74. Autobiography: The Drains 2

I started teaching in 1965. In my second – perhaps third – year of teaching I came across the Stephen Spender poem: My parents kept me from children who were rough. The poem resonated with me; I had that frisson of recognition, that Eureka experience. The boy in the poem was me.

My parents kept me from children who were rough. They rarely allowed me to play in the streets of Coburg. Ours was a rough area. The boys in the streets around our place were tough. I spent my days in our back yard or indoors, playing my solitary games, and envisioning achievements: being the first man to walk on the moon. I built intricate road systems around the tomato and the rhubarb bushes, for my Dinky cars.

I knew from an early age the superiority of the rough boys. Eddie Fennell had done me out of sixpence. The Scarletts had made it through the drain, while I sat by the entrance, paralysed by questions: What if?

What if there were a sudden storm, and a wall of water surged through the drain? What if I caught polio myelitis? I knew that term almost as soon as I could walk: polio myelitism. They were words my parents pronounced very carefully, always according that disease respect, giving it its full title.

“Never play in gutters – you could catch polio myelitis.”

Two diseases held me in awe as a child: polio and whooping cough. My parents dreaded both. There had been a polio epidemic a few years before; it had claimed the lives of many children, and left others – like the writer, Alan Marshall – permanently crippled. My parents had already experienced the pain of child death on two occasions; their fear was powerful, gargantuan.

Polio and whooping cough were high on the list of my childhood fears, up there with the Boogeyman, who lurked behind trees in the dark of night, and Ching-Chong Chinaman, and the old woman who pushed a pram around the streets of Coburg and Moreland, collecting treasures from other people’s garbage bins. All threatened, though in a vague, undefined way. But I was full of fears. I knew nothing of the character of polio myelitis, its cuases, its consequences – I simply knew it was to be feared. The smell of the drain was sufficient to tell me that here lay danger, that this place was alive with disease and with germs.

There were rats there, too – long, sleek, ugly rats that lived on the offal and waste that was carried in the slimy waters.

Another danger lurked in the drain, a threat more potent than the rats, or the smell or the potential disease. The underground portion of the drain ran beneath Pentridge, the high walled prison that housed the worst of Victoria’s criminals. The back portion of the jail contained the farm area and acres or uncultivated land. What if some prisoner were to hide in the paddock? What if there were a manhole or grill into the drain? What if some prisoner had found it, and was hiding there, in the drain, waiting for night?
The walls of Pentridge were a stone’s throw from the low cyclone wire fence that ran along the back of the school playground. During little play and big play small knots of children would stand along the fence line, under spreading peppercorn trees, and gaze across the road at the bluestone walls, wondering what they held.

There were stories, whispered in the shelter sheds and the boys’ dunnies, or out under the peppercorns, that the drain was a secret escape route. To our boyish minds, it seemed very possible that such a thing could happen – indeed, had happened. These imaginings were fuelled by a film of those times: The Third Man, with its haunting theme music, its narrow, ill-lit streets, and its pies carrying out their work beneath the city, in its sewers and drains.

But none of the “What ifs” was the real cause of my lack of adventure. What compelled me to sit outside while others ventured in, and through, was the sure knowledge that my mother would not want me to go there, would not approve of my entering that foul smelling drain.

How many drains did I avoid as a child?

I was wandering home from school one day. My route took me past the Coburg Railway station. Beside the path was a stand of shiny leafed, gnarled and stunted trees. I was later to learn how you could fold the almost round leaves in two, then blow through one end, to produce a high-pitched, buzzing sound. Among the trees I saw someone squatting; a bare bottom was clearly visible. It was a child, someone around my own age I guessed. He – or more intriguingly, she – was squatting to do a poo. (That is what I would have called it then; the word “shit” was not yet part of my vocabulary).

The body moved uneasily at my foot tread, waddling a little deeper into the undergrowth and the dark shade. I was drawn by curiosity, by the faint pull of an undefined sexual inquisitiveness. But the censor in me won out, the mental embodiment of all of the “Do nots” and “Should nots” of my nine or ten years. I did not find out whether it was a boy or girl. I walked on, out of the bushes, embarrassed and a little guilty. I walked down the underpass, along beside the railway line, down Loch Street, and around the corner to my house in Reynard Street, Coburg, there to play with my dinky toys, and dwell in my mind on what I had seen, and wonder about what I had not seen.

73. Autobiography: Down the Drain

The gullet trap at the back of our house smells. It is like the open earth drain that runs down Dorset Street, Pascoe Vale, where my aunt and uncle live. Or like some of the lockers at the Brunswick Baths after someone has left wet bathers or a wet towel for a couple of weeks. The odour is stale, pungent, insidious.

The oval at McDonalds Reserve smells like that too.

(It no longer exists, but it was a huge, open stormwater drain, perhaps ten metres wide and more than a metre deep. The drain ran in a north/south direction, emerging from its subterranean course at Bell Street. It was open for a distance of perhaps two hundred and fifty metres, then disappeared under the walls of Pentridge. There were many such drains around Melbourne in the 1940s and 1950s, but they have gradually been replaced by underground drains. The McDonalds’ Reserve drain usually carried only a trickle of water, except after a heavy downpour. Some twenty metres outside the bluestone wall of Pentridge, the drain went underground. While the exposed section was paved with bluestone, the underground section was concrete – concrete base, concrete walls, concrete roof. The drain swept in a wide arc under the Pentridge “farm”, and eventually emerged – perhaps 500 metres away – and discharged its contents into the Merri Creek.)

How many times have I sat on the rocks beside this drain, too afraid to enter, waiting for my more adventurous friends. Once I ventured into darkness, but only briefly. I preferred to return to the rectangle of light behind me than to go on into the darkness that lay before me.

What is it that enables some kids to explore cliffs and water holes, old houses and drains, while others sit outside, afraid to enter, afraid to climb, afraid to venture in?

Graeme and Peter Scarlett – the twins –and Eric Wardley had not only entered the drain, and stayed inside; they had emerged from the other end. They had travelled its length, in the darkness, without torches, and had emerged, triumphant, from beneath the threateningly high back wall of Pentridge, emerged onto the banks of the foul smelling Merri Creek.

Eddie Fennel, too. I remember Eddie Fennell. Sometimes I wonder what path his life has taken. In Miss Corrie’s class, I always sat in Row 1, with the bright children. Eddie sat at the very back of Row 6. Eddie was probably backward; he was certainly slow at his school work. Our seating in the class was determined on how well we performed on the monthly tests.

For the whole of my grade 6 year, the back row seat was occupied by Marion Davis, and by either Jacqueline Callaghan or a slight girl with whitish hair named Louise. These three invariably topped the tests. We would be tested on spelling, punctuation, dictation, arithmetic, mental arithmetic, composition, reading aloud … For most of the year I sat in Row 1. I spent a month in the first seat of Row 2, sitting next to Coral Williams.

The tests gave Miss Corrie the information she needed. We were seated according to our relative position in the mark hierarchy of the class. It stared with Marion Davis, in the No. 1 seat at the back of Row 1, UP Row 1, down Row 2, up 3, down 4, up 5, down 6 – to Eddie Fennell and Katrina Kurley. Most of the ones who sat in between have been lost to my memory, although a few remain there: Ian Cann, who broke my front tooth when he pushed my head down onto the drinking tap; Eric Wardley; Graeme and Peter Scarlett, who were to remain friends through school and beyond; Graeme Foo, who was “top boy” in our grade 6, and who went on to Coburg High, and from there became a motor mechanic; Laurie Ferguson, who was the son of a bookmaker; Coral Williams, who became a school teacher; Marion Hall, Rosalyn Blencowe, Joan Jenkins…

I wonder what became of the rest of Miss Corrie’s Grade 6 class of 1954. how many are living, dead, happy, mad? How many have had ulcers, cancer, heart attacks? How many beat their wives and children? How many murderers, playrights, plumbers, nuns, accountants, PhDs in Chemistry?

Eric Wardley is dead now, and so is Eddie Fennell. Eddie’s sister told me of his death at the 150th anniversary reunion of Coburg 484, in 2003. The Scarletts are alive. Marion Davis went into teaching, as did Coral Williams.
I recall one day when I had just moved from the Little School, on the south side of Bell Street, to the Big School. I was in Grade 3; Miss Browning was my teacher. I had found thruppence, maybe sixpence, in the sawdust and rubbish swept up outside Moran and Cato’s. I saw it shining there, in the dust, and claimed it as mine.
I found six pence
Jolly, jolly sixpence
I found sixpence
To last me all my life
I’ve got twopence to spend
And twopence to lend
And twopence to take home to my wife…

Foolishly, I told my school friends of my find.
“Whered’ya find it?” asked Eddie Fennell.
“Outside Moran and Cato’s,” I said, too naïve to see what was coming.
“That’s mine,” he told me. “I lost it there last night.”
“True dinks?” I asked. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
“Yeah!” he said, firmly. “You’d better give it to me.” His voice was menacing.
I gave Eddie Fennell the coin.

Eddie Fennell had been down that drain. He was afraid. I ventured maybe twenty metres, then turned back.

72. The Joys of Writing: Some Quotes

From: Wim Kayser A Glorious Accident

Sacks – on writing
“… I write by hand. Never computers. I’m computer illiterate. I’m afraid I might erase everything. I do like the mechanical heaviness of this typewriter, but most of all I like to write by hand… I often do little pictures as well, and I write in different colours. Sometimes little diagrams … basically I travel everywhere with pen and paper. All my books were written like this. In my house you’d see a whole roomful. I have my notebook with me now…”

Sacks: “The brain is not a computer, it is an orchestra of a thousand musicians; it is a work of art.”

Haldane: “The universe is not only weirder than we ever imagined it, it is even weirder than we can imagine.”

Dennett: “We are all faced with the baffling phenomenon: how could anything be more familiar and at the same time more weird than the mind? .”

Sacks: “… we are not blanks at birth’ we are really a billion years old.”

Matthew Arnold: “Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret to style.”

And a final joyful puzzle for people who like unlikely sentence constructions:

What are you like on stringing prepositions together? Could you manage to write a grammatically correct sentence using nine prepositions consecutively?

“…There was a little boy who, it is said, disliked a book about Australia that his mother was fond of reading to him at bedtime and (who) finally demanded, ‘What have you brought that book I don’t like being read to out of about Down Under up for?’”

71. Autobiography: Long and lanky, skinny and cranky

Long and lanky, skinny and cranky
1
That’s how my mum used to describe me when I was 11 or 12 or so, and shooting up like a beanstalk. You don’t hear the word cranky these days. It was a word of the 1940s and 1950s – a word of a bygone era. You don’t hear lanky much these days either. Or cobber or bonzer.

They’ve gone, or all but gone. Like zac and bob and two bob and florin and quid and twopence and ha’panny and tray and deena – all words that have lost their currency.

Should I add the once obligatory ‘If you’ll pardon the pun’? As if there is something unseemly about puns. Critics of puns would inevitably trot out the old injunction: ‘The pun is the lowest form of wit’. For as long as I can remember, I’ve long loved puns and punning. Where did that come from, I wonder? I recall that it was my father who introduced me to puns. One of his favourite jokes concerned Johnny and the teacher:

Teacher: Johnny, I want you to use these three words in a sentence: delight, depot and defender.
Johnny: Sure, Teacher. De light was out, de pot was full, so I did it in de fender.
Dosh and spondoola have also gone, and no one calls anyone a bot any more. For a time bots and botting were transformed into scabs and scabbing, but they too have disappeared – slid out of the language like a kid slipping out of side gate to wag school for the afternoon. Nowadays, if I want to read Kay Arthur’s story Wagging to a group of kids I have to explain what the term means; they understand the concept, of course; it’s just the term they don’t know. Kids don’t ‘nick off’ or ‘play hookey’ or play truant any more. I never once wagged school – I was never game, never had the guts to wag school.

Wag also had other connotations too that no longer have currency. Once you might say of someone: ‘He’s a bit of a wag’ – meaning that he’s a card, or a trick. A wag was someone who could make you laugh at their antics – a practical joker, a trickster.
Then there was chin wag. – or as my dad called it, jawing. A chin wag was a chat, a talk.
I was born in 1953, and grew up at a time when Australians spoke of Japs and Krauts, when the only kind of spaghetti you could buy in a cafe was Kiaora brand tinned spaghetti’ – spaghetti in a thick tomato sauce, and usually served on toast.

2
I was certainly lanky. At 14 I was already taller than both my father and my mother – the second tallest boy in my class at school. My mother was five foot two ... Being five foot two – petite – was fashionable back then.
Five foot two, eyes of blue
But oh what those five feet can do
Has anybody seen my gal?
Five foot two – I don’t even know what that is in metric.
Dad wasn’t much taller; five foot four.

Linda Robina May Kipping was born in Casterton, and raise in Hamilton, in the Western District of Victoria. She left there in her twenties, and travelled to ‘the city’ as it was then called – or more precisely, The City – Melbourne. She had left school at fifteen, at the end of grade three.
Dad was 14 when he left school. His full name was Herbert Garibaldi Carozzi. When Dad left the Catholic school in Coburg he was in Grade 5. He’d been ‘kept down’ several times, and could neither read nor write when he left.

When I had my growth spurt and ‘shot up’, my mum started saying, ‘We’ll have to put a brick on his head!’ My parents worried about me. They worried a lot, because they were scared that they might ‘lose me’.

They had had a lot of trouble conceiving a child. Over the years I picked up snippets of information. By rights I should have had two siblings - an older brother and a little sister; however, my brother was still born and my sister died within a couple of hours of birth. Mum had also had numerous miscarriages.

Sometimes I think about those little babies, one dead at birth, all blue and limp and lifeless, and what it must have been like for my mother to see such a sight after the nine months of hope and longing and dreaming. And for it to happen a second time.

I witnessed at first hand the births of four of my five children. Back in the 1970s that was a relatively uncommon thing. The stereotypical father paced the waiting room until a nurse emerged to tell him ‘It’s a boy!’ But in the 70s, ‘modern’ men were wanting to be present, and provided you had the doctor’s approval, you could be present – although you were required to be quiet and keep out of the way. You were allowed to hold your wife’s hand and speak quietly to her as she went through the pain of labour and birthing. You weren’t allowed to watch any of the actual birth; you weren’t allowed to see the baby crown, and to watch your child emerged from its mother, all wet and covered in mucous and blood.

70. On chatter

• Chatter, Silence and Focus
  
  Our lives are full of chatter, full of the noise of human voices, a constant chattering that not only comes from all around us, but that emanates from within our own heads. Radio and television provide a constant barrage of idle chatter, of small talk. Take talk back radio: It’s hardly ever a discussion we’re hearing - simply the sound of people who like the sound of their own voice. The airing of someone’s usually poorly articulated view.
  
  We chatter to each other to fill the silence, prattling on about this or that, and it is, to quote the Bible – Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians – ‘ a clanging gong or a sounding cymbal … signifying nothing’. And therein lies the nub of the thing: the lack of significance.
  
  In a wonderful line in his poem Australia, A D Hope writes:
  
  The Chattering of apes that passes as civilization over there …
  
  And let me be clear – I am as guilty of this ‘idle chatter’ as anyone.
  
  There is a scene in the film “As Good As It Gets” when the Jack Nicholson character attempts to express what it is that attracts him to the Helen Hunt character. He is an anti-social misfit, a writer of romance novels whose only pleasure in life is to insult and upset other people, an isolated, alienated, desperately lonely, thoroughly unlikeable man. But he sees something in the Helen Hunt character that others don’t see: that she only says things that she means, that she only talks about things that really matter, that when she speaks, it is about things she cares about deeply; she is honest, she is not putting on a show, a front, a façade. She speaks from the heart.
  
  There is distinction between ‘chatter’ and ‘conversation’. Conversation requires engagement: we engage with each other, we talk of things that matter. In one of his earlier songs, ‘The Dangling Conversation’, Paul Simons writes:
  And we speak of things that matter
  In words that must be said:
  Can analysis be worthwhile?
  Is the theatre really dead?
  
  And we sit and drink our coffee
  Couched in our indifference
  Like shells upon the shore
  We can hear the ocean roar.
  
  Simon gives us a brief glimpse of a couple whose relationship is drained of all meaning and life. The talk of ‘things that matter’ is, in fact, superficial chatter; each is actually ‘couched in indifference’, they are ‘shells upon the shore’ – no longer living creatures but empty shells, capable of seeming to produce the sound of the life force – the sea – but in fact lacking in substance, in life. The heart has gone from their ‘dangling conversation’.
  
  In his analysis of language, linguist M A K Halliday identified a wide range of functions – uses we put language to:



• To represent: to ‘name’ things



• To control others



• To express emotion



• To establish social contact



• To maintain social contact



• To include or exclude others from groups



• To inform or instruct



• To think ideas through

Interestingly, he also included ‘to fill time’, to fill the silence. Chatter is a way of breaking the silence.

I know of households where the TV is never off; it provides constant background noise – the chatter of voices and the sound of music. Many young people walk around with earplugs from their CDs, listening to their favourite music. They switch them off, though, when they are SMSing their friends. Of mobile phones, one 14 year old said, “I’d be lost without my phone. How could I talk to my friends.’

A young friend of mine set off on a journey around Australia recently. She and her friend took an I-pod with them - a little electronic gizmo that save you the problem of carrying large numbers of CDs. The I-pod carries literally hundreds of CDs on a silicon chip. The device is about the size of a cigarette box.

What is this need for the comfort of chatter? What is it about silence that makes us uncomfortable?

Throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, I craved company. I hated being alone – in part because I had grown up a lonely little boy with few friends. I recall a time when I was in my 20s. I was a teacher, as was my wife. We were living in Glenroy. If I arrived home from school and she was not there, I would become agitated and uncomfortable, and would go out and visit neighbours or friends. I hated being alone. It was as though I needed the reassurance and company of others to feel as though I existed. That’s the way I thought of it then: I lacked a strong sense of a self; I was defined by my social relations. I needed other people to tell me who I was.

I think I see it differently now. I think my ‘core self’ was always there, and it frightened me, because it was lonely, isolated, worthless. Give me the chatter of friends and acquaintances rather than the empty lonely shell that I feel when I am alone.
I think we chatter to fill the silence and to evade the truth. Chatter is a cover up, a time filler, a distraction from the deeper, significant things that trouble us. Silence frightens us – or at least some of us.

When Freud first developed psychoanalysis it was called ‘the talking cure’. These days there is a booming industry in talking cures of various kinds, psychotherapies of various persuasions. Our faith in the power of the spoken word to heal has a long long history. In the Catholic Church, people go to confession: “Forgive me Father for I have sinned”. They go through the ritual of confession, and they are given absolution; in the confession box, the sinner is cleansed, freed from the burden of sin. In Christian scriptures, Christ’s words can achieve miracles: the lame can walk again, even Lazarus can rise from the dead; it simply takes the words of Christ to achieve these things.

When couples are having trouble, they talk it over. They clear the air. The talk needed to ‘sort things out’ is, however, not chatter. It is the kind of deep conversation in which we say only the things that we mean, in which we only talk about things that really matter; when we speaks, it is about things we care about deeply; we are honest, we are not putting on a show, a front, a façade. We speak from the heart.

Not that that is always easy. And often, what we do have to say is painful both to ourself and to the other.
Silence is another possibility. When the spiritual seeker and writer, Thomas Merton, visited the giant statues of the Buddha at Polonnaruwa he saw them as standing for a way of life that “needs nothing” and can therefore “afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered.” They have “seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything – without refutation – without establishing some other argument … For the doctrinaire, such silence can be frightening.”

Spiritual traditions - whether Christian, Buddhist, New Age, whatever – have established silence at the core of the spiritual experience. In prayer, in silent meditation, we are able to ‘get in touch’ with god, with the spiritual.

Of meditation, Stephanie Dowrick writes (The Age Good Weekend Magazine, July 31, 2004):
There is a wonderful story told about the Buddha, who was once asked, “What have you gained through meditation?”
“Nothing at all,” he answered.
“Then, Blessed One, what good is it?” he was asked.
To which he replied, “Let me tell you what I have lost in meditation: sickness, depression, anger, insecurity, the burden of old age and the fear of death. That is the good of meditation, which leads to Nirvana (freedom from selfish and useless desires).”

She goes on to quote the Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius:

Are you distracted by outward cares? Then allow yourself a space of quiet, wherein you can add to your knowledge of the Good and learn to curb your restlessness. Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but creatures of your own fancy, you can rid yourself of them and expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe.”

69. Obsessions: A Short Story?

In his sixty first year Simon became a new man.
“I am the focal point of the universe,” he wrote in his journal. “Gamma rays from distant quasars have been concentrated on my brain. The molecular structure of my synaptic networks have been rejigged.”

His friends thought it was a passing phase, like the religion he had adopted when 17, or the atheism he wore like a coat of many colours when he approached 30, or the adolescent hedonic lifestyle he launched into when he went through his early mid life crisis, when he was 38. It was then that he discovered sex and the female orgasm. He began to experiment, setting impossible targets and achieving them.

“Tonight, my sweet, you will experience twenty orgasms, each incrementally more intense than the one before, culminating in an orgasm of such insane intensity that your body will become one with the universe, and you and I will meld into a single being.”

Another passing phase,like his jam making when he turned 41.

“Stolen fruit is the secret. Stolen fruit makes the best jam.”
He would go on late night fruit picking expeditions to neighbouring houses and local parks, scrabbling around in the dark, and returning home scratched and bruised at one in the morning with a bagful of quinces or crab apples or apricots or nectarines. He made dozens of pots of jam, rich and sickly sweet, and gave them to friends. He didn’t have what it takes to become a economic baron of the jam world; he wanted to spread the sweet taste of jam…

He wrote a song, plagiarising the sentiments and some of the words of Leonard Cohen…
“And this jam, my loved ones, will pour like honey in the valleys of the lonely,
It will sweeten your breath, it will seduce your taste buds, it will bring joy to your very soul…”

Then there was the era of his psychiatric explorations, when Freud and Jung became twin gods in his spiritual universe, and he ignored Freud’s dictum – “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” – and found deep meaning in the most transitory of superficial comments, and archetypal insights in the most ephemeral of his dreams.
At fifty five he became an obsessive poet, writing a poem a day: sonnets, limericks, villanelles, free verse flow from the dark creases of his brain matter, a sweet liquid flow of poetic lines that coursed their way through the catacombs and tunnels of his memory, following a course that seemed to him to represent truth.

“A poem a day. If I write a poem a day I will be a poet. A poet is one who writes poems; I am a poet.”

For days on end he would speak only in measured lines, forcing himself to create, at the very point of utterance, sentence after sentence cast in the sad rhythm of the iambic pentameter.
His days began and ended with a song,
with words that flowed like honey through his mind,
He held there, for the briefest moment, truth.
He saw the world transfigured to his sight,
the universe within a grain of sand,
eternity confined within a hour,
infinity he clasped within his hands.


But at sixty one he found his life’s purpose in a moment of epiphany. He suddenly saw how limited his life span would be. That he had, at the very best, ten thousand day left.

His obsession had become the writing of his lifework, his autobiographical work, which he entitled: The Encyclopaedia of My Life. His obsession had become the daily writing of this opus. He set himself the goal of writing, at the very least, a thousand words a day. Ten thousand days:
He tried to do the sum in his head, but his normally sharp arithmetical skills betrayed him, and so he wrote down the numbers, and labouriously calculated the answer:
10000 X 1000 = 10,000,000
Ten million words. Simon drew breath. Ten million words! 365000 words a year for twenty odd years.

Then his mind felt a slight shudder of recognition. In the past his left brain, segment A, Arithmetical calculation would have eaten that sum for breakfast. Simon prided himself on the simple enough task of multiplying 10000 by 1000. Perhaps his faculties were beginning to slow down , to crack up, to deteriorate; perhaps one of the great fears of his life – of a gradual sinking into senile dementia, into mental oblivion, into the loneliness of Alzheimers.

A joke twitched at the edge of consciousness. He’d read it just that morning … he scrabbled through his short term memory to find it…

But try as he might, it would not come out of hiding. He heard the echoes of its laughter, but could not for the life of him work out where the laughter was coming from.

That was when he realised he must cease with these obsessions. Obsessions, he now saw with the utmost clarity, were the sad, pathetic, doomed attempts of mortals to hang on to the ephemera of their lives. ‘Life is passing through our fingers like air, and we think we can grasp it!’ It was all pointless. All pointless. Who remembered his jams, still tasted the tart sweetness of his crab apple jelly? Did his lover recall the orgasms that melded them into a single being? And who could be bothered reading his endlessly repeated pentameters? And as for jokes, who would be there to tell his joke to anyway who would want to hear it? Even if he could remember it!

And then it was there, in its entirety. The whole joke. He could remember it. his faculties weren’t totally shot. He took out his notebook and began scribbling furious:
“There were three elderly men in an old people’s hostel. The 70 year old complains: “Ohh, aging is a terrible thing. You know, everything is starting to break down. I’m regular as ever – go and have a piss at 7 am every morning. But slow … it just keeps dribbling out for ten minutes….”

His 80 year old mate says, “I know….”

He paused briefly. Yes, he thought to himself, that’s what I’ll do.

And he stopped, took a new lined notebook from his desk draw, and wrote on the outside:
The Joke of a Lifetime
Encyclopaedia of the life of Simon D.

68. My Reading Life 9 Phillip Adams: "Adams V God - The Rematch"

I first came across Phillip Adams in the 1980s. I remember clipping from The Age a lengthy article that he’d written; it was on the anatomy of humour. I pasted it in a scrapbook. I recall little of the detail – other than his observation that our laughter humanises us. As the Pythons pointed out, in Life of Brian:

Life a bit of shit
When you look at it
Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke it’s true
You’ll see it’s all a show
Keep ‘em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you ...

The last laugh is on you ... It’s a view that Adams endorses. Given the inevitability, the irreversibility of death, we must choose, ultimately but also every day, every moment, between laughter – at the absurdity of it all – and despair.

I still have that scrapbook stashed away somewhere in our garage – that Temple to the god of hoarding, that pointless paradise of accumulated ‘favorite things’ that, Karin assures me, will be burned or sent to the tip the moment I cast off my mortal coil. She can be sentimental at times; she can invest great significance into objects that in truth are of little worth. But my hoarding of books and objets de memoire get her down at times.

All of this is at the forefront of my mind at the moment because I’ve just finished reading Adams’ latest book, ‘Adams V God: the Rematch’. I have several of Adams’ books in my library. I may even have the original of Adams V God, which was published in the late 80s. I certainly have ‘The Unspeakable Adams’. He’s been around a long time, and has published around three million words.

Phillip Adams and I are almost contemporaries. He was born in 1939; I was born in 1943. We both grew up in Melbourne. He was probably still at Eltham High (the school my eldest daughter Jordan attends) when I started at Moreland High in 1955. As Adams tells it, he ‘turned way from God’ at the age of six when he grew dissatisfied with her grandson’s ‘inevitable question: “But who began God?”’ It took me much longer. At 15 I responded to Billy Graham’s call to give my life to Christ; by 18 I was heavily involved in the youth movement in the Methodist church, a youth club leader and a Sunday school teacher and a lay preacher. I didn’t declare myself an agnostic till I was around 24.

What lay behind Adams’ rejection of the Christian church and its teachings. I was surprised to discover that Adams’ father was a minister in the Congregationalist Church – the Reverend Charles Adams - but that the young Phillip was raised largely by his grandparents because Adams Senior was away at war. It’s tempting – it’s always tempting – to psychologise, to see some psychological link between the father’s absence and Adams’ rejection His Father which art in Heaven, along with His representatives on earth, especially His Holiness the Pope. [Interesting, Phillip’s mother also dumped his father, ‘in favour of a rather sleazy businessman’ about whom Adams has nothing positive to say.

Adams is an auto-didact. He ‘was forced’ to leave school before completing his secondary education; it doesn’t seem to have done him any great harm, going by his Wikipedia CV: writer, film producer, TV and radio presenter. He’s received awards for his ‘outstanding services to the Australian film industry’, declared a ‘Living Treasure’ by the national trust, awarded the Order of Australia, and made Australian Humanist of the Year in 1987. Even his nemesis, John Howard, expressed his disappointment that there wasn’t a “Right wing Phillip Adams”.

I suppose the closest thing we have to such a beast is the crass and tactless Andrew Bolt, who is more or an argumentative bully than an intellectual presence. For while Bolt is a propagandist, Adams is a deep thinker – outspoken, true, but unlike Bolt, never disrespectful of those whose views her disagrees with, never offensively dismissive of the right of others to have a view.

The problem for the likes of Howard is that the term “Right Wing Phillips Adams” is an oxymoron.

Ah – the outspoken, unspeakable Adams. Unspeakable – despicable in the eyes of some – and always outspoken. For a time there Saturday mornings were a great delight for me. I’d sit sipping coffee at Alta Vita restaurant in Eltham, and read the weekly offerings of my two favourite opinion columnists: Phillip Adams in the Weekend Australian magazine and Catherine Deveny in the A2 section of The Age. They have much in common: they both write well; both lean to the Left in their politics; both subscribe to the view that ‘God is Bullshit’. Deveny gave her comedy performance of 2011 that title and constantly offends god botherers with her outspoken dismissal of their precious beliefs. Adams is a different kettle of fish. He takes their arguments seriously; he is willing to ‘enter dialogue’ with believers the better to understand their ideas – then he dismisses them. Adams is the more intellectual of the two. Adams can be funny, and he’s always intellectually provocative; Deveny is more of a pub brawler – smart and very funny, and at times outrageous: which is what led her to be dumped by The Age. Which had the unfortunate effect of halving my enjoyment of Saturday mornings.

Adams V God: The Rematch brings together essays Adam has written over the past 30 years or more. The first half of the book consists of essays that appeared in the original Adams V God; the remaining essays , in the rematch section, come from the last two decades.

‘The atheist,’ Adams begins, ‘was once as lonely a figure as the biblical leper. No more. ... All of a sudden atheism is fashionable. In a world shaken by a perfect storm of fundamentalism it’s increasing it’s market share, even in the god bothering United States.

For many years Adams was one of Australia’s few ‘public atheists’; as he observes:

...when atheism was mentioned in Australia, it was often identified with me – in the same way that my namesakes, Herbert and George, were linked to meat pies or lottery tickets. I’d only myself to blame, having pontificated on death and religion, mortality and meaninglessness...

[That’s one of the many things I like about Adams: his joy in verbal play, and his ability to choose just the right word. In this case, pontificate has just the right touch of both ironic self-effacement and pompous posturing.]
For Adams atheism is the only real choice, the only world view that makes sense. As he says:

It’s astonishing that people still believe in God. One would have thought that by the middle of the twentieth century, surrounded by nuclear missiles, felt-wick pens, VCRs and Vitamin B capsules, that He would have faded away like that other improbably invention, the Cheshire Cat. Yet He lingers on and, in some ways, looms larger and loonier than ever.

Adams credo is straight forward enough: If you haven’t tested your beliefs, you’re not entitles to them.

He has no time for the Creationists and their attempts to indoctrinate children in Creation Science. Most for their intellectual dishonesty. They claim that they are being open minded, and simply want children to be able to choose between competing theories. The trouble is, theirs isn’t a theory – it’s a dogma. While scientists are constantly questioning their conclusions, testing how robust their conclusions against new findings, new insights, the Creationists push their unchanging truth: that God created the earth in six days and on the seventh day he rested. And the evidence for this? The Bible tells me so.

He saves his most savage verbal attacks for just these kinds of fundamentalists.
As a rough rule of thumb, he writes, the greater the certainty, the more ringing the conviction, the less the humour, the greater the cause to fear. The fundamentalists have created God in their own mean-spirited, frightened and humourless image. If there was a god, I think he would dislike fundamentalists as much as I do.

I’ve given up trying to even talk to fundamentalists because – well, there’s nothing to talk about. Nothing is actually open for discussion. While I avoid them, or having been stuck in a room with them, simply ignore them, Adams engages with them. He reports that he’s received thousands of letters from Christians attacking him for his ‘unspeakable’ and blasphemous writings. His response is to write in reply: ‘Let’s not let a little think like god stand between us.’ How that must rankle! It must drive them mad – madder actually!

Perhaps he is mellowing as he ages. Around page 169, he writes:
There was a time when I saw the world through ideological blinkers, when it seemed there was only one opinion and one truth. I now recognise that truth is a hopelessly jumbled jigsaw, and that everyone has a piece or two that fits with somebody else’s piece or two. And I’ve learned to enjoy the company of people I disagree with ... whereas I’m frequently bored by echoing agreement.

Echoes there of Voltaire, who said to one of his students who kept agreeing with the great philosopher: ‘For God’s sake disagree with me, so there can be two of us!’

At the same time I find myself agreeing with Adams at so many points. Like when he writes:

o I’m ... grateful for the opportunity, for the complimentary pass to life, the most extraordinary entertainment imaginable.
o Even a few decades ago the range of possibilities we know and accept with indifferent shrug would have seemed inconceivable.
o In the light of the plight of people in scores of other countries ... spending time complaining ... is insufferable and obscene.

And especially when he observes:
o For me the problem and the joy of living in this century is that you have to apply more and more paradigms to begin to comprehend the simplest event. That is the price of our learning curves.

God V Adams: The Rematch is, for me at least, a wonderful read. I will go back to it, again and again I think, to reacquaint myself with the highlights: his demolition of the Seventh Day Adventists, the Mormons, and – with particular relish – the Scientologists.

There is not a lot in this book about Adams ‘the person’; his autobiographical writing is limited to his first decade. He recently withdrew from a project to write his biography, falling out with his biographer just before the launch of the book over precisely this issue: the inclusion of too much of Adams’ ‘personal life’ and – so his biographer claims – in particular his relationships with women. The biography has been published, without Adams’ blessing.

There are two particular highlights in this book for me, however. The first is when he ‘comes clean’ about his own beliefs:

I believe it is absurdly vain to see ourselves as echoing God’s image and just as silly to anthropomorphise , to Disneyfy, the concept of God into anything vaguely human. Like the hippopotamus and the hedgehog, humans are simply an evanescent expression of the life force, as destined for oblivion as dodos and dinosaurs....
I believe in laughter. A highly developed sense of the absurd, particularly one’s own absurdity, is extremely healthy. As long as you’re laughing, especially at yourself, you’re unlikely to be brutal or vindictive... I think that all the things that divide us – from brands of god to national borders – are fairly silly and should be laughed at as often as possible.

Does Andrew Bolt ever laugh at himself? Or Peter Reith? Or John Howard? I sometimes catch a glimpse of Tony Abbott grinning as he trots out his infantile mantra “It’s another Great Big Tax”, as though he can hear how much like a six year old her sounds, but maybe it’s just a knowing sneer. Julia Gillard seems to take her own “moving forward” mantra with straight-faced seriosity.

In the final essay, Hello World, This is Me, Adams writes AS god – or is that as God?
‘I’m not as fond of you mob as you like to think,’ He confesses. Typically of Adams, God saves his final word for his nemesis:
You know the humans that most irritate me? The people that say I talk to them. In person. The ones that say they speak on my behalf. You must have notices that among their number are some of the most boring, self-important, fanatical and hypocritical people on Earth.... God help us.'