and stunted are also at the mercy of the charity of game players and by necessity family and friends will often protect these people from the ravages of a game they don’t (and may never) understand.

I’d like to clarify that I don’t think it’s enough for us to simply step outside of the game and refuse to follow the rules.

Of what value is that?

You’d simply become another box-holder.

If I suddenly stop going to work, start voicing the intimate thoughts in my head to people on the train, stand on tables in the middle of cafes - simply because I can do all of these things - I don’t make any impact on the game. The game continues without me, and each of you that reads this will roll the dice and pass me by, collecting from the community chest and laughing as you pass “Go”.

The point is considered, decisive moves that deconstruct the very idea of the game.

Hitting someone in the street and stealing there wallet - that breaks a rule, but serves no great purpose.

But breaking into someone’s house in the middle of the night, subtly moving all their furniture, possibly taking photos of yourself going through their fridge, underwear drawers etc and placing it in the family photo album. That’s going to make them think.

That might make the homeowner consider exactly how safe they are. It might make them wonder exactly how the game protects them from this occurrence, and exactly what purpose following the rules serves.

By turn, it might reinforce the rules for them - it might make them doubly aware of the need for safety and propriety. If so, good. The point of this experiment is to undo the rules and, if necessary, rebuild them. Rules should not be arbitrary, they should be honed, tested, pushed, melted and destroyed, then rebuilt.

Fantomas, the great anti-hero/villain of french pulp-literature, once hid razor blades in soap that was delivered to orphanages. Let’s be clear - this is not path I wish to explore, the unnecessary mutilation of the unfortunate, for my own sake, but the act itself is a stroke of genius. To what end does the great villain commit this act, for what result?

Simply to strike fear into the hearts of the populace. Simply to let them know that their safety is tenuous at best and to assume otherwise is mass suicide.

The other lurks in the dark and it has your name. The rules are but constructions that imprison and blinker us all to the reality of the situation.

It starts.

2008-04-04T21:45:00.000-07:00

It starts.

In medias res.

Or is there no way of really starting at the middle of things?

Must we establish the rules of this intercourse before we can really be in medias res or are the rules already set out for us, long established, entrapping us at every turn, our words herded like sheep by the wolves of grammar and spelling into neat little sentences, gated by at the north and south by a capital letter and a full-stop?

But I’m getting ahead of myself, starting at the end, and there’s not yet time for that.

This blog is about the rules of the game. The game’s rules change from place to place, from time to time even from person to person.

You are playing the game right now. You are likely playing it for almost every minute of your day.

The game is, ostensibly, life.

There are rules inherent in our living in this (or any) society, the more obvious of these being our clearly outlined laws, which one can get at least a passable hold on through a little light reading, and if you want to know more, you can probably make your way to your local council, university law library, you can even spend 3 years of your life studying the rule-card that comes with the box of our Game of Life - Edition Australia 2008.

But there are other, more deep-rooted, subtler rules that we all play the game by, never stopping to question them, because each of them seems so inherently sensible, so necessary, that we never question them.

“Common sense”.

On walking to walk/school/the shops today, did you urinate in the street?
Did you pause to play with yourself whilst groping for the soup can in the supermarket aisle?
Did you punch the person who got in first at the coffee queue?
Or, more subtle -
Did you voice your every emotion aloud as you felt it today?
Did you tell the person next to on the train the many ways you would make love to them, given the chance?
Do you tell people your intimate feelings about bodily motions?
Did you decide to not wear clothes today, because you simply felt they were unnecessary given the weather?

If you answered “no” to the above questions, congratulations, you’re playing the game. You’re working with the system, to create a better world for all of us.

But what if you’re not? What if you’re arbitrarily following rules long set down by people whose best interest was to keep of us herded like the verbs and nouns in the little setences on this page? Clear, easily labelled, easily controlled?

What if it’s not even as sinister as that - maybe it’s as simple as a system that remains unquestioned/unexamined is a system not worth following.

The intention of this blog is to explore stepping outside of the game. I don’t intend to be bound by rules that either don’t make sense, or seem entirely arbitrary, anymore.

If you choose to follow me in more than simply reading this blog, this is up to you - bare in mind that if you follow my example you may find you are beginning simply to play another game, and missing the point altogether.

And so we start, now, in medias res, ab ovo, the egg hatched, the chick walking around, thinking maybe it’s time to stop walking around like its forebears, and fly.