An answer

The last words my mother said to me were ‘What’s the good of you?’ She couldn’t see any sense in life lived (if that’s the word) in a nursing home. She had many years of loving service to recall but memories gave her no comfort. Her inability to do anything useful in her last months made her existence meaningless and this put her in a state of painful frustration. Things like domestic duties and charitable commitment had given purpose to her life and to be without them made her angry. She said ‘What’s the good of it all?’ waving her hand at the ward she was part of, the people nursing her, feeding her, making beds, mopping floors … and the inmates, the elderlies staring into space, talking to themselves, or watching colour television. When I reminded her of all she’d done for those in need, suggesting that she now had to accept the help, the care, she’d offered others, she grew angry.

‘What’s the good of you?’

Questions, no matter how barbed, can point in more than one direction. ‘What’s the good of you?’ is a way of admitting that one is thinking, ‘What’s the good of me?’ Hence my mother’s anger. I went home. Mother died in the night. Her last words have hovered close for the twenty-five years since she released her fury. What’s the good of you? What’s the good of me? What’s the good of it all?

Why was I of no use? Because I couldn’t restore her sense of purpose, which was linked to her sense of duty, which rhymed with her sense of virtue, things which had upheld her through eighty-seven years and were lost. Never to be restored, and she knew it. She would never again be what she had been. She died the same night. Like her sisters, she was a woman of the strongest will, and I feel sure that she yielded to herself in wishing to be gone. Her body was cremated and I took her ashes to New South Wales to inter them with those of her husband and eldest son. Would I join them, when my time came? No, I decided, but I will write about that on some other occasion. Mother lies in the country where she met and married Father, yet her question hovers. What’s the good of me? What’s the good of you? What’s the good of it all?

To deal with these questions we must first examine them. Perhaps they are not really questions at all, but expressions of distress caused by loss of faith. Faith is hard to replace, and for that matter, it’s hard to eradicate even when it’s been replaced by disbelief. Faith serves many ends, many purposes, which have still to be served even after faith is gone. I give as an example of this something which I had heard in my school’s chapel services, year after year: the school prayer, which said, in part:

That those who are called to bear any office herein may always remember that strict and solemn account which they must themselves one day give before the judgment seat of Christ; and that those who shall here receive the lessons of piety and knowledge may use the talents committed to their charge to the welfare of their fellow creatures and the honour of Thy great name. And this we beg for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

I look upon this prayer with interest because, although I had reasoned my way out of Christian belief by the time I’d finished year 12, much of the school’s Anglican teaching, especially the language of the King James Bible, affected me so deeply that I can’t un-shape myself; my rejection, therefore, has turned out to be only a little more than skin-deep. This is a fascinating aspect of human nature, one that brings revolutionaries undone. They can tear down the outer constructs of an earlier age, but not so easily its inner habits of mind. Continuity has a way of protecting itself.

With these thoughts in mind, in reserve as it were, let us now see what sort of judgement (a word I spell differently from the Anglicans; there’s a development for you!) we can make about my life at the age of eighty-two, still five years younger than Mother was when she fell into despair. But a word of warning; I shall try to judge not only myself, and the society that formed me, but also the idea of judgement itself, which is fairly ridiculous, I think. More of that as we proceed.

The first thing I can say about being eighty-two is that I am at peace with myself and have a good-natured truce with the world around me. People are destroying each other in the Middle East, central Africa and numerous other places, but there’s nothing new about that. Individuals, and even whole nations can still make satisfactory circumstances for themselves if they’re fortunate. Lucky. Blessed. The trick for individuals is to be born at the right place and time: not hard, is it! The nearest I ever got to war was fourteen weeks of compulsory military training at Puckapunyal in 1953. The Menzies government thought that the capitalist (free!) and communist (enslaved!) parts of the world might fight each other, so Australia would need an army to defend our shores … Well, to defend our rhetoric, at least, and those who produced it. Was I ready to die for the idiocies of this cold war world view? No, but I was being trained to do so because there was no way of avoiding the preparation that our government had prescribed, there being no anti-war movement then …

One of the corporals involved in my military training at Puckapunyal (Pucka-bloody-punyal) told us about the war in Korea, which he was not long returned from. His company was going to launch a bayonet attack on the Koreans, in their trenches not far away. They were given liberal quantities of rum. They swilled it down and then they had a ‘swearing session’, as our corporal described it. They got themselves ready to charge the enemy with fixed bayonets by screaming swear words at the top of their voices until they were ordered to go over the top. This they did. He didn’t describe the combat that followed, only the build-up. I was relieved. I didn’t want to hear about the fighting because our corporal would have told us things I didn’t want to hear.

So there’s my first point of defence, Mother: I never stuck a bayonet in anybody, not even as listener to a story! What’s the good of me? No good at all as a soldier, but I count that as a point in my favour. Does anyone want to argue?

What did I do when I got back from Puckapunyal? I resumed at university, attending lectures and passing exams, and I fell in love with music. I went to concerts and to Vans Ovenden’s house in East Melbourne where music was played, night and day. I took it all in and I imbibed no more than a few sips of Vans’ ghastly sherries, even though they made him mellow and, to my eyes, sentimental. He loved the songs of Schubert and told his friends that if you wanted to make love with someone, you listened to Schubert with them, reading the words while the singer put magic in the air. Vans wasn’t a very rational man – or perhaps he was! – but he believed that magic and madness were very close. Close for everyone, but the strong-minded didn’t know it, and only those with open hearts and un-closed minds could see the obvious. He was, in his strangely open way, the world’s answer to what I was learning by solid study at university. Somehow I absorbed them both, but only by staying detached. I listened, watched, and thought, but made no commitments in those days.

I went through university on a teaching scholarship, costing my parents next to nothing. I was sent to teach in Bairnsdale and what a disaster that was. I went there bright as a button, ready to do whatever I was told, and I was told nothing. The world failed me, and I fell down with a crash, disheartened and uncertain. That’s what disaster does to you. It takes away the confidence – the faith, Mother – that you need if you’re to do anything. I looked around in my misery and I found very little: drives in the countryside and bush; Mozart’s Don Giovanni; a friend or two; and trips back to Melbourne. Vans’ little house in East Melbourne became my shining star and my only habitable planet, if I may so contradict myself: a place to dream about, a place where I was welcome whenever I could get there.

My learning went on. I learned to teach. I took Gippsland to my heart. It was full of stories, and I listened. I taught my students to listen to their own hearts and minds, and to what was circulating about them which, I had discovered, was as interesting as the superior culture to be found in Melbourne. I determined that one day I would write down what I was picking up from the bush workers, the farms and settlements around me. I was learning to be humble, though you wouldn’t have noticed. I had my privileged schooling and university life close behind me, feeding patrician ideas of myself into my thoughts, and the equal pride I drew from Father’s rural background – proud people, the Eagles – and from you, Mother: I was never in any doubt about my expectations of myself because they were streaming out of you. I must go further than you had, Mother: that was your maternal dream.

When my teaching reached a certain standard I was invited to join the staff at Melbourne Grammar. That was a matter of pride, of satisfaction, but I went in the opposite direction. I’m not sure if you ever knew, Mother, or realised. Instead of taking a spot high on the educational tree, I preferred to stay in the bush. Why? I wrote to the headmaster, telling him I’d stick to the bush band I was in rather than take a seat in the richly-sounding orchestra he was developing. It sounded good at the time, but I’ve wondered since, often enough, why I did what I did.

I think I was following you, Mother: you were always one for the hard road rather than the easy one. You were never happy with privilege, or more than the simplest comforts. You spoke well, you dressed well but simply, you put your energies into work, good works, and love. My brother and I got the love, Father got respect. The rest of the world got caritas, charity, a form of love but one that keeps its object(s) at some distance. I followed you in this by going into teaching, which, after initial failure, I worked out how to do well. You loved the stage, Mother, and I was a good actor-instructor. I did it for years, getting better and more thorough. Eventually, after I moved back to Melbourne, I began to learn that a teaching institution must have a curriculum. Improvisation, which had kept me afloat for years, was no longer enough. There must be levels of achievement set down, these must be shown to the students, and then they must be brought to the level, the capacity, to do each and every one of these things. The next step was to realise that assessment must be managed so that when the students were assessed the teaching was assessed at the same time. That way, there was a proper balance of teacher and student, teaching and learning. One can’t exist without the other. It’s not worth going on, because the age you taught in, Mother, ended a few years before I retired, and by now it’s well and truly in the past. In the age of the internet, there’s information everywhere, and with a little guidance that can be turned into nicely managed thinking and the further development that can spring from it. Our time is past, Mother, but I think we acquitted ourselves well, irrelevant as we may be today.

There’s a lesson there, Mother, perhaps an unpleasant one to swallow. We’re only useful if we do what our times demand. Individuals can stand alone – I’m thinking of conscientious objectors in time of war – but they are always only individuals. The masses, the mob, the vast majority, move as they’re directed and that affects the way they see themselves. If they’re in the crowd, they don’t bother to judge themselves. In seeing no need for judgement they are seeing through the idea of judgement as being applicable to human beings. If we spin the globe, touching it at a variety of points, and then imagine the peoples of these places brought to the same judgement in the same court of divine law, we can see the stupidity of the idea. Moroccans judged with Maoris? Aborigines and abalone poachers? Mongolians and the murderers of Rwanda? The dispossessed whites of Zimbabwe and the hostile, ever-brawling Nigerians? Their barristers would spend all day presenting arguments until the court of Jesus Christ which my Anglican school imagined had to admit its irrelevance. One law can’t be made to fit all (human) cases. It can’t be done. Globalisation has finished off the idea of judgement because a morality developed within one culture can’t be applied outside it except as a form of enslavement.

We don’t fancy that, do we Mother?

My argument has brought me to a dangerous point. Without an over-arching morality to restrain us, and point our way when we’re undecided, we can easily fall back on our impulses, admitting no reason why we should be checked. Fully grown, sexually mature children. Humans need restraint to shape them. If we’re shapeless, unrestrained, we’re dangerous. Society’s not possible without law, which is an agreement about what’s allowable and what’s not. This clashes with the culture of a media-dominated and media-articulated age where to grab a headline is an achievement in itself. To figure in a headline is to be noticed. To be noticed is sufficient in itself … or is it? If we watch our television newsreaders we will notice them occasionally give us the hint of a smile, or the wrinkling of a brow which allows us to construe them as frowning. They’re under strict orders to be impartial so they only show their connection with their listeners when they’re sure that consensus exists; this restraint distinguishes them from the type of radio broadcasters known as shock-jocks, who are trying to impose their values on their listeners by one means or another. The louder the voice, the more dictatorial. Democracies may be little more than assemblages of minor and sub-dictatorships. Democracy is famously the means – the intended means – whereby the voters, the people, pass judgement on those who wish to exercise power, or have been doing so. This brings us to a different form of judgement from the moral – and final, irreversible – type of judgement we were talking about earlier.

Judgement may be imposed, but it may also be exercised. That’s to say, it may not be external but internal to the person under consideration. Judgement – the thoughtful, reflective use of one’s mind in guiding one’s actions – may come from within. Most of us would say that we do this most the time. And then the next question: how do we bring up our children? We can’t avoid making rules for the household but if we’re wise we’ll put our emphasis on training our sons and daughters to consider their actions for themselves; they need to realise that things they do will have effects on themselves and those around them. With any luck they can be trained to train themselves until they become truly autonomous, insofar as human beings – social animals – can be. And how far is that? The individual encounters the social at every point in the 360 degree circle surrounding him/her. Us. None of us are alone. I sometimes feel sorry for those designated as stars; having been singled out for glory it’s certain that they won’t keep their status very long before someone takes it off them. It may be that when we praise a person we are really only praising the chair they sit on because we hope to sit on it ourselves. Every position in society has to be filled by somebody who will relinquish it some day in favour of someone else. Everybody can live in hope!

It’s time, I think, to return to Mother’s questions. What’s the good of you? What’s the good of me? What’s the good of it all? They’re not much use to us, are they, these questions. They imply, perhaps even invoke, a higher power, external to ourselves, to lay down a moral law, and then to judge us by it. There are people, I’m sure, who still believe in a higher power capable of enforcing a law which imperfect humanity must try to obey, but surely such people are in the minority by now. Centuries of warfare, not to mention what’s happening in Syria as I write, have made nonsense of the idea of a superior moral law. If such a thing is ever to be created, and then enforced, it can only be brought about by the unlikely hand of humankind. Can this be made to happen? Here are a few lines from a poem ‘Widmung’ (Dedication) by Goethe:

No one can really know himself,

detach himself from his inner being,

yet, each day he must put to the test

what is, in the end, clear:

what he is and what he was,

what he can be and what he might be.

But, what goes on in the world,

no-one really understands it rightly,

and also up to the present day,

no-one desires to understand it.

Conduct yourself with discernment,

just as the day offers itself;

think always: it’s gone well up to now,

so might it go until the end.

These lines were found among the notes left by composer Richard Strauss from the time when he was writing his Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, generally regarded as his response to the destruction of Germany in the period before its surrender at the end of World War II. Strauss had seen the opera houses of Europe destroyed by bombing and despaired of humankind …

Metamorphosen was his judgement of his fellows. He had no power to punish those who were destroying his civilisation, but he could, at least, express what he felt about it: judgements don’t have to come from the gods to be eloquent. Judgement is everywhere, in the eyes of anyone looking at anyone else. Judgement is an aspect of every decision that was ever made; that makes it pretty hard to escape, does it not?

The idea of judgement was dramatized, indeed grossly over-dramatized, by the Christian notion of the Last Trumpet sounding, upon which the dead were to rise from their graves and face the Almighty. Heaven was the reward of some, hell the punishment of others. God was supreme in this process, while even the most powerful of mortals was nothing. Mother was brought up in the Christian faith but I never saw any evidence that she believed in it. I think she knew very well how fallible we mortals are, and set her standards so high because she knew how low we could fall. If I think she was sometimes unrealistic it’s because she was for most of the time more realistic than most of us have the courage to be. I count myself fortunate to have had her as an influence in my life.

And I let her down at the end because I said what she didn’t want to hear. What was the good of her? At the end, zero, zilch, nothing, nix, as for the rest of us. We all fall down at the end. How could it be otherwise? If we’re in care it’s because we can’t look after ourselves, let alone somebody else. Mother’s time, like her finest impulses, had run out. She knew this was her situation and she hated it. In her anger, she decided to leave the world. I applaud her courage and wonder if I could be so strong. Perhaps the only thing I can do is take her questions, and answer them, one by one.

What’s the good of me? I suppose I could justify my existence. Many years ago a friend told me his girlfriend was pregnant and they were getting married. I asked where they were going for their honeymoon. He said they had no money for a honeymoon. I gave them fifty pounds. It doesn’t sound much in these days of high inflation, but at the time it was enough for a few days at a beach resort; they started their married life together and alone.

At about the same time I made a trip to Barham, Father’s birthplace, with my parents. I was absorbed at the time with classification of the eucalypts, and a famous book, Blakeley’s Guide, had told me that a sub-species of black box, Eucalyptus largiflorens, grew at the 37 mile mark of the road from Deniliquin to Barham. I was hoping I could persuade Father to stop, and was surprised to find that he was very interested in what I’d found in my dry-as-dust looking book. We stopped, Father got out with me, while Mother sat in the car. I examined the buds and fruit of every box tree in the sparse little clump but simply couldn’t find anything different from all the other black box trees I’d examined elsewhere. I felt I’d wasted my parents’ time, but Father didn’t think that way at all. He was as disappointed as I was. He wanted to know what the book told us to look for, and I read him the relevant lines. We both examined a few more buds and flowers but couldn’t see what the book said should be there. Were we in the right place? We did calculations and thought we were. So what had gone wrong? Neither of us knew but it was many years since I’d felt Father so close to me, so curious to know what my book-learning was telling me.

What’s the good of me? Years later, at the time which I now think of as the climax of my life, the woman I was in love with told me that I loved her perfectly; this was not something that anyone had said to me before, nor had I deserved it. But after years of selfishly personal love for this person and that, I’d finally broken the bonds of wanting to possess, and put myself at the service of someone else, a period two and a half years long when I exceeded my standards: if I have to justify myself, I can reach into the finest things of that time and feel secure against any judgement …

But I’ve already gone close to dismissing that word, that idea. What’s the good of you? I’m sure you can think of things to say. I spent thirty years teaching, so surely you’ve spent a lifetime, or half of one at least, in something useful? Working in a hospital, driving trains, classifying birds, growing rice, fishing in the deep, dark sea? I’m looking at you, dear readers, and I see you claiming to be useful! Making puddings, working in supermarkets, selling clothes … Yes, you’ve been useful if your occupation’s been humble. I’m less likely to be sympathetic if you’re wealthy unless you’ve avoided schemes that redistribute money from those with little to those with plenty. Look, I’m even prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt …

What’s the good of it all?

This is the hard one. This is where the keenest minds fall down, looking for a reason for existence, a purpose, a meaning when there is none. We’ve entered the realm where shysters prey on the weak-minded, telling them what to believe in order to quell those fears that incapacitate the souls of those who need an explanation, a summative statement that sounds grand and overweighs the uncertainties that some people can’t handle, while others can use these same doubts to energise themselves in order to function …

Meaning has to be made. It’s sometimes a construct of the mind, at other times a gushing forth of soul’s need, but, whichever, it has to be there and when it’s not it has to be found. Made. Put into place where it’s needed. There’s no person more valuable than the one who offers a vision, a way forward, a purpose, a list of things to do. In the days of mediaeval battle no soldier was more valuable than the one who blew the trumpet, or held aloft the flag, which gave the other soldiers purpose. This is what you’re fighting for!

How silly! What emptiness, if the sound of a trumpet – or the warlike rhetoric of a famous leader – is required to hold the citizenry together, and keep them confident, happy, or inspired. Surely human beings can do better than that?

Yes, they can. Music holds us together with a different kind of delicacy, and we can perhaps go even higher, something I say even though I can think of only one time in my life, a few minutes long, when I achieved the connecting vision which is the best answer I can offer to the questions I’ve been posing.

I had been in America, visiting friends in New York. It came time to go home. I took a short flight to Detroit and boarded the big Boeing that was, according to my ticket, going to take me, with one stop, to Sydney. To my surprise the passengers were mostly Japanese, four hundred of them. Going to Sydney? If so, why? Preoccupied by the question of the one stop – I was thinking of Honolulu, San Francisco or Los Angeles – I didn’t see the obvious. We reached cruising height, then the captain addressed us. ‘Welcome to our flight, Detroit to Osaka …’ It dawned on me. The Australian government had been arguing with America’s aviation control body about this very thing: American airlines getting two entries to foreign airspace (Osaka, Sydney) for the price of one entry to American airspace. Two planeloads of passengers (Japanese returning home from America, Japanese visiting Australia) counted as one flight. They play it hard, the Yanks!

We landed at Osaka, an efficient airport. I wandered about, amazed that world travel had reached the point where one could end up in a country without intending to go there. Then our flight was called and I found myself once more on a plane crowded with Japanese. There might have been a dozen Aussies on board. We took off, the American pilot complaining that our night flight couldn’t be made any shorter because landing at Sydney wasn’t allowed before 6am, a regulation he resented. 

We flew, and in the darkness we continued to fly. This brings us to the question of whether flying is exciting, or boring. My answer is, it’s both. The things airlines do to stop you getting bored are the most boring parts of flying. Those films! I switched off the screen in front of me but the flickering lights of other screens reached the corners of my eyes. I wanted to be asleep but couldn’t do it, sitting up. This was annoying so I tried to calm myself and get into some sort of semi-permanent drowse; I must have succeeded to some extent because at a later stage of the flight I was suddenly awake, my mind in full possession of itself: something was happening. What?

It took a short time, perhaps half a minute, before this new thought was in focus, and then there was no doubting it. I could see my daughter, lying on, or in, a bed. High in the sky, at thirty something thousand feet, I was looking down, and could see her. She was unaware of me because she was asleep, but I was close. She was immediately beneath me. My daughter lives in Cairns, on the coast of northern Australia, and it seemed certain to me, when I thought about it, that that was where my plane must be. I drew a line, in my mind, from Osaka to Sydney, and Cairns lay on the line. What about the time? How long had we been flying?

At this moment a steward came along the darkened aisle, checking on his passengers. I stopped him. ‘Can you tell me where we are?’ He thought. ‘Over northern Australia somewhere.’ I said to him in absolute confidence, ‘I can do better than that. We’re directly over Cairns.’ Airline staff have to deal with some peculiar people. He moved away, saying, ‘Could be.’ I was more certain than that. I turned my mind down again and there was my daughter, still asleep. I had never felt closer to her, even when she was a young child in my arms. If this sounds strange, I would like to say that I was serenely happy, untroubled, pleased to be in touch no matter how mysterious the connection.

The connection lasted a few minutes, then I could feel it weakening as the plane flew south. When it was almost severed, I pulled out the airline’s magazine from the pouch in front of me and found the map. Osaka to Sydney. We’d taken off at such and such an hour, and were due in Sydney at 6am. I wore a watch in those days, and did a calculation. So many hours for the whole trip, so many hours expended to the moment of her appearance in my mind, assume a constant speed for the plane across the trip, and where did that bring us to?

Cairns, in far north Queensland. Looking at the map, I didn’t feel that it proved anything, but it confirmed what I already knew: I had flown directly above my daughter. I had sometimes read of people having connecting experiences and had always wondered if I was such a person, open to the mysterious abilities of the mind, or not. Well, the event had proved me to be open to the mind’s discernment of something it couldn’t logically achieve by normal processes. Something else was at work. Please note that at no stage did I doubt what had happened. I’d seen my daughter as my plane passed over her, sleeping. I thought with pleasure of the phone call I’d make that night, when I could ring her from my home.

I reached Melbourne and I rang. She was surprised but saw no reason to doubt what I said. We’d always been close. I thank the reader for allowing me to describe this unusual happening; perhaps you don’t think it’s unusual at all. Perhaps you’ve had similar things happen to you, or those closest to you? If you have, you’ll know that occurrences such as I’ve described push aside all the doubts and uncertainties of self-examination. What’s the good of me? There’s plenty of good in being connected to one’s child as I discovered I was, so much good in the connection and the appreciation of it as to push aside, to make trifling, trivial, any validity there might be in the questions Mother flung at me in her despair. What’s the good of it all? No good at all, Mother, except the good we make for ourselves. If we need a purpose then we must manufacture it. If we can’t do that any more it’s best to leave the world to its clumsy, self-fulfilling devices. The world’s imagination can usually find games to occupy human minds, but you, Mother, were too perceptive to be tricked. You saw too clearly and knew what you had to do. You left us when there was no point in going on. If the rest of the world had the courage to follow you – to leave when there’s no longer any point in staying – population problems would disappear! Only those strong in mind would occupy the world. That would have suited you, I think, Mother, but the masses, the mob, the vast majority, can’t live up to your standards so you must let them manage as best they can. Life is larger than the human mind, it forces us to submit, something you, Mother, were never willing to do. You belonged to those who set standards, but, standards being what they are, you can’t be surprised when many of your fellows fail. It’s the way of the world, Mother; no wonder you wanted to leave.