THE GIFT

Inner Sydney is a world of contrasts. The well-heeled, the survivors, the creative, and those who have fallen between the cracks in the social cement all mingle on the same pavement. It doesn’t take much to have those cracks appear. One minute you think you are in charge of your life and then…you’ve fallen through.

I’d noticed her whilst we’d been having our regular Women’s and Girls Emergency Centre Sub-committee meeting at my local pub. The pub is close to a major hospital. There’s a residential hotel next door. She had the look of someone from out of town. From the bush. She was eating dinner alone. After the rest of the committee left with their action plans I asked her if I could join her. She was grateful for the company.

She was a teacher from the central west. Her husband was a farmer. But he was in the city now for a triple-bypass. Her life had been the close-knit community of the country. She was floundering now. She asked about my group and I told her that we were involved with an organization providing support for inner-city women who had nowhere to live. No homes. Seemingly no hope. But, if you could just reach out and offer these women a sense of hope, of community, a chance to reach through the social cracks and get back on their feet…then hope was reborn and life could be seen to flower again.

Our steak and chips came. We ate.

She said how distressed she’d been to see such women as she wandered the streets whilst her husband lay in theatre: his chest open. She’d not seen women reduced to homelessness before. It was foreign, alien, to her conception of a world where people helped each other. It was so hard for her to conceive of a woman living in fear and confusion.

Her own daughters were scattered across the land: having families, having careers. Her own focus kept coming back to the rising generations: children needing a chance to become adults and make a mark in the world. And now seeing women who had tried their best…only to see it all come undone.

“I want to give you something,” she said.

She opened her purse and pulled out her cheque-book and wrote a cheque to WAGEC. She gave it to me. We looked at each other.

“I just want to do something.” she said, “Something for other women.”

We touched cheeks in the way women who don’t really know each other do.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much. I hope he’ll be fine.”

“He will,” she said. “He’s a survivor.”

We went out into the night together. An ambulance wailed by and swept down to the hospital entrance.

“All the best,” I said.

“And you,” she said. “And your organization.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled and I smiled back and we went our separate ways.

Looking Into The Fire

He was about 8, a chubby, serious child with a look of abstracted inwardness that I remembered from my own childhood. The dreamer. He was with his mother and grandmother on one of the leather settees in the parlor at our local pub. I’d come down there too for the gas fire. It was cold winter. The flames curled around the imitation logs in a fair copy of a real log fire. Except that no logs diminished. Coals did not form and glow and shimmer: no red, gold, blue. No figures appearing in their depths. No fairy folk or trolls.

He stretched across a seat and stared into the shallow face of his iphone. He had a game up and running. Planes chasing planes. Explosions. Battles. Beside him an arc of real flames hissed and flared. He didn’t glance at it. He didn’t seek pictures in its heart. His pictures were before him: structured, ordered, accessible anywhere. Always the same pictures over and over. You can go deeper into the game but the game has always been defined. It will never take you anywhere not predetermined.

I remembered those cold nights in the farmhouse and the magic of the coals. I looked deep into them and watched those fairyland figures evolve. They suggested stories to me and I felt the stories unravel in my mind. Unlike the coals my mind’s fire did not consume itself. It fed deeper and deeper. It suggested more and other worlds beyond the first world of the fire and the second world of the images. Beyond a third world of stories were other possible worlds also waiting to be called into being. Waiting.

His dad came back with a tray of drinks and a fatherly joke for him. Dad admired the game. His back to the fire as well. Only I watched it. I wanted it to begin to consume itself and – in its slow, lingering death throes – create the possibility of pictures. The fire was always a dance between that self-consumption and the steadying hand of the fire-feeder who would stoke it.

The planes went down in the game as he played. I wondered about his mind and where it would go. How would it it feed and grow? Precise and structured, like a game, like the digital world that was as natural to him as the farmhouse fire had been to me. The pictures in my world had been analogs. From them I inferred a personal world of the imagination. The pictures in his world were digital. From them he would learn a series of actions.

For me it seemed natural to believe that the world was far, far bigger than anything I could imagine – because in my mind I could see all those misty worlds beyond worlds behind the images in the fire. There would always be characters out there yet unrealized, unborn, come to haunt me in my nights. But if the game contained all that ever could be imagined, where could the mind go in search of the beyond? And how could it go there? What inner techniques could he discover that would take him on such journeys?

Are we closing down our minds now? And if so: why? What is it that we are afraid to let imagination call up, turning instead to the predigested simulacra of the games? A world of rules and outcomes; inputs and outputs; where the only possibility of a world beyond the code is contained in that cryptic phrase: ‘error message’.

An error is a crack through which another reality strives to enter the world of rules.