‘I don’t even have a reason to cry anymore,’ Mum said with genuine surprise. ‘There’s nothing to cry about!’
That wasn’t strictly true, but it was as far as we allowed hope to fly into the Morton household. Hope was like a chicken; it could become airborne briefly, but it was ultimately a ground-dwelling thing.
At the time of Mum’s curious announcement, the Queensland–New South Wales border had been more or less closed for four months, save for a small window, which I had missed. And, yes, Deb had saved up for a holiday of her own to Cairns, which she was due to take in May 2020 with an old friend from Adelaide, but that had to be postponed to September. As that date approached, it had to be put off again.
Having saved some money for the now aborted holiday, she attempted to spend it on other things but was thwarted here, too.
‘I tried to buy a new bra from Big Girls Don’t Cry,’ she tells me during one of our regular phone chats. ‘But they won’t accept my email on the site, so I can’t get it! I’ve never had any money, and now that I do I can’t fucking spend it.’
My role here, as advisor and court jester, was to soothe. I admit it was a struggle, given the specificity of the information she had just provided.
‘Well, apparently big girls do cry,’ I tell her.
And we laugh and laugh.
I do not think either she, my sister or I were natural-born funny people. We were certainly bent in that direction by life, however. Humour is a tonic. The darker our lives became across the years, the more we worked to develop a kind of bolt-on system of jokes and laughter, often directed at our own struggle.
Like laughing at an electricity substation during a violent storm, we discovered that making fun of our predicament caused the dire circumstances to lose some of their power.
That, I think, ought to be the final lesson.
It is not as if we sat down as a family and decided to be funny in the face of being well and truly fucked. It rose from the ashes of our existence like a deficient phoenix, covered in soot and looking suspiciously like one of Mum’s chickens.
Some time would pass before I discovered the crisp and, at first, confronting philosophy of Albert Camus, especially as he presented it in Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Here was an account of the natural absurdity that had coursed through the gutters that ringed our life. Camus gives voice to the smoker’s chesty wheeze laugh of our almost comical survival.
The boulder goes up, it goes down. Up, down, up, down.
Wry observation, if not quite happiness, is a radical political act.
‘Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable,’ Camus writes. ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
Camus traverses impressive territory in his quest to answer the question of whether we should kill ourselves. The answer – no – is not so easily arrived at as it may seem. But it is the correct answer, precisely because the mission is absurd.
‘The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it,’ he writes. ‘But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.’
Vulnerability, then, is nearer to the Aristotelian concept of a life well lived. Nearer, still, to Nietzsche in its direct call for us to witness the full breadth of human tragedy and success and decide to live anyway. It is here, feet planted in the trembling earth, that we find solace.
It is impossible to finish this book without further reference to the pandemic that shuttered whole countries – the world, even – and livelihoods. It is difficult to ignore the far-reaching consequences of that deadly pathogen as it infected tens of millions of people, killing more than 1.7 million at the time of writing.
To be frank, 2020 feels like some kind of fever dream. It has the scale of a Hollywood blockbuster and, simultaneously, the strange hyper-local manifestation that makes it difficult to tell the difference between the two.
When my brother, Toby, arrived home just before things began to unravel nationally, and in time to build the chook shed, Mum was anxious. One can hardly blame her, given her experience of the last seven or more years trying to ward off drug-addled hangers-on in between the occasional stabbing (one) or axe chase (also singular).
Toby had kicked a psychotic and dangerous meth habit, but his prospects were dim and fading by the day.
‘Did you hear the news that the government is going to double the dole?’ I said to her down the phone, knowing that Toby was on this very payment.
Mum paused and then replied: ‘Don’t tell your brother.’
I cackled at the crispness of the phrasing, its direct route from brain to meaning. The layers of it spoke a secret language known only to the few of us, a whole cosmos of understanding in four words. That Toby was in debt so deep he will likely never rescue himself from it, even though he is almost thirty-six and still has time for things to right themselves. That, even though he is living back home again, he will more than likely pay no board, so what’s the use in being the first with the news about more money? That more money, in his very specific case, was not necessarily helpful.
We joked because to do otherwise seemed threadbare and slim. Not again, we thought on his return, before settling back into the rhythm we knew to be ours. Not long after he had come home, the somewhat new police officer in town pulled Toby over for a licence check. He was riding a different motorcycle almost every other week with no explanation for where he was getting them. When the officer saw Toby’s name on the licence, he said: ‘Oh, I read your brother’s book. It was really good.’
That book, which in part detailed Toby’s extensive criminal history and addiction to all sorts of drugs, was Toby’s pride and joy even though I suspect he still has not read it.
He rode around town the rest of the day, stoked that he was something of a minor celebrity in his home town. He too, perhaps better than the rest of his immediate family, has learned that things are the way they are and overthinking them can be a curse.
I don’t think being funny about difficult situations is defeatist, by the way. It is the opposite of laying down arms. Humour deployed against adversity is a very particular fuck you to those circumstances, one that shows up only as a faint blur on enemy radar. It is hard to grip, more trying still to counter.
It is a thing that makes even death insignificant.
When my Uncle Mick died, the funeral was held just outside Dalby. He and his wife – my mum’s sister Annie, who went before him – were mad golfers. They lived in a tiny half-tin house that backed onto the golf course at Bell on the Darling Downs, and it was here that their marriage became a type of satire about a working-class couple and a game dominated by preening masochists.
Annie was even smaller than my mum, but she had the kind of density of spirit you might find in a coked-up chihuahua. Mick was borderline mute, or at least that is how he appeared to me when I was a kid. He made eyes at you that indicated either surprise or resignation, and one gets the sense that this, too, is how he dealt with the love of his life.
Mick was the kind of man who learned to exercise his Miranda rights early and it largely served him well.
There was also the pub, which was located a short buggy ride from their home and the golf course, and within this Bermuda triangle much of their best comedy was written.
God, I loved them.
On one night, Mick failed to appear for dinner, so Annie called the pub and asked if her husband was drinking. He was, the bartender said.
With an efficiency only made possible by her diminutive frame, Annie glided to the car in rage and drove to the pub. Here, she stormed inside and confronted Mick and each of his friends individually.
‘You’re an arsehole, you’re an arsehole and you’re an arsehole. You’re all fucken arseholes,’ she yelled at them, before dragging her husband outside.
In a moment of apparent regret, Annie turned on her heel and popped her head back inside the pub.
‘Not you, Terry; I’m sorry, you’re not an arsehole,’ she said.
And that was that.
As the mourners gathered for Mick’s funeral and I sat in a pew hurriedly finishing writing my eulogy to him, my usual demeanour blotted with anxiety and grief, cousin Heidi told Mum, my sister and I of the now abandoned plan for his casket.
As she spoke, she handed us a few golf tees.
‘These are to throw on the coffin when he goes down,’ she said with a calm exactness. ‘We thought about throwing golf balls in but thought better of it because they’d all come bouncing back out.’
It’s hard to escape the fact that laughing at grisly things is, in itself, sometimes just very funny.
At the wake in Dalby RSL that evening, we all got a little bit drunk and one of Mum’s shoes broke. She had to walk through the club with one bare foot to get to the car, and she laughed so hard from the embarrassment she did a little wee. Yes, we were that family. There are those who consider any kind of jape or mockery at a funeral to cross the boundaries of good taste, but those are the people we need to worry about the most. Would you want to go to a funeral with them?
At a certain point, rigidity becomes a safety hazard. The chief structural engineer of the 828-metre ‘supertall’ Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai says the building moves back and forth some two metres at the very top.
Structural engineer Bill Baker has a term for the art of building tolerance for eddies and whirlpools of air into these structures: it’s a matter of ‘confusing the wind’, he says.
To various degrees, all skyscrapers around the world must move. To be unbendable, in the end, is to shatter. All that commitment to unyielding strength will only take a building, or a person, so far.
I like the poetry of that notion. Vulnerability is a design feature that allows us to confuse the wind. If we take our cues from Camus – and we could do a lot worse, to be frank – the stinging blows of an otherwise meaningless world can be absorbed.
It is not folly or uncaring, neither distasteful nor silly. To make ourselves fully alive we must disrobe before it all.
In his book Nuptials, published in 1938, Camus writes:
I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition.
Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow.
It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.
I am not old. By the time this book becomes a real thing, I will have turned thirty-four.
While I was writing this, stuck in lockdown with my flatmate Séamus, we watched The Young Pope in all its gaudy sacrilege. In such escapism, I was not expecting to have the wind knocked out of me when Jude Law’s Pope is told: ‘Holy Father. You’re so young and yet you have such old ideas.’
The line he delivers in response contains a universe: ‘You’re wrong about that. I’m an orphan. And orphans are never young.’
You’ll find no orphan here, though Law’s character says a person need not lose their mother and father to become one. In this sense, he uses the word as a catch-all for suffering. Suffering is a wound clock, skipping forward through time.
Yes, of course, I thought. How often we have observed timelessness in the eyes of people who have been hurt. I’ve seen enough of it myself to know how it leaks out of a person, the way it announces itself behind any mask. There are no right or wrong ways to deal with such collected pain. You might lean into it, as I did for a time, until it has had its spell. It may never leave you. You might leave deliberately on account of it. Lord knows I have been consumed with such notions before; there may still come a time when I am again, such is the nature of things.
All of these approaches may feel true for different people and at different moments. It is the obsidian character of distress that makes it so inscrutable.
But I am here, now, and I have seen with my own twin peepers and more than a segment of my own heart a lifetime’s worth of jagged neglect and all that bitter dying and crying, the beast heart of self-loathing and the endless mouth of regret. My siblings and I have laughed at most of it – even in the lower colon of despair – and felt the pale sensations of harm and humour curl around our bodies like enlivened vines. For years, under the bough-rocking grace of Deb Morton, we endured the ache of uncertainty; we moved with the elements because we had to.
We confused the wind.
And I’m damned if I am done with that bamboozling. Throughout, there were pockets of grace and light. Sometimes it was enough to see it only as morning broke, cleaving yesterday from the present. If only for a moment, even thick with the scent of not knowing, it was there. A shimmer of the world as it ought to be.
Oh, it was absurd alright. Unspeakably silly. And unfair! Yes, it was that, too. Anger sometimes broke through like a geyser of boiling water from the earth. I wondered if even the smallest part of a tear on a cheek ever made it back into the atmosphere, so that it might become better acquainted with its life-giving cousins in the clouds. Maybe these were the two sides, I thought,
But mostly, we laughed and turned into the wind and confounded it.
That is what love is, I think. It is turning into the world. Love is taking the soft hide of our selves and handing it over so that we might feel everything. When next you have the chance, go outside at night. Find a quiet spot, if you can, and even better if it is tucked away from the incursions of man-made light.
Tilt your head, as you must, and look at the night sky. You’ve seen it before, no doubt. But now I want you to take the time to notice every single point of carbonated fizz in the sky. Every last bubble of blazing fire beamed directly to you. Don’t skim or skip. Attend to each of them.
Odds are that you alone will focus on one in that precise moment that no other soul on earth is looking at.
It will be as if it were created just for you.
That is love. The everything sent from without and the turning to face it, the feeling of it on a naked patch of very human skin.
It is the overwhelming notion that it was there all along.