Download How Australia Made Me An Anarchist by Chris Kirk

I wrote this book in 2012 as a response to the radical joyous transformative experience of my first two years travelling in Australia between 2010 and 2012. I discovered the spontaneous self-expression and community of Rainbow Gatherings and Confests. I learned to live without money without missing out on anything. I learned the cold harsh realities of a colonisation so deep some people see no alternative. But the alternative was clear as the momentum of invitations and inspirations swept me up. I toned my muscles, I opened my heart and I fell in love. 

The book has been described as memoir, poetry, philosophy and human ecology. I write in many styles, but always with immediacy, honesty and integrity. 

Here is the link to download the audio and pdf versions of my book, How Australia Made Me An Anarchist.  Journey of a homeless poet through the stolen continent. 

Feel free to download and share with everyone you think will appreciate it.  I do however like to be paid for my work, so please make a contribution via the link below.  You can even pay later, when you have decided you like the book.  I have no other source of income. 

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From a book of essays by Jameson Alex West there is a sincere and considered response to my book. It is on YouTube in audio form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDG9zUHJxYg

12 Years a Slave [2013] by Steve McQueen

Violence without insight

The film's brutal and noble depiction of American slavery being unjust seemingly makes the film impervious to criticism. I happen to agree that slavery is an abomination, but I don't think that is a question being discussed in America or the world at the moment. As far as I know, it is a question that has been answered already. But the Academy can't help but pat themselves on the back because they have, for the first time, given their Best Picture award to a film written and directed by black filmmakers. Instead of feeling proud, I may instead wonder why they haven't been giving awards to filmmakers of diversity all these years. I suppose they are an American institution and they focus on American films and films that engage with the American sensibility. In this case they have chosen to acknowledge an issue which has largely been sorted in the American cultural mind.

I suppose it is a long process rewriting history to include the stories of the marginalised. This is a process that needs to happen, and for many people this is a process that needs to happen in large-scale accessible films that will be seen by many. Thus the film has its place.

However, the film doesn't offer any depth into the situation. There is no insight achieved into how this could happen, what toxic ideologies justified this culture on a political or a personal level. There was no attempt to place this man's experience into any large context at all. It was merely a depiction of the nobility of waiting for justice. For 12 years he worked as a slave and barely dared confront the legal injustice of his situation, let alone the moral injustice of it. He nobly waited for 12 years and eventually justice was done and he was able to return home to his family.

Titles at the end of the film not only tell us that the kidnappers were not brought to justice, but that the protagonist's salvation was extremely anomalous. Most free black people sold into slavery illegally were never freed. But that is not an inspiring story of overcoming adversity. That is a more accurate rewriting of American history to include the stories of marginalised, but not one that reinforces American values of waiting for things to get better, waiting for justice to have an opportunity to be done.

The violence of this film did not offer us a rewarding and insightful commentary on the grotesque cultural and political landscape of America that allowed slavery to flourish for so long.

Man of Steel [2013] by Zack Synder

I grew up with the Superman movies of 1978-1983. I may feel differently about them if I watched them now, but at the time they were gospels for a secular age, epic stories of good news in which we are saved from death by a superior being from space. 

Were these films really better than Zack Snyder's noisy and ridiculous Man of Steel? There was perhaps some charm in the characters, particularly Christopher Reeve's awkward Clark Kent. But there was one element that rendered those films transcendent, and that was the music of John Williams. Regardless of the artistic integrity of his compositions, his music has an undeniable power to lift a movie into a mythical realm that we humans find ourselves swept up into. One of Williams's techniques is the theme song, introduced at the beginning, woven delicately through the bulk of the film and then exploding upon the viewer in the exciting climax. It not only accelerates the urgency of the film's climax, but it brings the heart. Everything that is important to protect in the world is projected onto that music, and when we hear it thundering at the climax, at that crucial moment, in our hearts we know it will be okay. The careers of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas could not have happened without John Williams. He is the master of manipulation.

Man of Steel is said to be the Superman story of our age, of the 21^st century, our time of utmost scepticism and cynicism. In Zack Snyder’s film the score is indistinguishable from the sound effects and I could sum it up in one word, noise.

While there is an attempt to expand upon the story and the world by fully incorporating the destruction of Krypton and bringing its spiralling failed technocracy down to threaten Earth, the film spends most of its 143 minutes in noisy destruction that can barely even be called violence and that I would call silly if it wasn't so humourless. Sometimes statistics can be helpful, and it would be a sufficient film review if someone performed the simple but laborious task of calculating the percentage of the film's running time depicting a few almost invincible beings punching each other, banging into each other and just generally smashing their own and each other's bodies into as much human infrastructure as possible, resulting in the spectacularly banal destruction of first Smallville and its familiar chain stores and then New York and its skyscrapers. Things get smashed and crumble into dust. If that's your thing, you've found the right movie.

This type of violence cannot be considered dangerous or irresponsible, it is simply senseless and tedious. It is like an incoherent fascist ballet of utter abstraction, with bodies flying, falling and colliding. I suppose some people like this type of audio-visual stimulation. I can only assume they find it exciting, though I'm not sure what's exciting about it when there is no sense of coherent danger. It is noise. It is as gratuitous as any porn film. If it is the Superman film for our age, it is because, short of the character and plot sophistication of a Christopher Nolan film, it is more noise than you have ever experienced before, and in faster succession, and for longer; more smashes, more bangs, more whacks. A more appropriate comparison than The Dark Knight films would be the Batman TV series of the 1960s with its “Crash!” “Boff!” “Bang!” fight scenes. Those words are replaced by extremely complex computer graphics, but the experience is ultimately the same. Like any good porn film, the scenario that justifies the action is quickly swept aside for prolonged sequences of bodies pounding against each other.

Regarding the plot, Krypton was destroyed by inept committees, but the film adamantly rejects fascism. The military coup led by General Zod understandably wants to save the people of Krypton at any cost, even the genocidal colonisation of Earth. The benevolent line of Jor-El and Kal-El (Clark Kent) prefer instead to preserve truth, justice and the American way, by fighting fascist-inspired colonisation with the support of huge amounts of ammunition courtesy of the American government. And the Americans keep firing their guns, even though their enemies are totally impervious to them. Having justified the prolonged sequences of noisy destruction, the second objective of the plot is to create the hope and desire for a sequel, and you can bet $250,000,000 there is a sequel.

Risk [2016] by Laura Poitras

Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras started filming the inner-circle of Wikileaks in 2010 when they first burst into the headlines. She filmed them on and off for the next six years. She was originally sympathetic to their commitment to releasing controversial governmental documents that offer difficult insights into the inner-workings of large and powerful institutions. However, she became quite intimately involved with the group, even becoming lovers with one of them, Jacob Appelbaum, and on this human level she became personally disappointed with the group, particularly Julian Assange. As a result, she seems to have chosen to cobble together a collection of unconnected moments from over the years of Julian Assange not living up to his heroic reputation, rather than telling a coherent story of this critical period in the history of Wikileaks.

Assange indeed appears in some scenes to be arrogant, paranoid, dismissive and possibly even sexist, but if these were the most revealing moments she shot in six years, it doesn't reveal much. I think most people would be horrified if someone had filmed them for six years and then simply cut together the moments when they were most revealing of the least savoury parts of their personality. I'm not sure I would come off well given the same treatment, though most people consider me a nice person.

Poitras has already displayed her ability to convey the urgency of a historic moment from the inside in her documentary Citizenfour [2014], in which she recorded the moment that Edward Snowden conscientiously released documents revealing the NSA's illegal surveillance of large numbers of people in collaboration with other intelligence agencies around the world. So her inability to edit her footage into anything coherent or interesting when the group involved is extremely interesting and her access was total, is surely a result of her conflicts of interest.

Although Assange's dismissal of the two women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by him borders on sexism, the film itself has also been criticised for marginalising the women centrally involved in the running of Wikileaks in favour of more screen-time for Assange and Appelbaum.

The story of Wikileaks and the flawed personality of Assange have already been effectively communicated in Alex Gibney's documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks [2013] and Risk does not offer any deeper insight, despite intimate access and being three years more up-to-date. 

A documentary carefully examining the precarious line between performing a valuable, dangerous and always ethically ambiguous role in institutional transparency, and attempting to remain humble, respectful and balanced in the process would be a very interesting film to watch. Sadly, this confused and superfluous documentary is not it.

120 Beats Per Minute [2017] by Robin Campillo

BPM offers a documentary-like glimpse into a very specific historic moment: the AIDS epidemic in the '90s and one group's attempts to take action to stop their friends from dying, ACT-UP Paris.

The most vividly recreated scenes are the heated group discussions in their regular meetings, the political details of activism and the urgency with which they are acting as people die. 

I found it less effective on a personal level; none of the characters seemed interesting or fleshed-out enough to engage me emotionally.  So when the film becomes intensely personal it feels like it's still just reinforcing the political urgency of the moment.

However, at a time when cinema is largely depicting sex, and specifically anal sex, as brutal and disconnected, or just being coy about sex, BPM offers a delightfully intimate and frank depiction of anal sex, that act so central to the spread of AIDS; with care, with tenderness, with communication and with condoms. 

Melbourne Cinémathèque: Paul Verhoeven's Starships Troopers [1997] and Robocop [1987]

I saw my first film on DCP in 2009, so it has only been ubiquitous a few years, but already 35mm feels evocative of an earlier analogue age. The imperfections on the print seem to smell like popcorn, though there was none in the cinema at ACMI for the Melbourne Cinémathèque screenings of Paul Verhoeven's films Starship Troopers and Robocop.

The films have similar intentions, depicting a militarised and propagandised society, with Starship Troopers being considerably more extreme and less subtle than its predecessor. 

Starship Troopers is set in a globally unified 2197 in which everyone has American accents and knows who the bad guys are: the bugs. Nationalistic propaganda is depicted with overstated irony and we seem to be in permanent war with the sub-human and sub-intelligent beasts, whose territory we may have arrogantly encroached upon. 

But no matter, because the battle against evil unifies us as a society and citizenship (as well as voting rights) is the exclusive privilege of those who have served in the military. Even as millions are slaughtered in futile battles, more are recruited in hope of serving the society that entirely encompasses and protects them. 

Despite all the political satire, the film is not to be taken too seriously. It wields Hollywood cliche, bad acting, elaborate special effects and video game-like violence to the purpose of pure movie fun and thrills, tensing up at the threat to our heroes as we laugh at how ridiculous it all is.  The film wants it both ways: to satirise American military chic and "freedom", as the ability to choose to die for your country (or planet), and to totally relish in the thrill of the Hollywood science fiction action war film, with its big budget, special effects, exciting music and editing and pretty actors, and it mostly succeeds.

Starship Troopers is a bit thin on the irony though, and Robocop is a more successful and satisfying film in every way.

Robocop is set in the nearer future, in which the Detroit Police department has been contracted to a private company with some pretty nefarious intentions.  Now that the Police have been privatised, the next step is to mechanise the cops themselves and so crime can be fought by programmed and emotionless machines without human error, but perhaps with the type of error that only machines, psychopathic corporations and fascism can offer.

Robocop can be interestingly compared to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) with very interesting implications.  I have already written about how Nolan's film supports the fascist notion that the masses are dumb and helpless and must be saved from evil by psychopaths in uniforms and masks.  Nolan's Interstellar (2014) also presents the idea that the masses must be lied to in order to save them from what they're not capable of understanding.  And Nolan's films are presented without irony or humour.  We must trust in our great institutions and we must not question them because we are ignorant to the complex manner in which they will save us.  This seems to be the ideology of the 21st century Hollywood machine.  The '80s and '90s were different.  Rewatching the four Batman films released between 1989 and 1997 there is an astonishing lack of any ideological underpinnings in all except one of them, Batman Returns (1992).  This film chooses Catwoman and Penguin as the villians, but in both cases the real villian is not even the dim, charming and manipulable mayor, but Max Shreck (a vampire?), the corrupt corporate executive who is responsible for traumatising both Catwoman and Penguin into the dangerous freaks they become.  The film is ultimately feminist and anti-corporate and causes us to question the powerful institutions that do not necessarily have our best interests at heart.  Quite contrary to Nolan's suggestion that we have blind faith in them to save us from evil because we are inherently ignorant.

Verhoeven, in Robocop, plays with both of these elements, fascistic violence overcoming crime, and the vapid money-obsessed corruption of our corporate class, with considerable wit and fun.  The technocratic violence is effective against crime, but only when it is combined with a human element, as in the half-human/half-robot, but it is ultimately doomed to failure because of the compromises of the perverted intentions of the executives running the institution.  And although the masses are not necessarily depicted as stupid in Verhoeven's film, they are saturated with an incessant and compellingly stupid media pumping them full of inanity as coke-driven criminals and coke-driven executives unleash violent crime on their vulnerable city.

It all sounds rather serious and intense the way I am describing it, but it is actually constantly fun and funny, thrilling and stupid, offering you the dumb thrills you learned to love as a child and the clever irony you need as a thinking adult.

Both of Verhoeven's films draw you into the dumb violence of Hollywood and its fascist ideology of redemptive violence led by all-powerful institutions, but they also ridicule its grotesque consequences and the ludicrous propaganda supposed to convince us of its efficacy.

But if you're in the right mood, they're just fun too.

A Fantastic Woman [2017] by Sebastián Lelio

A woman dealing with the grief of her partner's sudden death also has to deal with his family's prejudice about her as a trans woman.

I usually find films in which people are constantly mean to each other irritating and upsetting, but in A Fantastic Woman Daniela Vega is so engaging I am fully drawn into her world.

She absorbs and channels all the prejudice and hatred that is unfairly thrown at her with utter dignity, being neither oblivious nor overwhelmed, but mustering all her strength and integrity to maintain her equilibrium and move on.

As she tries to grieve the death of her partner she is the recipient of all kinds of abuse, being called all sorts of nasty things; but Vega's presence speaks louder.  No, she is a grieving human being, she is fragile and yet robust, delicate and yet capable of rage, she is a woman, and certainly a fantastic woman with such poise and grace.

Spookers [2017] by Florian Habicht

A heartwarming mental illness horror documentary about community.

I would never attend the horror attraction Spookers and I would not have seen this film if I was not already familiar with the delightful and charming work of its director, Florian Habicht. Perhaps he has reached the limit of what his light and spontaneous approach is capable of accommodating. The only intention seems to be heart-warming and pleasant, and this seems to work when you're depicting falling in love on the streets of New York or getting excited about attending a pop concert, but when it comes to grotesque gore and violence, it is really not cute.

What I came to expect from the marketing is that the blood and horror of the Spookers attraction was to be intercut with the employees talking about how they found a peculiar feeling of family and home, self-expression and acceptance. Intercutting laughing, smoking and applying make-up with the horror element sounds harmless enough, diffusing the violence with the lightness and joy with which it is delivered. But it is extremely naïve to think that we as viewers don't respond to that imagery in primal and negative ways.

It is still up for debate whether or not horror films are effectively cathartic or desensitising to real-life violence. This film absolutely does not deal with these themes at all. Despite briefly talking about some Spookers attendees who become legitimately terrified and even showing footage of some almost catatonic person being gently escourted out, why an audience would want to expose themselves to this violent horror and terror is not addressed. It is fine to offer a fun and superficial film, an advertisement for the community of freaks who feel at home at Spookers, but the film attempts to address some of the deeper issues below the surface.

It is briefly mentioned that the site of Spookers used to be a psychiatric hospital where many patients were isolated for decades and severely mistreated and one of the patients is even interviewed. Some of the cast of Spookers have experienced severe mental health issues themselves or distressingly witnessed it in their family. The possibility is mentioned that Spookers may be ridiculing these real experiences or that it is reinforcing stigmatising myths about mental illness in general, but there is no depth whatsoever in the discussion. Once these serious and emotionally moving topics are introduced, the film just cuts back to more grotesque and vapid scenes of horror. I suppose this is intended to be amusing, but I found it rather upsetting. Having witnessed the traumatising possibilities of mental illness in my own intimate relationships, none of this is remotely amusing. It is naïve, irresponsible, superficial and just weak filmmaking.

Another day

Because the Queen chose to be born today 1000 years ago my local library was closed and I have had to cycle all the way into the city to be able to use a computer.  That could be potentially annoying.  As I cycle down Royal Parade through all the European trees dropping their yellow leaves on the street the reality of my environment strikes me.  I wait at the traffic lights and see a crazy filthy bird hopping all over the street.  I feel a sudden spell of appreciation for this bird's existence.  Amidst all this construction, abstraction, planning and post-human life there is a economically useless wild bird hopping about the city.  As unremarkable as the beautiful yellow leaves falling.

The world still exists.  The world has not ended.  There is still wilderness tentatively surviving the colonisation of concrete.  I have so much gratitude for the birds, trees, and wild animals inhabiting our city.  What a desolate world it would be if we really could eradicate the bats and rats.  How can I be angry at this extra ride into the city for some stupid public holiday when I am gifted the opportunity to appreciate my world.  I decided right then to acknowledge that bird - a pest? an invasive species? - as soon as I got to the library.

As I rode further some unseen bird shat on me from above.  It's black, white and translucent shit hit my hand and splashed onto my clothes.  I was not angry.  I figured I'd just go straight to the toilets and wash it off when I got to the library.  Where is my uncontrollable rage today?  The intensity of my fluctuating emotional state has lately caused the slightest disappointment, frustration or loneliness to send me into rage or despair.  But today I feel calm and focussed.  Are my emotions so arbitrary?  Are they moving through me with greater ease?

I feel peace, though my life is no more meaningful than it was yesterday.  My life is no more productive, successful or connected.  I have nothing to do and no one to meet today, nor tomorrow.  But my body is a smooth, unobstructed stream of energy, moving calmly towards the ocean.

I am prepared for further surges of the intense hopelessness that have been moving through me lately.  But today I rest in simple peace.  Today I love all the beings I share this earth with, human and non-human, plant and animal.  I will rage against the meaningless abstractions imposed upon this world another day.

Community

We gallop back and forth, all around the world, not knowing where we belong.  We follow the Rainbow, we follow the sun, we follow each other, ever-hopeful for the real life we feel in our hearts is possible; speaking about it, singing about it, visualising it, declaring it.  The world where we feel connected to those around us, alive, fulfilled.

We have a sacred role to play that is not separate from earning our living.  We make a contribution and in return, the appreciation of our community provides us food, shelter and love.  I simply need a home in which I can be naked and safe, alone and connected, with my lover and my housemates, a cosy nest in which I can wrap up warm and make love with the beautiful man who loves me.

I want to feel loved and appreciated, to make a contribution, joyously, spontaneously, from the best of myself, exactly what my people need, whether that’s performance poetry or a clean kitchen.  I am even happy to do mundane repetitive work for a busy capitalist in return for currency, but apparently the constellation of my being, as I have formed myself in this life, through which I can connect easily with diverse people, does not appeal to a utilitarian employer.

I offer the best of myself to the world.  Nothing is more fulling to me than to connect, to inspire, to serve.  To make the best contribution to the world I am capable of making, utilising my joy, my pain, my heartbreak, my sexuality, my creativity, my spontaneity, my unconventionality, my talent, my confidence, my arrogance, my empathy and my intelligence.  I will look to the world, see the job that needs doing, and do it.  I will ask the world what it needs and I will do my best to do what is asked of me. 

I love you and I give you full permission to offer me, in return, the love, the touch, the money or the home I need; whatever you feel capable of contributing I receive with the utmost gratitude.  I have needs too and I do not expect you to fulfil them, but I accept and appreciate your gifts when they come to me.

This is a spell I am passing out into the world.  I have needs right now that are not being fulfilled.  I need either money to pay rent or a home I don’t need to pay for.  I can contribute cleaning, cooking or gardening. 

I need loving touch that does not need to be sexual to satisfy the need in my soul for huwoman touch.  I need people to call me, message me, and visit me spontaneously.  In return I offer you nutritious meals, poetry, conversation and love. 

I am your Quinoa and you are my world.  Let us be a community.  Let us offer each other what we need.  I am always happy to talk to anyone about anything at any time, in real life, via message or voice call.  Assuming it is humble and not abusive, honest and gentle, I can listen, I can discuss and I can empathise.  I am not afraid of your emotions, I’m not afraid of your truth, your fears, your passions, your ideas, your shame, your joy, your sexuality or your trauma.  I only request you offer the same sensitivity and respect in return.  I can do my best to love you in whatever way you need if you would only ask. 

Please don’t be scared of me, my people.  I’m not a freak, I’m not better than you, you do not bore me.  Maybe sometimes I am awkward, intense or standoffish, but I so appreciate when people break through that veil to communicate or share with me.  I wonder sometimes if people are afraid of me or if I repel them.  I have so much love to give and so much love to receive.  I need you in my life, all of you, my locals and my distant friends, Melbourne, Facebook, the world!

Last night I performed my electronic spoken word masterpiece “My Very Nature” at a queer spoken word night at Hares & Hyenas on Johnston Street, Fitzroy.  It was a cosy, friendly place, I was given free drinks, but people would only speak to me long enough to thank me for my performance, no one allowing the conversation to develop beyond acclaim to a simple pleasant chat.  It felt like being famous.  What a peculiar hell that would be if people spoke to me like that all the time.

I am in this city now and I would like to stay if you’ll have me.  But I need real, daily, supportive community. 

Solidarity is the best tool we have in this world and community is the only way we can live, however we each choose to form these communities, wherever we choose to live.  We need each other and we deserve our freedom.  Our freedom of association, our freedom of interdependence, our freedom to live together, work together, eat together and sleep together with the utmost consent. 

I live in a society where everything is based on mutual consent.  There are sometimes coercive institutions interfering with our consensus decision making, but we have the power to defy and evade.  We have cracks to slip through and grow in, like a resilient dandelion. 

I want to live in a beautiful world populated by huwomans who love and support each other in all areas, even where there are taboos, such as money or touch.

The demonic artifice of instrumentality take 4

This is the first excerpt from the audio version of my book "How Australia Made Me An Anarchist", soon to be available in full.

The demonic artifice of instrumentality take 4

The original text is also available.

Pain and beauty

I can only assume God gave me a human body for a reason.  I can only assume that my desires and compulsions serve some purpose.  Perhaps I differ from other people in that I decided that everything I do should benefit me in some way, as opposed to destroying or numbing myself.  This is a life-long process ending inevitably with death.  I have heard theories that the self-fulfilment process continues after death, that after death you transcend these concerns to a higher level or that you cease to exist.  I do not know, I only have memory of experience this side of death and I do not pretend to speculate further.
    I propose that it is possible to know and respond to a personal truth so complete that I can only assume that it benefits me after death, on inconceivable levels and throughout parallel universes in which I may or may not exist.
    You are reading this with a particular mind, a mind that seems to be strongly embedded in a body that is strongly embedded in an environment, this universe.  It seems to me that for most people most of the time they have limited their awareness to this double-layered reality of body and universe.  We struggle as a species and as individuals to maintain and expand a valuable applicable understanding of this body/universe reality while simultaneously aware of an incomprehensibly larger and more complex reality, experienced most commonly through dreams.  We perform many convoluted experiments to understand this body/universe but we primarily get our information through the five senses; taste, smell, hearing, sight and touch.  There is also an intricate network of psychic interconnectedness, but for the purposes of this chapter I will maintain focus on the relationship with the body.
    It is impossible to separate the body and the mind, but what does promote separation is the consciousness.  Unlike the body and the mind, indistinguishable, the consciousness can choose whether or not it listens to the messages of the body.  The body communicates with the consciousness in myriad ways, but today I reduce them to pain and beauty.
    We all know that when we touch something hot the body will send a message of pain to the exact part of the body that requires conscious attention and thus the consciousness disengages the surface of the body from the excessive heat.  Pain is extremely important in knowing how to keep the body alive.  Without pain we will never know we are killing ourselves.  Pain is designed to be avoided.  We don’t want to touch the fire because the pain makes it repulsive.
    However, when we combine this natural pain avoidance instinct with the intellectual superiority complex of the human consciousness we come up with the bizarre idea that pain is “bad”.  It thus becomes a moral imperative to stop all human pain on this planet.  Being a completely hysterical process disguised as logical and with the power of human organisation and technology, this anti-pain campaign causes a lot of pain.
    There is a tendency for governments to ordain themselves with the responsibility of ending human pain and so it is the governments who maintain “defence” forces who are constantly searching for a potential enemy to attack.  Ironically this process causes a lot of pain and despite the evidence that suggests that this process does not in the long-term create peace, it is important for the survival of the governmental organisations that they maintain the appearance of stopping pain through this incredibly painful process.
    The pain of poverty is a pain that seems to span all life-forms and all time.  In the same way that a tree in poor soil, lacking the nutrients to sustain life, will slowly and painfully die, a family who can no longer extract food from their environment because the soil is barren or the animals have emigrated following the destruction of their habitat or because they have forgotten the wisdom of their ancestors about how to live with the land and have the land provide will experience the pain of hunger or starvation.
    I have never felt the pain of true hunger.  This is because I grew up in a culture defined largely by the massive feat of organisation and technology known as Capitalism, a noble effort of humanity to cease the pain of poverty forever.  However, it seems Capitalism has a few painful side-effects.  Primarily, it requires a massive amount of organisation.  It requires the sustained efforts of almost the entire human population from age 18-65 to keep the mechanisms of Capitalism moving.
    To maintain this strict regime of working 40 hours a week for 47 years is apparently very exhausting and leads to alienation, depression, stress, cancer, addiction and of course the feeling of the meaninglessness of existence.  I have memories of some of these painful experiences and tend to link them back to my own behaviour, rather than blaming the system, but I do not experience them anymore and thus do not feel comfortable talking about them.  It seems the above painful symptoms are unavoidable side-effects of those who choose to dedicate their lives to Capitalism in the hope that they never experience the pain of poverty.
    From the moment a child is born into this world they begin to learn.  They learn about their world and their place in the world.  For depictions of a natural, chaotic human education read the novels of Hermann Hesse.  This process, known in Australian tradition as Walkabout, involves a confrontation with nature, where Chaos reigns and the individual must rely on the inconsistent support of synchronicity, God and the kindness of strangers.  One can never predict what will result from this individuation process, destruction, realisation, simplicity or corruption.  It is irremovable from the rhythms of life and the movements of nature and thus fits awkwardly with Civilisation.  Thus Civilisation has provided Education.
    The purpose of Education is to send every child to an identical structured environment to memorise an identical curriculum and thus iron out, as much as possible, the natural variations and discrepancies in the children’s responses to the world.
    It is possible that some children, precocious in their examination but short-sighted in their ignorance, feel some confusion about the state of the world maintained by their culture, seeing the control structures’ apparent anti-human behaviour but not seeing the pain that it alleviates, the equality of thought and behaviour, the alienation from the dangerously chaotic nature of an uncontrolled earth.
    A successful education therefore relieves the child from the pain of self-examination and potential confusion by embedding them deeply in the rhythms of Capitalism, repetitive and therefore reliable, smoothing out the defects and deviations of nature.  Having completed a successful education a successful child will have successfully managed to find a way to contribute while maintaining an arsenal of logical explanations and entertaining distractions from urges encouraging their spiritual fulfilment outside of the civilised mechanisms of Capitalism.
    Just as war can be a painful road to peace, so can Education be a painful process for the child, channelling frustration into bullying, channelling confusion into conformity and self-expression into drug abuse.  But this pain is inevitably necessary to maintain the cultural unity necessary to perpetuate Capitalism and obviate other natural forms of pain.
    The most commonly accepted form of pain is, of course, physical pain, caused by illness or injury.  To alleviate physical pain completely humans have organised the impressively complex Health Industry.  Health, in this context, is painlessness, because pain, deep within the fundamental unexamined belief systems of the Health Industry, is “bad”.
    Pain is manifest as “symptoms” which can be repressed with the aid of drugs like antihistamines, for the repression of the symptoms of allergy, anti-depressants, for the repression of the symptoms of Civilisation, and of course the epitome of the Health Industry, pain killers such as paracetamol and morphine, all of which help the civilised man continue for as long as possible in an unhealthy environment without pain.
    Sometimes it is necessary to target the source of pain by cutting out a cancer or removing an individual from society and placing them in a mental institution or prison and thus tackling the root of the problem and allowing the continuation of an unhealthy environment.
    One of the unavoidable side-effects of the Health Industry is the dependence on drugs and experts that alienates the individual from their own body, what it needs to maintain healthy and heal itself, how it responds to its environment and the substances it consumes.  The Health Industry, it can be said, is addictive.
    The primary intention of the Health Industry in relation to pain is to overcome death, an aim not yet fulfilled.  In light of this failure the Health Industry compromises by withholding death for as long as possible, desperately clinging to the last seconds of life, regardless of their quality.  It seems death, inevitable though it is, is the shameful failure of our anti-pain culture.  Death is the most painful thing of all, the prospect of death, the process of death and the results of death are unbearably painful for a society in so much denial about reality and what it means to be alive.  Who could argue with the necessity of stopping death when it confronts us with our temporality, our deep involvement with the processes of nature, loss and loneliness.
    My mother’s death was the most powerfully transformative pain of my life, stripping me naked of the supportive nurturing aura of love I had experienced since birth and thrusting me fully equipped with the responsibility and autonomy of adulthood into a world far vaster than I anticipated.  My mother killed herself 25 days after my 21st birthday, for which she organised a surprise party for me, designed to lift me out of the depression into which I had sank.
    The depression was caused by a new realisation of the personal and social possibilities of the world and a simultaneous lack of change of lifestyle to match my realisations, excessive use of marijuana and obsessive love.  My mother’s death, unlike her surprise birthday party, rocked my world to the extent that all my foundations collapsed and I was left alone in a terrestrial environment that I slowly discovered was not as dangerous, chaotic or lonely as I had been warned.

Pain has been one of the guiding forces of my life.  Unlike a recurring dream that repeats again and again if not acknowledged I don’t seem to need so much pain to listen and understand and make appropriate changes.  But sometimes I need a jolt of pain like a dose of ECT.
    Seven years ago I wandered down to the beach one Sunday after work, alone.  I met a group of people who excited and fascinated me, I went home with them and they became my friends.  One man in particular, Darius, 21, I found particularly fascinating and disgusting the first time I met him.  The second time I saw him we realised an intense unspoken connection between the two of us.  We were young and stoned and could not have imagined that this intensity between us was years of evolving friendship stretching backwards through time.
    We were all stoned and Darius cornered me alone in the kitchen.  He picked up a knife and held it towards me and he asked me to lie on the floor so he could cut me open and eat my intestines.  I refused, semi-erect and scared of death.  From this moment on his presence or lack of presence was my only concern, I was in love, I was obsessed.  The deeper I got into this obsessive love the more pain I felt at the slightest rejection, the more impossible it became to tell him how I feel and thus diffuse the situation.  My silent intensity increased, along with my marijuana intake and the pain of his absence would cause me to bang my head against the wall and to punch myself in the face.  I resolved the situation by finally sending him a desperate intense email about months of repressed feelings that I could not possibly say to his face like a human being.  He sent me a short, dismissive callous reply that stabbed my heart figuratively and provoked me to break my relationship with him completely, banish him from my life for a few years until I calm down.  His reply seemed exceptionally mean-spirited at the time but it was just what I needed, a shock of pain, because I had built mental structures and lifestyle structures to facilitate the feeling of a lot of low-level pain.  For some reason I needed that pain and I found a way of manifesting it.  Finally, I felt it intensely enough to change my life, to ease the pain.
    Somehow I knew that I would not see him for years and then our friendship would somehow be renewed.  He moved in with his mother and girlfriend not far from where I was living on the far north west coast of New Zealand and we reunited, free from the need to experience the pain we had caused ourselves and each other six years earlier.
    I fell in love again though, shortly after banishing Darius from my life.  My flatmate’s brother came to visit and he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  Samuel was 15 years old, with long blonde hair and soft white skin.  I wanted to raise him on a pedestal as an artefact of extreme beauty; I wanted to make love to him, fulfil my desire, worship his body and bring him pleasure.  I felt desire, admiration, shame and delight and I didn’t know what to do with this bundle of conflicting emotions and so I did nothing, again repressing my love as a shameful object.  I hid, I made outbursts, I ran away and I mumbled my desire and of course with such chaotic unstable expressions I created no manifestation of our mutual love.
    Three years after the instigation of this internal affair I had only one option left.  Samuel was working as a body piercer and so I decided to have him pierce my nipple.  I sat on his bench and he pushed his sanitised needle through my nipple.  I felt no pain, but a wave of heat passed over my body and I almost fainted.  He laid me back and lifted my legs until I returned to normal.  I invited him to have a drink with me and we had a nice talk; but I told him I “care about” him when I should have told him that I want to make love with him.  This initial meeting became nothing and I made another appointment for my second nipple.  I approached my second piercing differently.  My brother told me that having his nipple pierced was the most painful thing he had experienced.  I wasn’t convinced that my yearning for this beautiful young man was a lesser pain than having a needle shoved through my nipple.
    I lay down on the bench, I closed my eyes and I focussed on my breath.  I felt no pain, no discomfort, just the intensity of the moment wash over me like a single wave from the cleansing ocean.  I stood, thanked him and left.  He was surprised by my abrupt behaviour but I had determined to move on with my life, to provide that last dose of pain and then make room for a new love.  I got the pain I somehow needed through frustrated love until the pain was sufficient and then I chose for it to end.  Why would I cause myself so much pain?  I don’t know, all I know is that I created all the necessary variables to experience and prolong that pain until I was finished with it, then I orchestrated a rather convoluted symbolic situation in which to end the process.  Three years later I have fallen in love many times since and he is but a memory and my friend on Facebook.
    This was 2008, my final year in Auckland.  I truly tried my best to live the life I was educated to live.  I got my degree, I paid my rent, everything was taken away from me when I lost my mother, my home and my life purpose, I wandered around in confusion, I came back to Auckland to try again.  I tried again with Samuel, I hung out with the Hare Krishnas and I wrote and performed poetry.  I returned to Auckland for two full years after my depression and lonely wandering manifested nothing tangible.  A fulfilling life failed to materialise for me in the city, despite my honest attempts.
    I found myself, towards the end of my second year, experiencing the same marijuana-fuelled depression I had run away from last time.  There was so much existential pain in my meaningless life and I had no idea why.  I didn’t know it at the time, having spent my entire life living in houses, but I was suffering from what I would go on to call Domestic Compulsive Disorder.  I didn’t know what I could do differently, all I knew was that my life was meaningless and I had to do something about it.  I smoked more marijuana and stayed home more, with the comforts of television, internet, the bath and my bed.
    I found myself, late one midweek morning, cowering in a corner of the living room in a foetal position, my last cone of marijuana packed into my bong, unsmoked, the banging of my head no longer providing relief from the unavoidable noise of the pain I had made for myself, non-physical but tangibly palpable.  The pain hurt but I can’t say it was bad.
    I saw life as a wave of fluctuating ups and downs, rather than the steep climb from unconsciousness to enlightenment and at that moment, in that room, in that foetal position, I saw clearly the exact moment I hit rock bottom, as I had been aiming for months, and thus began the ascent up the other side.  I instantly felt my energy come back, so strong I felt indignation at my pathetic position and I channelled this manic energy into immediate life change.  I ran around the house smashing my belongings, the useless objects that weighed me down to a life that did not satisfy.  The pain had finally reached a sufficient level to provoke action.  That night I filled two rubbish sacks with useless objects I had accumulated and that sucked up the space around me.  I smashed my bong on the driveway, throwing it from the balcony and unintentionally baptising myself in shit-stinking bong water as it flew from my hand and momentum took the bong and not the water inside.
    So quickly and easily I was free and could spend the next few months clearing out the practical considerations before leaving Auckland for my first invitation to paradise.
    Living a healthy lifestyle in a nurturing inspiring environment I would lay in bed at night in utter peace, I would feel emotions moving through my body like blood, like water.  I tried to understand these feelings, to name them.  I felt happiness and sadness overlap until they were indistinguishable.  I couldn’t look at my life and decide whether I was failing or succeeding and therefore whether my emotions were happy or sad; my life was a blank slate.  I felt confident to do anything, to go anywhere, or to stay put and do nothing.  If I felt sick I would fast and go to bed, but I lived under a skylight on a mezannine and it was too hot there during the day.  I was always happy to get out of bed in the morning and face the brightness and the vast ocean and the sound of its waves rolling up the hill like an amphitheatre.  If I felt depressed or tired I found work to do or I walked the dogs down to the beach and I would return hungry and tired to eat and relax.
    Pain would pass through me quickly and easily.  The dogs would kindly and lovingly lick my wounds without me having to ask.  Every morning I would feel new, every time I dived naked into the ocean I would emerge refreshed.  When my hair was cut it would rot back into the earth, along with everything else that could not be recycled or fed to the pigs.  I would kneel on the earth to weed the strawberry patch, I would bend down towards the earth to pick my salads, and I would lie down on the earth in the long grass and masturbate looking at the sky.  Pain was not an issue.
    I had lots of friends, Auckland was a good place to make friends, the social networks were well-defined and interconnected.  I described my paradise to them and they told me they would come to visit, but mostly they did not.  Nothing was more special than the days when my friends did come to visit and I accommodated them in my bed or on my floor.  To bring friends to share paradise with me was all the joy I needed and taught me what the next step in my life was.
    The two friends who came to visit me, the only two not trapped by the accumulations and commitments of their lives, inspired me to travel freely with them.  I had all the time in the world, but still there was only time for the most beautiful people and so I dedicated my life to them.  I followed Bill and Lauren until there was more beauty this side of my horizon.  I followed beauty to Australia and returned to paradise to find the dogs dead.  I could not maintain paradise and pursue beauty simultaneously, so I chose beauty, dreaming that one day I would return to paradise with a precious friend to share it with.
    I met four Swedish men in Australia and travelled with them.  We experienced so much joy together, I fell in love with them all and they invited me back to Sweden with them.  I flew to Sweden, I saw my friends and I have not 15 months later returned to New Zealand.
    In 2007 I was searching for a new home and I was blessed to be able to choose from two delightful prospects.  I was shown around one house by a beautiful young man, sexy, friendly, and for this reason only one decision was possible.  I never made love to this sexy young man but somehow I knew when I first looked at him that I was being offered something in him.  Now, four years later, we are about to be in the same country again, drastically different people both, but a persistent connection, manifest in my experience of his luminous beauty and the continued potential of our friendship.
    The world is so open and giving to me.  I do not earn money and yet even material objects are abundant.  Because of my freedom and joy there is a lot of room in my life to pursue what is meaningful to me, to change my mind and pursue the best option, to not know where my actions will take me.
    I marvel at this world’s insistence that pain is bad when it continues to provide me with invaluable information about the world I am living in.  Beauty is the most important thing in my life and I pursue beauty relentlessly, though I don’t know what to do with it when I get it.  It is painful to be rejected, though only for a moment.  When I am accepted the joy can be so overwhelming it could be called pain.  When I’m feeling strong I can lie under the stars, lonely but at peace, feeling the pain of my yearning for my absent lover and smiling at this delicious pain.  Only when I hold my breath is the pain unbearable, when I breathe well I can be sure that I can go outside and urinate and it will soak into the earth.
    When I slash open my thumb or am attacked by Police I can’t help but ask, “Why have I done this to myself?”  “I didn’t mean to,” some might say.  “It was an accident.”  But it is never accidental.  When my presence, my actions and my relationship to my environment are entirely in my control I cannot claim that the results of these variables are accidental.  When I tell my friend that I would like a good cry because I never cry, and then I forget the comment completely, and then I move on with my life and orchestrate a series of events that results unexpectedly in me crying in the rain in Stockholm alone and then I return to my friend and she reminds me of my comment, I wonder if my dedication to the meaning and purpose of my life is entirely the responsibility of consciousness.
    When I am not making conscious plans, pursuing them and succeeding, am I a failure, am I failing to realise my potential, am I being led nowhere by no one?  That cannot be true when I find myself in increasingly surprising and beautiful places with so many exciting and beautiful people.  I have never been able to conceive of plans as complex and delightful as the turns my life has taken.  I would never dare hope for so much love and beauty and my imagination is not great enough to conceive of the wonders I have seen.
    Like Alice following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole I am ready to jump at the right offer and abandon everything I know for the unexpected.  I have been warned of danger by people who barricade themselves in houses but my experience consistently contradicts their threats disguised as advice.
    When I sleep on the bare earth I am safe from snakes and crocodiles and Police.  Even rain usually gives me the night to rest beside the fire.  I find beautiful people and I am not scared of them like I used to be.  I naturally give the most exciting the most attention.  Perhaps I will tell them how I feel, if appropriate, or maybe I will just touch their shoulder and look into their eyes.  Even then I have discovered it is difficult to look into both eyes at once.
    When I do what I am compelled to do I don’t see how I can fail.  My purpose, after all, is to realise myself fully in this world and then dissolve into another world via death.  If I notice a beautiful human my conscious mind may tell me I want to make love to them.  The truth of my body cannot be translated into language however.  Maybe I’m not going to make love to this person, maybe we are simply going to share space with the knowledge that I want to make love and he does not, and maybe this is sufficiently intense and valuable.
    I go to temporary Edens where my tribe gathers and the true movements of life, emerging from the earth, emerging from the space between the humans that excite and terrify us the most, emerging from the subtleties of our bodies, become our guiding forces and are intensified in the natural environment and the familiar social structure of the tribe.  The concept that some emotions or situations are “good” and others “bad” becomes too ludicrous to entertain.  The ups and downs are rich and dynamic, they are my life and I value them.
    One day I am feeling lonely and horny and want to make a connection.  I walk to the waterhole to swim under the sun with my tribe and my frustration is exasperated by my observation that everyone seems to be ignoring me.  I stand amongst the people, interacting with one another, thinking I want their attention but I’m too sad and weak to ask for it.  Eventually I storm off up the path alone.  Everyone else walks slowly together, but I charge ahead, angry at being ignored.  It occurs to me that I obviously want to be alone and thus I walk alone despite my habit of togetherness.  It occurs to me that all day I have wanted to be alone and successfully I have manifested this through the pathetic conscious idea that I desperately need someone to validate me with their attention.  If my intention was personal space then I am amazed that I manipulated my own consciousness to such an extent that I repelled those around me with desperation.  Am I ever not manifesting my intentions when my true will is this powerful and my conscious mind so irrelevant?
    I am not alone in this world.  When I follow a beauty I can only assume he wants to be followed.  We have chosen each other to share this experience.  We have chosen each other before our lives began, we chose each other in another dimension or outside of time, we chose each other via the unconscious psychic network that connects us all.  I don’t know, but I know that we choose beauty to communicate with each other.
    Why am I staring at this child I do not know, how we could be friends I cannot imagine, but your beauty singles you out like a spotlight and rest assured that I have noticed and I am ready to honour or love you the second the opportunity arises.
    The more carefully I listen to the messages of my body, the more it tells me.  It seems there is always a deeper and richer and more complex understanding to be gained from real communication.  Words may be limited in their capacity, but pain and beauty hold an infinite depth of perfect contextualised truth.
    I guess if I calmly and confidently pursue this beauty who presents herself to me I will understand what we mean to each other.  If I respond to the subtle pains of my body with respect and love then I may not need the gross extremes of pain I have created for myself in the past.
    Life is an ever-opening flower of incomprehensible beauty.