We were lying in the fields on an overcast Saturday, 28 degrees, the sugar of iced lollies dribbling down our hands and hoping the sun would bless us for long enough to darken our transparent skin. Beautiful people surrounded us on all sides: impossibly thin; impossibly well dressed in that garage-sale chic kind of way; impossibly camp in their mannerisms. I had decided not to wear a hat and was regretting this when I saw the ocean of varied head adornments riding atop these sculpted hairdos. Then I remembered that I had lost my favourite hat in Edinburgh, and started feeling lonely instead.

I was reading ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, which made me miss ‘Catch-22’, maybe only because it was about the war. Sentences toppled over me like lego and I was without a building guide. What is this book about? Where are these characters taking me? Is the author talking about a dog, a person, a place, or an idea? I had felt this way before when reading Pynchon. And a glance around told me that this was the general sensibility of our time: a chronological period where the more nonsensical the t-shirt slogan, the greater the cred.

Security through obscurity is a principle used by computing systems. Applied to literature, I am basically talking about the text becoming an insular entity that the author alone can draw meaning from. I know this is an old idea tackled by many literary theorists, but I am seeing a tangible manifestation of it more starkly than before.

Can any text that inspires confusion, deliberately mind, be valuable beyond being comment on the disparate nature of individual existence? If the style moves the readers to pocketed pastiche rather than collective communication, then isn’t this book and others like it just furthering parochial division? Shouldn’t literature be a gateway to further the communication of ideas, more in line with Kerckhoffs’ principle, where ‘it is necessary… that the system be easy to use, requiring neither mental strain nor the knowledge of a long series of rules to observe’? Or would this lead to a stylistic plateau?

There are many pages still ahead of me, and maybe they will hold instructions for how I am meant to build a doorway into this text. Or maybe next time I go to the fields to read a book, I should take a boating hat and surrender myself to these seas.

I am currently trying to get my shit together, and the likelihood of it ever happening is feeling increasingly elusive as I try to plan and work at the same time. Meanwhile I’m reading The Land of Plenty by Mark Davis¹, which isn’t helping.

He’s going on about the ‘prosperity scandal’ and the mythologies that have propped up the misconception that neoconservative, free-market orthodoxies have increased the nation’s wealth in the last thirty years. Instead of managing the nation’s economy, these policies have thrown caution to the wind at a time when Australia has been fortunate enough to be buffeted upwards by globalisation².

On some level Australia’s mind boggling economic ineptitude and short-sightedness makes me feel better about my own financial mismanagement. Especially when I remember how I like to make concessions for my life, based on reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years ago.

By mashing Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return and Parmenides’ Theory of Opposites³ , Kundera’s concept of lightness might mitigate our bungling through life: if we are not burdened by the responsibility of having lived and learned from this life before, we are light – but our lives are meaningless, without weight; if we are burdened with this responsibility, our lives are weighty – but the repetition somehow gives them meaning, something to do with cycles⁴.

I’d say that we’re making it up as we go along, so as long as we endeavour to learn from our mistakes, our lives might be meaningless, but at least they’ll be pleasant. And by really bastardising it I came up with something like consolation: just as I have no experience of this life prior to my birth, I also have no experience of living in an economic environment that might have encouraged me to think long-term about my finances.

I had my parents of course, and they’re great with money, but I disregarded a lot of what they said. My bad. And anyway, I’m talking about how I might have turned out if I had grown up immersed in a successful, carefully regulated mixed-market economy – such as …⁵ Maybe I’d be able to make rent without living off beans and noodles for the following two weeks.

Seriously, I wonder about how a nation’s psyche might manifest as characteristics in whole portions of generations of citizens. People my age – teenagers growing up from 1996 to 2007 – were raised to believe that the prosperity we enjoyed would continue forever.

It didn’t, and the prospect of getting my shit together in this climate is all the more troublesome because of the pervasive feeling that I am pushing shit up hill.

Because we have both⁶ relied extensively on unexpected economic windfalls to give the impression of progress. We’ve worked hard, sure, but I’ve also been a lucky boy in a lucky country. Just as Australia has ridden the sheep’s back, then the miner’s back and now ‘the debtor-citizen’s back’⁷, I have coasted on the back of my parents’ success, on the back of a generation of false economic pretenses perpetrated by the Whitlam government through to the K Rudd, a bunch of noobs acting out on ideology rather than reason or good common sense.

And just like Australia, I have hit a brick wall after this unbridled, rapid and sometimes inexplicable propulsion through a false personal economy. About all that I’ve gleaned from living in this economy is an understanding of the ‘bubble’ concept: when the luck ran out and I needed to scrape myself up, I got my head around the bubble.

I feel like I’m back at the starting grid, but the race hasn’t stopped. Mark Davis’s Australia is at a similar point, from where it must learn from the failure of two eras of political consensus and move forward with a new vision. Get its shit together, basically.

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1. whose blog is unfortunately not working
2. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 255
3. which, the deeper I dig, seems to not exist – being, instead, a theory that Heraclitus presented and Parmenides rebuked
4. my intuition makes it more difficult to grasp weight than to grasp lightness – the fleeting, meaninglessness of a quick fling with life, a chromosome glitch and nothing more, that makes more sense to me
5. do these exist?
6. Australia and I
7. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 262

A couple of months ago I was hungover and hungry and I’d just woken up at Ronnie’s place. For ages it’s been something of a personal hangover ritual of mine to make it to the Queen Vic Markets, which are right near his apartment, and get a bratwurst.

These are not just any bratwurst – they’re thick, tasty and juicy, lathered in however many types of mustard you like, maybe a bit of cheese and then a field of sauerkraut balancing on top. These are a two-hand job. Nothing like this – way better:

Bratwurst!

I was dazed and it was Sunday – typically a day of decadence to make up for the previous night’s decadence. I figured I’d grab a bratwurst and then drink my hangover away.

I was ambling along, halfway to the market, content that I had planned my day, when I remembered that I was vegetarian – had been for all of about two weeks. The decision was made not in haste, but without any real preparation for the required lifestyle adjustments. Such as knowing where to get delicious comfort food off the cusp.

I wondered if it would really matter if I contradicted my recently developed consumption principles just this once – how much could my abstinence from meat really contribute positively to the welfare of the world’s animals and our environment?

I knew I could get some sushi to tide me over, but sushi isn’t bratwurst, and the main reason for my decision to give up meat was environmental concern. I couldn’t be sure that consuming rice grown in Australia was any better than eating the meat of flatulent, hoofed animals farmed on our arid land¹ . As with cotton, the water requirements are far greater than our arid lands can support, something something … rising freshwater salinity.

By the time I found two soggy sticks of blandness, I was feeling guilty. For potentially contributing to salinity, and for being ignorant. Because my choice to abstain from meat is informed by a broad interest in ethical consumerism and environmental conservation, rather than specifically animal rights, the requisite decisions are not as simple as trading animal rights for a diet of mung beans and tempeh.

In this series of sporadic articles, called Sans-bratwurst Blues, I will chronicle my research and decisions about ethical consumerism – lest I begin to alienate my friends with my self-righteous indignation. I will try to be equally sceptical of the CSIRO as I am of dubiously anonymous, blingin websites like The Main Meal.

This post is part of Blog Action Day.

Blog Action Day | 2009 | Climate Change

1. I have since figured out that rice might even be as flatulent as all those cows!

I have this thing – a kind of guiding principle – that I have come to call Three Degrees of Uncoordination. Calling it a principle is a bit of a stretch. It’s more like an explanation for my disorganised, frenetic, fumbling approach to life. For a long time, before I labelled my own methodology of life, I just read and wrote and observed the world, noticing things and ideas and wondering what on earth to do with them. And I talked a lot of shit.

Recently I began to get pretty tired of all the talking, and frustrated by the lack of doing. But I’m reluctant to act without conviction in my opinions, so I got kind of stuck: how could I act without conviction about my ideas, but how could I reach conviction without experiencing life (without acting)?

This was all happening at the end of my tenure as Voiceworks editor, where I had been reading a lot, talking a lot, editing a lot, crunching spreadsheets a lot, and not writing a lot. I was leaving my editorials to the last minute, but they came naturally when I finally got down to them.

This, I found, was because all of the reading and talking I was doing had a place to coalesce: as I drew from things that had happened in the three months since I last wrote an editorial, usually about three separate instances of something like intellectual coincidence would occur and I would have an idea – something to write about, some intention for the editorial.

Usually the process of writing the editorial had forced me to think about something in a way that I had not previously considered. I would express this, with the intention of encouraging readers to do the same.

Since then this ‘principle’ has developed naturally as a way of connecting ideas into some form of coherent thought, without which I get wickedly confused and forget my opinions all the time. I still chase ideas down rabbit holes until I find bits of grit, around which all those ideas coagulate.

I don’t have editorials to write anymore, but I have posts to write for this blog. The themes will develop sporadically, as I process ideas and output them here: kernels of principles I will then use to guide my way through life in an approximation of goodness and decency. Maybe, dear reader, you will too, as, here, in the category Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I will capture those kernels in the hope of disseminating something useful.

Indeed, they are opposites. According to Socrates’ oracle, the wisest of them all is the person are aware of their own ignorance. Such an awareness cultivates an ongoing, organic interest in gaining, challenging and validating your knowledge. Doing this, and then applying that knowledge to life is what I do, and the central theme of Socratic Ignorance is Bliss.