Commonplace book: Larkin's letters

Faint heart never fucked the pig

Life is its own justification, of course: except in cases where it isn’t, of course.

I am a corpse eaten out with envy, impotence, failure, envy, boredom, sloth, snobbery, envy, incompetence, inefficiency, laziness, lechery, envy, fear, baldness, bad circulation, bitterness, bittiness, envy, sycophancy, deceit, nostalgia, et cetera…

I have my little depressions and fits of spleen, certainly, but nothing like the flu has touched me; boredom, yes, irritation, with all my heart, but nothing requiring tablets.

Looking back on my first 40 years, I think what strikes me most is that hardly any of the things that are supposed to happen or be so in fact happen or are so. What little happens or is so isn’t at all expected or agreeable. And I don’t feel that everything could have been different if only I’d acted differently – to have acted differently I should need to have felt differently, to have been different, which means going back years and years, out of my lifetime. In a way I feel I am still waiting for life to start – for all these things that are supposed to occur as a matter of course.

You can’t dip litmus into poems and say whether they are bad or good; you can say whether or not people like them but even if people don’t, this still doesn’t negate the pleasure one has take in writing them. Still, some poems are by common consent ‘good’, so are these? Well, I should say that they just don’t begin to be poems in the professional sense any more than your dancing or golf or piano playing would be professional unless you really worked at them. A poem is a highly professional artificial thing, a verbal device designed to reproduce a thought or emotion indefinitely; it should have no dead parts, and every word should be completely unchangeable and unmoveable. Your poems are hit or miss, rather verbose affairs, remarkably articulate and at times vivid but essentially conversation, not poems. Someone once defined poems as ‘heightened speech’; does that suggest my meaning? Features such as metre and rhyme help this heightening; they aren’t just put in to make it more difficult to do.

We judge a writer by the resonance of his despair.

Projection

Joshua Frydenberg quotes “Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, constantly on guard against those who seek to destabilise his regime” as saying “Shiites are mostly always loyal to Iran and not the countries where they live.” Am I the only one who sees echoes here of the slanders of disloyalty traditionally levelled at Jews (and, occasionally Catholics)? I can see why Mubarak would push this line – he is, after all, aware that “those who seek to destabilise his regime” include, among others, the bulk of the population of Egypt, and any scapegoat is better than none – but I’m still surprised to see Australians parroting it.

If you want to avoid destabilising the Middle East, don’t invade Iraq (or Lebanon). If you want to control nuclear proliferation, start with the one power in the region that already has nuclear weapons. If you want a serious debate, don’t begin by creating bogeymen about the Protocols of the Elders of Qom.

IPA

John Roskam and the IPA see a decline in the sense of community, and blame it on – who could have guessed? – government overregulation. People used to accept risk, he says, but “now it is something that must be eliminated”. And what’s the remedy? “Many of the issues council health inspectors try to solve could be fixed by simply declaring that anyone purchasing at a community event does so that their own risk.”

Well, that sounds good – but Roskam does seem to skip over who or what is to do the declaring. If the community group sticks up a sign at its sausage sizzle saying “Eat at your own risk” that has almost no legal effect, if anything goes wrong the group is still liable to be sued for millions, and even if nothing goes wrong the insurance against such suits is likely to be crippling. If the government gets around this by passing a law saying that you eat at your own risk, removing by statute the average citizen’s immemorial common law right to recover damages for negligence, that might create moral hazard – are there really no football clubs out there who would relax their kitchen standards if they were absolutely confident they were immune from suit? It certainly sounds like more government interference, which is what I thought Roskam was against.

Indeed, given the IPA’s previous attacks on not-for-profit groups as anti-business special interest lobbyists one might be forgiven for thinking that the IPA’s real interest was in a more general abolition of product liability suits, something that would be of immense benefit to the corporations that fund it.

Yes, there are real problems in regulating community groups, but they can’t be solved by the IPA’s kneejerk antigovernment rhetoric. It’s not the government that has made us Australians more ready to resort to the courts than we were in the fifties, it’s us Australians. It’s not the government that has left us too little connected to our neighbours, it’s modern consumerist culture’s drive to unfettered individualism. In dealing with these important issues the community sector needs more support, not less.

Age bin citizenship

I think it’s unfair that the citizenship test for new immigrants is including all these new questions. Why don’t we go back to the basics? The test they used for the First Fleet could serve as a model.

Question One; “Do you plead guilty or not guilty?”

Question Two: ”What were you doing on the squire’s land with two partridges and a rabbit under your coat?”

Question Three; “Do you have anything to say before sentence is passed?”

That seemed to be able to identify the undesirables fairly well. They’re our ancestors.

Age bin Feb

The odd thing about the Exclusive Brethren pronouncement, surely, is its basic theology. When it refers to the "serious decline in moral standards resulting in bad laws, strikes and union strife, poor economic management, high unemployment, very high interest rates and difficult trading conditions” it seems to be saying that moral standards are important primarily because of their economic impact. God evidently disapproves of adultery, for example, not because it leads you down the primrose path to hell but because he thinks it has deleterious effects on your economic management. There's a whole entirely new new testament in this, one where you read about Good Samaritan Hostels Inc., the woman taken in unionism, and Jesus driving the moneylenders into the temple.

You learn something new every day.

Age bin - Hicks

Phillip Ruddock’s defense of the government’s position on David Hicks seems to contain some important admissions. He says

"I should address the argument that Mr Hicks could have been charged with offences under Australian law. The best legal minds at the Government's disposal remain adamant that is not the case. That decision is more complicated than simply identifying a criminal offence. The likelihood of success, available defences, the facts in question and the rules of evidence in Australian courts must all be considered."

What that appears to mean is that Hicks can't be tried in Australia not because he couldn't be charged with a criminal offence but because if he was charged he would probably be found not guilty. He can't be tried in Australia because "the facts in question" won't convict him. To put it another way, we can't try Hicks here because the government believes he's innocent.

Age bin

One effect of global warming is that the seasons are beginning earlier each year. As one sign of this, I saw a display of hot cross buns for sale in Coles on Wednesday, January 3rd – at least two weeks earlier than last year.