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Index
DIONYSUS IN THE DOCK: MAKING ALCOHOL ACCOUNTABLE – FOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL Fs and a Fifth.
SOME THINGS I LEARNED FROM THE SUMMER JOB.
POETRY – Poems appear in this section and are changed from time to time.
POETICS IN CORMAC McCARTHY’S PROSE.
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DIONYSUS IN THE DOCK: MAKING ALCOHOL ACCOUNTABLE – FOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL Fs and a Fifth.
December 2018
When I held a duty of care for sign-posting the lives of about 200 students living on campus at the University of Sydney, I took a trip to New York University and the Harvard Yard to benchmark some matters to do with student life, including academic matters. While there, I had significant discussions about alcohol on campus since the legal drinking age is eighteen in Australia and its universities and twenty-one in the States.
Some I spoke with felt twenty-one was a boon. Some felt it is was a dangerous falsity.
The danger arose when it was known full-well that 18 to 20 year-old students on campus did not cease to drink because of a law. Prohibition failed even when the Constitution of the United States was amended to outlaw or prohibit the sale of alcohol absolutely. Prohibition led to an immediate rise in illegal activities and corruption.
Danger arose where a residential officer knew that under-age students were having a drink in their dorm and an accident or incident later in the evening leads to injury and perhaps litigation and compensation. The pressure was on residence officers either not to know or to know and enforce prohibition. Otherwise sensible practices (serving wine at a meal in Hall) were in fact not legal.
Turning back the clock in Australia would probably mean that unlawful practices would sky-rocket in the under 21 cohort. Well-meaning measures could back-fire. The well-meaning desire to preserve young adults from excessive exposure to alcohol could do more harm.
In 1992 I limited alcohol at a student function in Tasmania. As a result, ‘pre-loading’ (in rooms, corridors and elsewhere) increased. The possession of hip-flasks increased. Much ‘goon’ was stashed around the venue and an after-party or ‘recovery’ went on over a ‘long’ weekend. One can change this but it is very hard work.
Alcohol is both extraordinarily inexpensive in leading supermarket chains and extraordinarily expensive in stylish Bars. Litres of wine can be bought in the former for the price of a Gin and Tonic in the latter.
Ideally, campuses where the drinking age is 18 will have very strong policies, practices and regulations to deal with the psychological and biological drivers that incline some to drink heavily and dangerously. Danger includes physical and sexual assault even when one stresses absolutely the right to drink and be safe or the right to drink and be respected or the right to drink and be rescued by friendly people.
I came to see alcohol in student life partly under the banner of the mercurial god Dionysus, whether the deity was in male or female form. It’s a short step from seeing the pagan gods as deep intensification of human desires and traits to rediscovering them and making them visible in today’s world. Dionysus is alive and well, along with Narcissus and many others, including Zeus as predator of women. I found it useful both to identify and to personify these deep human drives. It was almost as if Dionysus was a living second or third party, a real persona in matters that went wrong or chaotic. Ancient manuals on how many Kraters of were safe for a feast, knew as much.
I found that where alcohol was present and two people were entangled in dispute, it was as if each brought Dionysus as advocate and mouth-piece. The ‘god’ was certainly a para-causal agent in many matters and as the consumption levels rose, so did the power of the god affect the four psychological Fs that enter studies of human behaviours.
The four Fs are fight, flight, fear and freeze. I think that there is a consensus that increasing alcohol consumption impacts normal response mechanisms in these four areas that govern risk aversion and risk avoidance in young adult men and women. Alcohol above a measurable level slows basic human reactions dramatically and dulls signal inputs. I think it is obvious that the Dionysiac intrusion of alcohol also muddies the renewed discussion of consent and the law. The subtle complexities of consent are snared and impaired by Dionysus, even when Dionysus is sought as a companion. Perhaps a fifth F can be added: Fickle.
Dionysus as mercurial god, as intensified human desire, appears with the desire:
1. to drink with the aim of rapid intoxication.
2. for a form of ecstatic experience disconnected from waking reality.
3. for a direct and accessible co-participatory rite.
4. to mask and dull stresses, anxieties and challenges.
5. for a lower-inhibition pathway to physical connection or sexual activity.
6. a camouflage of consent
7. to merge into greater camaraderie as fakeraderie.
8. for collective rowdyism where crazy or illegal things appear as good ideas on the night; (Brain Snaps), and
9. significantly increases risk of serious assault in or near bars and clubs or streets and food outlets.
The best antidote to alcohol abuse on campus was the quality of academic life and the attractiveness of the student’s major university aims, and the creation of meaningful community in which people shared those aims and had more important and valuable things to do than waste themselves. But even this upside can be limited on occasion and in the face of deep human desires – and as Euripides showed in The Bacchae 2500 years ago, when Dionysus son of Zeus lets loose.
Barrett Seaman’s text Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess; What our College Student Won’t Tell You, (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons Inc, 2005) was a helpful reference work, but nothing substitutes for the actual experiences of those who have taken on the variegated responsibilities of signposting life for the brilliant young adults who live at or within our own Universities; those who pursue the risk and reward of actual, empirical, open, measurable and long cycle success.
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SOME THINGS I LEARNED FROM THE SUMMER JOB
October 2018
At School and early University, I learned a lot from the informal curriculum of the Summer job. I got my first around 1967 in a Perth store called Tom the Cheap. The owner was an iconic figure in Perth but his business empire did not endure. I learned to shift product from the back of the shelves to the front where it would sell. Elsewhere I became a Trades Assistant rigger. I had no training and no head for heights. I turned up for the job and was told to carry the tradesman’s tools. Soon I was high above the concrete floor of the new warehouse, connecting suspended systems for wiring. No harness. No helmet. No real induction. I just made sure I didn’t fall.
I became a storeman-packer up under a very hot roof space where it was always 100 degrees plus. I lasted four days and quit for a better job. I got no pay for the four days’ work for lack of notice. Fair enough I thought at the time. I learned that I could kill myself over Summer, and that my care and luck needed to be upped. There was a job in a pallet factory in East Perth where a kid with a compressed air nail-gun would shoot at the newbies every now and then.
I got shift work in a Plastics Extrusion factory, making irrigation and trickle systems. We worked a sixty-hour week, changing over at the end of week from 7am -7pm to 7pm – 7am, or the opposite. Some liked this because they were on overtime after 40 hours and double time and a half by the end. But it was dangerous. The young did not go home. Sleep-deprived people operated serious machinery. A worker got his hand in a machine meant to re-shred reject pipe. I was working to save for uni fees. Gough abolished fees so I bought a car.
When delivering water-tanks by flat-top ute, I learned that I should not pull into a petrol station without having a precise pre-measured ‘ground to top of tank’ height. One centimetre is not really clearance. Secondly, I needed a plan to get the tank off the Ute if no one was at the delivery site to help. Pushing it off and letting it roll, or denting the product was not best practice.
I also learned that when a forty-four-gallon drum of petrol was loaded onto the flat top just behind the cab, I had to rope it down. It had seemed too heavy to move, but I learned that if I accelerated from the lights, the drum stayed still while the truck went forward. By luck, the drum stayed right on the back lip of the truck as I applied the brakes by reflex.
One Summer I spotted a job on the Student Union board. It was in an office on Stirling Highway called The Angelas. I got the job by arriving ten seconds before the next applicant, having spotted him walking up the other side of the road. I decided that he and I were heading for the same place. I accelerated my stride subtly. I met Lang Hancock and his daughter Gina, who showed me some large boxes full of newspaper cuttings about Hancock and Wright from the earliest days of iron ore prospecting through to the present – around 1972. I was given free reign with scissors and paste to turn the lot into a sequence of scrap books. It was a great job but whether I passed Archives 101 I don’t know.
In early 1974, I was in Sydney and from another student notice-board got a job at James Hardie in Silverwater. I was the mail boy and had to walk all over the place in the pre-email days. I delivered large brown envelopes to the Doc in top floor R&D. On asking, he told me that these contained X Rays of lung disease.
Geoffrey Sambell, the Archbishop of Perth, got me a Summer job on the Brewery line. He had connections. I worked on the keg-fill line and in beer salvage. In those days all workers got beer chits. I think I got chits for six beers a day. Everyone did. Like the Austin 1800 one could float on fluid. Morning tea, lunch and end of day shift. It was no doubt manageable. The old blokes asked the young blokes if we wanted our chits. As a one beer a week man I did not. My older mentor got my tickets, and no others as well.
We worked at a time when long-necks were returned, washed and re-used. This required cockroach quality control since many a cockroach would crawl into a mostly empty marine, consume the dregs and die happy. There it would remain, desiccated until washed out. The Summer hires were quality control, sitting at the end of a speedy conveyor belt with a white-lit background behind the warm, full beer bottles that sped by. It was our call. Our judgment. Was that a recognisable cockroach part in the bottle? Or not. Applying the highly precise probability matrix, we pulled the bottle. But where did the doubt-line lie?
In the next bay we’d wipe fragmented glass from stubbies. Adjacent stubbies that had exploded for some reason, left sticky glass fragments everywhere. We cleaned and packed these into boxes destined for Christmas bonuses for staff whom we never saw on the floor. Some time later, that brewery was replaced by a super-automated plant elsewhere and perhaps there were some happy redundancies.
Perhaps the best Summer job I had was in a Brotherhood of St Laurence warehouse. I had complete freedom to vary the price of furniture according to what the purchaser was wearing. If a well-dressed man or woman wanted an item, I would say $200. For others, I might say $20 or $50 or even free. I pondered the economic theories I was imbibing in Social and Political Philosophy at Melbourne Uni and had some capacity to shape my own utopian thoughts.
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POETRY
A list of fifty of my published poems are on the Austlit site. Inquiries about purchasing a copy of The Projectionist Palliser Press 2004, or The Magpie Sermons 2017 can be made via the Contact link or the Public Speaking page.
Potato Sermon
Every day I walk past my potatoes.
I go by a little earlier or a little later.
Their humble leaf helps me think of
lack of hubris as I ponder hidden tubers.
And down below the humus
waits a Harvest Festival.
A Prior Potato Sermon
The Churchyard wall by the copse
divides two crops
into Potatoes one side
and corpses the other.
One day there will be
a clearer distinction between the two,
a difference in lumpish density
as Aquinas put it,
long before the potato reached Europe.
One will still be food for frying.
The other, though tangible,
may become bright, clear, radiant, agile and undying.
Most of the time I think I would prefer
to be harvested by an angel,
But for now I really feel like a chip.
A Very Short History of Europe
That Soviet Era clock
from the Greenwich trader’s stall
boasted its own Barometer
that said ‘The War was Cold’.
Its weight evoked an isotope.
Its progressive tin-plate curves
were wrapped around it in Chernobyl
when electricity was free for all.
The windowless Bank of England
has Lions rampant on its walls.
They guard a mound of coin
since Locke said, ‘Wealth is all’.
The museum of five Marquesses
is filled with gilded clocks .
They came across the channel
and chime their tick and tock.
The drawing rooms are filled
with cabinets of Limoges,
but the corridors hold the armour,
war ghosts of blood and gore.
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POETICS IN CORMAC McCARTHY’S PROSE
Edited 2018
This author is best known for No Country for Old Men (made into a film that can terrify) and also The Road, a bleak tale of perseverance in post- conflagration America. I draw attention to McCarthy’s minimalism and cut-down style. It is a poetics akin to Lincoln’s in his Gettysburg Address. He is a sculptor excising to give bare-bones text that is the more powerful for being spare.
As I finished The Road (a post-apocalyptic journey across a greyed-out America), I felt the last paragraph had morphed into a poem. I wondered how intentional this was, and whether the writer intended this. Here is the paragraph, inviting images of colour and design into a destroyed world.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their finds wimpled softly in the flows. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
This expresses dense Theology. At the end of a novel of apocalypse is also the negativity of Cain’s primal murder of Abel, now as end-time loss. It is loss wired into genes and is an old American restatement of original sin.
I want to try to re-arrange the layout of the paragraph to show its poetic force more clearly. Here is my experiment in blank verse line re-arrangement.
Once there were
brook trout in the streams
in the mountains.
You could see them standing in the amber current
where the white edges of their fins wimpled
softly in the flows.
They smelled of moss in your hand.
Polished and muscular and torsional.
On their backs were vermiculate patterns
that were maps of the world in its becoming.
Maps and mazes.
Of a thing which could not be put back.
Not be made right again.
In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man
and they hummed of mystery.
McCarthy’s readability is strengthened by his poetics of excision and the brilliance achieved by not wasting the reader’s mind with endless floridity. Minimalism leads to a fine poetry and to a stanza as much as a paragraph. Behind limpid text lies core familiarity with age old human ponderings on the tension between hope and despair, good and evil, futurity and the human capacity to create its own disaster. This is deeply embedded in the religious traditions of American colonial culture and European fore-tradition and ultimately in the Hebrew scripture and the New Testament.
Dr Ivan Head 