Death, monkeys, and dancing bears

Thinking about the meaning of death in different cultures these days. My study of non-European cultures has been either so academic or so pop, so Bhagavad Gita or else Monkey!, that I have no practical idea what death means to people outside Europe. There's something rather brutal about the dominant thread we have in Europe and North America now. Centuries of training by our religion to see life as a linear progression to death and to the subsequent judgement of our selves, as we now understand our selves, by God, who we comprehend as another self. I think we still have that pattern, if you can call something so simple a pattern, in our minds. But now, for so many of us, especially in Europe, who have been repelled by the church, we've lost even the small complication of the assumption of judgement at the end - just the simple linear sentence of our selves, growing and aging and dying, and then a sudden full stop.

But in early Christian theology (well, not REALLY early - really early, it was a death and apocalypse cult) there was a conception of the afterlife that was less deeply personal. An idea that on death, we came to understand the will of God, and being in heaven was the same thing as being part of God's will. The release of one's own will, which leads inexorably to the idea of the release of the self - of our consciousnesses in any way that we can understand consciousness. Though from what I remember that's an idea that was resisted by the people who wrote about heaven, and when I listen to Christians going on about God's will they're able to contort their mind into believing that surrendering yourself to God doesn't mean not being your self anymore. Too pagan? Too frightening? I don't know. But the release of the self. Imagine that. You could spend years trying to imagine it. A lifetime. And once you did - once you could imagine that - surely you're no longer your self . . .

I think being alive is the process of being able to release your self. I think I'm very excited to be moving close to Asia and to start taking my holidays in countries and societies I don't know a fucking thing about in any practical sense. My head was full of it last weekend when we were in Brussels Far East museum - Congo-era colonial visioning of the east extraordinaire, to the tackiest effect possible, and I was standing there in the middle of all the Chineuropean fantasization, thinking - I don't know shit. I don't know shit. No cleverer than that fat corrupt shitful bastard Leopold II. I've never gone outside of my cultural comfort zone whilst travelling so I'm really not used to thinking like that. I don't know shit. A bit like death, really.

Sorry if this post is coming off as morbid or (retch) "emo". I'm actually in top form. Rather in the grip of pity for Michael Jackson, though. I don't know about iconography but I think historians will look back on him as a sort of textbook figure about what obsessive fame in our era can do to a delicate person. I was going to post a video of a "Love You Save" performance from the late 70's - that song's in the running for my 'Best Song Ever' trophy - but having just looked at it again I couldn't help but feel, as I was watching him grin and dance around superbly, that I was geeking on a dancing bear with a ring through its nose and no more memory of the wild, no conception of the bad it might do, nothing except not fucking up, not fucking up and getting burned by its trainer . . . Couldn't do it. Poor dead dancing bear. Poor thing.

In testament to pity, here's the only joke about his death I've heard so far that had nothing to do with little boys (and I've heard at least a dozen already):

A post-mortem will be held to determine which was the cause of death:

A) Sunshine
B) Moonlight
C) Good Times
D) Boogie

The Complainant Gardener

Another short one today as the weather continues to buck my negative expectations and made irresistible sitting on the salvaged bench on our balcony, surrounded by flourishing tomato, cucumber, pea and lots of other plants, including some from our upstairs neighbour. I'm taking care of her balcony while she's away but she asked me to bring these two to my own balcony, because they're perennials that will flower while she's gone, and she didn't want them to go to waste. I love Germans.

It's a pity my camera cable is still lost because this morning I found the first tomato (or it could be tomatillo, I don't know) flower turning into fruit - a little green lump of swelling fertility - and I have a powerful urge to share it with the world, which I'm sure will manage to keep turning even without a blow-by-blow photo account of My Second Garden* . I'm starting to understand my family's men and their garden-feelings - and the Italians and the English were equally enthusiastic. When I'm sitting on my balcony surrounded by things that are flourishing in my care, I feel as smug, proud, and happy as if I'd just invented photosynthesis.

Oh, you know what I was writing yesterday about the other shoe dropping? It dropped. The ABC stopped streaming The Chasers War on Everything outside of Australia. I guess the big flap over the dying children sketch gave them that little bit of publicity that had too many furrrrrriners tuning in and, I don't know, but I'm pissed off.

*My first was a 2mx2m patch in my father's massive garden in the house where I did most of my growing up - but I only grew root vegetables there. I was four, for fuck's sake. Man, would I ever love to have a 2mx2m patch now. But space is such a different concept in Europe, which is no doubt a huge part of why I've started to feel it's time to leave.

The happy side of SAD

A short one today because I had to sleep in this morning because of more driving and properly meeting my upstairs neighbour, a German who's pretty awesome and who, with any luck, I'll be swapping plant attendance duties in the future instead of relying on an increasingly unreliable friend with a chemically dwindling short-term memory who lives nearby.

50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'

So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.

There are a lot of reasons to love this picture, redux

But one of them is that you can really see the kid visualizing the truck going over a landscape of strangely human, undulating hillsides. It's the sort of powerful imaginative visualization I remember from the long hours I endured being unsuccessfully catholicated as a child, which I spent pretending my hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match. That's why Italians talk with their hands, you know. It's because of all the time we spent pretending our hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match in church, while the priest blah blah blahs about crap we obviously pay the closest possible attention to, considering our 'perilously' low birth rate and the sort of revolting, hypocritical adulterous pigs we elect into highest office. And, of course, our ongoing Christlike attachment to the merciful and forgiving spirit of Fascism.

God, I love Picture Is Unrelated so much.

Speaking of Catholics, more Chaser:

The limits of the zoological approach, redux

Today's the anniversary of Dutroux being sentenced. It chills my blood, that case, that Nihoul is already back on the streets, that Dossier X was let slide the way it was . . . This country chills my blood. There's charm in surrealism, but the surrealism here is more late Goya than the Marvellous Adventures of Amelie Fucking Poulain, that's for sure. The Lie Gaenen thing tipped me over the edge, that demonstrated a little too aptly the tolerance in this legal establishment for recidivist paedophilia despite all that street-hitting over Dutroux. The king (himself accused of paedophilia in the 70's) has apparently rejected his demand for clemency, but nobody knows if the public prosecutor has actually done its job and got him into prison yet to serve the 2/3 of his sentence that recidivist paedophiles are obliged to serve here (he was already condemned for paedophilia in the 70's, and then went on to have a successful career as a children's author and television presenter).

Well, it's not just paedophilia, there's a lack of proportionate consequences for actions generally speaking that allows the proverbially stupid national spirit flourish. Everybody complains about the wild-boars-on-the-rampage traffic and everbody drives around drunk, but what can you expect when there are no traffic cops and no penalties for drunk driving? I've got an acquaintance here who got pissed, totalled his car in a busy downtown tunnel, waited for the cops to come, they didn't breathalyze him and the whole problem went away. Why not? Nobody got hurt, miraculously; he was insured, the insurance company paid, because in the official documents he wasn't drunk. Simpler for everyone.

Especially because anybody here who gets a prison sentence under three years doesn't have to go to prison, they're too crowded. The F-word mentioned the other day that he'd like to teach in a prison, rather than a private school, which is a sentiment I can understand but I got rather insistent he not do it here, where they're over-crowded in a hellish manner and apparently you have to be the bastard of all time to actually get sent there if it takes that long to get a recidivist paedophile in. But my guess is that if Gaenen'd been a Maghrebin paedophile they'd have scraped together some room. Jamioulx in Charleroi is 50% over capacity, more depending on the source, and apparently with the latest wave of inmates coming in they had to stick a bunch directly into the tank - 2.5mX4.5m rooms without a window and just a concrete slab for a bed . . .

And how are they dealing with the situation at the administrative level here? Paying the Netherlands Euro 30 million to take 500 prisoners off their hands. Because the Netherlands doesn't have enough crime so they've got all these jails sitting around empty. Fucking embarassing.