A one-armed man wearing a welder’s glove walked into a local veterinary clinic holding a stray cat that needed treatment. He looked like a falconer having a bad day at work. There were immediate questions, naturally. What, for example, was the precise order in which the man had come into possession of the cat and out of possession of his arm?
The cat was not, in fact, feral or stray and turned out to be the calmest and most gentle feline the vet staff had ever encountered, making of the man either a liar or the performance art equivalent of a bald man given the nickname curly. Odds of that kind of serenity emanating from any cat at all are quite low, but the odds of getting one that offers only love and kindness after being carried in like a spent fuel rod from Chernobyl are basically zero.
Things are not always as they seem.
An obvious point, perhaps, especially to any child of a certain household who thought they’d found the a secret stash of biscuits in the Sacred Tin only to discover the family sewing kit.
Next up: storing your tax receipts in the family dog!
Whenever we see something, we haul the past to it. A cat is brought into a vet and, in that moment, exists as all cats that ever went before it. Claws and teeth and bad tempers with only the smallest allowances made for the animal that, very occasionally, did not bite or scratch. In such a manner, we create the echt cat in our mind; no matter the variations of form and function among all such creatures. Similarly, the Royal Dansk tin tells us there are delicious biscuits inside. This remains the case until experience has repeated on us and thoroughly rinsed our minds of any hopeful notions.
The esteemed art critic John Berger famously elaborated on the concept of seeing-as-reconstruction in his series of essays based on the BBC show of the same name, Ways of Seeing. In these, he especially upbraids the gatekeepers of art (capital, the ruling class etc) and begs us to consider what it is they don’t want us to see:
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of the past entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote.
Berger offers a rich, complex terrain of thought that I will not defile in summary here except to say he accuses the cultural elite (gasp) of ‘mystifying’ the past — that is, deliberately obstructing insight into it — in order to prevent plebs in the present day from getting any of those famous notions.
When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. Who benefits from this deprivation? In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.
I remember the first time I read Berger, when my brain was still acclimatising to life outside the formaldehyde jar of my regional Queensland adolescence. Like a moth being flung from a trebuchet, the work made only the faintest impression. Perhaps because I did not yet possess a history of my own. Perhaps because I was embalming myself from the inside out in KFC oils. Who, now, can say?
The irony, of course, is that I needed something of my own to bring to Berger and, in time, I acquired it. In time, this experience made much of what I was reading — what I was seeing — step into a meaning that previously wasn’t there. As an art critic, Berger is concerned especially (though not only) with art. The thrust of his argument travels, however, and I find it useful elsewhere.
If all is not as it seems, and the past (indeed, the present) can be mystified in service of a ruling few what, then, are our strategies to overcome this? In a world that offers all manner of informational shortcuts, we must respond with our attention. Not the attention economy where eyeballs count as currency and their vacant stares as blank cheques but real, honest-to-God attention. In this manner, focus is not just a way of seeing it is the way. To turn the thing over in the mind’s eye; hold it up to the light, examine its fissures and flaws.
We must regain custody of our senses. Perhaps I am speaking in riddles. I mean only to assert, with some familiarity now, that in the public square we are are governed by a ruling class. Whether they are the political party you voted for or not, or the executives in corporate C-suites, the media or even the senior officials throughout the federation they all share common features. Proximity to power, sure, but, worse, a view of the world that is fundamentally at odds with how the rest of us live our lives. The power exercised by these few is usually associated with some kind of apparatus. A corporation, the parliament, bureaucracy and so on.
These systems are large and outwardly quite intimidating, whether they intend to be or not, but are all ultimately the output of human endeavour. Which means they are faulty, prone to error and abuse. There’s a reason old mate yells ‘pay not attention to that man behind the curtain’. Scrutiny imperils his project.
Professionally, I pay attention to some things and (I suppose) am lucky to do so. I’m even paid to do it! As a general rule, however, we see enough of what we think we need to see to form a view on it and then move on with out lives. Most of our lives are spent leveraging the phenomenal brain shortcut of top-down processing: possessing the idea of a cat prevents unnecessary mental exertion every time we see a different cat. We just copy and paste the idea of it in our mind. Unless the cat does something unexpected — say, conveyancing law — we can just assume everything is fine. Bottom-up processing requires more work, but in deploying it we construct an object based on what we see, and what we can know about it in the moment.
No prior values or biases — as near as that is possible — and reliant only on the data available. Part of the reason your world feels richer when you travel overseas, for example, is that you really are taking in more stimuli and sorting through it in your mind. Fewer shortcuts. Some of those Sicilian cats really do be looking like paralegals.
The custodians of power in this country don’t much want our attention. When they get it, in the form of opprobrium or praise, it is often not for the policies and preoccupations that matter. Misdirection and illusion form the substrate of their various schemes.
Intention matters little. You can mean well and still do unhelpful things in the absence of transparency or accountability. And you can continue doing them until the hot breath of sunlight arrests the slide.
The purpose of a system is what it does. And to know what it does one must really see it. Look beyond the veneer of politics, or press release and publicity. Venture further, even, then the explanatory memorandum of a piece of legislation to the full text of the bill itself. Primary sources! And, perhaps most critically of all, we ought to have the humility and decency to remain, if not quiet than sufficiently uncertain, when we’ve performed none of the work of seeing. Unearned confidence will be the death of us all.
I’ll take my own advice now and shut up.
Observations
Good News is On the Way
I was lucky enough to find a 1988 edition of Woman’s Day in the cafe where I was working this week and, naturally, proceeded to get no work done. I was one when it came out and, despite my Mum’s generous assessments of my genius, not much one for reading the papers at the time. The portal this magazine provided into that year was fun, in the way that knowing how Titanic the movie ends is fun. For example, poor old Prince Charles had just turned 40 and was wondering if he would ever take the throne!
Only another three more decades, darling, but I have good* news about this sibling rivalry:
I don’t wanna say why but he’s not going to be a huge threat.
The magazine also had a full page ad for some kind of lottery scam: a woman in America promised to mail you and only 99 others a lottery wheel (??) that picks the winning numbers apparently without, or mostly without, fail and she is sharing this beautiful system because she wants you to be rich. I know this won’t be news to half of this newsletter’s audience (hello beautiful people who grew up in an age where the scams were analogue and required a level of industry on the part of the scammer that, while not strictly laudable, is nonetheless impressive) but the idea of old school con artists having to attend to correspondence and take out ads in a magazine is quaint; makes me yearn for a simpler time when scammers were honest and hard-working and cigarettes only ‘reduced your fitness’.
Is Pepsi OK?
Pearl has never been a chicken limited by the strictures of tradition, or even physics on occasion. Where her adopted offspring will find laying spots in the garden or, God forbid, the nest boxes, Pearl is an explorer. She has laid her eggs in buckets and on a lawnmower, even a tub filled with collectible teaspoons which can’t have looked inviting for a single second, and, given access to a motor vehicle, would even try every motel in the country for comfort. I love her so much.
Went For a Run, Saw an Echidna, So I Stopped Running
I always imagine what kind of animals I might see on my various runs and walks around the edge of town and usually what I see are kangaroos, the occasional dead red-bellied black snake and, if I’m lucky, a bird of prey. I saw a sea eagle the other day. Didn’t know they were allowed out this far. Anyway, I was out for a run on Saturday afternoon, determined to finally hit 6km without stopping, when I came across an echidna ambling across the road at the 3.75km mark of my run and promptly stopped to say hello. 10/10, would stop and say hello again. He didn’t much like me and scampered into the paddock where I pretended, loudly, that he had very good camouflge to make him feel better.
Admin Blues
Last week, around the time I was losing all faith in humanity before briefly regaining it and then losing it again (and so on and so forth) I felt an urge that I have rarely felt as an adult. It was a near panic at the thought of being trapped in the country. It was sudden, explicit and demanded the unearthing of my passport that has been expired since the middle of a Covid-lockdown in 2021. I never got the travel itch like most people seemed to in their 20s. I was obsessed with work and earning income and even though I’d like to say now that that was a mistake and I should have enjoyed myself more that simply wasn’t an option then and thinking now that it might have been only flows from the fact that I spent my 20s working so that I could be in a position of relative comfort now. Not the point of this update, but I’m nothing if not thorough!
So I turned my room inside out and searched everywhere for my passport for three days during which I literally dreamed of turning up for flights without any means of leaving the country before, on Monday morning, the damned thing finally turned up in a packing box and I was able to take it to the Post Office to allevite this sense of claustrophobia that had been turning me into a stone. I don’t even have any trips planned! I just needed to know, you know? While I was at the post office I ran into a local guy I know who is sort of flirting with the edges of sovereign citizenry which I guess is how it starts. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never flirted with anything. He was needing a police background check in order to do some volunteering but was asking “if I do it through the post office instead of online do I still have to submit sensitive documents” and the woman behind the counter literally said: “Yes, that is the point of a police background check.” I don’t know what volunteering he wanted to do but maybe it’s for the best. I glanced over and said: “Mate I’m handing them my entire passport. Pick your battles!” And we laughed. But I meant it.
I saw a fabulous meme of a tin of those biscuits, open, with the biscuits inside and the caption “man finds biscuits in household sewing kit!” 😂
As someone who cares for a son who is an adult, disabled and medically vulnerable I cannot thank you enough for articulating the gulf that now exists between the world we used to be a part of and the world that has moved on in a form we cannot access.
Bonus points for using Berger who made me feel both smart and dumb as a box of hair in first year semiotics.