Citizen Scientist

Lessons in Immersion: music and poetry

At a time when I am becoming increasingly disillusioned by all media - including television, radio, newspapers and social media, here on Substack I have finally ‘met’ @Subhash Jaireth.

For the last few years, Rich and I had a weekly habit of watching all the ABC offerings on Monday nights - 7.30 Report, Australian Story, Four Corners, Media Watch, then Q+A, (while it lasted). By the end of our shared Monday evenings, we felt all caught up on matters of national importance, and once we added an episode of Foreign Correspondent, we felt informed on matters international, as well. Richard Lawson

This, together with my daily practice of reading the Sydney Morning Herald, and Rich reading ABC News - both of us swapping notes about particular stories and the way they were, or perhaps were not covered - seemed to be a functional way to understand what can seem like an increasingly chaotic world.

We were enacting what seemed to be a Huxley-esque ritual of both becoming aware and at the same time holding knowledge about the circumstances in which we live by bearing witness. For a long time, that has seemed important, and a way of feeling engaged and having agency simply by observing - as Huxley said, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

Then something happened over the last year, around the time when so much of the world’s media devoted journalistic space to the person to whom I shall refer to as the slumping-orange-headed-duck – a man who has become a powerful leader of a powerful nation. The this man is enjoying causing chaos, and the higher the fervour the more powerful and satisfied he seems to be, and it is for this reason that I refuse to mention his name.

Deep inside our little lounge room in our little corner of the world, sometime towards the end of summer as the seasons changed and the spotted gums outside the window changed from grey to salmon pink, our domestic media rituals also changed. We began tuning into Suzanne Leal ‘s weekly book club on Thursday nights - something we had previously missed due to evening teaching commitments. We also slowed down on current affairs consumption – and after a few months, we covered the TV with cushions, listening to music and chatting both before and after Suzanne’s show.

On Monday nights, where we used to tune into the ABC, we now looked at each other over dinner, as if to ask, should we? To which the answer was inevitably, let’s not invite the chaos of the world into this sacred space we were trying to create. The TV gathered dust in the corner as we brought a mattress out onto the floor and began using a ‘wobbler’ – which is what we call our chi-machine, which wiggles the feet around.

Where our old media rituals were creating a sense of angst and despair, we now had a ritual that works with ‘chi’. In Eastern medicine, this is thought to create a sense of calm. Whatever western medicine’s take on this may be, it certainly takes me back to the way I feel on my daily walks, watching fish swimming in rock pool. This reminds me of the way I used to feel when I lived in the Blue Mountains, when my daily walking took me into forests and the deep space beneath waterfalls, where I would watch fish darting beneath granite boulders. Whether I’m watching fish in boulders, or seeing seaweed swishing with the current, I have a deep sense of calm and respite from what often seems like an increasingly fractious world.

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki talks not only of self-acceptance, but a sense of developing a knowledge of how to stand on your own two feet as a significant practice of learning to be a human being. Perhaps that says something about why, over this year, we began to take turns as we wiggled our feet in the chi machine, lighting candles and simply existing in a space we designed not around media consumption, but around low stimulation, getting out of the couches and onto the ground where we could move and talk and stare at the moon out the window, and watch the shadows of the trees. Increasingly, we listened to music instead of listening to the news, until eventually, I wound back my nightly fix of a Radio National program whose presenter at times seemed to become somewhat sanctimonious and often quite agitated. Although I have always followed this particular program because it suits an evening mood, this too became something I was less interested in.

I am still listening to audiobooks, and have recently listened to Caelainn Hogan ’s masterpiece, Republic of Shame about Ireland’s mother’s and babies homes, and Susan Kiyo Ito ‘s stunning memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, which explores her experiences of adoption.

As I mentioned to Lisaherbert.vb@gmail.com on Sapphire Stories this week, there seems to be an overlap between the sense of something not quite right in the way we treat nature - which is a primary concern in my recent poetry collection - and the treatment of certain mothers and babies, particularly in the mid twentieth century.

I am also listening to @RebeccaSolnit ‘s Call Them by Their True Names - a lyrical reflection on what might be considered the current American Condition, particularly the orange-duck’s version of ‘democracy’ and attempts to manufacture an alternate truth, then have that truth enacted by other people, including magnates, media moguls and politicians in Australia.

This of course returns me to the place where I started, hungering for a story to immerse in that engages with the world, yet it slumps once again towards that wretched orange headed duck. No matter how hard we try to screen his presence out of our zen space, he keeps wading back in.

That’s partly because I want something more than zen, I want stories too. Despite our decision to transform what at times had become a media-consumption space into a low-stimulation chill lounge, and despite the chi machine, and the decision to slow up on current affairs, I still like to immerse in stories. I like to immerse in the writing of them, the reading of them, and increasingly, in the listening of them – because it helps to avoid spending yet more time with the hyper stimulation of a back lit screen and holding onto an interconnected electronic device which I am sure is not doing much for my health.

Because stories help me overcome a sense of isolation and loneliness and cultivate instead a sense of connection; this overcomes a sense of bearing the conditions of life alone as witness, but it’s more than that. It’s because I seek to understand the circumstance in which I live, and ‘story’ seems to be the most direct way to walk on these two feet, wobbled as they are, directly towards a deeper understanding of this world, of these times, ofwhere we are headed, and of how we got here, too. As Salman Rushdie once said, “Stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we understand the world,” and for me at least, I am deeply motivated by that need to know and connect and appreciate how things work, and the context in which we exist.

This is what often brings me to Substack, in search of new material, particularly something I can press play and hear, rather than cramp my arm and squint my eyes to read.

Enter the words of Subhash Jaireth.

Despite having written so many works of poetry, creative nonfiction and a significant body of work, I am new to reading Subhash. Last night, I began reading the first of his two-part essay on rivers, which builds on the idea of whether natural systems are alive.

I am particularly interested in this question, as more and more cities and countries bring law suits against corporations and governments which enact acts of ecocide against natural systems. I am reminded of words I once heard Paul Keating mention, in which he considered all of this great southern land as space which would eventually be completely developed – and though I like a lot of what the man stood for, I, for one, have never wanted more land to be developed. Since I was a teenager, I have longed for there to be a moratorium on cleared land, and to say to humans, well, go your hardest with what’s already been cleared, go up as far as you need, but do not go out any further into what is so very rare: rare earths, rare forests, and increasingly, rare oceans where nature rules, or for that matter, rare spaces above earth which are not crammed with satellites, some of which this week are scheduled to crash into the moon.

Is a River Alive? is a work written by Robert MacFarlane Like RebeccaSolnit this work considers something that has been at the heart of everything I have ever done as a human being awake and walking through life on two unsteady feet – and that is to understand our relationship with the more-than-human world.

I’d go one step further and say that my deepest desire is to contemplate earth’s natural systems without placing them inside the container of human existence. Although earth’s systems have evolved in the context of ancient humans stepping out her existence, for most of all time this was stepped out in what to me seems like a sense of harmony and balance with what earth’s systems could tolerate. And I say this, admitting that my greatest flaw is perhaps that I am a deeply less-than human person - because I am more drawn to the way a leaf will be carried by water down a stream than I am by the way my feet will walk alongside her. I am more interested in the way the wind will blow the footprints of the oystercatcher into a divot carrying ancient shells and silica than I am in understanding the size eleven footprints stepping over the tracks. I am interested in why, suddenly, I have seen, not one, but two eleven-armed starfish, and one wobbegong, beached at the remote space where I find myself alone and walking each day. I am more interested in why the borer is attacking the coastal banksias than I am in understanding what it is that humans are doing.

In this context, last night, I listened to Subhash Jaireth ‘s reasoning and ideas, pooled together in ways that left me feeling ready to jump up at dawn this morning and revisit the natural world with a greater sense of the dawn light on the water, a greater enthusiasm to see the white spray of whales migrating and birthing out at sea, and to watch as sea eagles forage out over the bay for something new to look out for, way beyond the headlands.

I recorded the music in the video in the musician’s cottage during my residency at Bundanon; and the video was recorded at Tathra Wharf. Of course it doesn’t escape me that I have inserted myself as a human, being, but a being, being human starting into water, and of course using the many rare earths that are used to create the second-hand iPhone on which this was recorded. I acknowledge the hypocrisy in that. I’m using the sounds as a sense of slowing down, layered with the sounds of whales, whilst standing on a structure which began as a whaling station. Perhaps it is in these ways that we begin to not only embrace what is lost, but also look out for and learn to love what is still with us now, in ways that I hope help us want to protect what we have. The sea turtle has been uploaded to iNaturalist, where I am recording her presence as a citizen scientist.

Thankyou Subhash Jaireth for sustaining my reading and listening for a wonderful evening. I look forward to engaging with more of your essays tonight, where I know I will learn so much more than by consuming an AI- generated news story, the kind of material which has replaced what many writers used to publish in a form of writing once known as ‘journalism’.