Thursday, July 30, 2009

What I see when I look in the mirror: ageing, body image, feminism and psychoanalysis


I often assume I suffer from mild body dysmorphia, which means that I supposedly have a distorted view of how I look. It’s much worsened by the fact that I have rosacea: the degree of horror varying with how pink the cheeks are at any one time.

But I’m not even sure about whether it is dysmorphia. For a start, my face is simply never the same each time I look in the mirror; with the rosacea affected by my food intolerances, I sometimes have ‘egg eyes’ (pinched and defeated looking); ‘tuna eyes’ (red and shrunken) or ‘oil eyes’ (same as previous). Usually there is some degree of swelling on my cheeks. The menstrual cycle complicates this further and I literally appear to age five years just before my period.

I suspect what actually afflicts me is hypervigilance coupled with an unhealthy narcissistic streak!

As a coping strategy, I go for long periods where I don’t do mirror close-ups. Everything except eyebrow plucking is done from a distance and even then I just focus on the relevant area, not the whole face.

It hasn’t always been like this. There was a time, before the ageing and rosacea started their ghastly double act, when I could gaze into the car rear view mirror and see my plumped-up, pale, glabrous skin and believe, momentarily, that I was beautiful.

So what happens when I allow myself, after a long interval, to edge closer to the mirror, to witness all the flaws – most of them identifiable as age spots, milia, broken blood vessels, enlarged pores, but some of them inexplicable, indeterminate markings, as if someone had smeared a tiny piece of non-removable charcoal on my forehead?

I got a close-up look the other day after perhaps a year of being too scared to. I was in the four-lane highway of Dandenong Road, in the Saturday morning traffic, waiting for a red light to change, and the face had gone. I mean the face as a whole, the face as an idea, as a unified concept. The new face was defined by its irregularities: the uneven vertical wrinkles on each side of the nose bridge, the deepening labial folds, the tiny crimson paths under the left eye socket and on either side of the nose. The expression in the eyes one of distaste. Not scared exactly, not quite horrified but somewhere close.

I almost stopped the car to check again. It’s unbearable, the desire to check. You check once and are shocked and then when you move your eyes from the mirror your imagination makes a monster of what you have witnessed, so you check again to reassure yourself. And in between the first and second checks you compose the expression on your face, you adjust your hair, you point your chin upwards, you civilise and arrange yourself.

You’re okay, your mind finally decides, overriding that first visceral reaction. Barely.

P.S. I’ve just done some basic internet research on dysmorphia and I probably do have a mild version!

Stuck in the mirror
Like many women before me, the ageing process has made me question my identification with what I see in the mirror. In the way I’ve written this blog entry so far, I have refused to identify with ‘the face’, distancing myself from it. It is no longer me. (In certain mirrors, with a bit of make-up on, it becomes ‘me’ again – for the moment.)

Could the discipline of psychoanalysis shed some light? Sigmund Freud explored the unconscious through psychoanalysis, and Jacques Lacan basically developed and elaborated on Freud’s theories. But other theorists of early child development such as DW Winnicott have extended and challenged their work.

I studied a little Freud and Lacan at university. I’m no expert on either of these controversial thinkers, but my obsession with the mirror made me think about a stage in infantile development that Lacan posited. It supposedly occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months and is called the ‘mirror stage’.

I wondered if I was going through another kind of mirror stage, a kind of de-identification with self.

Psychoanalysis, so often discredited these days, can be incredibly useful in explaining aspects of human behaviour that social theorists might struggle with. For example, like me, many Western women have long been crippled by a form of narcissism that sees them invest way too much in their body image. The fallout from this is obvious in eating disorders, as well as excessive time, energy and money spent on appearance.

Perhaps body dysmorphic disorder is some extreme manifestation of this?

Naomi Wolf wrote her feminist classic The Beauty Myth almost two decades ago. In it she posits a trenchant and disturbing thesis – that current standards of beauty came about as a backlash against second wave feminism. According to Wolf, when the popular media such as women’s magazines could no longer control women’s actions after feminism sent them scurrying out of the home, they introduced the body as a site of feminine guilt and preoccupation. The perfect woman, a 20-something, underweight blonde with translucently clear skin, is the uber-woman that none of us can ever measure up to (Twiggy was, of course, an early major prototype).

This is a compelling argument, one that is still useful in the twenty-first century to explain why women are willing to risk disfiguration and ill health to explore ever more invasive anti-ageing procedures, so ‘raising’ the standards that apply to all women.

But I think we need psychoanalysis and related theories to explain why so many of us are so invested in the beauty myth and our own appearance in relation to it; and why the ageing process threatens our self-image so gravely.

Feminine narcissism – not just a metaphor but a psychiatric condition, albeit mild in most – is one reason why feminism was spectacularly unsuccessful in luring the mass of women into checked shirts and overalls, and convincing them to bare their faces (another, of course, is that in an unequal world women feel compelled to compete via appearance).

Thus, women are not lying when they say of the face lift, the botox injections, the face peels, ‘I did it for me’. Advertisers encourage this: ‘Because you’re worth it’.

A word of warning: narcissism is often used as a term to denigrate women, to imply that we are foolish and frivolous to be obsessed with our bodies and appearance. This is the double standard of patriarchy: set up an impossible ideal, then complain when women spend all their time and energy trying to live up to it.

A recent article in The Age’s Good Weekend would have horrified many readers. It featured four women of various ages who spent what most would agree was excessive amounts on their beauty routine – the average was $16 762 a year, but two of the four spent more than $19 000 annually. These sums were for beauty and hair products and treatments only, not clothes, shoes or jewellery.

Before looking at how these women justified their spending, let’s take a very condensed journey through some of the theories that consider how we look at ourselves.

Lacan’s mirror stage
What happens at the mirror stage? Basically it takes place when the child sees its reflection in the mirror, and recognises itself as itself, for the first time.

At this point the very young child is a bundle of drives and experiences, with little control over its needs and bodily functions. It doesn’t experience itself as a unified being and it does not see itself as separate from the world.

When the child recognises itself in the mirror for the first time, it’s thrilled – the self that looks back at the child appears to be far more unified than the child feels itself to be.

The mirror stage supposedly helps the child develop an ego. But there are two sides to this. The child rejoices in this image of the unified self it sees in the mirror. But the child also becomes aggressive and angry towards the image in the mirror because unlike the image, it is still stuck with the reality of its uncoordinated, helpless body.

Feminist academic Elizabeth Grosz describes it thus:

The child invests the [mirror] image of itself … with all the hostility directed towards its own lack of satisfaction … The … internalized image becomes an … object of aggression (for example in narcissistic self-deprecation). [my italics].

Therefore, a huge split takes place within us in this important stage of becoming ‘ourselves’ – of developing an ego. Just as we are becoming ourselves, we are also alienated from ourselves.

All about my ‘other’
Before we get on to the bit about narcissism, we need to know that the mirror stage has another important function. It sets up the distinction between the self and the world, the self and the other. This is because for the first time the child sees itself as a kind of double being – reflected back at itself in the mirror – so it’s then able to recognise other people, and other objects, as being separate from it. The child is no longer merged with the world.

The mother is an important part of the mirror stage because she is the child’s main ‘other’, reflecting the child back to itself.

The mirror stage is associated with narcissism because it takes place in the state that Lacan calls the Imaginary – a closed system where mother and child continually reflect each other. In growing up, the child moves from the realm of the Imaginary into that of the Symbolic. What brings about this move is the oedipus complex. (Freud refers to the end point – the resolution – of the oedipus complex as the development of the superego.)

For Lacan, this process is represented by the presence of a male who brings the larger world into the closed system of mother and child. He believed it takes place when we start talking, when we enter language. Similarly, the superego described by Freud represents authority figures that we internalise.

Before I go any further, I have to say that the mirror stage has long been howled down as a developmental phase. Why, other theorists have asked, does it make a material object – a mirror – more important than the role of the primary carer, usually the mother? And how do blind kids develop an ego? Lacan himself later said that it wasn’t a stage at all but a state of being.

I and others have found it compelling, though, because it dramatises so beautifully that split from the self that also separates us from the world. And it uses the mirror, that non-place in which women so often get caught, as a site of self-becoming.

An important aspect of the mirror stage is what Lacan called ‘the desire of the other’. This means that at this point the child comes to see itself as an object of the mother’s desire – it is seeing itself through the eyes of an other, the mother.

For Lacan, then, narcissism might become pathological if we get stuck in the mirror stage, stuck in the Imaginary. And we can see, too, how, if we did get stuck in the mirror stage, we’d continue to feel aggressive towards that mirror image.

But here the concept gets confusing – when we start to age there’s no idealised self to falsely reflect back a unity we don’t feel. Instead, at this point in our lives, shouldn’t we feel more unified on the inside, so that the outer image, which is falling apart, isn’t so important? Shouldn’t the mirror stage be reversed? Perhaps that’s what actually happens when mentally healthy people age – perhaps they begin to detach from the image in the mirror. If so, this would surely be a healthy development.

But what happens if we never get to feel unified and whole on the inside, and the outer image starts to fall apart as we age? Perhaps as we try to detach from the outer image we're also feeling panicky and scattered inside. Or perhaps we simply can't detach – that’s when all hell breaks loose and we seek the two-hundred-dollar face cream, the knife, the injections.

These are speculations only (sorry about the pun). In his discussion of the mirror stage Lacan wasn’t overly concerned with narcissism as a pathology. Indeed, he seems to think that narcissism is the normal state, and goes on to portray conventional heterosexual relationships as narcissistic.

The mother as mirror
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief (not really but it sounds good) when the famous paediatrician and psychiatrist DW Winnicott replaced the mirror with the face of the mother.

It's significant that, just like Lacan and Freud, Winnicott believed that the newborn didn't see itself as a separate being and couldn't distinguish itself from the world. The newborn gets hungry, cries, and the world -- which appears to be part of itself -- feeds it.

According to Winnicott, as the mother tends the child and gives it her attention, the mother’s face literally reflects the child back to itself – in ideal circumstances, ultimately giving the child to itself.

This is very important. If the mother is not in a state where she can reflect the child back at itself, she will not be the mirror the child needs to become itself.

If she does not mirror the child, the child develops a ‘false self’ to protect the ‘true self’. Instead of having its ‘true self’ mirrored in the face of the mother, it searches her face in order to anticipate her moods, and responds accordingly.

The child is in danger of never being able to move into the transitional phase (the phase where kids have an object, like a blanket, they can’t be separated from). In this vital phase the child is slowly coming to terms with the fact that its mother (and others in general) is a separate being with her own interests and autonomy.

It’s not hard to relate this theory to a woman’s relationship with the mirror. Perhaps when we look at ourselves uncritically in the mirror and can accept our ageing process, we act the part of the approving mother who responds to our true self.

If we haven’t had that positive mirroring, perhaps when we see our ageing face we worry only about the reactions of others, and fear they will reject us.

But I think it's worse than that. If we don't get mirrored properly we can't move onto and through the transitional phase. So basically if our parenting's been poor (and there might be a thousand reasons for this, many of them social or economic) then we may still believe on one level that we are merged with the world. We may therefore wait indefinitely to be properly parented by a world we expect to bend to our needs, and we may grapple with the idea that those around us have interests and indeed existence totally apart from us.

Back to the superego
I wonder, though, whether the disapproval some of us experience when we look in the mirror is even more complicated. Is something else going on at the same time, something to do with the wider world beyond the bond of child and mother?

What makes us care about what the rest of the world thinks of us? What makes us subscribe to the beauty myth as an exterior standard by which we measure ourselves? This is where Freud’s idea of the superego and Lacan’s related idea of the Symbolic could prove useful.

I think we really need these ideas when we think of how some women might view their faces and appearance in general. If I think I look bad it’s perhaps partly my superego telling me I no longer measure up to an external standard that the world has imposed on me – the ideal of feminine beauty. I have internalised a disapproving larger world that is telling me I don’t measure up.

Thus, in the Good Weekend article I mentioned earlier, 28-year-old Canna Campbell justifies the $17 754 she spends a year on beauty with the words ‘People say that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression’. Head of a company that offers financial advice, she’s talking about how prospective clients will view her – seeing herself through the eyes of a larger world. Similarly, 50-year-old Wendy Snyder declares: ‘I want [people] to see a groomed, efficient person’ and 39-year-old Vina Chipperfield believes that ‘People judge us every day on the basis of our appearance’.

Beyond the mirror?
These remarks are very much just possibilities based on my limited knowledge. Not all women are narcissistic and overly invested in their appearance. Not all women have conventional upbringings with father and mother playing traditional roles. Parents vary enormously in their ability to love and nurture children. It would be fascinating to see qualitative studies on how aspects of upbringing affect female narcissism, body image and attitudes to ageing.

But again, let’s not forget Lacan’s idea of the larger Symbolic, the wider world, that we enter through language (but that also includes visual symbols). However loving, parents can’t protect their girls from the saturation of media images that portray society’s ideal of feminine perfection.

But perhaps even perceiving all this gives me choices. If I look bad in my own eyes I now have a choice: I can stay in the world of Winnicott’s false self, or instead play the part of the loving mother/mirror, reflecting a positive image back to myself: ‘I love your true self, and I’ll give you the structure you need to bring it into the world’.

Perhaps I can also realise that in judging my own appearance, my over-active superego is playing the part of a potentially disapproving world. And while I can’t necessarily dismantle the impossible standard of beauty I’ve internalised – how can any one person hope to do that? – I can detach from my image a little bit: if I don’t necessarily like what I see in the mirror – viewed through the eyes of the wider world – that doesn’t mean I don’t like me – the me I feel from the inside.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Get off your high horse, John Brumby

My political side has got the better of me again, and I'm shamelessly turning this blog entry into a very early electoral forum. I’m so incensed with the behaviour of John Brumby, Victoria’s state premier, that I’m using this entry to urge everyone in the state to vote him out at the next election, in November 2010.

The man has simply got to go.

There is something about state premiers and ministers in this country that is on the nose. After having been in power for a while, it goes to their heads and they forget that they are the servants of the people, not their masters.

Of course this happens at the federal level, with John Howard’s WorkChoices debacle and the embarrassing loss of his Bennelong electorate both being textbook examples. But in Canberra it happens under a huge array of scrutinising eyes and pens. With journalism almost guttered in this country, there are simply not the media resources to hold state politicians to account (unless you live in NSW, because that’s where the ABC news shown on the ABC HD channel comes from!).

I am ashamed to admit that part of my passion for getting rid of Brumby is not his policies (although I hate them), but the mean, triumphant glint in his eye when he announces the next disastrous decision that will destroy an area of unspoilt beauty, gutter a local community, entrench the power of a corrupt multinational and lead to decades-long environmental degradation.

The man’s hooked on power. It’s become a drug to him.

And he’s slowly killing the city and state that I love.

In this blog entry I’m going to summarise what I consider one of the main sins of the Brumby government, and briefly list the rest.

Plumbing the depths: proposed desalination plant
It's common knowledge now that Victoria is running out of water. As I write, our dams are only 26.8 per cent full. Something clearly needs to be done. The government has developed a Water Plan to secure the state's water supply, but the main option it has chosen to redress the problem -- a desalination plant -- is expensive and environmentally destructive, and has far higher emissions than the alternatives.

These alternatives include dual flush cisterns, government-subsidised rainwater tanks, storm water capture, and recycling of non-potable water (click here for more information about them). But it also needs to be said that part of the problem is some Melburnians' excessive use of water. On 27 February, for example, Melburnians were still using an average of 186 litres per person per day, higher than the government's voluntary target of 155 litres per day. Any new infrastructure will increase the cost of water, which means that those using little water are effectively paying for those who squander it.

The plant the state government is planning to build will be a seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant at Wonthaggi on the Bass Coast. This will take the form of a public–private partnership and will be responsible for one-third of the state’s water supply. If built, the proposed desalination plant will be the second-largest in the world.

According to Watershed Victoria, a group that opposes the government’s Water Plan and especially the plant, desalination is ‘expensive, provides few long-term jobs, has huge climate implications and creates [an] effluent outfall to the marine environment’.

If the plant operates at full capacity, its carbon emissions will comprise up to 2% of Victoria’s electricity use. The government has promised to offset these emissions but, as Watershed asserts, this will mean that ‘a huge chunk of Victoria’s renewable energy will just be covering new (and excessive) emissions’, so that renewable energy won’t be available to reduce existing carbon emissions. Moreover, the plant will be churning out ‘8000 litres of toxic effluent per second … just 1 km off the now pristine Williamson’s Beach’.

But there will be worse consequences if the plant goes ahead. As Watershed warns, there will be absolutely no incentive to develop ‘sustainable water policy’ over the crucial next few decades. The corporate body running the plant will only be interested in profit. Not only will it have no interest in other infrastructure to harvest and recycle existing water, but it could work against these things happening. In effect, it will be dictating Victoria’s water policy for decades to come!

It’s important to understand just how anti-democratic that is. It’s a similar principle to building a private prison and expecting the company running it to be interested in rehabilitation of prisoners, when such a policy would ultimately go against its business interests. The incentive will be to produce water, and charge the government for it, whether or not the water is needed. As recently as 11 July, The Age reported that the Brumby Government had already instructed Melbourne’s water officials to ‘run the new desalination plant at full capacity, irrespective of rainfall’.

This brings us to the issue of cost. Kenneth Davidson, writing in The Age, has explained his belief that the government’s stake in such a private public partnership would be more expensive than if it bore all the cost of a significant alternative – water recycling! Indeed, the government won’t release figures showing the contrary, which suggests the possibility that policy is not being decided on the basis of value for money for taxpayers, but, put simply, government corruption.

Any private ownership of such a plant spells disaster for water-saving and other methods of capture. However, the two companies bidding to build the plant – Veolia (Connex, who recently lost the contract to run Melbourne’s railways) and Degremont/Suez – seem particularly sinister. Both these bidders have extremely disturbing corporate records, as Davidson has warned.

I urge Victorian readers to write to Brumby and your local state politicians about the proposed desalination plant. The deal is yet to be signed, and once the corrupt multinationals that will run this carbon-creating monster are in, they’re in for decades.

Click here for more information about Watershed Victoria, why the plant’s a terrible idea, what the alternatives are, who to write to, and what to tell them.

Other John Brumby sins
Here are just a few of my other concerns about Brumby and his corrupt, incompetent ministers:

* The appalling state of public transport in Victoria – the Public Transport Users Association has useful info about this, while this Age article deals with some of the problems on trams

* A ridiculously expensive price tag for a proposed new rail link

* Using the global financial crisis as an excuse for ignoring local democracy and planning laws to fast track developments

* Refusing to create an anti-corruption commission (what are they frightened of?)

* Inappropriate, anti-competitive development at the already huge Chadstone Shopping Centre

* And who could forget the futile, expensive channel-deepening project, the removal of the ban on genetically modified canola, and the ridiculous north-south pipeline?

Why not vote Green?
I’m not a member of the Greens but I am a long-time Greens voter and supporter. Most people who don’t vote Green have little idea of the policies of this party. Instead they believe the outright lies that both the ALP and the Liberals have spread about the Greens in the name of fear mongering. In fact, this party is the only one that follows the mainstream science on climate change in terms of the degree of carbon cuts they call for. They’re not some wacky fringe group, they’re simply following the science.

Rather than being only concerned with the environment, the Greens have policies on a wide range of issues. The Greens are totally open about their policies, contrary to what some anti-Greens propaganda before elections has suggested. If you’d like to know more about Greens policies, visit the website and click on the ‘Party and Policy’ tab.

You may end up thinking that in many ways the Greens resemble the Democrats, although they have broader aims. (I personally think they should change their name to something like ‘Social Democrats’ to express this broad approach, but that’s another story.)

Remember that when you vote Green, your second preferences (eg Liberal or Labor) count as one vote if the Greens candidate is unsuccessful – so your vote is never wasted!

Thinking of voting Liberal to punish Brumby? The reality is they are likely to be as bad, if not worse, than Labor.

Bring back the garden state!
This is what Victoria used to be called. Previous premier Steve Bracks seemed to be committed to a ‘clean and green Victoria’ but I think that if he hadn’t retired he would have gone the same way as Brumby, perhaps with a tad less smugness. It’s tragic to see government policy so distorted by the demands of the market. We need politicians who will govern for all Victorians, not just big companies.

So get active, get writing, find out more and start telling Brumby where to go, and think about how you’ll vote at the next state election. If you’re a Victorian with a vote, the future of the state is your hands.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

A task unfinished: the tyranny of the recurring dream


In 1980, when I did what was then the HSC, the last year of schooling in Victoria, I got good marks. Not top marks, but enough to get into one of the most prestigious uni courses of the time – Arts Law at Melbourne University.

Even after all this time, the two words 'arts' and 'law' when used together summon up for me a magic that is indivisible. They evoke an arcane world of fun and study, of unknown but friendly young men and kind, dedicated tutors, a kind of playground of the mind. I did not see a clear future beyond the course and had no strong image of myself as a fully fledged lawyer. Rather, I believed I was entering an intellectual fun parlour, that everything from now on would be exciting in a way that would require little effort.

Not a small part of this was the prestige of Melbourne Uni and the fact that it was in an almost unknown part of town beguilingly far away, just beyond the city centre.

Unbelievably from this vantage point, university study was virtually free at the time in Australia, apart from a hefty student union fee that subsidised a hell of a lot of drinking and sport (I’m not against student unionism, but that’s another story).

If I was commencing a law course in 2009 and had earned a government-subsidised place (formally called HECS, now changed to Commonwealth Supported Place or CSP) the law course alone would cost me $8677 per year. If my marks were decent but not high enough for the CSP course, I would expect to pay more than $20,000 a year to complete a fee-paying law degree, although the Australian Government is phasing out full fee-paying courses for domestic students. (These figures are for the law course alone; my bill would have been slightly lower as an Arts Law student because I was studying fewer law subjects per year, as well as arts subjects.)

Anyways. The sheen took a while to wear off – Melbourne Uni and the bohemian and gelati mecca of nearby Lygon Street were like fairyland for a while – but in about six weeks disillusionment and social anxiety had well and truly set in.

I don’t want to rehearse my complete inability to cope with the lack of structure of uni life – in those days, there was a great deal of informal orientation from student clubs but nothing structured, no mentoring or buddy programs. All I need to say is that my planning skills were zilch; I was only ever motivated to study when the teachers and the subject matter grabbed me (which had miraculously happened in HSC but didn’t happen at uni in either Japanese or law, and even English was disappointing); I had severe undiagnosed social phobia resulting in emotional retardation and lack of social skills; I had an undiagnosed, garden-variety eating disorder; the fact that there were no fees made me incredibly blasé about the whole thing; and my parents had told me I could live at home but would be responsible for all my expenses. Any fool (except me) could see that the prognosis was not good.

To cut a long story short, I eventually dropped out of law, after barely scraping a pass in first year and failing both subjects in second. And, although I eventually managed a limp Arts degree, I crashed at Jap. In both Jap and law, I was defeated by the severe amount of study and the fact that the work in these areas was difficult and required thought and application – at school I’d mostly gotten away with doing well in subjects that came fairly easy to me.

But – and this is the crux of the issue – I had less nous than a baby ant when it came to actually doing anything about the pile-up of unstudied articles and case law, unlearned vocab and grammar. Once an amount of control had been lost, I did not even try to deal with it. I simply let go, and the balloon of university success bobbed away and became invisible. I did not, in any conscious way, stress about this. Actually dropping out of a subject before failure would have been an active acknowledgement of my dilemma that I was at the time incapable of.

I finally returned to study a decade or so later when I completed a Masters prelim part time at La Trobe University, and then a Masters degree in English at Melbourne Uni, supported by a scholarship. After that I did a diploma in publishing and editing at RMIT. Because I’d written a lot of poetry and attended poetry workshops over the years, I received quite a few credits in the RMIT course, so got the diploma without having completed the required number of subjects.

This is all necessary background for the topic of this entry – recurring dreams.

I’ve had different recurring dreams. When I finally found the twelve-step program that helped with my eating disorder, in my early thirties, I went through a period where I was constantly having birth trauma dreams. In these dreams I was in a confined, tube-like structure, horribly claustrophobic, struggling to move through it to the entrance. Sometimes this structure was a concrete pipe, sometimes a narrow tunnel in the earth. These dreams may have been the symptoms of a primal fear of being stuck in the birth canal. They eventually ceased, so perhaps I worked through this fear.

But in the last five years I’ve started having another kind of dream. In this dream, I have a huge amount of work to do, but have been incredibly forgetful and somehow missed at least a semester and sometimes nearly a year of work. In the dream I realise I have only weeks to cover an entire years’ work. There’s no getting out of the work: I must do it.

The funny thing is that, in the way these types of dreams relate to my life, the chronology of my study history has been reversed. The dreams were originally about the later RMIT course, and my guilt about having received credits for its completion (this guilt was misplaced, because as well as all the poetry experience, in 1985, not long after getting my original Arts degree, I’d done a few subjects in one of the first TAFE writing courses in Melbourne, and never bothered trying to get credits for these subjects).

In the RMIT-related recurring dream I would find myself in some kind of classroom situation (the settings often mixed up with old workplaces). I was hopelessly behind because I’d somehow forgotten that I was doing the course, and was finally turning up to class. A teacher who was a favourite in real life would be presiding over the dream class, adding to my guilt. I’d calculate with dismay just how much work I would need to do in the next few weeks, and then wake up with a delicious relief.

Eventually this version of the dream ceased. By the time this occurred the RMIT diploma had been hanging on my office wall for at least two years and I think it had finally entered my unconscious mind that the course was well and truly finished, credits or no credits.

But I’m now having a variant on this kind of dream. In this variant I’m a post-grad law student, and have been inexplicably absent from the course. In this dream I find myself with mountains of work to do and only weeks to do it in (it’s always assignments, not exam preparation, perhaps suggesting the editing work I do now).

The meanings of this variation of the original recurring dream seems obvious to me.

When I was dipping out on the law subjects more 25 years ago, I was blind to the practical implications, thought little about what my future would be, and didn’t lose sleep. In fact, I’ve always known I wasn’t suited to law. Even if I’d completed the degree, I probably would never have practised. For most of the years after that failure, my lack of suitability to a law career appeared to justify my dropping out.

But while I was slacking off, smugly thinking that the law students who studied were ‘sucks’, underneath the neurosis and my disillusionment with uni life I was probably feeling a perfectly healthy guilt at my laziness, a guilt that the other, stronger feelings were crowding out. Somewhere in an unknown part of myself I knew there was work to be done, and perhaps now these guilt feelings have gradually burrowed out of their hidey-hole and are coming to light.

But as we grow older we view our personal histories with ever more sophistication and understanding, and these dreams also have a cognitive element. Over the years I’ve met enough rich lawyers and law degree holders to come to understand that a law degree, even if never used to practice law, would have done me absolutely no harm and improved my wages in a variety of fields. My older self now understands that I was throwing away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The fact is, when I dropped out of law I had no burning desire to do anything else (except, interestingly, journalism – and a law degree would have got me a much better entry position). After three years of low-paid regional and suburban journalism, I ended up doing low-paid work in the community sector, where I watched well-paid social policy officers with law degrees write policy papers.

In fact, I’ve come to believe that the whole RMIT recurring dream was just a rehearsal for the main event – a dawning sense of the unfinished law course. Part of me knows there’s a course I haven’t tackled, a job waiting to be done. I wonder now whether I’ll ever stop having this dream, because I’ll never stop being affected by the lack of a law degree.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Theft in a cafe


I wrote this short piece quite a few years ago but it’s never been published, so I thought I’d give it an airing here.

There was wood everywhere: stick-like chairs, honey-coloured pine floors with the oily flatness derived from thousands of footsteps, slim wooden venetians, and redwood stairs that went up past the counter to the toilets. My fat morone wallet was gone; the small café was hugely empty, and so was my black shoulder bag: it felt too light.

My father said, frowning, “I wish I’d been more vigilant.”

My mother said, “I saw the woman tripping down the stairs. She fell in a very strange way.”

The waitress, who had a heart-shaped face and delicate features, said: “They both looked very odd. They looked like they were on something.”

They had been sitting behind us. The chairs of the woman and I had their backs to each other. The consensus was that the woman had pretended to trip down the stairs on the way back from the toilet. As she landed, throwing her arms wildly forward, she had pulled out the wallet from my bag, which lay next to my chair. The zip of the bag had been open. This was what my mother had seen: that strange lunge, which must have ended in a neat, successful operation.

“They left very quickly,” said the waitress. “They hadn’t ordered anything.”

The afternoon melted away in an instant. We would go back to the house, and cancel the cards.

We went back to the house and cancelled the cards. As I talked into the phone my father, perched on the edge of his chair, began to sketch in pencil a profile of the woman my mother had described. “Is that about right?” he asked my mother. “Kind of – the nose was more pointy.” He kept sketching, adding length to the nose, more detail to the long, straggly hair.

Then he and I drove down to the police station, which was round the corner from the café.

“Where next?” my father kept saying at each corner, “where next?”

The reception area with its wide, bare counter was empty and silent. The policeman who appeared was young and reedy, with a long, smooth face and knowing expression. He was so tall he had to lean down awkwardly on the dirty green counter to fill in the form. I signed it and started to leave. “Would this be any use to you, constable?” said my father, holding out the sketch he had made of the woman. The policeman looked bemused; my father’s hand dropped, and he turned and opened the door for me.

We parted to hunt the alleyways. I peered at skips, and through grills into drains; I stared into the bowels of litter bins. I wandered past bulging green garbage bags full of rotten food, piled up in the corners of lanes. As I searched, people sat chatting on outdoor tables, or walked in and out of the shopping mall with their gelati. Ostensibly I wanted to retrieve the spare front door key I’d foolishly left in the wallet, and my numerous cards; but I chiefly yearned to see the rectangular shape I knew so well, its exact tinge of faded morone.

When we got back the cottage smelt of brewing coffee. There had been no phone call to say the wallet had been found. We decided I should wait to change the locks until the following day. There was a small bolt at the bottom of the front door, and my father lay on his side and hammered away at it. My mother and I sat in the adjacent lounge, sipping coffee and eating biscotti as he worked.

“It was my fault,” I said. “Leaving the zip of my bag undone. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“Nonsense,” said my mother. “She stole it from you. She was an awful woman.”

“She’s an addict,” I said, staring at the sketch of the woman’s profile, which now lay on the coffee table between us. “Her life must be hell – always having to scramble for her next hit.

“If heroin was legal this would never have happened,” I added, warming to my theme. “Did you know that methadone’s more damaging than heroin because it’s a synthetic drug?”

“What?” said my mother. She looked as if she was torn between complete disbelief and a desire to have the statement properly explained. My father sat up and put the hammer down. There were tiny flakes of white paint on the carpet under the place where he had shifted the socket of the bolt. “That’s a lot of bull,” he said. “The Salvation Army says we need more detox and zero tolerance. Sweden tried your idea and now they’re back to zero tolerance.”

I didn’t know whether he was right about Sweden so I kept quiet.

When my parents left they asked me what I would do that evening. I said I was going to sip camomile tea and watch a bit of tele. My mother told me she had recently seen herbal tea served in a little coffee plunger. “It makes just the right amount,” she said. “About one and a half cups.”

As soon as they had gone I lay down on my bed in the darkness. It felt as if the blood was slowly seeping out of my veins and spreading through my entire body. I got up and went back into the loungeroom. I grabbed my father’s sketch and started jabbing at it with a pen until it started to tear. I tore the larger bits into small pieces with my fingers.

Later, getting ready for bed, I imagined waking suddenly in the dark, cold steel against my throat.

--------

The next day I put the money my father had given me into my makeup bag and took the tram into the city. A woman and a four-year-old boy got on at Johnston St. The woman sat down at a right angle to me, so that I could see her profile. She was young-looking, with straggly blonde hair and pinched eyes.

“Are we in the city?” asked the four-year-old. “Not yet,” his mother replied, “but we will be soon. You sit over there.”

He started to climb onto her lap. “I want to press the button,” he said, straining to reach the bright red button on the steel pole beside her. “No, Cameron,” she said. “It’s not time to get off yet.”

But he persisted, giggling and protesting at the same time, moving his hand up towards the button as she simultaneously pushed it away. His eyes weren’t looking at her at all; he seemed to know he did not have a chance but felt compelled to ritualistically repeat the action.

“Get away from me,” she said. “I don’t want you near me. Go and sit on the other end of the tram.”

She tried to push him off her lap but he continued to reach for the button, alternating between frustrated sobs and mirthless laughter.

“I’ll ring Glen,” she said. “And he’ll get you. You know what Glen’ll do to you.” She reached into her bag, took out a mobile and began dialling.

The boy’s face puckered. “No,” he wailed. “Don’t call Glen.” He began punching her legs, then threw his head back, sobbing and swinging his torso back and forth. “He’s not there,” said his mother, putting the phone back into her bag. “But I’m going to tell him how naughty you’ve been.”

It was time for them to get off. Reluctantly she let him push the red button, then she walked firmly down the steps of the tram ahead of him. He cried and laughed, and strained to put his hands around her disappearing waist.