Civic Responsibilities

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

- T S Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

On Newcastle Beach, embracing the unanimous heat of the public holiday, one of the group starts talking about, as is bound to happen on the sand, with alcohol rising from within, coal ships passing, Heidegger. He criticised the Nazi party, not for their brutalism, but for their technocratic modalities, they say. Heidegger wanted them to be bucolic, to touch grass, but they used computer software to upscale their holocaust. That defeated the whole purpose of the enterprise if you were just going to be mechanistic about it. Look to the United States, England, the Soviet Union for the automation of cruelty, but not Nazi Germany.

It was not by chance that this topic of conversation was taking place on Australia Day née Invasion Day, during the midst of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, during the midst of Israel’s assault on Palestine, on the beach, within the sort of heat that ripples the horizon and bleaches the sky, that makes one take another drink and watch the passage of a coal ship entering the harbour wearing a flag of convenience with Mandarin script printed on the side.

That ship, one of the group says, has come from up there, the other side of the world, where all that history is happening, as we tan. Here, where stories are erased, a land of plains swept clean, formatted and overwritten. One of the group, Mog, sits and thinks about all this.

Mog and his lady friend Pim wash off and open the corrugated roller door of an industrial arts collective warehouse they rent in the west end of town. Mog pushes aside the previous project he was working on and sets his attention to something new. He and Pim were talking on the way to the shower in an access alley behind a hostel (they were told off the other week for using another shower in the same alley at three in the morning, the owner yelled out from a third-storey window, but what could they do, they were already lathered in soap suds) about what they could do to contribute to the peace efforts overseas.

Pim says something interesting, she’s thinking about the commentary on Heidegger and the Nazis from the beach earlier. She read somewhere, in a book perhaps called Against Empathy, how emotions and feelings are not the best tools for solving a conflict. Those are how conflicts start - someone gets a stubborn idea about something, like how their country is entitled to a patch of land belonging to another country, by way of some misguided nationalistic fervour that fuels a passion that is all ego, all ardour and power and erotic violence, and suddenly your troops are goosestepping through someone else’s mud. Logic doesn’t lead to that: nobody goes to war based on systematic rules.

Years ago, Mog says, a DJ in Sydney pumped MDMA through the air vents to deliver a cloud waft of the love drug to all the pending party people. What if we did the same, but totally different. We could create a delivery device for rationality drugs, airborne nootropics that are breathed in by insurgents and politicians, enhancing their logical capacities and depleting their reliance on emotion.

After working out the initial mechanics for such a delivery device, and pooling together enough expired ADHD medication sourced from the back of a discount chemist, and a little more mid-morning drinking, Mog and Pim retire to the gardens of a cathedral that overlooks the city to have a snooze in the shade. They occasionally rouse, brushing ants and flies away, but otherwise just drift in and out of consciousness very pleasantly. At one point, unsure if she’s awake, Mog asks Pim how she thinks the cloud of logic nootropics should be disseminated from their workshop in the west end of Newcastle to Palestine and Ukraine, when he hears the resounding horn of a coal ship reverberate its bass note throughout the city. He smiles and goes back to sleep.

Later that afternoon they both head to a rooftop party hosted by a technology co-workspace that funds their industrial arts collective. The ethics of celebrating together on a day of mourning for so many is the central topic of conversation. Someone says that the ‘Change the Date’ campaign feels like it grows in momentum and intensity every year, it never used to be a topic of conversation twenty years ago. Then, someone else chimes in that First Nations leaders actually made it known in 1938 that the day was one of mourning and not celebration, and that Australia Day was not always recognised as January 26, that it used to be July 30 back in 1915 and that every state and territory did their own thing for a long time. It was only in 1994 that it became a national public holiday for everybody. But still, someone says, it is talked about a lot more now, don’t you reckon.

Palestine and Ukraine are talked about too, to which Mog and Pim listen but don’t contribute. They don’t want to show their hand too early, given what they’re working on. The general consensus is what a tragedy it all is, but how confusing it all is, too. Take Ukraine. Putin set Russia to invade the country based on claims he was engaging in a process of denazification of the border regions. This was understood to be an absurd position, an excuse to appeal to the emotions of those who knew no better, yet we know that Ukraine does actually have a Nazi problem. Take the Khatyn massacre, someone says, and someone else says you don’t even have to go that far back, just look at the statues being erected for flagrant anti-semites even today.

And then with Israel and Palestine, someone says something about Hamas, someone says something about Jewish people needing a safe haven to protect themselves from a history of genocide, and someone else quotes Golda Meir about how peace will occur with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate Israelis, and then someone else mocks this sentiment as easy for an imperialist to say, and so on.

The heat of the day just isn’t letting up. Mog and Pim finish their drinks and head back to the workshop where they continue working on their project. They have to do something. Beach philosophy and bourbon can only get you so far, at some stage you’ve got to act. They weld together some ejection components, hook up some Raspberry Pi clock systems and timers, funnel in crushed Adderall and Ritalin into alchemical bags of gaseous swarm, and pile the results into a shopping trolley that they push from the west end towards Carrington.

Cloud castles gather in great smudged tumbles of sulphur and tangerine.

At the coal loader, those clouds break open and hot rain pours down. Beneath the artificial starlight of the machinery overhanging the ships and the dark rain, Mog and Pim start to question what they’re doing. What exactly is the plan here, to sneak onto a platform above the funnel of a coal ship and drop their device inside, set to a time when this particular ship will be in the Black Sea or the Mediterranean, ready to toot its horn and catapult their construction into the air, ready to disseminate its cloud of rationality? Physics aside (which, given how heavy Mog has been drinking since early morning, are not completely out of range), what would Adam Curtis say about all this?

Remember that documentary where he talks about Daniel Kahneman, from the story Daniel tells about being a young Jewish boy in Nazi occupied France and how he is stopped by an SS officer tasked with sending Jews to the death camps. He is convinced that he was about to be sent away and killed, but the SS man picked him up, kissed him and showed him pictures of his own son in Germany.

The mind is not a rational tool. It is a dreamscape of simple, contradictory stories. Beneath the rain, Mog looks like a wet dog rendered immobile by saturation. Pim squeezes water out of her ponytail, takes Mog by the hand and walks him out of the port. They push the trolley with their device down an embankment where it melds into a pre-existing rubbish heap.

Sitting on an abandoned gas silo in a nearby industrial meadow, watching the coal ships come and go beneath the rising sun, Mog and Pim have been thinking all night. If Mog quotes Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ one more time (Do I dare disturb the universe…), Pim says she’ll jump. They can agree on a few things, however, like regardless of the story we’re being told about current events, the reality will turn out to be far stranger than we were ever told. And, that a lack of vision for the future will always result in a violent hunger for old forms of power, and for nationalistic narratives to force meaning into the nihilistic void that dead market forces have given us. And, that innocent lives will be lost and forever changed so that political elites can establish global financial conditions that remain as motionless as possible. And, maybe even that line of Pynchon’s, that if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

Mog and Pim look at each other, bathed in dry sunrise. Look at the clarity of our thoughts when we’ve been awake all night, at such heights, and without a drink since the previous afternoon. And how does it feel, to be rendered in this way, how young our skin is to the touch when it should feel so old, like crumpled newspapers smeared with dry blood. Tap on my face. No lines. It’s so smooth. The hours really have lost their clocks, haven’t they. Is this why the future feels like yesterday.

- Friday, January 26, 2024.