Stages of Life

MY JOURNEYS THROUGH LIFE

It is time now to assemble the many dimensions of my life. The previous chapters have traced all my voyages around the globe. But along the way I have dropped anchors here and there, for example in those institutions we call education, work and society, in that continuity we call family, and into that immense sea we call ideas. In this chapter I’ll summarise my trajectories through institutions and ideas and then lean on Shakespeare to help pull the whole thing together as the Stages of Life.

MY Journeys through institutions

My primary school was the Queens College of British Guiana and, in those years, I was also a Boy Scout and something called a Runner. In the event of an attack by the Germans runners were to cycle across Georgetown with messages about the attack. My secondary school was Malvern College in England where Latin and maths overlapped with an institution called the Army Corps where we drilled with gas masks and 303 rifles, and another institution called cricket. My friend Chris Richardson always maintained that cricket was not really a sport but more of an ordered pageant with its own mysteries, e.g.

“Here you have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out and when he’s out he come in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When both sides have been in and out including the not outs, that’s the end of the game.”

The “sandwich” apprenticeship ran for five years at Bristol Aircraft, wrapped around a three-year engineering degree at Cambridge. I rowed as stroke in an eight in my first term at Cambridge, then joined the swimming team, though I never got a half-blue. While at Cambridge I trained as a cadet-pilot in the RAFVR and was later offered a job as a test pilot with Hawker Aircraft. However, back in Bristol there were exams for membership of the Institute of mechanical Engineers and the Institute of production Engineers. Much later I completed a Masters in Information Technology at UTS, but never completed the economics degree at Macquarie. But I will probably never finish my informal continuing education in the social sciences.

My work experience was very varied: aircraft engineering at Bristol, the Iron and Steel Research Association, Hawker-Siddley Industries, IBM, and Lowndes-Ajax Computer Services all in London, and then in Sydney the Post Master General’s department, NSWIT, UTS, and Telecom. At one time the University of Macau called me a Visiting Fellow and, when they didn’t know what to do with me the Macquarie Department of Economics called me a Research Associate. In those institutions we call society I remain happily involved in those called marriage, family, citizenship, and communities such as Wondakiah, and I write stuff for Progress in Melbourne, Robert Schalkenbach Foundation in New York, and Land and Liberty in London. .

MY Journeys through ideas

As a teenager I had no idea what “Types of Ethical Theory” was about, or why an engineer had written two large volumes on the subject. But it was cheap, two shillings and sixpence in the second-hand bookshop back of Eastbourne station. Five years later I paid one pound for “A History of Western Philosophy” written by a mathematician (Bertrand Russell). “The factors of production are land, labour and capital” said Vic Blundell, a shoe salesman now teaching night school political economy. “While you are visiting here you might as well sit the aptitude test” said my friend Bill who had graduated in classics, and four weeks later I, as an engineer, had joined IBM. There I met Latin scholars, geographers and mathematicians, all learning an exciting new trade. Since that time, when computers occupied an obscure little niche under engineering in the Dewey Decimal system, I have seen information technology leap to the top of Dewey’s hierarchy of knowledge, from there contributing to every branch of human endeavour. Its binary bits now define physics, chemistry, Crick’s double helix, the behaviour of matter, the pixels of vision, the true-false conditions of logic, the structure of information itself, and the way it is presented in media..

It was Kate who first confused me by doing a degree in something called New Media. I thought I had known about the media. It was blackboards at school, textbooks at Uni, keyboards at work, and newspapers, radio and TV for leisure. Information was transmitted one-way, boss to worker, expert to novice, writer to reader. But then there was, of course, a new idea called postmodernism that tried to reverse this direction, to “privilege” the reader. But some of it became so absurd it was hard to take seriously, for example “Some postmodern theories, therefore, while emphasising the crisis of the meta-narratives, have never been sufficiently self-reflexive in recognising their own paradigmatic and chronic foregrounding of the temporal” (Featherstone & Lash, Globalisation). Please explain!

Very recently new media has presented society with three new challenges. Wikileaks, which has been called the only new political idea in a hundred years, The Arab Spring in which paper pamphlets inciting revolution have been replaced by cyber networking and, in an article called “The university of YouTube”, the Sydney Morning Herald claims that “In cyberspace, the ivory towers of academia are undoubtedly crumbling”.

For the last three years Henry Lebovic (Science) has been explaining to me the contributions to Peace and Conflict Studies of Gary Trompf (comparative religion), John Lederach (psychology), Jake Lynch (journalism), Frank Stilwell (political Economy) and Ken Wilber (the integration of all knowledge).

All these experiences have reconfirmed for me that the explosion of ideas is breaking down traditional barriers between the systems we call knowledge. I have enjoyed trespassing across these barriers and will continue to do so since my own universe of ideas is still expanding. But, meanwhile, let us close this chapter with the help of the poets.

THE STAGES OF LIFE what do we see and how do we travel through it?”

For William Blake it was “To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”

For Tennyson “I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch where-through

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

For ever and forever as I move”

For TS Eliot “We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

(Little Gidding, Thje Four Quartets)

Dylan Thomas, reflecting on his life, said “The ball I threw while playing in the park has not yet reached the ground”

But it is Shakespeare who immortalised his seven stages of man with the words:

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts”

Centuries later anthropologists were to reduce Shakespeare’s poetic journeys to what they called the Rites of Passage through life. These are the rituals that society forces on us when we try to muddle through life on our own. Of course it depends on when and where you live but most of us pass through some religious and coming of age rites. While I don’t remember my circumcision I do remember my first haircut, sitting in a gigantic, ornate cast-iron chair made in Chicago. I include these two rites only because Wikipedia, for some reason, puts them high up on their list. Missing from their list are marriage and procreation, which surprises me. I like the inclusion of “Walkabout” since life is really a continuous journey through many stages. So, in “the struggle to understand” these stages in the journey I will expand on Shakespeare’s list. Since previous chapters already contain photos of me at various stages, I will use photos of my children and grandchildren to illustrate these stages.

BIRTH. Isabel arrived by Caesarean section on May 17, 1996. Birth was nothing new in our family. But it is always miraculous. And so her first breath automatically inflated the collapsed lungs, immediately shutting off the umbilical life-support system and starting up the other life support system. When we visited, Kate was on the way to give her a bath, pushing in front of her a kind of hatstand on wheels, carrying a saline-drip bag attached to a small harpoon in her arm. A new birth provokes varied reactions. Uncle Tim said of Kate “she looks quite extraordinary”, which was my reaction too to newborns, before my own fatherhood began. A friend of mine described his first baby as a “soggy bundle leaking at both ends”,andMadeleine,anticipating Rebecca’sarrival, said “I hope it will be Chinese”.

CHILDHOOD “When I grow up I will be older and bigger than you” INITIATION for Madeleine

YOUTH [John with guitar] GRADUATION for Rebecca

MARRIAGE (John and Raji) is that point at which you cede control over your life and God help you if you try to retrieve it. Our one and only excursion on a tandem nearly ended in divorce when Joan discovered a design fault that denied the occupant of the rear saddle any form of control.

But, if you survive these conflicts you will find that “It is one of the graces of married life that for some magical reason we always look the same to each other…That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body” (Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture)

MOTHERHOOD. [Kate]

“God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers” (Jewish proverb). “All mothers are working mothers” (Anon). “A man’s work is from sun to sun, but a mother’s work is never done” (Anon).

SERENDIPITY, that happy and unexpected discovery of tranquillity in old age, can have other, less comforting meanings, as when Kate explains to her girls in the back of the car:”You must remember that grandad is now at an age where he does not always respond well to requests that he might find confusing.” I love it.

MY EIGHTIETH. It was Madeleine’s idea that we should all meet up on June 8 at Ningaloo Reef. But it might be cold and grandchildren would be in school then. So February 27 was chosen instead. My family operates on a need to know basis and often I don’t need to know. And so preparations for my birthday continued in my ignorance and well beyond my control. Family affairs are a bit like political movements in that they don’t seem to have a reverse gear. So I was astonished to find 60 people had been invited. There were letters of apology, including one from Chris Richardson, also turning 80, and welcoming me to “middle age”. I think he was trying to reassure me that there was life after 80. In the events leading up, Joan was the prime mover and shaker, as they say, ably helped by Kate, John, Madeleine and Rebecca.

And so, on each table at the Waverton Bowling Club was a menu and program of events designed by Kate, and a piece of paper with two verses from Finlandia. John, as MC, asked Paul Coleman to say grace, and then conducted all of us singing the two verses. There were speeches about someone who didn’t seem to be me from John, Joan and Madeleine, and Neil Hartley proposed a toast to me. Next came a birthday song composed by Kate and Pete, some embarrassing but fortunately fake emails read out by Ann and Mary, and a song by Rosie. But, for me, the highlight of the evening was the meltingly beautiful trio from Cosi Fan Tutti sung by our four children. After the desert, with John directing and Kate on piano accordion, more than half the guests got up for square dancing and the staff had some difficulty getting rid of us at the end of the evening. It was the most wonderful birthday party I have ever had.

OUR GOLDEN WEDDING. I tried to summarise this as “An ode to a pair of April fools”

But if indeed we are fortune’s fools

These fifty years has he smiled on us,

First courtship, marriage, four small angels,

Then, beckoning to the world at our feet,

A papoose on my back, spare nappies on yours,

And, each new morning, carpe diem,

As we listen to those who really know,

And know to tell it well:

About early promise

”While jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintop” (1)

And of the road ahead

“No gi’en thought fra where I’ve come, and less to where I’m gang” (2)

Then comes that time of settlement

That age they call maturity

When growth is now observed elsewhere

In nature and in progeny

Beyond self and selfishness,

To those perfections begetting wonder.

“When I consider everything that grows, holds in perfection but a little moment” (3)

And thus our children grew, each held,

In equal perfection, but a little moment.

And now their children also. Carpe diem.

We sleep “perchance to dream”,(4)

Or wait in dark for nature’s clock

As did Hardy’s Tess D’Urberville:

“at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken”.

And now, in our fiftieth, our golden year,

We also wake to birds at dawn, and

Then I think that time I saw you first,

And later with that yellow buttercup,

(Now pressed and folded in some book),

And later still La Belle France, then I

“Call back the lovely April of your prime”.(3)

So “When I do count the clock that tells the time” (3)

I count also blessings and doze again.

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,

I summon up remembrance of things past”(3)

But blusting winds have sometimes crossed our path,

They call them Lovers’ tiffs,

And stronger ones have torn like gales,

At that fabric we call family,

So I turn again to him who knows so well

To turn my own weak words to poetry,

To speak that good sense called philosophy:

“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May….[but] thy eternal summer shall not fade….so long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to me” (3)

So if “the course of true love never did run smooth” (5) then

“Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits, when I am sometime absent from thy heart,

Thy beauty and thy years full well befits, for still temptation follows where thou art” (3)

And “My glass shall not persuade me I am old

So long as youth and thou are of one date” (3)

And “If thou survive my well-contented day

When that churl death my bones with dust shall cover,

And shalt by fortune once more re-survey

These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,

Compare them with the bettering of the time,

And though they be outstripped by every pen,

Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme” (3)

After all “we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep” (6)

But while still awake we chase our immortalities

Each in our different way

And leave small scratches we perceive as sanity

Along that crazy road that leads somehow,

To “The the last syllable of recorded time” (6)

Romeo and Juliet
The Dubliners
From the sonnets
Hamlet
Midsummer night’s dream
Macbeth

RETARDMENT

“Grandma and grandpa used to live in a big old house until grandpa got retarded and they moved to Bateman’s Bay where everyone lives in nice little houses, and so they don’t have to mow the grass anymore. They ride around on scooters and wear name tags because they don’t know who they are anymore. They go to a building called the Wreck Centre but they must have got it fixed because it is all OK now. They do exercises there but they don’t do them very well.

There is a swimming pool too, but they all jump up and down with hats on. At their gate there is a doll house with a little old man sitting in it. He watches all day so nobody can escape. Sometimes they do sneak out, and go cruising in their golf carts. Nobody there cooks, they just eat out. And they eat the same thing every night, called early birds.

Some of the people can’t get out past the man in the doll house. The ones who do get out bring food back to the Wreck Centre for pot luck. My grandma says my grandpa worked all his life to earn his retardment and says I should work hard so I can be retarded someday too. When I earn my retardment I want to be the man in the doll house. Then I will let people out, so they can visit their grandchildren.“ (Anon.)

FORGETFULNESS (Martin Parker, Beyond Descartes.)

“Since brain and memory have long since said goodbye

I think, therefore I am does not apply

On good days though, I take some heart because

I think I thought , therefore perhaps I was”

IMMORTALITY

The magazines in Sam Seit’s waiting room promise immortality in cosmetic surgery. Johnny Macey, my landlord and also the guitar player in the Paramount Jazz band, told me his first recording seemed for him like a tiny scratch of immortality he had made. Hamlet mused about “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns”. For John Masefield “Let them answer who reply to every question, as befits an iron time….I can only see a valley with a million grass blades blowing, and a hill with clouds above it whither many larks are going, singing paeans as they climb.” For me “Some bright morning, when this life is over, I’ll fly away, I’ll fly away in the morning, to that land where surfing never ends, I’ll fly away alleluia bye and bye” , (adapted from O Brother Where Art Thou)

But, as Dylan Thomas said:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. “

POSTSCRIPT. I have really now come to the end of my memoirs, written for my family. But, if old age should “burn at close of day” I have work ahead of me, more burning questions to ask, more tantalising answers to seek. And so, more for my own enlightenment, though you are welcome to read them, I will continue writing essays. Henry tells me that the Greek philosophers parked all really interesting questions into three spaces called the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. I will park my essays in these three spaces.