False Positive

Our Cultural Traditions and Norms Could Kill Us

I am really worried that in SL our ‘island mentality’ and relaxed and convivial social norms means that a vast amount of the population do not understand how important it is to change their cultural habits of closeness and community gatherings (both family and religious) immediately. These traditions might kill them. And us.

The rest of the world is really of not much significance to people with an exclusively local mindset. Nationalism and patriotism which are good in themselves taken too far mean that most people feel that the rest of the world and its happenings do not and will not affect us. Interconnectedness and exponential numbers and pandemics and actions which must be taken to ‘flatten the curve’ are hard to conceptualise without the language to put it into words.

We are proud of our high level of literacy, but that is literacy in Sinhala, and this virus is international, universal and global. And most of the effective warnings and sound medical advice coming in from the countries who have first dealt with it are conveyed in English. These must be translated now, immediately, and the messages conveyed through visual images so everyone can understand them. Island wide, in every form of media.

To survive this pandemic with minimal losses, our beloved lifestyle of sun and sea and social vibrancy and inter-connectivity has to change. Principles of the laws of causality (cause and effect, how every action has a consequence) need to be understood. Social distancing, proven to be the most effective limit to the spread of this virus, is alien to our culture. People are tactile, and show support and affection through physical proximity. It is not going to be easy to change this mindset.

Everyone has to say: ‘I am sorry, but we have to not see each other in person, for a while.’ Children who were at school in their hundreds until a few days ago, with dozens of kids in large tuition classes, and adults in social gatherings and business summits and meetings, are likely to possibly have been in contact with people who unknowingly have carried this. I have been reading up on it daily, seeing what happens in other countries compared to SL. The culture here is very social, enmeshed and inter- generational, and it is impossible to stop people being in contact with each other just by advising them to do so. They do not as a whole understand the numbers, or the urgency.

We must think back two weeks from the first declared cases: Where were we? What were we doing? Who did we see? And they say that the incubation period may be longer than 2 weeks. More like 3.

We cannot take any risks now.

I saw on Twitter 2 days ago, the comment that: ‘Pettah is full of people. In supermarkets entire families are shopping accompanied by little ones and grandparents too. The TV showed some religious gatherings with many elderly people participating. Very few are practising social distancing by keeping a metre apart’.

I am happy to report that when I went grocery shopping yesterday at the local Food City, the shelves were well-stocked and all essentials were in good supply. No one was pushing or shoving, as we have seen people doing in other countries. The staff wore gloves and masks. But the security guards outside were not wearing the masks properly, some covering only their mouths but not their noses.

This kind of haphazardness of preventative implementation is completely eclipsed, however, by the criminal moral ignorance and unforgivable unconcern displayed by those who have attended large communal gatherings in the past two weeks, with information about the spread of this illness and its high level of contagion widely available to them.

Whether gathering for religious reasons at festivals to pray for their families and country, or to celebrate brotherhood and camaraderie and sentimental traditions at 3-day sporting matches, it is clear that the numbers of those infected explode after events like these. In the name of personal pleasure, and of spiritual sanctity, our fellow citizens and their compulsions are about to inflict unwanted damage on us.

Even this for me paled in comparison to the news that there were citizens returning from Italy last week, blatantly lying to immigration authorities about their place of departure, to avoid quarantine detainment, careless of the consequences to their families, friends and the doctors who they expect to look after them when they fall ill, and think they are having heart failure because they cannot breathe. Their highly developed sense of personal survival far outstrips their sense of collective responsibility.

The entire medical staff of a large hospital are now in quarantine instead of being able to assist, at this critical juncture. It is obvious that the medical staff need community support: not only in the form of understanding of citizens  of their own crucial personal role in limiting the spread of the virus, but also in terms of our collective awareness that this crisis will take some time to pass, and in the meantime doctors, nurses, and all other medical staff need equipment: especially respiratory equipment, and supplies of personal protective gear. Not only in the short term, but in the mid to long term. They are most at risk of getting ill, because they will be most exposed to those who are ill, and for prolonged periods of time. A community funded and supported supply chain would be a wonderful creation, with social service enterprise groups, online activist groups and philanthropic individuals all contributing.

On a social level, the medical staff in every hospital will be working round the clock, and they will need food and drink and sleep in order to be healthy enough to care for those who will fall ill. It is a slow-breaking and terrible tsunami they are facing, as the numbers of those who are infected rise and start to explode.

Community groups who are assisting the elderly, immuno-compromised and less able amongst us by shopping for groceries and essential medicines for them must be supported. It is time to be vigilant on behalf of those most vulnerable, and to serve and protect them. All the things we proudly celebrate in our culture: the importance of family, the love and concern for our children, our compassion for our fellow human beings, our pride in our nation, our concern for the suffering of those in trouble, have to be translated into direct action, now. Or the words will be empty and the hospitals (and cemeteries) will be full.

It is unfortunate and ironic that many of those celebrating so joyfully at sporting events are highly likely to be ardent patriots, sincerely devoted to their families, schools, and formative institutions, and all round good people, thronging temples and churches and kovils and mosques, and sporting stadiums and arenas, in numbers at every gathering of the faithful.

Not knowing is not as bad as not caring. But both levels of unawareness of the vital - and viral - connection between self and society may prove disastrous.

Our collective ignorance about these issues has - until now - been merely frustrating. From this week, it could be fatal.

Touch Me Not

There’s a fascinating flowering plant known as ‘the touch me not’, whose leaves curl up for a few moments in self defence when you touch them. It is also known as ‘The Sensitive Plant’. The Romantic poet Shelley wrote a poem about it, likening its behaviour to that of the soul of the poet.

Two hundred years before Shelley, Shakespeare’s King Lear had also practised some marked social distancing: in his case, rejecting the kind comradeship of his dear and loyal friend, The Earl Of Gloucester. Gloucester, accused of treason for aiding and abetting Lear who had been banished from his own kingdom by his two elder daughters, was blind because he had had his eyes put out while refusing to confess under torture. He had been cast out of the castle and told ‘to smell his way to Dover’. Being blind, he had stumbled through the chaotic countryside at the mercy of every whim and weather.

Finally, hearing his old royal friend’s voice, he is overjoyed, and asks for proof of his identity, as he cannot see his face. He wants to show his continuing love, loyalty and respect by kissing his hand. King Lear’s response is right in tune with our times:

Gloucester says: ‘O let me kiss that hand’.

King Lear replies: ‘Let me wipe it, first. It smells of Mortality.’

Some context here: the body and the person of the King or Queen is traditionally regarded as sacred. A common person cannot touch a royal person - all the rules of feudal hierarchy decreed it. You could look, but could not touch.

Courtly love rules also required that a true and devoted lover would see his lady as unattainable: she was so high above him, he could never hope to do anything but love her spiritually. He projected his ideals and aspirations onto an image of her, and she guided him through this world like an embodied angel. Ethereal, illuminating and untouchable.

On social media this past week, people are suggesting that instead of hugs, handshakes or even fist bumps on greeting each other, people should bow, as they did in the Eighteenth Century, or put their hands together in the succinct and subtle Namaste.

Our hands are suddenly of great concern - we are being told to wash them several times a day, with conduct books on the correct way to wash our hands being circulated via Instagram and YouTube, in still and animated images. It is because of our hands with their elegant musculature and opposable thumbs that we developed into human beings, able to  make things, from Stone Age tools to planetariums and rocket ships.

With our hands, we touch everything in our world. It is how we instinctively connect with the things and people around us. So now, it’s gloves on, rather than off, but hands on (committed) rather than hands off (disinterested) in our attempt to combat the deadly virus disease, and the low standards of personal hygiene of our fellow citizens.

The corona virus COVID-19 has now been declared a pandemic, which means the focus is now on getting prepared and resourced to deal with it. Do we have enough equipment in the ICU units to protect the health care practitioners who will be treating hundreds of us? Do we have enough soap, hand sanitizer, face masks and cleaning products in our homes?

Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the responsibility of the judgment of Jesus of Nazareth as a criminal. Lady Macbeth, hundreds of years afterwards, thought ‘a little water will cure’ the deed of murdering the reigning King of Scotland. Then in a dramatically symmetrical karmic infliction, she develops compulsive obsessive disorder, washing her hands repeatedly, with no one but her husband understanding why she thinks they are unclean. Isn’t it ironic.

Her doctor says: ‘What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands’.

The lady who looks after her says: ‘It is an accustomed action with her... I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.’

The lady herself, in despair, trying to ‘sweeten’ her hands with every scented soap available, asks: ‘What, will these hands ne’er be clean?’

There it is again, the smell of mortality.

Unfortunately for us, we sensitive plants, we are not abstract creatures, and it is through touch that we convey love and receive signs of affirmation, affection and acceptance. So now that personal contact is being said to be dangerous, we are comprehensively deprived of a source of happiness and our sense of tactile belonging is diminished.

We are being told not to travel, to work from home and conduct conferences, seminars and classes virtually by Skype and Zoom. Technology may enable us to communicate, verbally and visually, but on the personal level I think that the lessening of physical presence and proximity we will now inevitably experience as we self-isolate will create an outpouring of dreams, and romantic fantasies.

We will create avatars and iconic images of them in our imaginations. Those we love will be the very ones we do not want to touch, for fear of contaminating them with our viral mortality.

The Elixir Of Youth

A girl sits on a chair in a blaze of media coverage and accuses adults of stealing her dreams and hopes for the future, and lacking the courage to fix the problems she and her generation will inherit. Did the world alter its velocity, or change the way it spins on its axis? Was anyone listening? Was she over-emotional? 

Astrologers do an identikit portrait of her personality from an interpretation of her character qualities, based on the positions of the planets at the hour of her birth. Instagram and Facebook are filled with images of her, demanding ‘How dare you?’ And almost from the first moment she speaks, her words and her expressions are transformed into a myriad memes and GIFs. 

J.K. Rowling wrote about prophecies, and envisioned that children would rise from their enforced passivity in a crisis, and would save the world, in Book 7 of the Harry Potter series. This idea is opened up in the classical quotation at the beginning: 

‘Oh, the torment bred in the race,

The grinding scream of death

And the stroke that hits the vein,

The hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief, 

The curse no man can bear.

But there is a cure in the house,

And not outside it, no, 

Not from others but from them,

Their bloody strife. We sing to you, 

Dark gods beneath the earth. 

Now hear, you blissful powers underground - 

Answer the call, send help. 

Bless the children, give them triumph now.‘ (Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers)

Whitney Houston sang it in ‘The Greatest Love Of All’: ‘I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride to make it easier.’

The children of today have grown up fast, and in many ways unprotected, in the shadow not of nuclear war as Generation X did, but amidst the collapsing structures of economic systems which have polarized the world and destroyed the habitat and the moral environment simultaneously. 

But life finds a way: intelligent organisms survive because they adapt, and seek to not merely survive, but thrive and flourish. The wisest know that if a long term survival is wanted, this flourishing must be inclusive and not competitive in the ‘kill or be killed’, ‘win or lose’ ultimatum way that is modelled for us by many of the current leaders of the world. 

It is the passing of the baton that is happening. Inter-generational respect given and demanded. And it is sustained in the actions of the Hogwarts students, hope of the future generations of the wizarding world. They organize, they rally, they defy the rising elements of fascism and sadism. They retreat underground, threatened and defiant, and go into formation; but they emerge with the ability as well as the will to create a better world. The difference I see is that there is a big picture vision available to them: something that is more than ‘Me Me Me’. 

It seems as if the youth movement of 1968 is going through a recycling sequence: 50 years on, and fuelled by frustration and cynicism instead of idealism. Youth are rallying, but their collective uprising is being modified because they are also being rallied and herded. They have withheld themselves from corporate enslavement and the proffered icons of glorified wanderlust, boycotted the convenience of toxic consumables, rejected mechanistic education processes and embraced alternatives to binary thinking. But they are children, being scolded and told that they are disrespectful of their elders. 

The sharp sparks of the Arab Spring, selectively televised protests against the Global Financial Summits, the transport disruptions in Hong Kong, the fresh-faced disaffected in their trillions are becoming fierce, in the way the sensitive do when hit too often. 

'You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,' 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg thundered this week at world leaders at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in New York. 

She has accused these leaders of ignoring the science behind the climate crisis, saying: 'We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth - how dare you!'

I have been thinking - with Greta’s voice echoing in my ears - of apocalyptic fairy tales and futuristic fiction: in William Goulding’s ‘Lord Of The Flies’, the entire structure of civilization devolves into a struggle for tribal supremacy amongst a group of children. The ending is a brilliant wake-up call: we have been so immersed in the politics and sociology of the brutal battle for survival that we have forgotten the protagonists are children. At the end, after people have been killed and democracy lies in ruins, an adult comes to rescue them and sees a bunch of children who look like savages. 

In Orson Scott Card’s brilliant dystopic ‘Ender’s Game’, the global ‘threat’ takes the form of a space war, and the enemy is an alien race. The ‘soldiers’ who are trained to fight are children, aged 8, 9 and 10, recruited and trained in tactics and skill, and damaged immeasurably by their loss of childhood and their longing for its innocence and its possibility of spontaneity and joy. Ender the child protagonist is manipulated by the adults who are training him: they let him believe that the real war with its mass destruction of a species orchestrated by his special skillset is only a realistic training session. The truth devastates him. 

Greta Thunberg is suspected by some of being used like a ventriloquist’s dummy to voice socialist political viewpoints, and this narrowing of her impact is disrespectful of the bigger picture she has so far managed to articulate. Child labor is used illegally throughout the world, and children are trafficked and utilized by predators and exploiters of all kinds. The rights of children have only comparatively recently been recognized. And more abuse is being reported all the time, and investigated and prosecuted by Royal Commissions. 

What concerns me today is that the thunder and the anger being expressed and generated so fiercely will shortly become whimpers and muffled cries. That the fire of outrage will be doused. That the damage has been done, and the human race is run. 

‘Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be,’ sang Whitney Houston. But she herself, and her only daughter, died tragically before their time. And J.K. Rowling’s wondrous imagination failed to provide her heroic, triumphant children with a life less ordinary in their mid 30s. 

My favourite part of the last Harry Potter film was Professor Minerva

McGonagall making the statues coming to life, to help defend the embattled school. Somebody has made the equivalent of that spell happen, in the world today, and (all rhetoric and bluster aside) this may be the way the world we used to know, ends. 

Out with the old. And the thread of continuity between the generations frayed so thin. 

Designing Our Joy

I attended a talk given by a former Olympic athlete recently, a man called John Coyle, who won silver at Lillehammer in speed skating, and is now a motivational speaker of eloquence and energy. 

The subject of this talk was the difference between chronological and experiential time: or, as he put it to us, how to create the endless summers of our childhood days, as life seems to get faster and more bound by routine and less joyful as we grow older. 

A lot of our best memories as human beings, the most vivid, the most loaded with sensory impressions, are lit up in our imagination because they were our first experiences of something: our first swim in the ocean, the first climb of a sacred mountain, our first dance, etc. Anticipation was huge, and our openness to the experience was heightened by adrenaline. 

The teenage years and our twenties and early thirties contain some powerful life experiences, electrified by wonder, because they extend the boundaries of our known world. We are growing, through study, work and socially, and we are on an arc of expansive discovery. 

Physically, our bodies are full of vitality and we are fit and flexible: energy in motion. Our immunity is high - we can shake off illness and depression easily. We are enjoying the adventure, and the process of rapid growth and learning. 

John Coyle pointed out that in our search for stability and freedom from anxiety in our lives, both professionally and personally, we often settle down after this early flurry of activity into a passive and unexciting personal Middle Ages. Goals are achieved, and the mode is ‘keeping on keeping on’ - continuity, life insurance, health insurance - rather than discovering new ground. It becomes mechanical, and often tastes stale. 

We are becoming petrified - not in an exciting way. We are turning into stone. How do we know this is happening? When we cannot remember doing anything new or meeting anyone different for ages. When we find ourselves doing roughly the same things and saying the same things with the same people. Year after year. Like clockwork. 

This is chronological time. Measured by sameness and routine and schedule. Monochrome in colour. 

The vibrant colours of wondrous, life-enhancing experiences are how we measure experiential time. And according to Coyle, we can design at least 5 or 6 of these experiences in our lives each year. 

The more we can do so, the more alive we will feel. 

We plan a trip to a place we have not been to, before. We read books or watch films we have never known or heard of. We challenge ourselves to expand our habitual food and drink repertoire. We make new friends. We alter our set patterns, and make life more interesting and less predictable. 

Perhaps most importantly, we embrace the concept that danger, trauma and emergency should not be airbrushed out of our lives. We should allow ourselves the opportunity to go outside the sanitized realm of our perpetual safety and comfort. We could challenge ourselves to face and live some inconvenient truths, amidst the high volume thread count sheets and luxury towels of our survivalist aspirations. 

Coyle told us about a trip he had made with his daughter to a resort a few years ago where everything was luxurious and gorgeous - and in which he felt restless and cocooned. He suggested they go for a walk towards a town they could see the lights of, nearby. He had not researched it or prepared for the trip. The town looked closer and more accessible than it was. 

They took ages to get there - and as it was on a tropical atoll, their rubber shoes were ripped to shreds by the coral on the sands and they were in physical pain, dehydrated, hungry and exhausted when they finally sat down. But he said the meal they finally had at the end of that unexpected trip was one of the best and most delicious feasts he had ever enjoyed. He can remember every part of it in detail, years later. He can recall it at will. Because it was such an unexpected contrast with what had come before. 

Listening to him, I remembered something a student of mine had said some years ago. His sister suffered from depression, and he had observed that she would send herself into a downward spiral by focusing obsessively on one negative event or situation and blowing it all out of proportion to the point where she was frantic with sadness, glum and downcast. She felt helpless to stop this process once it started. 

He said, I thought what if she could reverse this? She could find one thing, however small, like a tiny orange flower in a grey arid zone, and expand it, zoom its significance in her mind, intensely celebrate it, until it took over all her mental space. It would be a remedy for the sadness! 

Similarly, we can create joy for ourselves and certain select others by planning opportunities to surprise ourselves, to be open and to respond in a heightened way to what gives us most pleasure. We can slow down the time for these joys - we can zoom in on them, mentally. These are the experiences we remember, and we can pattern them like lights on a string, to illuminate our way. 

We’ll Always Have Paris

Image Credit: Notre Dame Cathedral in flames from The Guardian

Humphrey Bogart says this to Ingrid Bergman in the film ‘Casablanca’. A great exit line, as he farewells the love of his life with supreme gallantry and apparent nonchalance. 

Paris represents very different things to different people, of course. To the characters played in the classic film by Bogart and Bergman, the city of light represented their wondrous days of love and happiness, brought to an abrupt end by the gross invasion of Nazi soldiers. 

A few years ago, there was a terrorist attack in Paris. Do you remember? There are so many atrocities these days, it is difficult to keep track at times. It was mid-November, 2015, and the bombings were a series of co-ordinated attacks. 

The world was shocked, and horrified. Every TV screen showed the scenes, and the panel discussions with expert analysts and commentators seeking to process this orchestrated tragedy. 

Those were early days for social media influencers, with Instagram in its early days, but anyone feeling compelled to comment had an opportunity to participate in the global grief. 

A Facebook friend of mine at the time  posted a poem called ‘Your Paris’ on her page, saying it was by Sylvia Plath. It was not. It was a piece of fan art poetry written by someone else, calling him/herself ‘OnlyCrow’. At the very bottom of the poem, it says: ‘A response to Ted Hughes’ poem in the style of Sylvia Plath’. 

https://allpoetry.com/poem/9577509-Your-Paris--by-Sylvia-Plath-by-OnlyCrow

Not wanting to embarrass the poster of the poem in front of her FB audience, I contacted her on Messenger when I saw the post, and said I believed she had made an error. Her brazen, argumentative response amazed me. She said she felt sure it was a little-known poem by Plath. I said that specific title was a poem written by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes. She said: then this poem must have been Sylvia Plath’s response to his poem! 

The original poem in question, ‘Your Paris’, by Ted Hughes, was a bitter revelation about the honeymoon he and Plath had spent in Paris. It was riven with ironies: the couple even in those early days were incompatible, estranged, experiencing the city differently in radical ways. The city he knew had just survived the war, the same war Bogart’s character had referred to, in ‘Casablanca’. The walls of the beautiful historic buildings were ‘patched and scabbed with posters’, pockmarked with bullets, and the people were damaged in ways that could not be glossed over: 

‘So recently the coffee was still bitter 

As acorns, and the waiters’ eyes 

Clogged with dregs of betrayal, reprisal, 

hatred. 

I was not much ravished by the view of the roofs. 

My Paris was a post-war utility 

survivor, 

The stink of fear still hanging in the wardrobes, 

Collaborateurs barely out of their twenties, 

Every other face closed by the Camps...’

Ted Hughes, ‘Your Paris’. 

Hughes described Plath as willfully ignorant of recent history, her ‘ecstasies ricocheting’, her ‘gushy burblings’, her ‘shatter of exclamations’, the ‘thesaurus of her cries’ only grazing the surface of her surroundings: sentimental without being truly emotional, striking an attitude she thought was appropriate, a poser, cut off from herself as well as her surroundings, including himself. 

The person who had posted the fan poem on her Facebook had not read Ted Hughes’ poem. She had probably been taken unawares by the contemporary terror attack, and could not at short notice manufacture an original response to the hot button topic, so she had looked up ‘Paris’ and ‘Poetry’ on Google’s search engine, and grabbed the most emotive post to share and make herself relevant, which is the most overriding concern for a wannabe influencer. 

The thing is, Plath could not have written that poem in response to Hughes, because Hughes wrote it and published it decades after his wife’s  death, in the collection ‘Birthday Letters’. This fact was pointed out by me to the poster of the poem, in our private chat on Messenger. She said: ‘Well, who cares? Everyone today attributes everything to Shakespeare, anyway.’

So you see, while terrorists attack eternal cities and places of worship, there is another contest going on, amidst the breaking down of incompatible beliefs and value systems. It matters who said what, and when. It matters that identities are not conflated, and demarcations are not blurred. It actually matters, that people create original work, and that it is correctly attributed to them. It matters that false truths are not perpetuated, by what Hughes himself calls ‘practiced lips’. 

The person who made that prideful error had been a student in Sri Lanka with a degree in Arts. A reader of books. A person who considered herself to be highly literate. But she was also - in that instance - careless and inexact, and actual inaccuracy and ignorance are costly, if you want something more than rapid fire attention and Insta-fame. 

I was asked last week about what I thought characterized great literature, in an interview. And I thought it through, the minutes ticking in the sound studio where the podcast was recorded. Restraint, I said, eventually. Exactness of word choice. Precise positioning and placement. The stretching of the ideas over a strong conceptual frame, like a fabric, so the patterns can be traced, and seen. 

Passion is not enough! Emotion is not enough! Ranting is not poetry!Hyperventilation is not expression! Grabbing at the most obvious thing is graceless, inadequate and ill-advised. 

It matters that not every situation can be reduced to a meme or a GIF. Not everything is interchangeable and shareable and relatable. In my opinion, anyway. 

My own Paris is the silhouetted trees on the boulevards in winter, and the waffles bought and eaten hot from vans with chestnut chocolate sauce; and the strange feeling when you walk past the place where the guillotine used to stand, at the Place de la Concorde. Not so much the overarching hollow victory of the Arc de Triomphe. 

It was buying three big blue buttons for my winter coat, with all the French I didn’t learn in school in one of those tiny haberdashery shops which are so hard to find anywhere these days. 

It was imagining the mobs and the aristos being publicly leveled and taken down in front of them. The fading of the great ideal of the Republic. It was all that, but without heartbreak. 

Hughes said in his poem that he and Plath stayed in the ‘Hotel Des Deux Continents’, showing their inability to bridge their otherness even in supposedly the most intimate stage of marriage. He found her reactions to things vociferous and hectic, almost anticipated or rehearsed, ringing hollow in his ears. 

Hughes became Poet Laureate of England in his time. Somewhat known. An original voice. 

Plath became a feminist icon. Gone too soon. Died too young. Lady Lazarus. Indeed, she would have had to rise from the dead to write the poem that woman claimed she did. 

I wish that Ingrid Bergman could have married both men, in ‘Casablanca’, because her character clearly loved both of them. I wish Hughes and Plath had had a happier honeymoon. But I am glad that the grating incompatibilities of time, temperament and circumstance produced that classic film, and some wonderful 20thC poetry, to redeem the despair of terrorism and the trauma of delusion and false hope. 

Teaching us all the difference between friend and frenemy: what is true, and what is faux. 

Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

People process grief in different ways. Some throw themselves into work, either physical labour or intellectual challenge, which provide an alternative to the maelstrom of emotion. Some take up soothing, mechanical, repetitive tasks like washing dishes or sorting linen or cross-stitch embroidery. 

We are told about the healing power of nature: watching the sunrise, seeing butterflies fluttering through colorful flowers, going on forest walks or climbing hills to reach a summit. 

It would take a cultural anthropologist to sort through the myriad alternatives and make a specific recommendation to suit each distinctive individual. 

Years ago, at the wedding of a dear friend whose mother had an acerbic tongue, I was warned to hold my own and refrain from response, as the lady had no filter, and had shown all her life zero awareness of the feelings she was hurting by speaking as she habitually did. Fortunately, I did promise to refrain, and that restraint was required, as it turned out. She insulted her own daughter while we were dressing her for the wedding: ‘Thank goodness she has finally lost weight!”, she said. “At least she can fit into this dress”. I excused myself and left the room, and took several deep breaths in the corridor. I may have jumped up and down, a few times, in all my bridesmaidery finery. 

Human beings are sometimes appallingly inappropriate in their single-minded drive for whatever is in their own focus at times of stress. I did not have to live with my friend’s mother. I only had to grit my teeth for two days and smile and make a speech, and wish them well, and leave. 

Funerals, too, are times of great communal stress. Whenever numbers of people come together, chaos is almost inevitable. 

At a funeral last week, several incidents occurred of interest to cultural anthropologists. Different societies have different bereavement and burial customs, and the custom followed at that funeral was that the body of the person who had died was laid out in his parents’ home for two days, followed by a cremation. 

On the first day, the casket was open, and the people sat around it and offered their condolences and support to the grieving parents of the deceased. Coffee and tea and refreshments were served to those out in the garden in the marquees. 

A famous cricketer, related to the widow of the man who had died, came to pay his respects. And - to my amazement - I saw a group of women in their 40s line up to request to take selfies with this celebrity, with the body of the dead person lying there right next to them. Seeing me staring at them in total astonishment, they invited me to join them. I told them I was not a fan. And that was the understatement of the year. 

Later in the proceedings, I saw a lady I had never seen before go and stand looking at the face of the dead man, and then deliberately move aside the velvet ropes that had been placed around the casket and step right up to him and touch him all over his face. To be fair, her husband had been trying to stop her, but was pushed aside with the force of a bulldozer. Crying, this woman explained to me that she felt entitled to do this, because he had been like a son to her. She felt like his mother. 

I said his actual mother would be surprised to know that. All these years, she had thought she was the only one. I had found it offensive to see this lady touching my brother’s beloved face. Every protective, territorial feeling I had was rampant. 

The worst outrage, though, was perhaps the most mundane. Returning home after the cremation, we found the house bare. All the flower arrangements, wreaths and bouquets, including those sent to my mother and myself, personally, as expressions of love and support from dear friends, had been removed. 

Where have all the flowers gone? I asked. 

The person who had made the arrangements said : oh, sorry, but they are taken with the hearse. I was told by some of my friends that the funeral parlours resell the flower arrangements, and that it is big business. I could not believe it. But apparently some do - and if you leave floral arrangements on the graves of your loved ones at the cemetery, people steal them. One friend said she now breaks up the floral arrangements her family take to the cemetery, and that she scatters the flowers on her father’s grave by hand, to prevent this happening. 

Were the flowers resold? Or were they burnt together with the casket at the crematorium? Does it matter, at all, given that the flowers were only going to last in their beauty for a day or two, at the most? And in any case, there is a superstition that funeral flowers should not be kept in the house after the person has been buried or cremated. 

But it mattered to me. All these incidents, small in themselves, felt like disrespectful violations. I know this is because of the great loss we have suffered, and the intense grief we are feeling, which magnifies everyday human actions and their impact. Perhaps I did not want to lose my place in the hierarchy of grief, or admit that anyone else could have loved my brother as we did. 

But I went to the flower markets and got all the colourful flowers I could find, from the buckets of flowers on Eye Hospital Road: big bunches of gold and orange and red and yellow, like fireworks, in every available vase and jug, on every windowsill and table, to light up the house. Much more vibrant than the white ones that were sent to us for the funeral. 

We are told playing the music my brother loved will help us think of him with joy. So, now all the hundreds of people have gone, we can do that. And he can hear it, and be happy, in heaven. 

And I can plant some butterfly flowers at his grave, so that no one here on earth can take the flowers away. 

Where Your Treasure Is

Global warming, drought and catastrophic climate change are no longer mere theories or background news on the television. A friend of mine in rural Australia was evacuated from her home a few days ago. On Boxing Day, she and her family were having a picnic by a stream. 

Three days later, she describes how the bush fires had threatened the town she lives in. They had cleared the garden of all debris and flammable material, and soaked everything in water, as a deterrent. But the fire fronts had advanced, they were told to evacuate, and then she had been given only a few hours in which to return to her house and collect the things of most value to her before the fierce winds changed direction again. 

She said she stood, strangely energised with excess adrenaline, in the middle of her home and wondered what she should take. Her family and pets were safe. What mattered most to her, faced with this disaster? Her computers? Her books? Her music? Paintings done by her husband? Her dog’s special basket and food and water bowls? 

What a decision to have to make. I remember 15 years ago when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka, an elderly couple in Mount Lavinia, who had been teachers of my parents in their school days, would not believe the sea would come up to their home. They did not want to leave. How could they even begin to move anything out of there? They did not have the physical strength to lift anything. It was all we could do to persuade them to come with us in the car to higher ground, before the wave hit. 

We only knew about the tsunami because someone in a neighbouring house had cable TV and we heard there had been an earthquake in Indonesia. And when we had arrived, with an iced cake in a beautiful box, to have morning tea with them on Boxing Day, they said the ocean had vanished. The tide had gone out. It was abnormal. 

Experience of recent bush fires in Sydney made us suggest to them that they should take their important personal documents such as passports, bank books, birth certificates and land title deeds. These are crucial, from a practical point of view. But the most important things to save are all the photographs and albums of family pictures, above all else. These cannot be replaced, especially if there are no digital copies of them. 

My friend is a writer, and she said that, for her, deciding what books to take was excruciating. In the end, she ran out of time and had to leave them. She was still, when I started to write this article, unsure if her home had survived or not. It now appears that her home has been lost to the fire. 

Her description of her situation of choice  faced with a firestorm reminded me of the great Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Scandal In Bohemia’. The great detective solves a mystery in that instance by himself orchestrating the threat of fire, and observing the actions of a woman who had concealed a document in a place no one had been able to find. 

Sherlock Holmes explains his thinking: 

‘When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse... A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box. Now it was clear to me that our lady of today had nothing in the house more precious to her than what we are in quest of. She would rush to secure it.’ 

The Holy Bible endorses this perspective  as well. In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Chapter 6, Verse 21, we are told Jesus told his disciples ‘Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’. 

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs outlines the need for shelter, food and sleep as ground-level, universal, basic requirements for human survival. The next level up is human contact, affection and social connection. What a lot of people realize after they have been evacuated is how unnecessary a lot of things we accumulate are, for our actual lives. They make our lives more comfortable and convenient, but are ultimately replaceable. 

What cannot be replaced are the lives of living beings, and homes which have been built by the hands of their owners. Religion teaches us to detach ourselves from material things, but the everyday objects of our lives are dear to us. It is not only the value of our homes measured in square feet or perches, but the value of the lives we live in them, that we try to secure. 

I would advise not waiting for an emergency to make these decisions. Calmly, carefully, select items which mean a great deal to you, from each room in your home. Put all the things you cannot live without, including photograph albums and family pictures, in a suitcase with a strong handle, and keep this in an accessible place. 

That bag should contain everything you need to start all over again, if you should ever need to. 

15 years ago, my parents’ teachers’ home in Mount Lavinia was spared: because of the angle at which it was built, it was not directly in the way of the terrible wave. But the salt water destroyed their garden, and came right up to their door. 

There are still two months of summer temperatures ahead for Australia, and this is going to be like fighting a war. The country will not be the same again. Thousands of animals have already perished: livestock and pets as well as wildlife. Decisions about what to take and what to leave, what is irreplaceable and what is replaceable, will be made by thousands of people. 

Only when the immediate threat to personal survival is over, can the damage to property and land be assessed, and the rebuilding and replanting start.