Babar and the Parable of the Crows

the road will only ever be wide

The rideshare driver’s name was Babar and he was taking me from Melbourne’s city centre where I was staying, south across the Yarra River and toward St Kilda where I was due to be filmed for a documentary about aged care¹.

He was born in Pakistan but raised in Barcelona; about the latter he displayed a striking revolutionary zeal.

‘Brother,’ he said, ‘you have to move to Barcelona. There, everyone is happy because they are clubbing all the time. Everyone is dancing, brother! They have clubs all the time, every night. Clubs for everyone, brother!’

He proceeded to make an exhaustive list, in case I was not yet a believer.

‘Clubs for boys, clubs for girls, gay, straight, you name it brother,’ he said. ‘Clubs for artists and clubs for the people in business, everyone goes clubbing.’

And then he looked into the rear vision mirror to lock eyes with mine so I understood that what he was going to say next was deeply serious.

‘One-hundred-year-old grandmas?’

‘Yes,’ I said, allowing him his moment.

‘Clubs!’

Babar had an energy about him that I can only describe as kid who put a fork in a wall socket at Ibiza. And I don’t mean that as a sledge. He was charismatic and his enthusiasm for clubbing seemed connected to a broader philosophy. I cannot say the same for mine in my late teens and early 20s on the Gold Coast. It was there I sought out Jägerbombs with the gluttonous precision of a truffle-hunting pig and blacked out so often that I fear — should I ever return to the site of the now defunct Melbas or the inexplicably enduring The Bedroom — there is enough of my unconscious self stuck to the floor to trigger a twin paradox and ruin both our lives.

While I drank reservoirs of rum and coke and danced madly, it occurs to me now I never once danced sober anywhere; not even alone. Crucially, I did not dance because I was drunk, I danced because I was temporarily unafraid. Though it is true that I also had a lot of fun, I’m not sure you can characterise a contingent relief — unburdened, while ever you could stay drunk which was not, alas, forever — as true happiness. That seems a rather emaciated form of it, actually.

Now, I don’t know if Babar drinks, but I know in my bones that he dances sober.

‘Just looks at crows,’ he tells me, and for a sparkling moment I fully believe he is about to tell me they also go clubbing.

‘When one crow is in pain, he cries out ark, ark, ark. And the other crows? They all come help him,’ Babar says.

‘And what do we do when someone else is in pain? We ignore them, brother! I tell you now, if you hear someone cry out in pain and you don’t help them you’re in a cage.’

I am immediately reminded of a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye I’ve had saved to a poetry folder on my laptop for many years now². It’s called Shoulders and is about a man crossing the street in the rain with his young son asleep on his shoulders, so concerned with his son’s safety that no car should be allowed to pass close enough to touch even his shadow; eager to ensure no drop of rain should fall on the boy. Nye closes the poem out:

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

I can’t quite imagine Shihab Nye at da club, but her and Babar are not so dissimilar.

Perhaps I was moved by his crow-philosophy more than I otherwise might have been on account of the incident shortly before Christmas. I was working on a detail-heavy news feature and had been playing phone tag with one of the interviewees I really needed to speak with all Wednesday as deadline loomed. But they agreed to phone me back in the evening so I took myself off to trivia as planned and ducked out on the verandah of the old pub with my laptop as the call came in and proceeded to conduct an interview in the Summer day’s closing light.

It was one of those interviews you really needed to listen to³ and I was trying my hardest until a magpie flew into the power pole transformer box overhead and seemed to get tangled up in the wiring, hanging upside down and with an air of pure distress. Now, I know magpies like to hang upside down for fun and that this spirited form of play is a feature of Australian life, but this one seemed to be injured and in trouble. The scene’s aura of trouble was only strengthened when the magpie’s friend (also a magpie) arrived and seemed even more concerned for the fate of his pal.

I even took a photo and, sure, it looks like he’s having fun in it but I’m telling you he was distressed

The interview continued, as did the flailing of the magpie trapped in the wire, and it became harder and harder to concentrate as I realised I was going to have to go back inside the pub and find someone to help, though goodness knows what anyone could have done about it.

After 15 or so minutes, I had to tell my interview subject that I was becoming distracted because a magpie was trapped overhead. And then, as suddenly as it had happened, the little fuck just flew away. I don’t even know if he was really stuck and, short of stumbling across the first journal ever kept by a bird, will likely never find out.

The ordeal left me with elevated cortisol which was still working its way through my system when Babar hit me with his parable of the crows.

I knew, of course, how hard it was to help people. How necessary it was.

In 2018-19, around the time the the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety was announced, I was writing report after report about the overuse of psychotropic medication, including heavy duty psychotropics like risperidone typically used to treat people with schizophrenia, to subdue and flatten the elderly in residential aged care homes by severely overworked and under-resourced staff⁴.

One of the researchers I spoke with, Dr Juanita Westbury⁵ had led an enormous intervention in hundreds of nursing homes, targeting thousands of residents, with a simple premise: what if there was another way to support elderly people with complex needs or ‘behaviour’ problems instead of doping them up on antipsyhotics? Turns out there was.

In many cases — not all, but many — residents were experiencing intolerable pain which was going unnoticed either because they couldn’t effectively communicate what was wrong or because the signs were missed. Some of those signs were as simple as calling out in the night, a behaviour often but not exclusively associated with dementia, or the development of delirium.

Nursing home residents were being drugged because they were in pain.

They were calling out in pain.

I did not need to tell Babar that he was right, on the whole, though it occurred to me there may be a causal link between the people who do try to help and those who choose to dance; the ones capable of being moved.

Observations

Fly-Bys

On my flight back to Brisbane on Thursday the plane had almost landed when the aircraft accelerated and started climbing again. There were small and intense storm cells dotted all around the airport, like a minefield, and the pilot told us that the ‘missed approach’ was due to a sudden burst of strong wind. We came so close to the ground that all the flight systems automatically had us showing as ‘landed’. Even my frequent flyer points and status credits turned up which they don’t until you’re wheels down and on the way to the gate. We were still very much airborne as they changed the runways and we circled overhead for more than 30 minutes waiting for a clear moment. When it finally arrived we landed and the wings tilted so sharply it looked like they might clip the tarmac. I could feel everyone sit upright on the plane in a collective moment of situational awareness.

blackboard: hurrrrrry up

I fly a lot, and have experienced the occasional aborted landing on one of those smaller Buddy Holly aircraft but never in a jet. Even the pilot at the end chipped in over the PA system: ‘Well that was mildly exciting!’ Quite! As we landed, the lightning started and closed the tarmac to ground crew which meant our bags stayed on the plane for another hour and when they finally did come out there were half a dozen or more flights queued up so they just chucked the bags on whatever carousel was convenient, regardless of what carousel the screens told us they would be on. So I stood at the mathematical and visual centre of three carousels and scanned them in a continuous loop for another half hour, astride my defensive claim like the Colossus of Rhodes, until I had my bag and could leave for the 90 minute drive home in what had become the late afternoon traffic. I left my hotel in Melbourne just after 10am and arrived back in Boonah some eight hours later. And then I went immediately to the gym and ran 3km because that is the person I have become, inexplicably.

Title of My Novel?

This is completely silly, and may not translate at all, but you never know. I was talking to Mum last week, in the living room, and the blue heeler Jack had ambled up the hallway to go to sleep at the foot of her bed. In any case, I could hear him having one of his little dreams where he yips sharply but softly every now and then, presumably because he is still guarding his family against potential threats but is also in a library. We don’t know the mind of the dog. I said to Mum: ‘Jack is dreaming’. She looked at me in a terrified kind of awe, as if I had just performed magic: ‘How do you know he’s dreaming?’ The delivery of it gave every indication that she felt the only way I could have known this information, several rooms away, was for me to have communed with the dreaming dog personally and verified it. Rather than, you know, just hearing him. I laughed and then declared the title of my novel will be How Does My Son Know The Dog is Dreaming? In the manner of Philip K. Dick.

Vale, David Lynch

I watched Twin Peaks very, very recently in life. It explained a lot about the genius of David Lynch that I had come to know only through his commentary on the creative process and film-making. When the man spoke about reaching deeper and deeper into the creative ocean to go fishing for ideas, using small scraps of inspiration as bait to go back and lure something even more profound, I can see now what he meant. So it was with his cult-hit television show and the mesmerising film The Lost Highway. I’ve not seen the rest of his filmography, but I’ve seen enough to know we lost one of those rare geniuses who operated on a higher plane. I won’t write an obit, others have done plenty on that front, but Lynch’s death last week at age 78 has prompted a rediscovery of some of his greatest hits.

Here is one of those Lynchian vignettes that has me in rapturous gratitude that we got to share a life with this man.

David Lynch is recalling a day in 1981 when, he says, he "rescued" five Woody Woodpecker toys that he saw hanging up as he drove past a petrol station.

"I screech on the brakes, I do a U-turn, go back and I buy them and I save their lives," he says seriously. "I named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan and they were my boys and they were in my office. They were my dear friends for a while but certain traits started coming out and they became not so nice."

Looking straight ahead he says with a grim finality: "They are not in my life anymore."

In another interview with Paul Holdengräber in 2014 Lynch is asked where ideas come from and he responds, with a slight chuckle: ‘On a TV in your mind’. But when he is pressed further he embarks on a remarkable and, frankly, adorable reflection on the creative process. Watch it below, but I’ve transcribed the key part here:

‘People, we don’t do anything without an idea. So they’re beautiful gifts. And I always say, desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook and you can pull them in. And if you catch an idea that you love, that’s a beautiful, beautiful day and you write that idea down so you won’t forget it. And that idea that you caught might just be a fragment of the whole, whatever it is you are working on, but now you have even more bait. Thinking about that small fragment, that little fish, will bring in more and they’ll come in and they will hook on and more and more come in and pretty soon you might have a script, or a chair or a painting; or an idea for a painting! More often than not [they come as] small fragments. I like to think of it as, in the other room, the puzzle is all together but they keep flipping in just one piece at a time.’

Holdengräber points to another room, over yonder, and Lynch laughs.

Then he says: ‘In a sense, David, there is always another room somewhere.’

Lynch: ‘That’s a beautiful thing to think about.’

Holdengräber: ‘Let’s think about it a bit.’

Lynch: ‘No, you think about it [laughs].’

Folks, we’ve lost a real one.

1. The documentary is called Careless and is currently in production under the direction of Sue Thomson.

2. This folder is screenshots of poems as they appear in books or from various websites such that I can open all of them at once and cycle through them, reading, sort of like one might do with the family holiday album except I occasionally do it just to feel something. I laughed out loud when I read the collected personal writings of Alex Miller A Kind of Confession and came across his journal entry from the 1960s or thereabouts: ‘Reading fiction is very boring. Novels particularly, especially if they are well written. And poetry is only readable if you are the poet, a friend of the poet’s, or an enemy of the poet’. I have oft instinctively agreed with this assessment, even though I come back to the best poetry again and again as my secret shame. I think this tells me something more meaningful: that nothing is better than the best poetry and that the best poetry is vanishingly rare. Hence, my folder. They are my poetry outliers.

3. Yes, I know how that sounds. But all acts of information intake require triage. Especially if your whole life is absorbing information. One gets around to assigning various categories of utility to it. Come to think of it, in somewhat Borgesian fashion, if one were to absorb every bit of information with 100 per cent fidelity it would take just as long to understand it as it would to produce it in the first place, leaving very little room (read: no room at all) for the art of synthesis. But anyway, I digress, he says, adding yet more ancillary context to his pieces with sprawling footnotes.

4. An excerpt from one of my reports in January 2019:

In her submission, Dr Westbury, from the University of Tasmania, said more than 60 per cent of nursing home residents — based on a ­national sample of 11,500 — were taking one or more psychotropics every day. They include: powerful antipsychotics developed to treat schizophrenia; benzodiazepines such as Temazepam; and, increasingly, anti­depressants used off-label to treat insomnia or for their sedative ­effects, typically Mirtazapine.

“Residents were often on doses of antipsychotics for years,” Dr Westbury said. “And frequently they were on multiple agents or not taken off doses before giving them another, different drug.”

Benzos are licensed only for short-term use because of “side ­effects of drowsiness, language impairment, cognitive impairment (and) falls” while the consequences are even worse for antipsychotics. In her submission, Dr Westbury said: “In dementia, only one agent, Risperidone, is subsidised by the PBS for use in Australia and only then for 12 weeks in Alzheimer’s disease (not vascular dementia or Lewy Body dementia) and only for agitation and or psychosis when other treatments failed.

“When taken by people with dementia, antipsychotics increase the risk of stroke, death from any cause, heart arrhythmias and pneumonia and also cause metabolic and movement disorders. In the US, they are not ­licensed for use in people with ­dementia at all and have a black box warning of severe adverse ­effects.”

5. Now acting professor Juanita Breen, University of Tasmania.