Here’s what I wrote when I turned 35:

I called Mum and said “Congratulations! I’m AWESOME!”

Only one tiny thing is needed to complete my happiness: a Swedish Warmblood mare, six years old, 16.2hh, bright bay with a white blaze and four white stockings, a trot that levitates, a huge jump and a kind and willing disposition.

Here’s me at lunchtime today:

He’s far from six and he’s no mare. And I sure do miss my mother, not to mention my Dad. But despite everything, it’s been a pretty okay birthday so far.

I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens. Perhaps it was easier for me to navigate that world than my home

Perhaps it was easier for me to sink into those worlds than to navigate a world that would not explain anything to me, where I could not delineate good and bad

How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother’s hands. How unfair it all seemed.

After I left New York, I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

From left: Brenda, Robin, Barbara, Colin

My Brother Robin

Our Robin was born in Mosman, Sydney on September 5th 1935, the youngest of three children of Army Captain Kenneth Chalmers and his wife Brenda (nee King). His siblings were, sister Barbara, born 1930 and brother, Colin born 1933. In the summer of his second year he contracted a serious gastric infection which lasted for many weeks and effectively retarded his physical development at a crucial time in his young life.

The consequence of that was that he was always smaller than his peers which earned him, at high school, the nickname “Massive Muscles the Mighty Midget Mosquito” or “Massive” for short.

IN 1939 the family moved to Port Moresby in what is now Papua New Guinea where our father was detailed to provide fortification for the strategically important harbour in the event of war. The contingent was made up of 22 army personnel, two howitzer anti-aircraft guns, two searchlights, one army wife and three children. Port Moresby boasted a population of about 700 “whites” and a similar number of native Papuans, two schools for white children, one state and one catholic, each with 22 pupils, and one for natives. The rivalry between the two white schools was intense and we children were divided between the two. Stone fights in the main street of town were not uncommon. We had to call a truce when we got home. Robin, being the youngest was often caught in the middle or left standing looking bewildered. Nevertheless we children had many happy and sometimes disastrous adventures together and with our friends.

World War II intervened and our tropical idyll ended with a move to Melbourne and to the Blue Mountains when Dad was posted to the Middle East in 1941. This was a period of adventure and, looking back, amazing freedom, for we three as we explored the bushland and invented games centred around the wilderness at our back door in Hazelbrook. There were few children in our village so we became a tight-knit trio for the next couple of years.

Our Mother’s untimely death in the latter half of 1942 brought an abrupt end to all this and we found ourselves back in Sydney in the care of Mum’s two Aunts who selflessly stepped in. These two women were then in their sixties and the elder one had raised our Mother from the age of five. It is hard to imagine their courage in taking on three unruly pre-teenagers. Robin was only seven. In recent years he told me that he really could not remember our Mother – a sad blank in his life and the possible reason that he did not relate to the kind and oh so tolerant lady, Rosa Heath, that our father married when we were teen-agers.

The disruption caused by the war and the demands of army life was probably felt more by Robin than Colin and I. By the time he finished high school he had attended 11 schools in two States, city and country public and private, and sat for University entry exams in the UK. One story of high school life he would tell related to compulsory School Cadets at that time. Not being sports minded or attracted to the army, he wangled his way into the ordnance section where he could sit with his feet up and avoids any physical activity. And his father a Brigadier!

Others will have to tell you about his years in England. What I do know is that he graduated in engineering at what was to become the University of Sussex and eventually part of the University of London – much to Robin’s dismay. His first job in engineering was with Sperry Rand. I also know that he became an expert curry maker and married Jean Ellison, returning to Australia in 1968 with Sarah and Iain at their feet. Alain and Rachel followed in due course.

As an engineer working in Australia he worked initially for AWA, a pioneer electronics company in this country, moving to other jobs throughout his working life. He was involved in many exciting projects. Software for the original Collins Class submarines; software for the automated on course betting at racecourses; the acoustic system for the new Sydney Opera House are some that come to mind.

As he and Jean settled in Sydney and we live in Brisbane we have not spent much time together over the years but I do know that whenever we were able to get together it was such fun to be part of their lovely family.

Robin was a man dedicated to serving the community in which he lived. He was prominent in the school Parents and Citizens organization during his family’s school years, spent a number of years as a volunteer guide at Taronga Zoo and compiling a data base of the animals there. In retirement he and Jean travelled in their motorhome for ten years during which time he helped a traveller friend compile and publish a guide book of information about the many, many towns and villages he visited in their travels.

Settling in Barraba saw him still looking for ways and means that he could contribute to the community and the town that he loved so much until his sad decline into dementia.

He was a self confessed sceptic, read widely, thrived on animated discussion always taking the lead role, read widely, loved to perform and entertain and enjoyed life to the full.

For me, he was my little brother and I loved him. May he rest in peace.

Robin Paul Chalmers
1935 – 2015

Robin was much-loved husband to Jean, father of Sarah, Iain, Alain and Rachel, father-in-law to Ian, Jeremy and Rachel, and grandfather of Kelly, Ross, Claire and Julia. A brilliant engineer and a man of integrity and kindness, he bore his difficult last illness with dignity.

The family wishes to thank Doctor Piet, the staff of Barraba Hospital and the staff of McKay House in Tamworth for their care for Dad; and our friends in Barraba, who have supported us with such generosity of spirit.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Centre for Research on Ageing, Health and Welfare’s Dementia Research Endowment or to the Battersea Dogs’ Home.

I needed something from the world I didn’t know how to ask for. I needed people—Dave, a doctor, anyone—to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible.

The insistence upon an external agent of damage implies an imagining of the self as a unified entity, a collection of physical, mental, spiritual components all serving the good of some Gestalt whole—the being itself. When really, the self—at least, as I’ve experienced mine—is much more discordant and self-sabotaging, neither fully integrated nor consistently serving its own good.

“That’s so generous,” she said to me when I gave it to her—and of course I’d been hoping she would say that. I wanted to do nice things for everyone out of a sense of preemptive guilt

The great shame of your privilege is a hot blush the whole time. The truth of this place is infinite and irreducible, and self-reflexive anguish might feel like the only thing you can offer in return. It might be hard to hear anything above the clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyway.

A cry for attention is positioned as the ultimate crime, clutching or trivial—as if “attention” were inherently a selfish thing to want.

Just south of the Lions Park out of Manilla, NSW, someone has painted a bearded face on a tree.

It’s the first of eight such faces (that we know of), all taking advantage of the contours of the burls. The second one, named Toby by my nephew though it looks more like Gromit, is my favorite.

Before this trip to Barraba I tried to describe to myself the difference between my father’s town of a thousand souls and my own beloved city of San Francisco, population 800k but arguably way fewer souls. There are the giveaway jokes: Barraba used to have an asbestos mine, and just missed out on a new abattoir. In New York, everyone’s writing a novel; in LA, they’re working on a screenplay; in SF, they’re building an app.

That second joke gave me a clue. I love the density of narrative in cities, the plaques on London’s Georgian houses, the ghost of the railroad through the Mission, the undergrounded waterways. I thought for a while that Barraba is relatively empty of stories, until I remembered with a stab of sorrow that it used to be full of them, but that my ancestors tried to kill all the people that knew them.

Barraba is in Gamilaraay country. One story I do know is that of the Myall Creek Massacre.

I’ve spent enough time in Barraba to have made good friends and learned a little of their stories. Pam has a great one about her husband Ted riding across a flooded creek to be with her when she had a baby; she remembers the sight of him galloping up to the house, surrounded by a halo of flies. Jane’s family owns a property called Wiry, which I had assumed was an Aboriginal name. Turns out it was part of the land grants to returned soliders, and because it’s a relatively hilly and inaccessible property, the recipient grumbled “Wouldn’t it root ya.” More giveaway jokes.

Jane asked me flat out what all seven of you remaining blog readers have probably been wondering: “Are you neglecting the blog because the stuff you’re thinking about is too intense and sad?” Yup. But something really terrific has happened. A researcher has become interested in Dad’s blog, which was critical to his diagnosis of semantic dementia. We have 17 years’ worth of his written records as his condition developed – more than five times the length of the next longest case study. Joanna believes we can extract psycholinguistic markers of the changes to his vocabulary that may help scientists to develop more sensitive diagnostic tests.

As part of collating the material for Joanna, I read a few of Dad’s earliest blog entries. He had a decent line in giveaway jokes of his own:

Tue 10 Feb 1998

Got away late from Sydney. Lasted on the road until 6 o’clock at which time we found ourselves in Gunning, between Goulburn and Gundagai.

Gunning is a town of a thousand souls and very few outstanding features.

Death is the eater of meaning. It swallows up whole universes, erases stories from the landscape.

The work of grief is to make sense of loss. We have to make new narratives to mark the place of those that are gone.

We have to find the faces in the forest.

We chose the most beautiful morning imaginable.

Even @karlthefog had come out to Alcatraz.

The flock of kites in prison made me think of my Dad.

The Lego portraits made me think of playing with my brother as children.

Each portrait is of a prisoner of conscience.

I was ashamed at how few of the names I knew.

It’s a powerfully angry and compassionate body of work.

We are all one family.

I love you more than you can possibly imagine.

The brilliant Sumana made this exact point to me two weeks ago:

Butler creates woman protagonists (such as Lilith in the Xenogenesis trilogy) who are seen as traitors for consorting with their enemies or oppressors. Her stories have the capacity to make the so-called traitor’s motivations understandable, often showing a willingness to negotiate as the product of a stubborn sense of hope for the future that can take the form of a commitment to nurturing a new mixed race.

From the book I cannot put down, Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling. Cvetkovich has also introduced me to Jacqui Alexander’s phrase “radical self-possession,” an idea that instantly caught fire and ran down every blood vessel and nerve in my body like music or healing grace. I asked myself what radical self-possession would look like, and Future Rach (who drops by occasionally to give me hints) said:

“Like me.”

Passages I could have written myself:

Although it was very inconvenient, the most disturbing aspect of the whole episode was the fact that I had been able to ignore the initial pain. By ignoring it, I had made it worse. I was able to recognize this as a warning sign – a notice about my inability to pay attention to the sensations of being in my own body – but I didn’t really have any idea what it would mean to live differently.

Dental care is something of a metaphor for the state of other affairs in my life. Taking care of the tooth disasters involves an act of faith that when something is wrong it can be fixed and that it’s possible to move on… Health maintenance has become for me a sign of self-love, although it also gives rise to some nagging questions about class. Regular dental care seems to be part of the secret life of middle-class domesticity that passes as normal – one of those things that no one talks about but everyone is supposed to do…

When you’re depressed, and all you want to do is sit still or curl up in a ball in bed and never get up, putting the body in motion is a major struggle and a major accomplishment.

I sometimes feel the need to touch the land of my childhood in order to remember myself to myself. I’m not recalling a lost paradise; I’m acknowledging the troubled history that led to my departure as a part of figuring out what it means to go back. My own history of dislocation connects to the histories of immigration and displacement… My “ancestral home” is the site of many histories, both happy and sad, both my own and those belonging to others.

(Note that I am not depressed right now and have not been for years. This book is giving me an opportunity to reflect.)

Untitled, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

The Asian Art is always fantastic but this exhibit just blew me away. You should go.

Me: Dad told us about how when he was seventeen he built a radio controlled boat from a kit and sailed it in the pond at Kew Gardens.

Big: I remember that boat.

Me: You do?

Big: It was in the lawnlocker.

Me: Oh my God. I think I remember it too. About yea big?

Big: Yeah.

Me: I can see the curve of it. And smell what the lawnlocker smelled like. I would never have remembered that on my own, not in a million years.

“This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else.”

There will be twenty women in the next US Senate. Twenty women. And at least one of them is a staggering badass.

Gay, straight: it’s all the same love.

Beautiful.

Rachel Maddow is perfect. The end.

In an otherwise creepy and depressing thread, I found this wonderful comment:

A girl needs to learn how to perform “what boys like” in order to attract and keep boys’ attention, and boys take it for granted girls will be doing this, that girls exist as objects for their attention to pick and choose from (this is why many guys, especially young ones, feel perfectly at home evaluating women, any woman at all, with “I’d hit it” or not – we are surprised at their presumption, but from their POV that is their role as selector). Boys and girls (and men and women) will “punish” girls who aren’t trying to fulfill their given role.

This was such a strong pressure in my adolescence that specific instances of gender-enforcement stand out in my memory: Christine saying “It’s past time you started shaving your legs”; Aaron and his friends forming the Itty Bitty Titty Committee to give marks out of ten for our bust sizes; Cameron saying “I wish you hadn’t cut your hair; your long hair was the good kind, with curls.” And many more. Women were the biggest enforcers. Jan, the minister’s wife, was the worst. Anne Summers wrote a book I still haven’t finished, about women in early colonial Sydney, called Damned Whores and God’s Police. Those were our only options. Jan was God’s chief of police.

Girlness was a performance judged by a panel of assholes. I sucked at it, which turned out to be my salvation. Being a horsy girl was a recognized loophole on the tomboy spectrum (although, again, Claudia, when we were all of ten: “You can’t just talk about horses all the time, you know.” HAHAHA SUCK IT.) The panel of assholes still in full flight in Australia, by the way, where the gendered slurs against our Prime Minister boggle the mind. (Anne Summers, on point again.) But whenever I get to bitching about this on IM, Liz sensibly points out: “It’s not Australia. It’s the patriarchy.”

Argh! I have daughters. I drag them along to barns and science museums and give them math books and read Swallows and Amazons to them at bedtime so that they can have Mary King and Limor Fried and Fan Chung and Nancy Blackett as alternative role models to Jan-the-minister’s-wife. But they’ll need the hearts and stomachs of concrete elephants all the same.

And still. More vividly than I remember all the putdowns, I remember the day I realized I was a free agent, and could exercise a choice. I want that for everyone.

Hugely enjoying this tale of growing up among Mitfords-manque in America.

Life is a scavenger hunt run backward as well as forward, a race to comprehend. But with Wasps, the caretakers lock the explanatory sorrows away, then swallow the key.

It is unkind of me to consider the embarrassment of the aristocracy my own private soap opera, but Goddess forgive me, I do.

When Donny lived in Manhattan he’d often walk by the Ralph Lauren store on Madison and glower at the windows’ horsy homages to the world the Robinsons once bestrode. “If Ralph really wants to get to the heart of Waspdom,” Donny says, “he should do a whole window full of beakers of lithium and patients in white gowns.”

I know I was rude about the SMH just a fortnight ago, but it really was my first window into the adult world, and for many years the name Fairfax held for me the ring of integrity. I’m gutted at the layoffs. The innocent are punished while the guilty walk free.

Here are a couple of unicorn chasers.

Tintin author Herge was a super-problematic dude in many ways, but he was exemplary in at least this one: he made friends with a Chinese scholar and he listened to his friend and he let that friendship change him and his work. That’s all you can ask of anyone, really, so: props.

This conversation between two Asian-American foodies about cultural appropriation is a privilege to overhear, and also contains these handy hints on not being racist:

Danny Bowien is a guy who NAILS it in terms of messaging. He does funky hybrid party Chinese food that I think we’re all honored to be the inspiration for. Danny hit me on twitter today wanting to put my Hainan Lobster Rice on the menu, do it! I love that people like Danny and Kareem Abdul Jabbar are interested in our culture in an inquisitive and honest way.

Danny’s the chef at my new favourite brunch place, so: yay.

I don’t remember when I first read Maus. I think it was probably the year I lived in Ireland, when I went on my first big graphic novel binge, but it feels like I read it earlier than that because it has become so much a part of me. Did Marie Suchting put it in my hands? Seems like the sort of thing she would do. Bless you, Marie, wherever you are.[1]

Maus is kept in the same area of my memory where I keep Olga Horak, a docent at the Sydney Jewish Museum who told me the story of the blanket in which she was carried out of Auschwitz. Olga’s blanket is made of a mix of animal and human hair.

Olga said to me: “I survived Auschwitz. One day all the survivors will be dead, and then there will be only you: the people who have met a survivor. Now it is your responsibility to remember and to tell the truth about what happened.”

Because I stand in this once-removed relationship with WW2, I am as interested in Art’s story as I am in that of his father. You can’t be a sheltered white Westerner and read history without knowing the terrible price of your peaceful, privileged life.

And of course Adorno was right: no poetry after Auschwitz. You can’t engage with the death camps in any meaningful way and then walk away feeling hopeful about human nature, or God, or life, or anything else at all, really. Ask Primo Levi.

But you can’t despair, either. What you do is you become Schroedinger’s human, both hopeful and hopeless. Everyone is a potential genocidaire; I, too, am a potential genocidaire; therefore I must do my work and be kind to other people and raise my children well. Or as Beckett put it: I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

It’s the human condition. This is what MetaMaus is about. It is the story of the story of Art, and of art. It is the impossible poetry after Auschwitz.

[1] Oh, Marie. I’d been meaning to call. I am so sorry. I hope you knew what you meant to me. You did your work and you were kind to me and raised me well.

I guess it’s nine years since the Iraq War began. FP has an only slightly half-assed postmortem. I’m not claiming any superpowers of prescience when I say that the disaster played out exactly as I expected it to. I was, after all, only one of at least ten million people who were against it from the start, and that’s only counting those who felt strongly enough to march against it. Everyone I knew was at that march, if not in San Francisco, then in London or Sydney. I had six-week-old Claire with me, in the tie-dyed rainbow footy pyjamas my mother had brought with her from Barraba.

People – like, for example, my Dad – are vaguely surprised, even now, when I say that I consider the Iraq War the most serious failure of my adult life. It’s easy enough to blame the war criminals, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Wolfowitz and Feith, and to be sure, it was their fault. They overreached and they betrayed the trust that was placed in them, to put it mildly. They should all be in gaol.

But I knew. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. I knew Judith Miller was talking out of her ass and that the Grey Lady was publishing lies. I knew the casualties would be in the tens of thousands, at least. I knew the war would drag on for at least a decade, and that its cost would spiral into the stratosphere. I don’t mean that I had a strong hunch. I mean that I never doubted any of that for a second. Knowing what I knew, why the hell didn’t I protest harder? Why didn’t I fight more? I feel those deaths on my conscience. I always will.

I knew the banks were going to crash, as well, for all the good that did. With those two awesome feats of clairvoyance on my record, you might be wondering what I know now. Well, I’ve known for a while that Romney’s going to get the GOP nomination and that Obama’s going to win reelection. So I haven’t sweated over the outcome of this campaign like I did over the last one. (Pretty cold comfort, though, I have to tell you. The whole women-as-the-punching-bags-of-the-GOP-primaries thing is surprisingly painful anyway.) I’ve also felt the center of geopolitical power shift from Washington DC to Beijing. And I’ve seen the future of work, and unfortunately, it sucks.